In Memoriam: D. Michael Quinn, 1944–2021

IN MEMORIAM

NO. 1 I VOL. 90 I UHQ

84 in memoriam

D. Michael Quinn, 1944–2021

When Dennis Michael Quinn passed from this life alone in his condominium on some indeterminate date in late April 2021, Mormon and Utah history lost one of its greatest historians. Among Mormon historians, he was certainly the one who insisted most doggedly on the discovery and assertion of Truth, particularly in what he called the “silent places,” where the facts most inconvenient and embarrassing to received orthodoxy lurked. For that insistence, he paid the highest penalties, over and over again: it cost him his marriage, it cost him his academic career, and ultimately, it cost him his church membership.

Quinn was born in Pasadena, California on March 27, 1944, and grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Glendale. Childhood and adolescence, for most of us, are difficult times at best, but Quinn had to cope with challenges from which most of us are spared. A broken family, less than effective parenting, excruciating physical problems, ambiguous ethnic, social, and religious identities, and a mysterious same-sex attraction—all of these forced the boy to rely upon the proverbial resiliency of childhood, a resiliency that the cruelties of our adult world and the tribulations of Nature itself all too often compel our children to exercise.

His father, Daniel Pena, was a Mexican immigrant and a Roman Catholic. His mother, Joyce Workman, was a sixth-generation Mormon of Swiss ancestry. Before the boy was born, his father changed his name to Donald Pena Quinn in an attempt to conceal his Mexican heritage and speed assimilation, inspired by a childhood friendship with the future actor, Anthony Quinn. (The future actor was also born in Mexico, but to an Irish father.) Although surrounded during his youth more by Catholics than Mormons, the boy early decided to embrace his mother’s faith—so enthusiastically, in fact, that as an adult he referred to himself as a “DNA Mormon.” Nevertheless, family life in the Quinn household was a religious battleground in which the boy was often used as a pawn, and when the parents divorced in 1949, religious differences were a factor.

Social and economic ambiguities were also part of his life: although the Quinns lived in a poor neighborhood, they attended a Mormon ward in a more affluent area to try to conceal their humble status. Finally, as early as eight years of age, he became increasingly aware of a samesex attraction, as his uncle cradled his body and lovingly lowered him into the warm water of the baptismal font. It was an attraction he fought all the way into adulthood and marriage.

Physical problems dogged him as well. Born with a cleft palate which was corrected by a military surgeon while his father was in the army, he underwent speech therapy to learn to pronounce “S” correctly. A bout with polio threatened his life, but he emerged unscathed as a result, he claimed, of Mormon priesthood ministrations. Finally, he was plagued with ear infections that caused excruciating pain and repeated eardrum punctures until the eardrum was surgically replaced. Those tribulations seem to have developed within him a stoicism in facing adversity, a resource that would serve him well.

A good student, Quinn planned a pre-med major when he entered Brigham Young University in 1964, but bad grades in chemistry and math caused him to change to English literature and philosophy, in which he graduated, with honors. Between his junior and senior years, he married Janice Darley, a union that eventually produced four children.

Quinn’s graduation in 1968 ended his draft deferment which placed him in peril of being sent to fight in Vietnam, a war he strongly opposed. He considered fleeing to Canada but decided

instead actually to enlist, hoping to parlay his college education into a better duty assignment. The strategy worked; he was assigned to military intelligence, sent through the army’s German language school, and spent the next three years in Germany. It was while in Germany that he made the decision to apply, upon his discharge, for graduate work in history rather than English, though he had been accepted into a Ph.D. program in the latter field at Duke University.

Back in Utah, he began work on a master’s degree at the University of Utah under the direction of Davis Bitton, for whom he also worked as research assistant. He also began at that time a lifelong friendship with LDS Church Historian Leonard Arrington and worked for him briefly at the newly created History Division at the Church Historical Department. It was Arrington who persuaded him, near the end of his master’s program, to apply for doctoral work at Yale to work with the celebrated Howard R. Lamar, who was long famous for training topflight western historians.

Quinn became one of Lamar’s prized students, blasting through the Ph.D. program in an almost unheard of three years and producing a prize-winning dissertation. He arrived back in Utah just in time to win a faculty position at BYU. It seemed the fulfillment of a dream: a high-powered Ph.D., a happy and growing family, and a well-paying job at a university run by the church to which he was devoted.

But things began to turn sour. For one thing, he and Jan decided that, try as they might, his homosexual orientation was making their marriage impossible. They divorced in 1986. It was an amicable separation, and Quinn remained close to her and their children and even to her husband when she remarried.

Even before that, he had been getting into academic hot water. In 1981, Elder Boyd K. Packer of the LDS Church’s Council of Twelve Apostles launched a frontal attack on historical honesty in a talk to the Church Education System, “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect.” Quinn took it upon himself to reply. His response, “On Being a Mormon Historian,” could well be considered the finest thing he ever wrote. In addition to being dishonest, Quinn pointed out, Elder Packer’s “faith-promoting” history, which glossed over leaders’ failings and unsavory historical events, was actually faith-destroying because people are going to find out the truth eventually and blame the church for lying to them.

From that time on, Quinn became a lightning rod for conservative opposition within the church; while he continued to build a resume of solid historical articles, it seemed he always had something controversial in the works. His 1985 article documenting hundreds of authorized post-Manifesto plural marriages was a frontal assault on the official church position that no such marriages had happened. His Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview, which his former mentor Davis Bitton advised him not to publish, drew howls of protest and savagely hostile reviews from the FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research in Mormon Scriptures) Institute at BYU, a bastion of defensively conservative and orthodox Mormon scholarship. Although Quinn answered the FARMS reviewers in characteristically lengthy and polemical—even sarcastic—footnotes in a second edition, BYU administrators were coming to the realization that Quinn was drawing hostile attention from the Mormon hierarchy and told him that further research on controversial topics would be denied university support. Deeming that an unacceptable attenuation of academic freedom, Quinn resigned his faculty position. Although he continued to produce scholarship at the highest level, Quinn had become a poison product within academia and never held another permanent position.

Quinn’s resignation came at a time of increasing pressure and purging of allegedly dissident Mormon intellectuals, and it is no surprise that his enemies in the hierarchy smelled blood in the water and began to plot his excommunication. Quinn protested that his books and articles had never been anything but an honest quest for truth by a loyal member of the church, and he refused to stand before any ecclesiastical court whose proceedings, he correctly perceived, would be a foregone conclusion. That conclusion came, nevertheless, on September 26, 1993, when he was excommunicated as part of a larger purge known as the September Six. At this writing the question remains: when

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Quinn’s ecclesiastical superiors excommunicated him, did they excise a potentially fatal cancer, or did they throw away one of the people the church most needed?

With that excommunication, his exile was complete: his marriage was gone, his faculty position was gone, and his church membership was gone. With nothing of his old life remaining, he left Utah and at the time of his death was living in his late mother’s condominium in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

Assessing Michael Quinn’s personal qualities is not a simple task. On the one hand, he was a delightful colleague, a popular teacher, a loyal friend, and a loving husband, father, and son. He was, truly, a “DNA Mormon” who served his church loyally and tirelessly as a missionary, a temple worker, and in a variety of ward and stake callings. Rare in such a profound intellectual, his faith was innocently childlike and literal, embracing such things as angels, demons, miracles, revelations, and direct messages from God. On the other hand, he had a hair-trigger mercurial temperament and a righteous certitude that made him the bane of editors who would deign to alter the holy writ of his manuscripts.

Assessing his contributions as a historian, by contrast, is remarkable easy, for it is nothing short of monumental. For one thing, there is no “Quinn Thesis,” no overarching general interpretation of Mormon history which would be the basis of a school of thought or something that future scholars would plug their own work into. Instead, his work represents a consistent and intense commitment to discovering the truth in every dark corner of history which attracted his attention. Like his role model, Juanita Brooks, Quinn thought that only the complete and unvarnished truth was good enough for the church he served. There was, though, an immediately recognizable “Quinn Style,” in which the elaborate bibliographical endnotes competed for space with the text. That style rendered his books at the same time both intimidating and accessible: once the reader realized that fully half of the huge volume was documentation, the relatively brief text became more approachable.

Each of his books drew intense critical fire: the J. Reuben Clark biography for exposing its subject’s negative personal qualities and advocacy of unpopular opinions and positions; the Mormonism and magic book for suggesting that Joseph Smith had practiced disreputable Dark Arts; the trilogy on the Mormon hierarchy for many reasons, including Joseph Smith’s post facto alterations of sacred writings, post-Manifesto polygamy, frontier violence, and the octopus of the church’s financial affairs; and the same-sex dynamics book for suggesting that Mormon icons like Evan Stephens, the beloved composer and Tabernacle Choir director, may have been gay.

In retrospect, though, those proverbial Quinn endnotes and his own defense of his research vindicate his work as the exhaustive labor of an honest historian. While the voices of his critics have faded over time into insignificance, Quinn’s work stands collectively as one of the great monuments of Mormon, Utah, and western history.

Michael, where are thy accusers?

Gary Topping

—Cottonwood Heights, Utah