After D. Michael Quinn’s death in April 2021, his children found his remarkable, unpublished memoir in his home and entrusted Signature Books with its publication. Relying on his journals, primary research, and reminiscences, Quinn shares his life story as few have heard it–from his father’s hiding of his true name and Mexican identity, to his upbringing by his abusive grandmother, to his choice to closet his homosexuality, to his undying commitment to his faith and its history. 

From the age of nine, Quinn felt convicted he would one day serve as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He chose the path he believed would take him there, eventually living as a straight LDS family man in a mixed-orientation marriage. In the 1970s and 1980s he became a BYU professor and one of Mormonism’s most promising, prolific, and respected historians. But his uncompromising commitment to total honesty about his religion’s history, along with his homosexuality, set him on a collision course with church leaders and the end of his seemingly idyllic Mormon life. Throughout his telling, Quinn unflinchingly opens up about his feelings and experiences that shaped his enigmatic life.

D. Michael Quinn taught history at Brigham Young University for twelve years after he earned his PhD at Yale University in 1976. He is the author of several books on Mormon history, including his three-volume Mormon Hierarchy series and Early Mormonism and the Magic World View published by Signature Books. He received the Herbert Feis Award from the American Historical Association for his 1996 study, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth Century Americans: A Mormon Example. In 2016 the Mormon History Association awarded him the Leonard J. Arrington Award for distinguished and outstanding service in Mormon history.

Foreword 

Publisher’s Introduction 

1. Early Childhood, 1944–1949

2. Emerging Identities, 1950–1953

3. Father Figures, 1954–1956

4. Secrets and Revelations, 1957–1959

5. Budding Intellectual, 1960–1961

6. Internal Conflicts, 1962–1963

7. Baseball Baptisms and Disbelief, 1963–1964

8. Spiritual Promptings, 1965–1966

9. Accelerating Religious Path, 1967–1968

10. Counterintelligence in Germany, 1968–1969

11. New Mormon History, 1970–1972

12. Historical Breakthroughs, 1972–1973

13. Academic Gambles, 1973–1975

14. High Hopes and Growing Fears, 1976–1977

15. A Path of Conflict, 1978–1980

16. Apostles vs. Historians, 1980–1982

17. Fatal Shifts, 1983–1985

18. Farewells, 1986–1988

19. Out, 1988–1998

20. Chosen Path, 1993–2009

Publisher’s Epilogue: Legacy

Index

About the Author