A lot of people are surprised that Carol Lynn Pearson hasn't been excommunicated by the Mormon Church. "People have been chastised for less than I'm doing in terms of feminism — and of this issue, too," said Pearson, a feminist Mormon author of national renown. "This issue" is the Mormon intolerance of homosexuality that she is fighting, from the inside, to change.

Pearson was already a published poet and author held in high regard in the Mormon community — she was fourth generation, in a society in which that scores bonus points — when she wrote a book that revealed a family secret of both tragedy and redemption.

Published by Random House in 1986, when AIDS had only had a name for five years, Goodbye, I Love You told the story of her 12-year marriage to a fellow Mormon that produced four children before ending in divorce. They had discussed his homosexual desires after they had become engaged, and together they felt their faith would lead to a proper marriage. "Neither one of us wanted to end the marriage," she said, "but he was clear that he could not always maintain the kind of marriage he had promised me." Although they divorced, they remained friends, and when he developed AIDS, she cared for him in her home until his death in 1984.

Through the years, she has become more outspoken on finding a place for gay men and women, who decline the offer of salvation through celibacy, in the Mormon Church. As such, she has become a kind of mother confessor, offering support, counsel, and a shoulder for Mormon individuals and families dealing with homosexuality, a kind of a double whammy in the Mormon world, where rejection by the church can sting as much as rejection by family.

"I sort of thought I was through with this subject, of how we deal with our gay people," Pearson said from her home in Walnut Creek. "But I found myself drawn back to playwriting, and there was this story that kept knocking at my mind. It just

A scene from Facing East. Photo: Julie Stark

came to me that I was not done, because I still have a voice in Mormon society, and there were things I could say best through theater about our misunderstanding of the phenomenon of homosexuality."

The result is the play Facing East, which had its premiere in Salt Lake City last year, traveled to New York for a limited run, and will open Aug. 10 at Theatre Rhino. It is being presented by Salt Lake City's Plan-B Theatre, which received a grant from Bruce Bastian, a gay Utah philanthropist and former Mormon, to underwrite its bi-coastal productions.

The play takes place at an open grave following a funeral for a young man. "The father refuses to leave because what was said at the funeral did not speak the truth," Pearson said, "and he conducts another service with just him and his wife there that lets us know the truth about the young man." He was gay and he committed suicide, but his mother still doesn't want to hear these facts as her husband recites them.

And then the late man's lover, whom his parents had refused to meet, arrives at the grave not expecting the grieving parents to still be there. "He's about to leave, but the father says, 'Don't go. I need you here.' And that increases the conflict between him and his wife, because she's not going to hear about her son from this man," said the playwright. "We're emotionally wrung out, but there are steps toward healing at the end. And I think any flaws in the writing seem to be compensated by the power of the piece."

While Pearson was partly motivated by the fact, she said, that Utah has the highest suicide rate in the nation for young men, the characters in Facing East are fictional, or at least amalgams, based on the stories she has heard since publishing Goodbye, I Love You.

Ironically, perhaps, Pearson found herself to be a figure in a one-man play created by her former son-in-law Steven Fales. In his solo drama Confessions of a Mormon Boy, which has twice played San Francisco in addition to a New York run, Fales recounts his marriage to Pearson's daughter Emily despite his own gay inclinations. Following his excommunication for publicly coming out, his play follows him to New York for a stretch of sex, drugs, and prostitution before finally cleaning up his act — and putting it on the stage.

"I saw the show, but I'm going to take the Fifth Amendment on saying very much on that at all," Pearson said. "I do wish Steven well, but it was hard for me, the whole history of my daughter having to go through the same thing that I did. That was a very weird but in some ways predictable kind of a psychological thing of picking up the unfinished family business."

More family stories are at the heart of Pearson's recently published No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones. While she doesn't expect the Mormon hierarchy to soon change their views on homosexuality, she has seen a recent softening of language in how it is officially addressed.

"The wonderful major loophole is the belief in ongoing revelation, which is what the Mormon church was founded on, and which was a great scandal to many of the churches of that time," Pearson said. The end of polygamy and the acceptance of blacks are among the revelations church elders have heard from God since the church's founding.

Until a revelation about gays is heard, Pearson said she is "very comfortable in leaving all this in the hands of a loving God. I have no reason to believe that the kinds of judgments that we put on each other right here have any kind of divine binding."

Pearson will on hand for a post-show discussion following the performances on Aug. 11 and 19.

Facing East will run at Theatre Rhino through Aug. 26. Tickets are $20. Call 861-5079 or go to www.therhino.org.