Gay Mormon New York

An intimate look into the careers of three talented queer Mormons in mid-twentieth-century New York City Between 1936 and 1951, May Swenson, Twig Romney, and Buzz Miller left their Mormon homes in the West to harness Manhattan's incomparable artistic abundance. Swenson published eleven books of poetry and won a MacArthur Genius Grant. Romney inspired Leonard Bernstein, with whom he had a passionate affair, to compose his Symphony No. 2: "The Age of Anxiety." Miller, a significant other of Jerome Robbins, danced for two decades on Broadway, most famously in the iconic "Steam Heat" number in The Pajama Game. Grappling with the absence of gay Mormons from the rich legacy of Mormon biography, Gay Mormon New York weaves three individual lives into a portrait of Manhattan and its cultural scene at midcentury.