Carol Lynn Pearson spent sixty years writing the truth about Mormon patriarchy, Heavenly Mother, and loving a gay husband through AIDS — without ever fully leaving the church that caused her pain.
Carol Lynn Pearson died July 29, 2026, at eighty-six, after nearly sixty years as one of the most widely read Mormon writers alive — a poet, playwright, and LGBTQ advocate whose debut collection "Beginnings" sold more than 150,000 copies. Jess and Hannah trace her life: her marriage to Gerald, a gay man she cared for until his death from AIDS, later published as "Goodbye, I Love You"; her feminist search for Heavenly Mother in "Mother Wove the Morning" and "Finding Mother God"; her advocacy for gay Mormon families in "No More Goodbyes"; and "The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy," her reckoning with a doctrine still built into LDS temple sealings. She never got a real answer for the harm. She got the words for it — and that was the beginning of getting free for a lot of people.
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