This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Mindfulishness. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
This week I set aside my discomfort with generative AI to play around in the Midjourney image program, reimagining scenes from Mormon history and culture as if its many strands of queerness had been allowed out into the open. What if the Book of Mormon character Nephi had a boyfriend? What if the Salt Lake Temple hosted Pride? What if two of the church’s top authorities shared a hot tub? (Perceptively, Midjourney kept them in suit and tie.)
I’m one of the ones who think AI (or people misusing it) will probably kill us, and soonish. In the scheme of things, I’m less clear about how bad that is. Will AI preserve and extend a human-born consciousness while bringing exponentially greater intellect to the project of understanding reality? Will it compose a million new Bruckner symphonies and pulse them out to every solar system? Or will it manufacture paper clips until the earth is a lump of coal? For now, the uncertainty has carved out in me a strange technophobic margin; I have yet even to try ChatGPT.
But conversations about Midjourney (including one with a friend who’s been drawing on its tendency to blend the eerie and the hilarious) have slowly eroded my resistance. And from the moment I started typing in my first prompt (Jesus at the gym), I could see the potential to portray things that writers like me spend all day thinking about, and can give voice to, but seldom have the skill or resources to make visual—to give a “seen it with my own eyes” reality. Again, we can assume people will use this power to unpeaceful effect. But how might it work in service of repair?
Mormonism is a natural subject for a lavish visual reimagining, given the tension between its origin in creative fantasy and the strictures attempted by its modern custodians on who can portray it and how. (See the church’s multiyear campaign to eliminate all uses, everywhere, of the word “Mormon.”) The religion was birthed in sexual deviance—Joseph Smith had 40-plus wives, some already married, some of them to his friends—and relies, theologically, on a whole-cloth fiction about the history of the Americas. Around these awkward facts has evolved an extensive and muscular (and very, very rich) organizational core which, for many decades, has been obsessed with the world’s perception of it and has thus sought to monopolize the terms of that perception. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints puts the Vatican in the shade when it comes to the operational and ideological control it exercises over each Mormon congregation on the planet. Paintings, illustrations, songs, high-school and college religious curriculums, and libraries worth of text—magazines, clerical guidelines, scriptures, instructional manuals, storybooks for children, lessons for prospective converts—are authorized, created, translated into various languages, and physically or digitally distributed by the corporatesque church hierarchy in Salt Lake City.
As a rule, these correlated official works do not portray queer subjects. They certainly don’t celebrate them. And so, as a rule, 16 million people (or whatever fraction of them are more than just members of record) are fed a narrative about ultimate reality that excludes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual people. (The official Mormon lens also tends to exclude the black and brown portions of the church’s membership, which today is growing largely in Africa.) I can tell you, having once been a child in the church, how determinative those words and images can be of what someone believes is possible, and of what someone believes is valued by God.
So, it didn’t take me long to wonder what Elton John would wear to give a talk at General Conference. You can see many of the images I’ve made so far here, here, and here on Instagram.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.