Posted by:
elderolddog
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Date: October 08, 2021 05:06PM
From Connell O'Donovan's very interesting and very readable history of The Gay in mormonism:
http://www.connellodonovan.com/abom.htmlA RATHER QUEER EVENT AT THE TABERNACLE
Sometime around late May or early June 1928, the famous homosexual clairvoyant, George Benjamin Wehner, conducted a seance at the Mormon Tabernacle.
Wehner had just spent one year traveling through Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East with his lover, and upon return to the United States had reconnected with his longtime patrons, Teresa "Tessy" Phebe Kimball Werner, her sister Winifred Kimball Hudnut, and Mrs. Hudnut's bisexual daughter, Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy (aka Natacha Rambova), the actress, danseuse, and extraordinary movie set designer who was married to silent film star, Rudolph Valentino, allegedly also bisexual.
Teresa and Winifred were the granddaughters of the Mormon Apostle Heber Chase Kimball and his first wife, Vilate Murray. The extremely wealthy Winifred Kimball Hudnut, famous throughout the United States and France as a spiritualist and theosophist, had been introduced to Wehner through her daughter, Natacha Rambova.
The homosexual psychic Wehner (1891-1970) had been a vaudeville actor and singer, and had also composed the very popular Broadway hit, "I Want My Mammy", which had been sung in "black face" by the famous comedic actor Eddie Cantor in 1921's Broadway musical, The Midnight Rounders.
Rambova employed Wehner for quite some time to assist her in contacting her dead ex-husband, Valentino, to receive messages from him in "the astral plane". These messages and her memoirs of their life together were published in 1926 (a year after their divorce and just months after his death) as "Rudy: An Intimate Portrait of Rudolph Valentino by his Wife".
In 1929, George Wehner published his own memoirs of his life as a clairvoyant and stage performer. The very last page of his autobiography tells of his visit with the Kimball family (consistently misspelled by Wehner) in Salt Lake City a year earlier. While in the Tabernacle, Wehner had extraordinary visions of and received "intimate" messages from Heber C. Kimball, Joseph, Emma, and Lucy Smith, Brigham Young, various other Kimball relatives, and finally, none other than the Angel Moroni.
- - "Here, on one never-to-be-forgotten day, the Tabernacle was closed to visitors for a while, and Edward P. Kimbal [sic], the grandson of Heber C., gave us a private recital on the world-famed organ. As the noble tones of this great instrument swelled and reverberated about us in the lofty Tabernacle, I became clairvoyant and was aware of the presence of numerous spirits.
- - "And no wonder! For there I sat with Aunt Tessy, Mrs. Hudnut, and others of their relatives, all of them direct descendants of those brave and daring pioneers who suffered almost insurmountable difficulties for the sake of the religion which they felt to be right. It was a soul-stirring moment, and I had never dreamed of "seancing" in the Mormon Tabernacle of Salt Lake City. But after all, what place more suitable for the communion of souls?
- - "A force far stronger than I began to control me, although I was not unconscious, and I began to whisper rapidly the messages of those returned spirits. The messages were of a personal and intimate nature, and came from Heber C. Kimbal himself, and from his friend Brigham Young, and from Joseph Smith, and Lucy Smith (Joseph's wife who later became the wife of H. C. Kimbal), and from Emma Smith; and from Aunt Margaret Judd Clauson, from William Kimbal (eldest son of Heber C.) and from Phoebe Judd Kimbal, the mother of Aunt Tessy and Mrs. Hudnut.
- - "At last these spirits faded away and I saw the whole interior of the Tabernacle shimmering in a glorious blaze of golden light, in the midst of which appeared in the air above the organ, the figure of a young man in blue robes holding a long trumpet of gold. From my clairvoyant description of this radiant being my friends recognized the spirit as that of the Angel Maroni [sic], the son of Mormon who, it is said, led his fainting people across the plains and deserts to ultimate safety by showing his presence to them from time to time, as a beacon of faith and love.
- - "And what more infallible guide can any of us have than love? Angels of Light ever surround us, leading our faltering footsteps along the path of the Christ, ever upward on the spiraling way of progress and evolution to the very doors of God."