Remembering Lynne Whitesides

This is a re-broadcast of my 2023 interview with Lynne Whitesides. She passed away from pneumonia/leukemia on July 7, 2025. We miss her. Lynne Whitesides was the first person punished in the September Six. She shares her story of why she wasn't excommunicated, who was involved, and where she is on her spiritual journey. Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/thV_CGqy3jY Copyright © 2025 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission. First to Get Punished Interview GT  00:34  Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I'm so excited to have one of the original members of the September Six. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where we are? Lynne  00:45  I am Lynne Whitesides, and I was the first of the September Six. GT  00:49  Okay. Lynne  00:50  We are at the Utah Valley University in Provo. GT  00:56  Right, Orem, actually. Lynne  00:57  Are we in Provo? We're in Orem. GT  01:00  Well, very good. I've been doing this podcast for eight years now. And this is our first time talking. You're hard to track down. Lynne  01:11  I don't know. I'm glad to be here. GT  01:14  Well, thanks. Well, as we look back on this, can you talk about the events? I don't know how far back it goes. Does it go back to the 80s? Or was it just really concentrated in the early 90s, that led you into trouble with Church authorities? Lynne  01:30  Well, I can go back a little farther, even in my own [story.] But I don't know that we want to go there. I'll start with from when I moved from Chicago to Salt Lake City. And when I did that, my friend, Lorie Stromberg; do you know Lorie? GT  01:48  A little bit. We're Facebook friends. Lynne  01:50  Lorie said, "Why don't you volunteer for Sunstone?" And I had three little kids and my husband was doing his residency and he had gotten his residency here in Salt Lake. And I so I went down, and I volunteered to just be one of the people who helps at Sunstone. And at the end of that symposium, so that was '84, or something like that. GT  02:12  Okay. Lynne  02:13  Then, I think Marti Bradley had a talk with Elbert Peck and said, "We think Lynne should be the new chair of the symposium." So, they invited me to be the chair of the symposium for the next year, which I did. I mean, I did it for four years. So whatever the four years were. GT  02:30  So, you were the leader of Sunstone? Lynne  02:31  I was the chair of the symposium. Elbert was the editor and Daniel Rector was the publisher. And then there are [others.] At the time, her name was Marti Esplin and now her name is Marti Ashby now. She was an editor. There was a really cool crew that worked there, Connie Disney. GT  02:49  So, this is after Peggy Fletcher's Stack. Lynne  02:51  Yes, just right after when Elbert took over. And it was so much fun working with Elbert and Daniel. Because I had no idea how to pull a Symposium together. But Elbert, in particular, was so gracious and helpful and just kind of showed me the ropes. And by the time I was done [with] four years, I could run a symposium, so it was great. GT  03:16  Well, it sounds like Sunstone and correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like it used to be a magazine. And it seems like Peggy was trying to get people to write for the magazine. And she started the symposium and now the symposium is the whole thing. Lynne  03:31  Yeah. GT  03:31  There's not that many people that read the magazine anymore. Lynne  03:33  I don't even know. I don't follow the magazine anymore at all. I haven't been to the symposium for years, since 10 years after, and then this year. Because I have been invited to speak. But, those four years were really kind of heady because Peggy, that's what she was trying to do. And we were getting a lot of professors from BYU and the University of Utah, but also just all kinds of really interesting people.