Do I like Utah?

Notes from my latest trip to the Beehive State.

My grandmother’s neighbor, Grapejuice, sitting in a patch of flowers.

A little disclaimer here for this one. I speak very candidly about Utah and Mormonism in this essay. I know that the church doesn’t like the term “Mormon” anymore, but for the sake of my word count I’m not going to type out “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” every time I want to refer to the religion. If that lack of distinction offends you, I’m sure some other things in this essay will offend you, so I encourage you to either skip out on this one, or suffer in silence. Your choice.

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“I’m sorry,” is the most common response I get from most of my ‘woke coastal elite’ friends when I tell them I’m going to Utah for the weekend. If you’re at all familiar with the cultural perception of Utah among those outside of its borders, this is probably not surprising to you. With the the rise of ex-mormon YouTubers who pull in millions of views, and reality hits like Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, it seems that at least in my circles, people are becoming more aware of the quirks of Utah culture, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing.

Despite being an aforementioned ‘woke coastal elite,’ (I was born in Seattle and now live in Brooklyn, a woke bicoastal elite even), I’ve spent quite a lot of time in Utah. There’s Utah-ness and Mormonism on both sides of my family. My grandparents on my mom’s side live in one of the Mormon capitals of the world, Provo, and my grandparents on my dad’s side used to spend their summers in the smaller-but-still-Mormon mountain town of Midway. My sister and a few other members of our extended family live in Salt Lake City, and given that on both sides of my family I have not just Mormon, but polygamist Mormon ancestry — meaning that a few generations back, this one guy named Samuel Rose Parkinson had a whole bunch of wives and a whole bunch of kids who proceeded to have even more kids — I’m sure that half of that city is at least a second cousin of mine (the further back you go, my family tree starts to look more like a hedge maze). This means I find myself back in the Beehive State at least once a year to visit family or skulk around Salt Lake trying to ‘accidentally’ run into Jen from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives so I can convince her to leave her husband.

I’m not from Utah, but I’m certainly influenced by it. This means that I’m not homo- or coffee-phobic, but I can certainly down a 48oz Diet Dr. Pepper with raspberry puree and vanilla creamer in 30 seconds. It means that I shop secondhand for “ethical reasons,” but a good chunk of that secondhand clothing is from Deseret Industries, a chain of thrift stores owned and operated by the Mormon Church. I can’t help it if my sense of style is nearly identical to the dead grandfathers of Utah County.

If you’re a born and raised Utah lover, the idea that I’m met with sincere condolences every time I visit my grandparents might be offensive. Unfortunately though, the main reason people say this to me is because, since I apparently need to avoid earnestness at every turn of my personal life, I tend to play up the horrors of going to Utah. I whine about the fact that half of the passengers on my flight will be children under the age of six. I roll my eyes about how there won’t be any good coffee in a one hundred mile radius. I complain about how every store is closed on Sunday. I snark about the American flags hanging by each porch swing and the random Jesus statues towering over people’s front yards. And yes, all of those things are annoying, especially being the only twenty-two year old on an airplane who isn’t already a mother of four, but are they really enough to be met with “I’m sorry”? Is this state truly so terrible that this reaction is justified?

Most of the reasons I just mentioned are petty grievances, but there are genuine reasons I and other ‘woke coastal elites’ want to avoid the state. Despite their main guy (Jesus)’s whole thing being about spreading love, a lot of Christian denominations can be pretty nasty to people like me, and unfortunately, Mormons can be some of the worst offenders. Of course, not all Mormons are homophobic or transphobic, but I can’t ignore the fact that the Latter-day Saint dominated legislature in Utah continues to pass anti-trans laws at an alarming rate, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors; care which saved my thirteen-year-old life, and the lives of countless others.

I’ve seen the damage this ideology can do firsthand. There are members of my family who grew up Mormon and closeted, and it is not for the faint of heart. You can read more about the effects the Church’s stance on homosexuality had on my family in this collection of letters my grandfather wrote to Church Elders across many years (P.S. I designed the cover!). All of this to say, that as a spunky they/them with a pretty gay looking mullet who sometimes likes to dress a little out-of-the-box, I don’t always feel safe in Utah. Of course, there are little bits of sanctuary, like my grandparent’s house which often has a pride flag out front instead of the standard American flag or Encircle, a non-profit LGBTQ+ resource center with locations all around the state, but these safe spaces are few and far between. For the most part, it’s Mormons all the way down.

For all the complaining I do, part of me actually really enjoys going to Utah. Believe it or not, there’s actually a lot to love about this place. For one, Utah has some of the most breathtaking nature of any state in the country. Depending on where you are, you could step out into a Walmart parking lot and be greeted with a downright emotional view of the mountains at sunset, or the mesmerizing red rocks of the southern half of the state. In fact, the view from a Chili’s was so inspiring to Tan France (the fashion gay from Queer Eye) that he decided to move to Salt Lake City. In 2018 he told the Salt Lake Tribune, “I went out to dinner at Chili’s on Fourth South, and at the end of that meal, I said to my friend, ‘I’m going to live here one day… I can see the mountains from this restaurant, and that’s beautiful.” He has since decided to sell his Utah home, leaving some (me and my sister) to speculate if it had anything to do with the closure of that fateful Chili’s. And if Utah’s natural beauty was so inspiring to someone as elegant and worldly as Tan France, imagine how awestruck he must’ve been when he encountered the only thing in the state more beautiful than the landscape: the sodascape.

Since Mormons can’t drink coffee or alcohol, the main drive-through beverage trend in Utah is ‘dirty soda’ (I call it Mormon soda), which is basically soda with syrup and creamer in it. Anywhere you go, you’ll see shops like Swig, Sodalicious, and Twisted Sugar, all selling soda and other sweets. The craze really took hold in the late 2010s, but I personally had been invested in the concept since I first visited the original Swig location in St. George when I was very young. In Utah, you may not always be free to express yourself with the way you dress or the bathroom you use on state property, but you can always express yourself through a ridiculous soda order. My regular drink used to be a Dr. Pepper with watermelon syrup from Swig (which I stand by as being delicious, even if it sounds disgusting), but these days I’ve been more into the ‘National Parks’ from Sodalicious, a Dr. Pepper with huckleberry, raspberry, and fresh lime. Pure bliss in a cup, and it can only be found in Utah (and some parts of Arizona and Texas).

When a soda shop opened in Rockefeller Center in 2024, a lot of people who knew I had a personal stake in the Mormon soda industry asked me what I thought of it. I’ve tried it a few times, and I don’t know what it is, but it just does not hit the same outside of Utah. Maybe the soda fountains in Utah are higher quality, or maybe the air in New York is just less holy, but something wasn’t the same. It’s as if the magic of Mormon soda only exists in its homeland. Also, since it was in New York City, I paid much more for a much smaller cup.

So there’s the nature and the soda, but are those really enough to offset everything else going on in the state? Is that enough to make me look past all the negativity and actually admit that I ‘like’ Utah? Unfortunately, not really. But on my latest trip to Provo, I observed something else about the state I hadn’t really seen before. It happened when I absentmindedly opened up The Dating App.

I only opened it on the night before I was to fly back to Seattle, so I had no real intention of messaging anyone I saw there — it was more of a window shopping experience. Now, this may sound stupid, but as I swiped through the algorithmically curated pile of eligible suitors, it was though, all at once I remembered that there are plenty of other “spunky they/them’s with gay looking mullets” in Provo, most of whom I assume also enjoy a ‘National Parks’ every now and then. You just have to look a bit harder to find them than you do in a place like Bushwick. Despite my lamenting about the heterosexual-ness of Utah culture and all the horror I feel whenever I read about the latest anti-trans attacks coming from the state legislature, at the end of the day, I get to fly back to a blue state. The people who live here and are smiling at me through my screen are the ones who have to bear the brunt of these attacks.

You might be able to see that since I love gays and I love soda, it can be hard for me to decide whether or not I ‘like’ spending time in Utah. It’s a conflict I face each time I end up in the state. Do I enjoy coming here? Would I ever visit if I didn’t have family here? Is there truly no way to capture the magic of a ‘National Parks’ outside of these borders? Was Tan France right? Is there more to Utah than I give it credit for?

To sum up my average Utah experience, I invite you to take a close look at the house I stayed at during my latest expedition to the state. To support the 20+ members of my family coming into Utah County to celebrate my grandma’s 85th birthday, my aunt booked a massive house on The Short-Term Rental App. The house was on an idyllic street, and for the most part, fit the needs of the weekend perfectly. It had more bedrooms than I could count, two dining tables, a built-in trampoline in a backyard that was otherwise mostly waterfall, and even a movie theater in the basement. The overall look was charmingly outdated, clearly built during the Tuscan interior craze of early-aughts, leaving each room feeling like an alternative set for Troy Bolton’s house in High School Musical (which was actually filmed in Utah!).

The house was as alarming as it was charming. Upon entering, I was greeted with two large metal hounds that I momentarily thought were real. Once the door shut, I came face-to-face with the first of what would be many photos of Jesus in the house. For the sake of protecting some amount of the homeowner’s privacy, I have decided not to include any photos of the house, but you should know that I took a lot.

After this first holy encounter, the house started to reveal quirks even faster. A built-in urinal in the first floor and basement bathrooms, a television mounted on the ceiling above the master bed, a three-ring binder of gold plates, and my personal favorite, a motion-activated night light that was just a white square, until it revealed the face of the man himself when you got close. And of course, in true Utah fashion, there was a MAGA-red Trump mug in the kitchen cabinet.

At some point over the weekend, someone mentioned to me that the house actually belonged to the CEO of Blendtec, Tom Dickson, also known as the guy from “Will It Blend?”, a series of infomercials where he put a bunch of random bullshit in his blenders to see if it “would blend.” This explained more than a few anomalies in the house: the built-in blenders in the kitchen and master bathroom, the framed “Will It Blend?” poster in the basement, and the deposition excerpts from some blender-related lawsuit that were accidentally printed on the back of a poem my cousin wrote for my grandma. While it didn’t explain everything (for example, I still have no idea what was up with the mysterious, unlabeled dials that were everywhere or the motion activated paper towel dispenser), the fact that this rental house happened to belong to the guy from “Will It Blend?” adds to the Utah-ness of it all. Mormons are somewhat of a crafty demographic — I guess the reason I haven’t invented anything cool is because I’ve been drinking all that coffee — and anyone you run into in the state could be the CEO of something. In fact, on our way back from the Blendtec’s CEO’s house, we drove past the new multi-home development being constructed by the CEO of Crumbl Cookie (a chain that started in Logan, Utah).

While we could’ve deduced that this home belonged to the host of “Will It Blend?” on our own, my grandparents actually met with Dickson before the weekend. They wanted to “check out” the rental beforehand to make sure it would suit the family’s needs. And in what is perhaps the most “Utah” thing about this whole escapade, they knocked on a complete stranger’s door, explained who they were, and Dickson invited them in to watch the Artemis Launch in the downstairs movie theater.

For all the complaining I do about Utah, this whole Jesus-house-of-blender-related-horrors experience actually captures a few things I love about the state. Not only was our rental house randomly owned by obscure CEO and self-declared ‘homeboy’ Tom Dickson, but he was also neighborly enough to invite complete strangers into his private movie theater. If there’s one thing Utahns do right, it’s hospitality.

The “Will It Blend?” website used to sell a tee-shirt with this design. If anyone can find a resale of it please let me know. I have to have it.

What’s unfortunate though, is that for as fun and silly as his house was, Tom Dickson still had that Trump mug. Perhaps he bought it in 2016 before Donald went full-on, outward ‘fascist mode.’ After all, it was kind of hidden in the back of the cabinet. Maybe my homeboy Mr. Dickson is ashamed of his past support for Trump. Maybe he’s had a change of heart. I don’t know about him specifically, but what I do know is that for all the hospitality these Utah locals might offer people like my grandparents, it’s not clear if that same energy would be extended to someone outside of the Mormon mold. Even if Dickson has gone woke, the rest of the state sure hasn’t. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won with an over 20% lead in the state.

What’s even more unfortunate though, is that these strong-held conservative beliefs that so many in Utah have, will come to hurt them in the end eventually as well. While Utah’s ‘bathroom laws’ currently only extend to government buildings and public schools, the notion of forcing people to use bathrooms aligned with their sex at birth, has a documented history of backfiring on cisgender people, especially cisgender women. By electing infamous climate change denier Donald Trump, the Utah electorate has shot itself in the foot when it comes to receiving any federal aid for the looming ecological disaster that is the drying up of the Great Salt Lake. The city’s titular lake has been drying up for years as a result of both climate change and the way Utah distributes its water resources, and if it continues to dry up it could release a whole plethora of toxic chemicals into the air, rendering the region uninhabitable for a good portion of the population. Billionaire and Trump ally Kevin O’Leary is set to build a 40,000 acre data center in the state that would raise nighttime temperatures significantly, and could raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64%. These disturbing developments do not just exist as the short-form news delivered to me on Instagram Reels: they’re real problems and they’re going to cause harm for everyone in the state. My family, Tom Dickson’s family, all those people on The Dating App, Swig employees, Sodalicious employees, and perhaps worst of all, the cast of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Everyone. Regardless of their Jesus night lights and Trump mugs.

I still don’t know if I ‘like’ going to Utah. Though I’m not sure that I’m happy about receiving “I’m sorry” as a response from my friends. I’m not blaming them; God knows Utah has its problems and I have serious qualms with it as well. I think at this point, whether I like it or not, I’ve spent enough time there that the state is a part of me. I’m a woke bicoastal elite, but I also know that the people of Utah aren’t just background characters in the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Those blurred out figures sitting behind Jen while her husband has a public meltdown about her making more money than him, are real people.

A lot of us ‘coastal elites’ like to write-off middle America as a land of racist rednecks, or in Utah’s case, sober racist rednecks. But the truth is, the Utah Mormons are suffering under the same systems as the rest of us, they’ve just been taught that the source of their troubles is immigrants who drink coffee and transgender people who sometimes need to use a public bathroom. Not to mention the queer people and the communities of color in the state, who bear the brunt of this misplaced blame.

I’m not sure how I want my friends to react when I say I’m going to Utah. “I’m sorry” feels too negative and “have fun” just feels sarcastic. But it’s not like I can expect them to say “have a complicated time in a state that hates you but has influenced your life in ways you might not even fully understand yet” every time. I’ll keep the “I’m sorry”’s for now, and I’ll keep whining about the state’s flaws — after all, I love being part of an in-group that’s making fun of the out-group — but my heart won’t ever truly be in it. Every time I catch a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, part of me will wish it were the red rocks of Ivins. When I pay $10 for a smoothie in the East Village, part of me will wish I could have just made it myself in a master bathroom BlendTec. And, most of all, each time I take a sip of coffee, I will always wish it was a ‘National Parks.’