Back in 2010, Troy Williams was nicknamed the unofficial “gay mayor of Salt Lake City.”
For more than a decade, the LGBTQ+ activist was executive director of Equality Utah, and now he’s stepping down with a long list of accomplishments in his wake.
“Utah is a very unique state,” he said. “We're very conservative, we have a very sort of religious culture here, but we found a way to advance LGBT rights.”
Williams didn’t start as a diplomatic force. He was a self-proclaimed rabble rouser when it came to fighting for LGBTQ+ rights.
“I was the one leading the marches and the protests, but the [Latter-day Saint] church began dialogue with my predecessor and others, and we recognized that there were areas where we didn't agree. But we kept asking ourselves the question, where can we find common ground?”
Ultimately, that happened in his role at Equality Utah — using his background as a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a navigation tool to create dialogue.
“It was really important for me to kind of come to the table with the church and begin dialog,” he said. “That's the only way we can move things forward, is if we have the courage and the openness to sit down with the people who we perceive to be our adversaries.”
In today’s polarized political climate, that’s been harder to come by. In fact, Williams said that the willingness to sit in Utah was “a unique gift” that the country as a whole was losing.
The approach Utah Equality championed bore fruit.
In 2013, Utah became the first state in the country to overturn a ban on gay marriage following U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby’s ruling on Kitchen v. Herbert. It barred the enforcement of both the Utah law prohibiting same-sex marriage and the amendment to the state constitution that defines marriage as a legal union only between a man and a woman. That prompted a rush of gay couples seeking marriage licenses.
Williams said it wasn’t a smooth ride getting there.
“The church had invested a considerable amount of resources in traditional marriage, and so there was a lot of contention, and there were a lot of protests and marches and rallies, but the church began private dialogue with leaders of Equality Utah.”
Two years later, Utah became the first Republican state to pass anti-discrimination legislation covering sexual orientation and gender identity in the form of SB296, commonly known as the “Utah Compromise.” That added protections for LGBTQ+ Utahns in housing and the workplace. It also provided anti-discrimination protection for religious beliefs, and was supported by Latter-day Saint leadership.
“We discovered that both parties realized that we didn't want people to be evicted from their homes or fired from their jobs because they were gay, because they were transgender or because they had religious beliefs around these issues, and from that little sliver of common ground we began to build.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pamela McCall: Utah’s 2026 legislative session that just wrapped up. What happened with LGBTQ+ rights this year?
Troy Williams: Specifically, transgender issues have been a flashpoint, and in many ways they've been weaponized by some cynical lawmakers, and so it's become very challenging. However, this session, it kind of proved that we can still make progress. There was several pieces of legislation that would have harmed transgender Utahns, but we sat down with leaders in both the House and the Senate. We sat down with the governor. We made our case, and these measures, the most egregious elements of them, did not advance or move forward. We were able to kill several bills and then amend others.
PM: You called conversion therapy a “dangerous fraud” and Equality Utah supported the state ban. How big was that achievement?
TW: The fact that in 2023 we were able to bring lawmakers together to unanimously ban conversion therapy in this state is a phenomenal achievement, and that happened because people on all sides had the courage and the willingness to sit down and listen to each other.
In this polarized moment, where everyone, it's a winner-takes-all kind of politics, that willingness to come to the table and hear each other, to make reasonable compromise where necessary, and actually, you know, move things forward, is really a unique gift. We're losing it as a country. And if Utah can be a model for how we engage these kinds of issues, that will make me very proud.
PM: What else are you most proud of from your time at Equality Utah?
TW: I'm most proud of Utahns who are conservative and religious and who are willing to come to the table and actually help us find common ground. I want to give credit to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a way that they're often unheralded for. They have very specific doctrinal beliefs around marriage and around sexuality that they haven't wavered from in any of our negotiations. The real work is to reach out to people who don't think like you, and to figure out and discover where we have common ground.
