The Lord's University: A Memoir
When Daniel Embree enrolled at BYU, Utah’s conservative Mormon university, he hoped it would make him straight. It didn’t.
The Lord’s University: My Life Underground is a finished, unpublished memoir about an art student who would have gone to an art school on the East Coast if he didn’t believe that God told him to head west instead.
At Brigham Young University, Embree seeks the counsel of a reparative therapist and a Bishop who promise him that if he follows their bizarre instructions he can be cured of his gay inclinations. Instead he finds that no amount of prayer and piety–not even 2 years as a missionary in Los Angeles–can make him straight, and he must accept himself as a gay man.
Just as he discovers an entire underground community of gay BYU students and meets the man of his dreams, the Mormon church wades into the campaign for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California, and turns the campus into a war zone over his future.
Embree is currently seeking a literary agent and opportunities to publish The Lord’s University.