SALT LAKE CITY

THE 1996 session of the Utah legislature had some important business to discuss: new roads, a light railway system, increasing crime and all the myriad problems of a state that is growing by 3% a year. They got almost nothing done. Their agenda was scuttled by a few teenage students at Salt Lake City's East High School, who had formed a gay and lesbian student association on the school premises.

The leader of the group, Kelli Peterson, says she just wanted a place for students to meet and talk about gay life. But in deeply conservative and Mormon Utah, this was an act of defiance. The Utah Eagle Forum, a conservative lobbying group, blamed "adult" homosexual activists for...