LGBTQ
“I’ve been watching you,” he said as he took a seat in my office.
He was a senior administrator at the college where I served as dean of the chapel and campus pastor. I was new and knew him only by name.
“I have something to tell you. I think I can trust you.”
I had no idea what he was about to say, but having been a pastor for twenty years, I was (as John Prine sings in a song) prepared for the worst.
By the time our counseling session was over I knew all about his hidden life; and by the time (some months later) he had told everybody else his secret, he had lost his job, his wife, and his church.
That was a quarter century ago. He has moved on and so have I; and in many ways, so has the country, even to the point of seriously considering a gay man as the presidential candidate of a major political party.
It wasn’t always that way, though.
My education and early ministry occurred in a cultural context in which the gay and lesbian people were demonized. I remember the campaign led by Anita Bryant of southern Florida to put a stop to what she called the gay lifestyle.
At the time, I knew no one who was gay or lesbian. Or so I thought, not realizing then that my best friend in middle school and high school was gay. She did not know it either, I assume; and it was only a year before her death three years ago that I was told.
She told me.
“After college, I was in a religious commune,” she said, referring to the days of the Jesus Movement. “My spiritual leaders paired me with a single man about my age and urged us to marry, which we did. It lasted less than two years, but I knew within months it was wrong.”
It was wrong, she explained, not because he was not a good fit for me as a person but because I was just becoming aware of my real self.
She went on to live her life out west, a professional counselor in a state prison system, converted to Judaism, fully embracing her life as a queer person.
Except: late in life, in poor health, she returned to our childhood home, reconnected with her family and faith, and repudiated the queer identity she once embraced. She died alone, but not after telling me many times, “I love you, Dwight. You were always my best friend.” In between our teenage friendship and her deathbed confession were fifty years of total and complete separation.
Like Americans as a whole, I was gradually awakening to the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it meant to be queer in the United States, or more importantly for me, queer in the church.
I remember not a single church episode involving queer folk for the first fifty years of my life. I know now that every church of which I was a member or a minister had its fair share of gay people. But I had been raised and educated in a religious culture in which black people were told to sit in the balcony and behave, women folk were told to sit in the pews and be quiet, and gay folk were told to sit in the closet and stay there.
The first time I had to make a decision about all this was early on in leading the Academy of Preachers. This was an initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment and operating with this clear mission: “to identify, network, support, and inspire young people in the call to gospel preaching.”
I wrote that statement and led the organization from 2008 to 2018, as founder, organizer, president, traveling promoter, and later chair of the board. It was the best job I ever had. We gathered young people ages 14-28 to festivals of preaching; and those who came were Orthodox and Evangelical, Catholic and Protestant, male and female, and, yes, gay and straight.
I had not given any thought to including or excluding gay preachers. Until one called me for clarification. I said the only thing I could think to say: “We are asking only if you have a call to preach, not who you are sleeping with.” I later realized that question opened the gate into identity and behavioral issues that were far bigger than just gay sex. And it revealed an equation of orientation and behavior that I know now is unacceptable.
Our preaching festivals soon featured the American Spiritual Ensemble, with their delightful and talented pianist. I loved him immediately and to this day, only later learning his story as he shared it with me as a guest on the radio.
“I was a child prodigy on the piano,” he said without a trace of boast. “My parents were fundamentalist pastors in Rome, Italy. I knew early on I was different.” His relationship with his parents, he explained, has been a long and difficult journey.
He was not the only gay man in that fabulous chorus. But who was and who wasn’t was only my guess; and we all know how dangerous such guessing can be. But I remember the day one of them embraced me and kissed me on the back of the neck.
“What does that mean?” I thought then and think now. I still don’t know but wish I did.
Mostly, I don’t know much about all this, except that I have remained open to the people God has put on my path, many of them queer. I don’t understand them, for sure, but I don’t understand myself, either, or a lot of other people. But this much I know. We in the church were wrong about black people and we were wrong about women, and I decided it was highly probable that we were wrong about gays.
I love my friends, gay or straight, and I thank God for shaping my soul and directing my path in ways that brought me to this good place. I hope they feel the same way.
