Children of Stonewall--and the Kingdom!

Our group at Creative Camp.

This past Sunday I stumbled offering the Moment for Mindfulness at Ormewood Church about the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. I had originally planned to do it from notes, but decided to write it out so I would say precisely what I intended briefly. But I momentarily lost my place, I guess because I rarely do public speaking these days.

But I did get in my thought that the several-day-and-night 1969 resistance of drag queens, people of color and LGBT folk to the harassing bar raids of New York City police officers served as a “foundational myth” of our present-day movement. As such, it’s been useful for political and, I’d say, spiritual organizing and mobilization.

Yet our contemporary movement did not begin there. In the U.S., it began long before when Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin founded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, a lesbian activist group. It began in 1964 with the foundation of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco. It began nine months before Stonewall when the Rev. Troy Perry and 12 brave souls founded Metropolitan Community Church in 1968. It began with the work of people like Bayard Rustin, Christine Jorgensen, Barbara Gittings, Frank Kameny, and many more, as well as multiple social, political, and religious groups building an activist base. This is true in other nations as well.

All resistance movements, however, can trace their roots to ancient times, to yes, even biblical times. Our pastor, Jenelle Holmes, gave an artful sermon on Rizpah’s resistance, protecting the bodies of her dead sons (2 Samuel 3:7; 21:1-14), drawing parallels to Matthew Shepard’s mother, Judy Shepard, creating a foundation that helped pass hate crimes legislation, Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, insisting on an open coffin so the world could see his battered body, lynched after he was falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, and last week’s photograph of a drowned Salvadoran migrant, Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, on the shores of the Rio Grande River.

I can’t recall Jenelle “losing it” in a sermon, but tears came as she approached its final page. And she wasn’t the only one. She turned it into an occasion for lament, and instead of our usual small group discussions, provided three holy spaces for our responses: one with candles to light for lives lost to injustice, another with prayers for justice we could read silently to God, and one for writing cards to legislators expressing our grief for lives lost in our country due to injustice. Many visited more than one of the three stations.

A few weeks ago, we held a “Creative Camp,” Ormewood Church’s version of Vacation Bible School, for our own and our neighbors’ children. I helped with the 2-4-year-olds, all boys, and I saw where notions of “Original Sin” as well as “Original Innocence” came from! Yet I was moved by their willingness to buy into the program, so to speak, though our most prolonged conversation was about farts, ha!

The experience no doubt prepared me to be moved, at the end of the service honoring the ripples of Rizpah’s resistance, when Jenelle’s nine-year old daughter, Darcy, presented me with the artwork to the right, depicting my partner and me. I learned later she had done the same for a lesbian couple in the congregation, Ceej and Cathie. I lost it. Tears of grief, of gratitude, of hope.

 She represents for me the children of Stonewall and more broadly, the children of the Kingdom of God.

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

An Extraordinary Friendship

Selfie taken by Erin Swenson with me when we took 

a walk along the Atlanta Beltline a few weeks ago.

I conclude a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that posted each Wednesday of June, Pride Month, and now extended to this first week of July, given the “interruption” of my post on Orlando. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next week! And for the dozens of activists I’ve encountered and have yet to write about, maybe I’ll tell more stories next June.

There are momentous occasions in our lives that cause us to remember details surrounding them vividly. It was inside the El Capitan Theater in downtown North Hollywood when I was 19 years old that I saw The Christine Jorgensen Story, a 1970 film about a transgender person, long before that term was familiar.

As a young gay man, I identified with her, though I did not think of myself as other than what we now call cisgendered. But that she crossed gender expectations was one more encouragement for me as a same-gender loving young man, and one more reason why I never resisted including “T” in “LGBT.” For me, it’s always been a “no-brainer” to do so, and I speculate my attitude originated from seeing that film.

It seemed fitting, then, when I learned that New York City’s Stonewall Rebellion that is heralded as the beginning of the U.S. queer rights movement was largely initiated by drag queens and transgender folk discontent with the abusive enforcement of gender expectations of our American society.

My first Presbytery of Greater Atlanta meeting after moving to this city was one that considered the continued ministry of the Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson after transitioning from Eric to Erin. Having been ensconced as a volunteer in presbytery and synod ecclesiastical committees and conclaves in Southern California—to my dismay having little effect on changing Presbyterian views on lesbian and gay Christians—I had delayed involvement in similar commitments in my new home of Georgia.

But I wanted to be supportive of Erin, whom I had never met, and see how this presbytery behaved in considering her ongoing calling. I was impressed with her pastoral approach, showing great patience in answering even the most insulting of questions. I was also impressed that, as a therapist who had “been there” for many of the presbyters as Eric, many of them were more receptive and respectful of her own choices.

When her calling was affirmed by a healthy majority, the heavens opened up for me, and the Spirit descended in a rare appearance at a presbytery meeting.

That began what I consider a beautiful friendship. I’ve spent time with her former and loving wife and her faithful daughters, with her father and her sister and brother-in-law, and a friend—whose Pakistani birth certificate read “female” when he knew he was male—and his wife, both faithful Muslims, whose wedding, celebrated by Erin, I attended in their Sufi circle. I also was invited to attend their festivities on Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

I think the most memorable holiday dinner I’ve hosted included LGBT Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and atheist/pagan guests and there were only seven people around my dining room table!

Erin was there for me the night when my mom died, the first to come to my house with Sharon Taylor, my pastor whom Erin had notified. Erin was there for me when Mark and I separated, helping me with my double grief, recommending a couples’ counselor and serving as our divorce negotiator as well. She retained me as her writing coach when she was writing her as yet unpublished but powerful memoir.

She gave the charge at my MCC ordination in 2005, and she served as celebrant of Wade’s and my wedding in 2015. And she was beloved by my dogs, Calvin and Hobbes, with whom she would stay when I was out of town, and last July, joined me and Wade and a few friends celebrating Hobbes’ life at a recently opened Mexican restaurant.

And she was among the “trinity” to whom I dedicated my book, Henri’s Mantle, for getting me through “the recent unpleasantness.”

I entitled this “an extraordinary friendship” not only because of Erin’s great friendship, but because I believe transgender folk have been great friends to lesbians, gay men, bisexual and straight people, enlarging our view of gender and gender possibilities.  To me, that is a spiritual value, and applies to our understanding of God as well.

The Religion and Faith Program of HRC, the Human Rights Campaign, contracted me to pull together their curriculum, Gender Identity and Our Faith Communities: A Congregational Guide for Transgender Advocacy.

Earlier posts in this series:

Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom

Don’t You Want Me?

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

Love between Women

Nobody Doesn’t Like Janie Spahr

Stranger in My Office

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, photographer, and blogsite. Other rights reserved.