Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: LGBT Pride

Showing posts with label LGBT Pride. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

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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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Stranger in My Office

Gary Nixon & Mel White

Photo courtesy of Sean Hiller, Press Telegram.

I continue a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that is posting each Wednesday of June, Pride Month, extended to the first week of July, given my post on Orlando. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next month!

Yes, the title is a play on the title of Rev. Mel White’s “coming out” book, Stranger at the Gate, which changed so many lives and landed him on 60 Minutes.

But when he came into my church office claiming to ghostwrite for many of the major evangelical Christian celebrities, I have to admit my first thought was that here was another gay man with delusions of grandeur. Only they weren’t delusions.

He told me of his work almost confessionally, but he did not seek absolution so much as understanding and conversation as to his next steps. He believed his work moderated the tone of what each wrote about homosexuality. His subsequent memoir also explained that at least a couple of those who breathed fire upon LGBT people did so disingenuously, to raise money and their media profile. Several knew they had gay people on their staffs and valued their work.

I also learned the truth about at least some ghostwriting. An “author” might give Mel a few pages of notes about an intended book and let him run with it. Mel did the heavy-lifting, but the “author” got the glory and the bigger check. He did well, but not so well that when sent a first class airplane ticket he wouldn’t cash it in and fly economy to better support his family.

This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He and his partner Gary Nixon had visited West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where I served from 1977 to 1987 as founding director of the Lazarus Project, a ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community. It was toward the end of my tenure that we met, and my then partner, George Lynch, and I became friends with Mel and Gary.

We liked hanging out with them because both included George in our conversations. George and I had endured the irritating habit of people addressing me rather than him, given my various roles, though he had more education in religion and a longer commitment to the Presbyterian Church! (He had been “outed” on his way to ordination in the “southern stream,” the Presbyterian Church, U.S., in which he had been born and raised.)

I have been blessed with partners who were always more computer savvy than me, and it was George and Mel I thanked in the acknowledgments for bringing me into the computer age with my second book, Come Home: Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians. Mel lent me his old computer, which worked fine until the ninth chapter, which kept disappearing before my eyes, forcing me three times to write it again one long evening! The next day I went to a discount store and bought my first computer.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. I typed my first book, Uncommon Calling, on an IBM Selectric Mel had given me, and showed the manuscript to Henri Nouwen, who because of his closeted state could offer advice but no publishing connections, and to Mel White, who liked the book and gave it to his wife, Lyla, to read. She “loved” the book and took me to a fancy lunch to celebrate, as she was an acquisitions editor for Harper & Row’s religion division in San Francisco.

Lyla passed it on to them with a high recommendation for publishing it, but the manuscript was summarily returned to me rather than to her, not the protocol, by what Mel and Lyla surmised was a homophobic and closeted homosexual editor. Six months of trying other publishing houses made me so frustrated I submitted it again to Harper & Row, explaining it had been declined but asking it to be reconsidered, and got a favorable reply from editor Jan Johnson, who had not seen it when it came through the house earlier. She had just edited John Fortunato’s AIDS: The Spiritual Dilemma.

Mel made a huge splash when his own book appeared in 1994, becoming a media sensation, including the stint on 60 Minutes, which ended with the interviewer asking the inane “magic pill” question: “If there were a magic pill that you could take to make you straight, would you?”

After the interview, I called Mel in Texas to congratulate him. He asked me if I thought he had lost fellow LGBT activists in saying “yes” to the magic pill question. I said absolutely not, that it was a stupid question anyway, and that he had replied honestly, which is all that is required of us.

A few years later, I was a guest in Mel and Gary’s home in Laguna, California, when both of us were speaking to an LGBT Christian conference in that seaside town. Mel received word that a huge shipment from India had arrived: everything Mahatma Gandhi had ever written. It was the beginning of Soul Force, the latest chapter in Mel White’s life.

Given that our finest times with Mel and Gary were often along the shore in Laguna, it pleases me to have a happy ending to this post. They now live in Long Beach near George Lynch and his spouse, Louie Tamantini, meeting for dinners and together attending last fall’s Pride celebration in Palm Springs. I only wish I could’ve joined them!

That All May Freely Serve recently made available a video of my personal account of the movement (11 minutes).

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

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Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Nobody Doesn't Like Janie Spahr

Jane Adams Spahr

I resume a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that is continuing each Wednesday of June, Pride Month, extended to the first week of July, given my post on Orlando last week. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next month!

Rev. Jane Adams Spahr goes back to the earliest days of the LGBT Christian movement, but her influence will be felt for generations to come.

When she faced multiple church trials for her activism, it was apparent to me that the church could only embarrass itself by her prosecution, because, re-purposing a then current Sara Lee pastries ad (“Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”): “Nobody doesn’t like Janie Spahr.”

Her genius, I believe, was encouraging EVERYONE to tell their own stories, in her words, “personing the issue.” And as it has turned out, that was the saving grace of the whole LGBT movement, that we were everywhere, telling our stories to our families, friends, coworkers, congregations, communities, congressional districts, and political parties. I believe that’s why our congregations and culture were so readily transformed.

My earliest recollection of her was during a party in the San Francisco Bay area. She was faux flirting with my host, a Presbyterian minister and closeted gay man, who returned the innocent flirtation. I knew both were gay, but they did not know that of one another. I found myself later saying to my host, “I think Janie would be supportive if you came out to her.” And to her, “I think Bill would be supportive if you came out to him.”

Janie was blessed by a truly loving husband, Jim Spahr, whom she credits with facilitating her being/becoming herself. We should all be so lucky, to have a partner who supports our emergence even if it means divorce. They and his wife Jackie are still friends, and when I served as the interim pastor for MCC San Francisco, this “trinity” was the first to welcome me over dinner and the last to say farewell to me just before I returned to Atlanta, again, over dinner.

In the early days, she brought me to the Bay Area to consult me about the founding of the Lazarus Project, even as she was initiating her Ministry of Light.

We each had our own spheres of influence and our own way of doing things, but I was surprised to learn that some fellow travelers in the movement imagined there was great dissonance between us. Once, after a devastating defeat at a Presbyterian General Assembly, we came out of the hall, grief-stricken. As an introvert, I could find no words to speak, but as an extrovert, Janie found just the right words to comfort us, something I later wrote about, commending her.

Yet afterward a mutual friend told me that the tension was so great between us that “you could cut it with a knife”—but I felt no such animus, and had no idea where that notion came from.

There was a moment that dismayed me, however, but it was not Janie’s fault. It came from the fact that she was “grandfathered” in as a minister, having been ordained prior to May, 1978, when the denominational ban on LGBT ordination was enacted, preventing my own ordination.

And it came because Downtown United Presbyterian Church of Rochester, NY, hired her as an associate minister. I was stunned by that piece of “good news” in a phone conversation with one of my other heroines, Virginia Ramey Mollencott, and I honestly say that I felt a twinge of envy, for it was a position to which I could never have applied, not being ordained. Yet I was furious when the denomination would not allow her to fulfill that call.

Because of her charisma and inclusive and generous spirit, as well as the generosity of the Downtown church, which then hired her as a “lesbian evangelist” to travel the country on our behalf, Janie Spahr became for many the face of our movement in the Presbyterian Church. Yet she and the church founded That All May Freely Serve, a ministry intent on representing the many faces of our movement. Wherever I travel for speaking engagements, I encounter someone whose life has been touched or transformed by her ministry.

And usually I find it was simply because she listened to them, and offered them words of assurance, affirmation, and encouragement.

Nobody doesn’t like Janie Spahr!

That All May Freely Serve recently made available a video of my personal account of the movement (11 minutes).

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

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Love between Women

Bernadette Brooten

In thanksgiving for the life, ministry, advocacy, and friendship of the Rev. Kathy (Young) Lancaster, who served the Presbyterian task force on homosexuality as its staff person.

The last two posts of May unconsciously began a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that is continuing each Wednesday of June, LGBT Pride Month. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next month!

Many years before Brandeis University professor Bernadette Brooten published her extraordinary 1996 work, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, she attended a Lazarus Project conference I organized featuring John Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Today these books stand side by side on my bookshelves.

I was so taken by her work unearthing evidence of females in relationship in antiquity, that I suggested she return as a co-presenter with Boswell at another such event.

Initially she was responsive to that idea, but upon reflection, she graciously but firmly explained to me that it wouldn’t work out. The introduction to her later book may explain her hesitancy: while crediting Boswell with gathering more on female homoeroticism in the Roman period than many previous scholars, she and other feminists criticized his book’s lack of gender analysis.

So I suggested she co-present with my friend Ann Matter, who was doing similar work with women loving women in the Middle Ages. Their collaboration, “Lesbians in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” was a big success, drawing more lesbians than any previous Lazarus gathering, though one couple left early, disgruntled to discover the material presented had to do with religion.

I had met Ann Matter while in seminary in 1974 when, together, we introduced the need for ministry among LGBT Yalies to the Yale Religious Ministry, an interfaith gathering of campus chaplains led by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a progressive Christian who would later describe himself (as many of us could be described) as “a recovering racist, sexist, and homophobe.”

The year after Brooten’s book appeared, she joined me and other presenters to lead an LGBT-oriented conclave at the Presbyterian conference center at Stony Point, New York. Attendees were blown away by her insightful and well-researched, well-documented presentation—the most scholarly of any of our presentations.

But it was only when, during the Q&A that followed, she was asked about her personal history, that she launched into a story that mesmerized her audience. The story is still hers to tell, but suffice it to say it explained her personal passion for her work as well as the struggles she faced in doing it.

Bernadette had not come intending to tell her own story, but that was also needed to inspire us.

Somewhat ironically, the final sentence of Love between Women, intended as a cap for remembering “the ancient traditions that have diminished and debased the lives of lesbians, bisexual women, and—indeed—all women” may also serve as a reason to rehearse our personal stories:

“By understanding our past, we may progress toward a more humane future, one in which we acknowledge the sacredness and holiness of a woman expressing her love for another woman.”

Under which in my copy of her book I wrote, AMEN!

To see previous posts in this series, click on this link or copy in a browser, http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and scroll down to earlier posts.