Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Mel White

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 27, 2012

The Boy with Green Hair

I am convinced that films often serve as the “sermons” of our time, interpreting what Jesus was all about.

As a boy, I was sometimes left to entertain myself on Saturday afternoons. Watching TV, I happened onto a film that touched my experience even before I could name it. I knew I was different and was pained by my difference because, like most children, I wanted to be like everyone else.

The Boy with Green Hair was about a war orphan my age who woke up one morning and discovered his hair had turned green. Now, I had to gather this from the dialogue, because we only had a black and white television set. Besides my nascent sexuality, which I could hide, I had an analogous experience: I had bright red hair. My father affectionately called me “carrot top,” which I didn’t mind, but hated it when a stranger called me “red,” usually in a less-than-respectful way.

So I could understand from several vantage points the discomfort of the boy with green hair who wanted to fit in, but had schoolmates make fun of him, fear him, even scapegoat him. The boy had learned the day before his hair turned green the truth that he was an orphan, having never been told his parents were killed doing relief work in war-ravaged Europe. Passed around by various selfish relatives, he finally landed with “gramp,” a compassionate, retired vaudeville performer and magician.

The orphan has a mystical encounter with fellow war orphans in the woods, one of whom tells him his green hair may be a sign of something good, a way to tell others of the cost of war. No one believes him, of course, and he finally submits to the pressure of conformity and has his head shaved, an act which causes all who tormented him to be ashamed. When read a letter his father left behind, assuring him of his parents’ love and encouraging him to warn others of the price of war, he resolves to let his hair grow back green if it wants to. He accepts his difference. I identified with him because I knew I was different, though being gay was then more unspeakable than having either green or red hair.

Not many years ago I discovered a whole community online that had similarly identified with the boy, having seen the film on television in the 60s, themselves experiencing in various ways what it was like not to fit in, those whose differences “orphaned” them. I also learned that the director of the film, Joseph Losey, was blacklisted three years later for refusing to appear and refusing to cooperate with the inquisition known as Senator Joe McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities.

Another form of McCarthyism is expressed today by those who vilify “identity politics,” as if it were a new thing or a bad thing. But it’s nothing new, having been practiced by dominant cultures that required conformity to their identities to belong. And it’s only bad when refusing to welcome those of different identities.

A friend of mine, Mel White, used to do a series for churches entitled, “I Saw Jesus at the Movies.” I saw Jesus in this movie about pacifism and diversity and the courage and compassion required to achieve both.

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Chris will be leading “Claim the God in You! A Midsummer Retreat” in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13-15, 2012, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Various events may be attended singly or together. The public is welcome! See details on the church’s website, clicking on the far right box: MCCBR Retreat.

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