Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: West Hollywood

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Three Meditations for Pride

West Hollywood Pride, 1979.

Meditations selected from my 1994 book, The Word Is Out.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to [God], throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

Exodus 11:14

As Jews celebrate Passover in remembrance of their deliverance from Egypt, so we celebrate gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride month, week, and day, as a remembrance of our deliverance from spiritual and societal bondage.

A straight minister invited to deliver the sermon at a gay pride worship service approached me for advice. “I’ve always been taught that pride was a sin,” he said, perplexed.

I explained that I believe shame, not pride, is more of an issue for people today. False pride, or hubris, may itself be an expression of deeply felt shame, the need to puff oneself up because of low self-esteem. Current theories link shame to many of our personal and social ills. Then I told him that one cannot apply a concept of the sin of pride to a marginalized people like us who have always been taught that we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) wrote in her book Out of Africa, “Pride is faith in the idea that God had when [God] made us.” Lesbian and gay pride simply expresses “faith in the idea that God had when God made us.”

We celebrate our faith in your idea in making us, Creator God.

We pray others will share our faith and our pride.

Atlanta Pride, 2005.

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Mark 11:9

What a day of pride! Yet a day of humility, too, for Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and was heralded by everyday people, not local officials or dignitaries. But it was a moment of kairos—a spiritual turning point. And it was so powerful that, as Jesus said to the religious fundamentalists objecting to the revelers, “If these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” This is how I praised God for my first encounter with a gay Christian minister, Bill Johnson. This is how I praised God for my first encounter with a lesbian and gay Christian church, Metropolitan Community Churches [founded nine months before the Stonewall uprising]. This is how I praised God for my first Christian boyfriend, Stan Schobert. If I had not cried out with joy, church walls would have screamed!

That’s why the religious organizations get extra applause and shouts in lesbian and gay pride parades, so the pavement beneath them doesn’t bellow!

Hosanna! Blessed are all those who re-present you, God!

Atlanta Pride, 2009.

But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”

Acts 16:28

Paul and Silas are beaten and jailed for delivering a young female slave from those who were exploiting her psychic powers. Midnight finds them praying and singing hymns to God, when an earthquake opens the prison doors and unfastens all the prisoners’ chains. The jailer awakes. Knowing the penalty is death for allowing an escape, he intends to take his own life. But Paul shouts, assuring him no one has escaped.

Paul’s generosity of spirit prompts the jailer to ask about the gospel, and he is converted, caring for their wounds and feeding them.

The chair of the committee guiding my preparation for ministry opposed my ordination because I was gay. Years later, on a visit to the church I served in a non-ordained capacity, he asked more about the gospel we proclaimed. His son had come out to him. In our dialogue that followed, I invited him to serve on the board of my ministry.

Our liberation is not complete until we free those who imprison us. Through prayer and singing, God will give us the grace to prove redemptive even to our captors, and proclaim the gospel of the integrity of spirituality and sexuality.

God of Mercy, we pray for the liberation of our captors rather than their harm.

Grant us grace to be gracious.

The above meditations for June 25, 28, and 30 are from my 1994 book The Word is Out: The Bible Reclaimed for Lesbians and Gay Men, re-subtitled for the 1999 edition Daily Reflections on the Bible for Lesbians and Gay Men. Each month of the year-long daily devotional has a theme. The theme of June is Liberation.

Also see last week’s post: A Prayer Quartet for Pride

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Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

John Boswell in front of my West Hollywood apartment in 1983.

Photo by Chris R. Glaser.

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

When I was serving a national Presbyterian task force on homosexuality as its only openly gay member, one of my Yale Divinity School professors, Henri Nouwen, suggested I would benefit from the scholarship of a new young professor in Yale’s history department, John Boswell.

But it was other mutual friends who brought us together for dinner, and by the end of the evening I was smitten, not only by how brilliant his mind and revolutionary his research, but by his good looks and boyish charm. I persuaded my task force to invite him to share some of his handwritten manuscript, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, at our next meeting in Philadelphia.

We had sought the expertise of scholars like situation ethicist Joseph Fletcher and scientists like sex researcher William Masters of Masters and Johnson, but none of the experts we consulted wowed the task force like John, and some of his as yet unpublished work filtered into our background paper and certainly influenced the recommendation of the committee’s 1978 majority report that homosexuality should not bar someone from ordination.

When I served as founding director of the Lazarus Project, the first ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community funded by a mainstream denomination, Boswell lectured many times for us over the years about his work discovering the hidden history of LGBT Christians, from saints to same-sex unions in the church.

He happily stayed in my modest, shoe-box-shaped West Hollywood apartment on those visits, and his unique request each time was that we go to Disneyland.

As far as I know, I was the only friend who called him John because of my affection for the name. Other friends knew him as “Jeb,” the acronym of his initials.

On the occasion of his first visit in the fall of 1983, I invited several people to have dinner with him: Rev. Troy Perry, founder of MCC, Malcolm Boyd, openly gay author and priest (who did not use “Rev.” as a title), and Steve Schulte, executive director of L.A.’s LGBT Community Services Center and one-time Colt model.

Meanwhile my friend George Lynch was en route from South Carolina. We had met at the beginning of the summer during the Atlanta General Assembly reuniting the southern and northern Presbyterian churches, and we joked that we took reunion seriously by bonding as a couple. He was scheduled to arrive the next day, so I urged him to get there in time to enjoy this dinner.

I probably served my signature lasagna, as it was something I could prepare beforehand and bake while I visited with guests. The salad, however, was in process when I received a phone call from George that he had broken down on the nearby Hollywood Freeway, and the tow company would only take cash, no credit card. So I left Boswell with the task of finishing the salad and greeting our arriving guests while I drove to assist poor George.

As I was going out, a feverish Troy Perry made a brief appearance to meet Boswell, and excused himself before dinner because he had returned from Mexico with a severe case of—in his own words—“Montezuma’s revenge.” Upon my return, Boyd, with his date, a writer from the L.A. Times, and I enjoyed chatting with Boswell over dinner, while awaiting the arrivals of George after tending to his car, and Steve Schulte, who was delayed at the airport returning home.

George and Steve arrived at the same time, and after introductions and servings, the initial focus was on George’s long distance drive and his harrowing experience breaking down in the middle of Los Angeles rush hour traffic. We all welcomed him to California!

Given the cast of characters, I am certain that we had some important conversations about church, politics, and the LGBT community. But the memorable thing for me was our good humor as we adjusted to the evening as it was, a bit chaotic, very homely—yet a rare opportunity for an intimate gathering of early history-makers in the LGBT community.

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