TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1:
My question is, I want you to think back, now coming into your ministry, but even before that, when did you first realize you were straight? Which has to do with of course, how did you learn about it.
Speaker 2:
It was my best friend in high school and we went into college and we both went to the same college and we were hanging out one time and he had a hard on and he was letting me know he had a hard on and it just sort of dawned on me, I said, “Oh, boys can be attracted to one another, but I was straight and it was fine. It was very interesting to me. It was confusing to me because I hadn’t noticed it before and I still don’t know. I didn’t ask him his background, but that was it. So, it was really not until college, I guess.
Speaker 3:
I think it was just, from my perspective, so deeply ingrained in the culture that the thought of an alternative never dawned on me on until I was an adult. So, I don’t know that I can pin a particular time on it.
Speaker 4:
I think I became most intensely aware of it in graduate school. I don’t remember conversations or awareness among college roommates at all, but when I came out to Berkeley for graduate school, one of my roommates began going out to San Francisco a lot. And at first, I didn’t have any clue as to what, and I I was really naive still even at the age of 23 about gay culture, although certainly living in Berkeley and in the early sixties it was in the news and around, but he had, my roommate had a breakup with his boyfriend and I found him sobbing in the kitchen and I was too clueless to even know how to comfort him. But I realized what was going on and I thought this is something that I’m unaware of that I don’t know this culture at all. I don’t know anything about it.
Speaker 5:
I would say reflecting back that the suburban New York culture on the Jersey side that I grew up in, very homophobic context that I participated in vaguely with jokes that were homophobic and that probably suggested to me that I should be heterosexual and so, I just assumed that for a long time. And then probably it was confirmed, I would suspect, number of years later out of high school, in my mid-twenties maybe, I’m driving, and I did a lot of hitchhiking in those days myself and so, I picked up hitchhikers and I picked up a hitchhiker guy who came onto me and I realized I was not interested and put him back out and thought about it and said, yeah, I’m not interested. So, that kind of was the confirming moment.
Speaker 1:
So, as you came into your Unitarian Universalist Ministry, how did you encounter lesbian or gay folks in ministry, in your congregations, at seminary? Do you have any thoughts about how you became engaged with this?
Speaker 2:
Well, in seminary it was 1983 that I went and there were lots of lesbians and gay men around. Mark Belatini, I guess, was my first really admired UU Minister who was gay and I fell in hetero love with him. You know how it is.
Speaker 3:
Well, I would say long before I began to think about ministry, my sister came out in the mid 1970s which was kind of my first real awakening as I watched my parents’ response and how much that differed between the two of them. And then through the 1980s I was very involved as a lay leader and running the Pacific Northwest district’s leadership school. And of course, we had lots of folks who came to that, some of whom were out and so I had some experiences long before heading towards seminary.
Speaker 4:
I first joined a UU church in 1969 and that was the year of the Stonewall riots, of course. And I can’t remember, I mean it must have been talked about in our fellowships that I belonged to, but I don’t remember much about it. And it wasn’t until 1975 that I went off to seminary and by then I had friends who were at least bisexual and I don’t remember having a lot of discomfort with it. I don’t remember… My memories of that era are all sort of vague. No dramatic event stands out that was suddenly consciousness raising for me. I had a close friend who I learned was bisexual. I don’t remember whether we had any conversations about it or not. She was very open about it and strange as it seems and maybe I’m just totally blanking out, when I entered Meadville in 1975 I don’t recall any other gay or lesbian students in that era and I don’t know whether they just weren’t there or whether I was just blind. I had zero gaydar. I don’t know. I just don’t recall any fellow students in that time that were gay.
Speaker 5:
Like Duane, long before I went into the ministry, I had become aware of the larger culture and I overlapped with Dennis a year behind Dennis at Starr King and I do remember that my first year there at Starr King, there was a woman who enrolled who was a feminist separatist and she had a dramatic effect on the other men in the Star King culture and myself included, but I was more curious, others were a little more outraged and upset about it and I’m just sort of saying, “Whoa, let’s see what this does.” And it was very interesting to see her stances taken and the reactions. And I saw more of the reactions because her stances were to be basically absent from anything that included men, but it stirred all kinds of stuff. And that was really an introduction to that dimension of the dynamic.
Speaker 5:
I’m not sure what her sexuality was because I never really got to know her. But then going into the parish and my first ministry, there was a fellow who was ended up on the board and was a very good churchman who came to me one time and wanted to talk about cross-dressing, which is what he did in his other life, I guess, and wanted me to know about that. And so, I was interested and learned about that. But then after 10 years of my first ministry and my spouse Barbara and I teamed up to do co-ministry and we had an interim ministry in a large congregation, which on the search committee for which to bring us there was a transgendered person who was in educator mode and was very happy to talk about it with anybody and was extremely helpful to us. And then let us know that there were other folks in the congregation who were trans. And that was a period when I was going to a lot of the workshops at GA about trans stuff because I was really fascinated and wanted to know.
Speaker 5:
Well, that fall and then into that Christmas time, we decided that we would host a Christmas gathering for the members of the church and their friends who are trans and we had, I don’t know, 10 or 12 folks show up for our party just because they often had, we’d realized and we were learning that they had very little other opportunities to celebrate, certainly not with family, most of them, so we had this living room, and we also made sure that there was a board member from the church who came because we knew we were just interims, we were going to be passing through and this was an important part of the congregation because they all had different levels of comfort with the congregation, but they were, many of them involved. And we were very respectful of that and we heard a lot of stories and pain around that circle at that Christmas party, but we felt honored and were hoping that we could continue the development of that congregational culture to be supportive at that time.
Speaker 1:
Is that how you came into being an ally?
Speaker 5:
Well, I guess I felt like an ally before that. And then I guess it was the next move, a year later we came to the East coast to the Joseph Priestley District and they had a Allies group there, the colleagues did. And so I joined that group and that was more formal to be an ally in a group called Allies. So, that would be it.
Speaker 1:
But the rest of you. How did you come to the decision that you were an ally?
Speaker 2:
Well, it goes way back. I mean, we had a commune in, what was it? 1964 and one of the people in our commune was bisexual. A good friend of mine, Gabe, and still is, we still keep in touch, but he was the one that first introduced me to the Philadelphia Queens and he brought Queens over and these, now these were just joyous people and just flamboyant and I don’t know, it was just part of, I mean, we were a counterculture anyways, a commune. So that was… I don’t know, I just felt that it was wonderful myself. Here’s these people expressing themselves and so at any rate it was… I have another story about transsexuals.
Speaker 2:
You want me to do it? I got a call, our church was a good mid-sized church and I got a call from a person who identified herself as Elizabeth and she said, I’m in transition and I just wonder if I can come to your church, if your church would accept me. I said, “Well, of course it would.” I said, “I tell you though, I don’t know how everybody in the church will respond.” I said, “So, you know” and I talked to her about building some trust before she got you know, but at any rate, she comes in, she’s 6’4″, she’s wearing clotty high heel shoes, her hair is just terrible. She’s just dressed, it wasn’t very good. The women took her in and they were about to have a women’s retreat and it’s this big deal that women in the church, they had about 50 women go to this retreat.
Speaker 2:
So, they invited her to the retreat and over the next two years they accompanied her, there were members that accompanied her to Canada to begin her transition. And she’s happily married now and she was just a delight, but it was a test for the church. And I was always watching to see how the church would respond and always also pushing the church to really be what it claimed to be. But any rate, it was a really thrilling thing to just observe over time. And she ended up doing a beautiful embroidery for us, or what do you call it, needle point, needle point with our logo and all that on it.
Speaker 4:
I remember clearly at another stage in my awareness, came in my first settlement, which was in Sioux City, Iowa, I graduated from Meadville in ’79 and a couple of years later I was elected to the district board and the President of the board at that time was a gay man and I knew that and during that, it was ’81, he began to talk with us about what was then, the word AIDS wasn’t on the radar yet, but Kaposi Sarcoma was the word, the disease description.
Speaker 4:
And he began, in kind of a casual and informal way, to educate the rest of us on the board about this new thing that was beginning to be recognized in the medical community. And he and I had a lot of conversations about it and I can’t even remember how, I mean, I guess it was fairly soon that it was recognized that it was particularly prominent among gay men. And my feeling is that there was no great turning point when I suddenly began to think of myself as an ally. I don’t know if there’s a word in the gay-straight spectrum that corresponds to colorblindness in racial terminology, but I guess I felt kind of neutral about it. I wasn’t uncomfortable around him or other gay men and I felt supportive of what they were working to, I mean I was certainly aware of all the discrimination that was going on and it just felt natural to be supportive of them. So, that’s my recollection of just sliding into being an Ally.
Speaker 3:
I think I’d say the beginning of that was when I was a student at Starr King and had fellow classmates who were out and we really bonded well as a group and it was just of course we’re going to support each other through our ministry careers. So, it was kind of the beginning. My CPE work was at a major acute psyche unit in San Francisco and we had some men there with AIDS dementia, had some experience with that. And then Judy Wells and I served as co-ministers of a new congregation. So, everything we did was new and it was in South Central Pennsylvania, a pretty conservative area and it quickly became a draw particularly for lesbians, not very many gay men came, but we had several lesbians, at least one transgender person who came and joined the congregation. We did the welcoming congregation program and there was an elder who was a straight but an Ally. His brother had been gay and had committed suicide. So, Alan was very much interested in working as an ally for gay rights in a number of ways.
Speaker 3:
One of the things was that he encouraged me to get involved in trying to get some legislation passed to add protection and housing and employment for people despite of gender expression or sexual identity. A bill had been introduced in the state legislature multiple times and never gotten out of committee. We went together with a couple of other people to visit our state legislator who let us know very clearly that that was not his issue. He was not interested in talking with us. He was concerned that the gay agenda, the next thing we’d be in there asking him to approve gay marriage and the next thing would be to permit gay men to marry their dogs at which point, one of the group who was a gay man got up and walked out and the guy said, “Oh, I hope I didn’t insult your friend” and the elder said, “Well, you did” and really called him out on it.
Speaker 3:
But that led to try and get an ordinance passed in the city to establish a human relations commission and provide those protections at the city level. The strategy was if we could get several cities in Pennsylvania to do that, then maybe the legislature would act on a statewide basis. The mayor appointed me to a task force that was called the Carlisle Inclusive Communities task force. Inclusive communities was a thing that was sponsored by some national association of cities and he wanted that to be on the sign welcoming people to Carlisle.
Speaker 3:
He was kind of a relatively conservative Republican and what he didn’t realize when he created this committee was when he cut us loose to develop our own subcommittees and figure out what we were going to work on, there was a task force on sexuality and I was the chair of it and we proposed, it was the only thing that came out of this whole larger task force and it was proposed unanimously that the city adopt this human relations ordinance. When we took it to the city council, he was furious with me and really called me out and embarrassed me in front of the, or attempted to embarrass me, in fact, he did embarrass me in front of the City Council and the public that were present. “How dare you bring this,” yada yada.
Speaker 3:
Well, we had a couple of supportive people on the council, but we could never get enough votes and it was painful to me to retire without having made that happen. But such a great joy when about three years ago with a couple of new council members, they passed this ordinance and to see the widow of the elder who had started this, sitting in the front row at the city council meeting proposing it was just grand.
Speaker 1:
Thank you.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much. Is there anything burning that you need to say?
Speaker 2:
I guess I did want to say that it was a confluence of feminism and paganism and gay rights that sort of came together for me to, I guess it was a historical thing from the 60s into when feminism became, and of course my wife was a big feminist and so I was corrected, my language and all of that along the way, but it was in paganism, also a natural theology and all of that, that really, I don’t know, kind of put a different kind of a background and a reality and to compare that to the “normal society,” I loved it.
Speaker 5:
I wanted to give a shout out to the camps and conferences. Unitarian Universalist camps and conferences, which I was very involved with through the 60s and the 70s, in particular, in the Rowe zone, basically Rowe, Massachusetts camp and conferences there that I was involved with in leadership roles and the eye opening encounters and relationships that grew out of that context were very formative for me around this issue as well as many any others.
Speaker 1:
Super. Thank you all.