For years, the debate over openly gay clergy has rolled Catholics and fractured mainline Protestant denominations, pitting liberal theologians against rock-ribbed literalists. Those in the ever-receding majority who believe the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God are astonished to find themselves on the defensive when they criticize the very idea of permitting gay clergy, since scriptures like Leviticus 18:22 aren’t what you’d call ambiguous: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”
The press, of course, has never been known for its obsession with Biblical imperatives. And these days, aside from donating organs to diseased siblings, there is no surer path to eliciting media sympathy or securing profitable dividends than coming out for the Lord as a gay cleric. Anonymity and humble servitude are as antiquated as animal sacrifice, because for those who step out of the closet boldly, the perks are immediate and seductive. Declaring your sexual proclivities a “gift from God” in the pulpit transforms your carnal inclinations into spiritual communion. As your ministerial role is superseded by your political and sexual appetites, you find yourself compared to historical martyrs, or at the very least you collect fat book advances as you battle your church’s canon. And, perhaps most important, truckling newspaper feature writers in search of the kind of religious figure they can write about generously without tripping involuntary gag reflexes are all too happy to harmonize in the “It’s Raining Men, Hallelujah” chorus.
Take Malcolm Boyd, who recently retired as a minister from the Episcopal church. Known in the ’60s as the “nightclub priest,” Boyd rose to fame working the civil rights/anti-war circuit. His seminal work was the 1965 prayer book “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” And no one could fault Jesus for politely declining, if only so that He would not have to be subjected to Boyd’s prose style: “After we make love, you hold me in your arms. My heart is pounding, I lay upon your chest. . . . Bless us Jesus.”
Boyd was an early comer-outer, emerging in 1976. Soon after, he began publishing books like Look Back in Joy: A Celebration of Gay Lovers, books that feature poems like “The Bishop,” in which the eponymous ecclesiastic’s “right hand moved slowly over my buttocks, then up and down my legs. ‘If you haven’t been a good boy I will have to whip your bare a — ,’ he said. The heavy, cold episcopal ring on his hand lay on my naked a — as if it were an instrument of possible torture.”
One would expect such composition to have earned Boyd censure by the church, jeopardizing his standing and perhaps costing him his platform for celebrityhood. One would be mistaken, as the Episcopal church’s 1979 resolution declaring that “it is not appropriate for this church to ordain a practicing homosexual” is rarely upheld. Most of the mainline denominations ostensibly forbid the ordination of “practicing” homosexuals, though they are similarly lax.
Not only has Boyd escaped his church’s wrath, he’s been consecrated in the secular press. The Los Angeles Times reported, straight-faced, that Boyd was ” mysterious yet open, complex yet simple, and simultaneously at war and peace with himself,” and that “he is untroubled by the fact that many in the church still refuse to accept him.” This noble attitude has freed him to decry the church’s “anti-human, anti-Christian treatment of gays” — though while he was an associate rector and writer-in-residence at an Episcopal church in Santa Monica, his deprivation included living openly for years with his lover, presiding over a dozen samesex unions, and forming an Institute of Gay Spirituality and Theology. Even his performance art (based on his first book), with its “aerobic semaphores” and “locomotion choreography,” received praise from the Los Angeles Times. After a dearth of Messianic theater, reviewer Donna Perlmutter wrote that “little else could be so ripe as the Jesus theme.”
Gay clerical sanctification is an ecumenical affair. Though the Southern Baptists and other fundamentalists don’t go in much for drinking or dancing, let alone buggery, they too have made a standout contribution to the gay- minister gallery: the Rev. Mel White. White was formerly the closeted ghostwriter to evangelical luminaries like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell. When he finally accepted his homosexuality and broke up his marriage after “spending all those years trying to return God’s gift,” as he wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, he decided to take on “the enemy,” namely all his former employers, for their homophobia. They cancelled his contracts.
Martyr overboard! The Roanoke Times said sympathetically that White ” couldn’t get the time of day from people who had bared their souls to him.” Gannett News Service columnist Deb Price called him “a deeply religious man fighting for the rightness of his cause” against “the towering giant in the current antigay crusade.” Frank Rich of the New York Times dubbed White a “decidedly unhypocritical and eloquent champion of gay rights.”
In an interview with USA Today, White compared himself to Martin Luther King, while the Baltimore Sun compared him to Gandhi. But Gandhi did not receive his civil-disobedience training from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, as White did before he showed up at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network with flowers on Valentine’s Day to talk Robertson out of his Biblically inspired stance against homosexuality. Later, in an open letter, Robertson wrote that he didn’t need White’s word on the subject, since he already had Moses’s and Paul’s. But when White wouldn’t go away and Robertson had him arrested for trespassing, the media again maintained their mournful vigil. Gannett’s Price even visited him in jail, and noticed his ” face gaunt from three weeks of fasting” as a result of his hunger strike to protest being jailed (which he could have avoided by paying a $ 50 fine).
Obscure when heterosexual, White in his gay incarnation garnered a full hour on Larry King Live and a 60 Minutes segment, a book for Simon & Schuster (Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America), and, soon to come, another tome (Storming the Gate: A Gay Christian Discovers Soul Force). Though White is by his own account “totally free of hate,” he continues to blame his former employers for everything from the Jenny Jones homosexual-murder case to losing his car keys under the chaise lounge.
There are different forms of canonization in the the gay-cleric-as-media- star universe. There is posthumous canonization, as in the case of Catholic priest Jim Healy, who ministered at the Queen of Peace parish in Arlington, Va. The Washington Post dedicated a 3,648-word story to his memory simply because he was a gay cleric who died of AIDS, and because the “liberal Catholic renegade” spent “decades at the altar calling people to . . . fight the world’s cruelties and injustice.” Then there is the unwilled and unwanted posthumous canonization performed on Methodist bishop Finis Crutchfield. He died of AIDS in 1987, but was in the closet to the end and from all evidence had no desire to be outed after his passing. Even so, media reports revealed that, unbeknownst to his church, his wife, and his son, Crutchfield frequented gay bars and bathhouses three times a week and engaged in group sex. The Chicago Tribune thought the story “particularly poignant to other gay clergy, who typically face the loss of their pastoral assignment . . . if they go public with their sexual preferences.”
Lesbian canonization was recently accorded the Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, a Methodist. Her coming-out party included being named the Minnesota Women’s Press “1995 Newsmaker” for “furthering equality, safety and respect for women. ” She also helped conceive the annual ecumenical “ReImagining Jesus Christ and Us” conference, where lesbian clergy swill honey-milk and worship female deities while asserting Christ’s death was a “model for human child abuse.” You can even receive a gay canonization if you’re not gay. Bishop John Spong’s Biblical scholarship (he asserts that Paul was a “self-hating gay man” ) has inspired bidding wars between blue-chip publishers and made him what is believed to be the first Episcopal bishop from the Newark diocese to expound his views on Oprah.
But few have profited quite as successfully as the Rev. Peter Gomes, the gay, black, conservative minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church. Which is not to be reductive: He’s also a “reluctant revolutionary,” according to a recent 10-page New Yorker spread. In fact, Gomes “defies stereotypes,” we are told in no fewer than 12 recent stories, with Gomes himself telling the San Francisco Chronicle, “I have spent all my life transcending and breaking stereotypes.”
Gomes is the kind of gay preacher who doesn’t want to be known solely as a ” gay preacher,” though he reserves the right to “devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.” Just don’t put your labels on him.
Gomes came out in Cambridge in 1991 after a small student magazine named Peninsula dedicated an entire issue to making a scriptural case against homosexuality, an effort Gomes compared to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. When he made the announcement, the Boston Globe reported his ovation lasted 27 seconds, while the New Yorker insisted it was upwards of a minute. Though he was Harvard’s highest ranking religious official and had worked the Bush and Reagan inaugurations, the Washington Post fretted that “his days as White House preacher may be over.” But his post was secure. And if his coming out evidences anything, it’s that his semi- apostasy is good for business. Though Gomes has been at Harvard since the mid- ’70s, a Nexis search of straight Gomes (pre-1992) turns up approximately 30 hits. But gay Gomes numbers 200-plus.
Much of that is due to his new book, The Good Book, which implores us to read the Bible with “a moral imagination” (or, in his case, just an active one). While the book speaks to many issues, Gomes attacks scriptural literalists who hold that the Bible speaks clearly against homosexuality for suffering from the “moral obtuseness” of the ordinary Germans who permitted the Holocaust. So powerful has the resistance been to Gomes’s brave assertion of principle that the book, his first, was snatched up by Morrow for $ 350, 000 at auction, solely on the basis of a seven-page proposal. Before he even wrote it, his prescient publisher described it as “one of those spiritual classics . . . an instant winner and an eternal one.”
Gomes was featured on the American Dream segment of the NBC nightly news because he “is a man of God who wears a coat of many colors.” He’s sold 90, 000 copies since the fall, numbers that will only be stoked by his upcoming 60 Minutes segment. And he is believed to be the first Plummet Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard College ever to be featured in a two-page Q&A in People magazine.
Print reporters who’d have an aneurysm before abiding a preacher like Jerry Falwell making a splashy show of affluence, or Clarence Thomas bragging that he is an “Afro-Saxon,” get orgiastic about Gomes’s WASPy worldliness (he’s a Black Brahmin and president of Plymouth’s Pilgrim Society). Press accounts read like J. Peterman catalog captions when detailing his gold pocket watch and fob, his Griffin cigars, his English gardens, even his study lined with tapes of “Jeeves and Wooster.”
But the free pass he’s getting pales in comparison with the raves for The Good Book. “I believe it is easily the best contemporary book on the Bible for thoughtful people,” proclaimed the Right Reverend Lord Runcie, the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury. “If we open our minds as well as our hearts, it’s never too late.to be transformed,” said the omni-affectionate Deb Price of Gannett.
Never mind that The Good Book, or at least the part everyone’s worked up over, is fraught with specious assertions, such as “One has to look rather hard [through the scriptures], and with a user-friendly concordance, to find any mention of homosexuality at all.” Not really. My remainder-rack concordance had 12 references in 10 different books of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments), all of which spoke as disapprovingly as Leviticus.
Gomes does end up listing several verses himself, since his objective is not to espouse tolerance generally, but to argue against the Bible’s arguments against homosexuality. He deals with them, in logic too tortured to replicate here, mostly by recounting the research of a handful of contemporary theologians, who’d get upbraided by nine out of ten Greek and Hebrew scholars.
Gomes plays hermeneutic hopscotch through barely penetrable thickets of pop theological assumptions and porous reasoning throughout The Good Book. But so goes the new orthodoxy of the narcissistic postmodern church, where Bible-based dissenters are as irrelevant as Old Testament dietary laws, and you are to pick your own deity (less often a transcendent divinity than an extension of yourself) and worship accordingly. Nobody seems to mind, least of all the media.
Last fall, the Rev. Erin Swenson of Atlanta, formerly Eric Swenson, had his/her ordination upheld by the Presbyterian Church (USA). Was there even a modicum of outrage or shock concerning the genitalswitching pastor? Not hardly, but there was this unblinking notice in the Wilmington Morning Star: “Along with her 20 years of experience as a counselor for both heterosexual and homosexual couples, she is also ‘transgendered,’ a condition she sees as ‘a gift from God.'”
Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
