Gay teen-agers are more than three times as likely to attempt suicide as other youth, according to a Massachusetts study reported this spring in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. Young men are especially at risk. Robert Garofalo, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital at the Harvard Medical School and the lead researcher, noted that these gay young people were more likely to engage in high risk behavior such as alcohol consumption, drug abuse, and sexual behavior with multiple partners to try to escape the homophobia of society in general and that of the high school culture in particular. Garofalo observes: “Any clinician who works with youth has long suspected that attempting suicide is an issue for a subset of gay youth.”
The numbers are given a name in the true and poignant story of Bobby Griffith, a teen-ager who was so overwhelmed by social, fundamentalist religious, and family hostility to his homosexuality that he jumped from a freeway bridge into the path of a tractor-trailer. He left behind a four-year diary that helped to transform his anti-gay fundamentalist mother into a crusader for the welfare of other gay children. Her story is told in Prayers for Bobby: A mother’s coming to terms with the suicide of her gay son (written by award-winning journalist Leroy Aarons), published by HarperSanFrancisco.
D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries to Reclaim America for Christ has launched an assault against the educational film, It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School. The award-winning film takes viewers inside six public and independent schools where students (in first through eighth grade classsrooms) freely discuss issues relating to people who are gay or lesbian. Bob Chase, president of the National Education Association recommends It’s Elementary as “a great resource for parents, teachers and community leaders working to teach respect and responsibility to America’s children.” The president of the American School Counselor Association, Carolyn B. Sheldon, says the film is “an extremely moving portrait of how … by addressing gay issues, we will prevent violence and foster equality.” Louis Z. Cooper, director of Pediatrics at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City states that “Prejudice is a major health hazard to American kids … [T]his film is a terrific tool toward addressing acceptance of gay and lesbian people.”
But, according to Kennedy’s fund-raising letter: “When the homosexual activists go into the schools and now, directly into our homes [the film is scheduled for PBS] and lure children into ACCEPTANCE of homosexuality, they must be stopped. … We must halt the recruiting of children for the homosexual lifestyle.” Kennedy, in attacking the film, is drumming up donations “for this effort and all our ministry outreaches.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s cohort, R. C. Sproul, has written Choosing My Religion, a workbook distributed to school children through Coral Ridge. The children are instructed to read Romans 1:26-32. Then it is stated: “One particular type of sexual sin is singled out by Paul as especially wicked. What is it?” After the child fills in the “right” answer – “homosexuality” — he or she reads: “In light of that verse, how would you respond to someone who said, ‘I think gay is okay. What ever makes you happy is fine with me.”
Coral Ridge Ministries and Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council are putting on a TV ad campaign to push the “ex-gay” line for the Religious Right. In the first commercial, a mother says: “My son Michael found out the truth: He could walk away from homosexuality. But he found out too late. He has AIDS.” Each of the ads ends with the tag: “It’s not about hate, it’s about hope.”
After two years in the Coral Ridge “ex-gay” program, Southern Baptist minister Jerry Stephenson claimed to be cured of his homosexuality. He then went to Key West to work in another “ex-gay” ministry. He became engaged to be married. But he was finding it harder and harder to deny his continuing homosexuality. “She knew and I knew that all the counseling in the world wasn’t going to change my inside feelings.” He’s now left “ex-gay” work and has opened a fundamentalist Bible school where openly gay and lesbian students may enroll. Located near Panama City, Florida, the school has both local and correspondence students.
“I had based the rest of my life on what I had been told at Exodus” [the “ex-gay” program]. A gay son of Texas Baptist missionaries, Stephen Wambsganss married a young woman and tried to “go straight” through the “ex-gay” movement. “But the whole time I was married I was living in this maze of depression. And I lost my ability to write music.” Now he’s an ex-“ex-gay” and living in New York, happily committed to a gay relationship with another young man with whom he has a career in alternative folk music.
Membership in the Masonic Lodge “make[s] a demonic atmosphere in the home [and is one of the] roots and causes of lesbianism” according to LIFE ministry’s “ex-gay” newsletter. In “Notes on Lesbianism,” in Words of Life (No. 44), the “false ungodly beliefs” of the Masons ranks sixth among twenty-four “roots and causes of lesbianism.” Also included: “gifted in sports,” “mental illness in the family,” and “many changes in locations and cultures.” “Notes” begins with this sentence: “It is interesting to find that a number of women drawn into lesbianism had no sexual activity with a woman before being saved.” It is explained that this is “due to the loosening of buried emotions at the receiving of the Holy Spirit and turning away from old addictive patterns that covered the emotions. … Warnings should be given [to women who are new Christians] about being together too much, talking too many times a day, inappropriate physical touching or sexual desire for each other.” LIFE (Living in Freedom Eternally, Inc.) is the major “ex-gay” organization in New York City.
“I believe that most of these folks who propound the need for gays to change are loving and sincere,” said Kelly Kirby, a national Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG) board member who was in “ex-gay” ministries in the 1970s and 1980s. “But in my case, attempts to change my natural sexual orientation caused real spiritual, emotional, and psychological damage, which took a lot of work on my part to undo.”
The psychiatrist who heads the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, John Bancroft, used to do aversion therapy to “cure” homosexuals in Britain. Now looking back on that earlier stage in his understanding of homosexuality, Bancroft says he’s “embarrassed about it when people discover it. I think it was a fruitless exercise, but it didn’t take me very long to realize that.”
One of the Right-wing’s homosexuality advisors, Paul Cameron, is quoted in Rolling Stone magazine in March as saying what he’s been saying for many years now: gay sex is lots better than straight sex. His observation, he says, should rally anti-homosexual forces before gay sex supplants heterosexuality. “Marital sex tends toward the boring,” he said. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.” If what one is looking for is a powerful orgasm, he said, “men do a better job on men and women on women.” According to Cameron, “homosexuality seems too powerful to resist” and therefore, society must continue to be vigilantly anti-gay.
According to the Right-wing Internet jockey Matt Drudge, it’s more important to be the first to post a story that’s “interesting” than to worry about what he disdains as “high-falutin’ rules” about whether the story’s all that accurate. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy at Columbine High School, Drudge put two stories on his web site based on a posting from a so-called “gay biker” who hailed the killers as “a bunch of our fellow homosexuals [who] decided that they had taken enough.” The wording itself should have given it away for the hoax that it was. But Jerry Falwell picked it up from there, pushing the notion on Geraldo Live that the Christian kids at Columbine were killed by “homosexuals.” Fred Phelps and his followers then went to Littleton to picket memorial services. They carried signs that claimed: “Fags Killed Them.” There has never been any evidence that the two killers were gay or were seriously thought to be gay by their classmates. But, as The New York Times columnist Frank Rich observes: “The gay boogeyman or woman can still be exploited by demagogues with impunity.” He says that “the efforts by both Mr. Falwell (via TV) and Matt Drudge (via the Internet) to whip up hysteria by spreading unsubstantiated rumors that the Columbine killers were gay” are illustrative of his point.
“He reacted in a totally positive manner. He was nothing but supportive and understanding. He made it clear it would not be a problem with him.” That’s what the gay newsmagazine, The Advocate, reports openly gay Charles Francis, scion of a prominent Republican family in Texas, said about George W. Bush’s response to his telling the would-be GOP presidential nominee that he is gay. According to Steve Labinski, president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans of Texas: “Francis’s comments are similar to those of almost every gay person who has met or known Governor Bush, and there are plenty of people like that. But the question for us is, How will his personal support translate into politics?” Columnist Frank Rich notes: “The first-tier candidates for the 2000 G.O.P. Presidential nomination now forsake gay-baiting entirely, leaving such ugliness to the increasingly marginalized Gary Bauer and to Steve Forbes, whose latent embrace of Christian Coalition dogma may have more to do with distancing himself from his late, outed father than whatever it is he actually believes.”
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church has invited eight anti-gay Anglican leaders from overseas – mostly from Africa – to come to the United States and talk with gay-affirming bishops as well as with fellow Christians who are gay or lesbian.
An Episcopal priest who supports the ordination of openly gay priests has been elected bishop in Connecticut. Andrew D. Smith faced opposition for the position from Martyn Minns, anti-gay rector of the charismatic-oriented Truro Church in Fairfax, Virginia. Truro Church once sponsored “Liberation in Jesus Christ,” one of the country’s first “ex-gay” programs – until it was discovered that its founder was engaging in sexual behavior with the young men who were coming for the “ex-gay” experience.
Another new Episcopal bishop who is gay-supportive is in the Diocese of Rochester. Jack McKelvey, formerly an assistant bishop in Newark, won over V. Gene Robinson, a priest from New Hampshire who had hoped to become the first openly gay bishop in the 2.5-million member denomination.
“Our evangelical brothers and sisters, of all people, from whom we are surely entitled to look for better, are saying, ‘Yes, you are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, and that is enough, EXCEPT, that you are only really justified, you are only really saved, if you are gay or lesbian, if you agree to surrender forever any kind of relationship of which you are capable which would give expression to the physical aspect of your human being.’” This was some of what was said in a recent sermon by Episcopal priest H. Gaylord Hitchcock, Jr. at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch in New York City.
Synod 1999 of the Christian Reformed Church voted in June to call the 275,000-member denomination “to repentance for their failures to minister to those who experience same-sex attractions.” But a gay-affirming overture from First Toronto CRC was ruled not legal. That petition was the work of Hendrik Hart of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and Jim Lucas, chaplain to “As We Are,” a support group for gay men and lesbians in the Reformed tradition. It was signed by over 300 CRC members, including some three dozen ordained CRC pastors. But the minister of First CRC of Pella, Iowa expressed the alarm of many delegates: “the CRC is waffling on the issue of homosexuality.” Another delegate, Elder Joel Kramer of Classis Yellowstone, announced: “When the church I am in saw that we were going to be discussing homosexuals and ministry to homosexual members, the whole church exploded and went on the warpath. If we send this report out with the labels of ‘gay and lesbian sisters and brothers,’ it will cause an explosion in the church.” An additional three years of study is now expected to produce a report to Synod 2002, proposing specific ways to minister to homosexuals in the CRC.
Three Calvin College students who are gay or lesbian spoke on campus to a group of some 200 fellow students this spring. Calvin College is the flagship liberal arts college of the conservative Christian Reformed Church. The three students, participants in the Calvin Gay and Lesbian Discussion Group, shared their stories of their experience at Calvin. One of the students described her having been in class discussions on homosexuality in which it was assumed that there were no gay or lesbian students present. All three students agreed that just recognizing that there were gay men and lesbians at Calvin was reassuring for them and would help to break stereotypes for others. One of the students who attended the meeting said afterward that she was “glad that the main focus was on the care that we can give each other.”
During the first week in May, over 500 ribbons were distributed on campus so that both gay and non-gay students and faculty members could wear them in solidarity and support of Calvin’s gay men and lesbians. One student who wore a ribbon got an angry message on his answering machine, attacking him for wearing the ribbon and for being a “gay-lover.” Another non-gay student hugged one of the lesbian students and said: “I’m sorry.” “Sorry for what?” she replied. “Sorry for all that you have to put up with. I know how much I’ve had to put up with just wearing this ribbon for a couple of days. And you have to live with such comments all the time.”
According to Jim Lucas, chaplain to a group of gay men and lesbians – largely from the CRC: “Never before have current gay students spoken publicly on campus about their being gay, organized a dialogue series on the issue, or sponsored Ribbon Week to give other students the opportunity to show support. … Personally, I found myself overwhelmed with joy as I witnessed the events. … I remembered the many years of depression, anxiety, fear, and loneliness, which I endured while I studied at Calvin College and Seminary. And so I found myself enormously grateful to see gay students who are being spared this suffering, who are experiencing peace with themselves and God at such a young age, and who are receiving heartfelt affirmation from other students as well as faculty.
An overture for the Reformed Church in America to sever all ecumenical ties with the United Church of Christ until it repents of its affirmation of practicing homosexuals was submitted – “with tears” – to the 1999 General Synod of the RCA by its Florida Classis. A second overture, also from the Florida Classis, called on the RCA to go on record stating that support of “homosexual relations is a rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Both overtures were roundly rejected during the annual meeting of the denomination in June.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has defeated an effort to repeal an amendment that bars ordination of non-celibate gay men and lesbians. Commissioners to the 1999 General Assembly meeting in Fort Worth in June voted 319 to 198 against repeal, even though the 3.6-million memer denomination’s Committee on Church Orders and Ministry had recommended repeal.
The Southern Baptist Convention, in a resolution in June, rebuked fellow SBC’er Bill Clinton for his presidential proclamation of June as “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” – the first such presidential proclamation in history. A second rebuke was added, condemning the President for his ambassadorial appointment of Spam heir and philanthropist James Hormel, a former law school dean at the University of Chicago, — and openly gay. Hormel, who will represent the United States in Luxembourg, is the nation’s first openly gay envoy.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla) was outraged by the appointment and vowed to block “every single presidential nomination” until the White House reversed itself. Not too long after this outburst, the computers in Sen. Inhofe’s offices were found to have crashed under their load of pornography.
Four American Baptist Churches in California, dismissed from their regional ABC organization three years ago because of their welcoming of openly gay men and lesbians, have failed in their appeals for reinstatement in June. Meanwhile, an Ohio congregation has won its appeal of dismissal over the same issue.
The United Methodist Women’s Division has contributed $11,000 to help some high school students who are trying to create better understanding between gay students and their heterosexual peers. The group, one of at least 400 such groups across the nation, is the Gay/Straight Alliance of East High in Salt Lake City. When the Utah legislature passed a law aimed directly at knocking out the club, the GSA made use of another law allowing private groups to rent space in public buildings. The gift from the Methodist women is intended to help these students do this.
Suspended from his United Methodist pastorate for blessing a union of two men in his congregation in Chicago, Gregory Dell has a new job while he awaits his appeal of his conviction. He will be directing a gay-affirming ministry of United Methodists called In All Things Charity.
Blacks account for 36 percent of AIDS cases but only 13 percent of Americans. This fact is beginning to register within the African-American churches. “From the beginning it was perceived as a gay white male disease,” said the Rev. Rosetta E. Dubois-Gadson, whose son died of AIDS and who now has an AIDS minsitry at St. Luke’s AME church in Harlem. Only 50 churches participated in the first Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS led by Balm in Gilead ten years ago. This year, some 5,000 churches signed up. According to Balm in Gilead founder Pernessa Steele: “If churches were doing enough, we wouldn’t be in business. Some members of the clergy have been misinformed that AIDS is a sin and that it only affects gays. Their position on homosexuality becomes their excuse.”
The Canadian Supreme Court, in May, struck down a heterosexual definition of the word “spouse.” The decision was 8 to 1. There was an immediate anti-gay outcry and the Canadian House of Commons – by a vote of 216 to 55 – adopted a declaration that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Roman Catholic Archbishop Adam Exner of Vancouver said: “A same-gender couple can’t be spouses, they can’t be husband and wife. … Society depends on the strength of the family and the Court decision eroded the strength of the family.” Said a young gay couple in Montreal, “Our families have been torn apart because they won’t accept our gay relationship as a part of the family. How does the House of Commons vote ‘strengthen’ the families that want nothing to do with their gay sons?”
The California Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a statement supporting a state Republican’s initiative to add a “heterosexuals-only” definition to California’s constitutional provision for marriage. The initiative will appear on the ballot for the March 7, 2000 primary. The bishops thus join other anti-gay religious organizations in California and elsewhere, trying to pre-empt a possible “full faith and credit” obligation should any other state recognize same-sex marriage.
(In 1901, Alabama drew up a constitutional provision that read: “The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a Negro.” When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned laws that prohibited interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia, 1967), such bigoted laws were enforceable in 17 states. It was not until 1998 that South Carolinians voted to discard its unenforceable law against interracial marriage. Alabama has yet to accomplish that.
In 1935, Adolf Hitler signed a “Law For the Safeguard of German Blood” which mandated that “Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or German-related blood are forbidden. Marriages which have been performed in spite of this law, even if they have been performed in a foreign country, are void. … Whoever acts against [this law] will be punished with forced labor.”)
Lesbian writer Norah Vincent’s article, “Pro-Life Lesbians,” was published in The New York Press during Pride week in June. She writes that “like lesbians who may be pro-life at heart, closet pro-life gays are usually too intimidated by the lesbian pro-choice mafia to dissent privately, much less in public.” She notes that “Pro-choice intimidation reigns in the queer world, as it does in the most prominent feminist organizations like NOW.” Her article quotes from gay men and lesbians who are active in the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. She quotes B. A. Keener’s saying: “Many lesbians give the party line that abortion is needed because they alone need to control their body. But the baby is not their body – it is a separate body, with different genetic make-up, heart, blood type, etc. If they truly want to control their body and be ‘pro-choice,’ then they should have made those choices before the pregnancy. First you can choose whether or not to have sex. Then you can choose who to have sex with. Then you can choose how to have sex – you can’t get knocked up by spit. You can choose what orifice to have sex with, anal or vaginal. Then you can choose when to have sex (there’s only a couple days a month you can get pregnant). You can choose to use birth control. You can choose what method of birth control to use. These are all your choices. But then there has to come a time when the choices end, and that’s the time to take responsibility for the choices you’ve already made.” She ends the article by saying: “It’s time that lesbian feminists opened their doors to pro-life dykes. They are not the enemy. In fact, by welcoming pro-lifers into the gay and lesbian rights movement, pro-choice feminists would make their true enemies that much weaker.”
The Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians has been both banned and welcomed by both pro-life and gay pride march leaders. The DC-based
Alliance was banned from this year’s March for Life in the nation’s capital. So PLAGAL officers were surprised to get the following note after the March: “I write this letter to the gentleman who approached me at the recent Pro-Life March in Washington, D.C. Regrettably, because the March had already begun, and he ran up to me rather quickly and departed just as quickly, I was not able to ask his name. Hence, the reason for this salutation. You will recall that at last year’s march I came over to thank you for your presence. I missed that presence this year, but thank you for the leaflet descriptive of your commitment to the cause of life. Don’t give up. With warm regards, and Faithfully in Christ. /s/ John Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of New York.”
The rabidly anti-gay Tim LaHaye is the most popular author on the Publishers Weekly list of Religion Best Sellers, compiled in March. On the hardcover list, LaHaye has the #1 best seller, Apollyon (written with co-author Jerry Jenkins). On the paperback list, LaHaye’s books are in the #1 (Left Behind), #3, #4, and #5 slots.
AND FINALLY:
THE 16-year-old actor, Jonathan Jackson, was one of “The 50 Most Beautiful People” in People magazine in May. It’s reported that “he pierced his left ear three years ago, a move that raised eyebrows at his hometown Seventh-Day Adventist church, with which he has close ties. ‘I hope they understand,’ he says, ‘that faith doesn’t really come from whether you have an earring or not.’” Not every Christian has the wisdom of a 16-year-old. Pat Robertson, who’s 69, was responding to a viewer’s question about “the Bible’s position” on the subject of pierced ears. Robertson proclaimed: “I am personally repulsed by men with earrings. It’s all paganism. All that piercing goes back to paganism!” Next question?