INTEGRITY
GAY EPISCOPAL FORUM
c Integrity 1975 ISSN: 0095-2184
Vol. 1 No. 10 September-October 1975
INTEGRITY: GAY EPISCOPAL FORUM is the official newsletter of Integrity, Inc., a nonprofit religious, charitable, educational, and literary organization with offices at 701 Orange Street, Fort Valley, GA 31030. Signed articles represent the views of the contributors. Copyright 1975 by Integrity, Inc. 10 issues/$10, including Membership. Add $1 for all subscriptions that require plain envelopes. Couple rates are $13 for one newsletter. Copies of earlier numbers are available for $2.50 each.
Editor..................................... Louie Crew, Ph.D.
Contributing Editor.............. Ellen Barrett, M.A., M.Div.
Contributing Editor............. The Rev. Michael G. Koonsman
Contributing Editor..................... Robert Ragland, M.D.
Consultant......................... The Rev. Robert W. Cromey
Consultant................. The Rev. Norman Pittenger, S.T.D.
National Co-president.......................... Ellen Barrett
National Co-president........................... Jim Wickliff
National Vice Co-president........................... Dan Fee
National Vice Co-President........................ Kate Jones
National Secretary-Treasurer....................... Bob Diehm
Trustee.......................................... Ernest Clay
Trustee........................................... Louie Crew
COLLECT FOR INTEGRITY
ALMIGHTY GOD, who has called us by your prophets to bring justice to the peoples, and has chosen us for friendship in your son Jesus Christ, give us grace to witness to your love with Integrity of spirit, and power to sing a new song to you in Dignity of life, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. AMEN (G.G.)
INTEGRITY & THE PRESIDING BISHOP
NYC. On 3rd September the Presiding Bishop the Rt. Rev. John Allin will meet with INTEGRITY co-president Jim Wickliff and founder Dr. Louie Crew.
Wickliff and Crew expect to urge Bishop Allin to call for leadership at the top in support of Gay people. The usual pattern of waiting until there is a safe broad support from the grass roots will not only delay justice indefinitely but will itself create the division or polarization that possibly we still have time to avoid.
The occasion will be the first that Bishop Allin has actually met with INTEGRITY, but even before he assumed his role as chief of the Church in the United States he wrote Dr. Crew of his concern for Gay people and of his interest in seeing that we have access to those in power.
To date the Church has not offered any financial backing to INTEGRITY, which has been completely self-supporting. Wickliff and Crew expect to explore with the Presiding Bishop some of the sources of possible support for INTEGRITY's increasing programs of an educational and literary, as well as charitable and religious nature.
Following the meeting with Bishop Allin, Wickliff and Crew hope to meet with Bishop Moore in NYC, Bishops Ogilby and Mosley in Philadelphia, and Bishop Walker in Washington. INTEGRITY members in these three cities have been informed of meetings scheduled with Wickliff and Crew at Calvary Church in NYC, St. Mary's in Philadelphia, and St. Stephen's in Washington.
BISHOP OF N.Y. BACKS INTRO 554
[From GCN, 19 July 75]
NEW YORK -- The Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, has announced his support of Intro 554, the New York City gay civil rights bill.
Bishop Moore reaffirmed his support of gay civil rights legislation in a letter to Barrett L. Brick, chairperson of the Committee for Gay Civil Rights. "It seems incredible," the Bishop stated, "that -- in this city, in this age -- I must endorse a third bill that would accomplish this simple act of basic civil rights protection."
Support for "laws guaranteeing homosexuals all civil rights guaranteed to other citizens" is the official stand of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of New York.
The letter was released on the day of a city-wide protest against the efforts of the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese to defeat Intro 554, presently bottled up in the City Council's General Welfare Committee. The Committee for Gay Civil Rights is one of the dozens of groups which sponsored the march and rally at St. Patrick's Cathedral on July 12.
ARCHIVES
NYC. Negotiations are underway by The National Gay Archives and Library Committee to collect and house all important Gay materials of any sort, possibly at the NY Public Library. If you have materials or want information, write to Dennis Lampkowski, 2 Grove Street, Apt. 5-C, NYC 10014.
CONVENTION
[Editor's Note: The following report has kindly been circulated through the Diocesan Press Service to all diocesan editors. We are grateful to the Rodehavers and to other nonGay Christian people who joined in this occasion with us. For those Gay among us who were there it will long be remembered as the Pentecost that was Chicago.]
By Worley and Margaret Rodehaver
CHICAGO. Lack of self-acceptance is the most difficult of all problems homosexuals face, according to three speakers who addressed the first national meeting of INTEGRITY August 8-10.
INTEGRITY, organized in 1974, lists chapters in seven major U.S. cities, and is an organization for Episcopal homosexuals and others interested in understanding the homosexual lifestyle(s).
Registered for the three-day convention were approximately 150 persons from across the country [Editor's note: final count was over 200], clergy and laity, male and female, both homosexual and heterosexual.
Keynote speaker, the Rev. Dr. Norman Pittenger, Anglican theologian from Cambridge University, England, while stating flatly that lack of self-acceptance is the homosexual's most difficult problem, based much of his address on God's love for all humankind and humankind's need to love God and one another.
The Rev. Robert Herrick, preacher during a special INTEGRITY Mass on the second morning of the convention at the Cathedral Church of St. James, proclaimed the Chicago meeting as a "great moment" for the Episcopal homosexual, a moment of birth and a moment of death, a moment when self-affectation must die.
Dr. Louie Crew, founder of INTEGRITY went about commenting on the subject of self-acceptance from a second point of view.
Speaking during a "Founder's Banquet" the second evening of the convention, he said, "I assess our most urgent need as Gay people to be the need to love one another. Unquestionably we will require the Grace of God, but until we shed our own homophobia learned in the parlors of Pharaoh and welcome instead rich Gay catholicity, Gay diversity, I see Gay people trapped in Egypt forever."
Those individuals gathered in Chicago were more interested in learning to relate to one another in an open Christian atmosphere than in denouncing those whom they indicated have forced them for so long to meet in less than Christian surroundings.
Dr. Pittenger addressed an open meeting the second day of the convention, a four-hour session attended by more than 200 persons.
He stressed that any discussion of homosexuality or, for that matter, heterosexuality, must be based on an open understanding of human sexuality.
Urging homosexuals to "love one another" he warned against shallow relationships, relationships in which one person uses another.
While he did not condemn sexual acts engaged in just for the sake of sex, he suggested deeper, more loving relationships for Christian homosexuals.
"I protest against the idiom of marriage for homosexuals," he said, "because it carries with it a great amount of luggage (historically) which does not apply to the homosexual condition." He supports "unions" between Gays, unions based on love and understanding.
Dr. Pittenger said his view of love is not one of "sweetness," a view pretty much dead in the circles in which he moves in England.
"Love is a deep concern ... goodness of act .... It is not sentimentality," he suggested. Love is genuine, shared concern, the "getting into somebody's life and being vulnerable."
Dr. Pittenger and Dr. Crew both received INTEGRITY's first annual award for "outstanding contributions to Christian understanding of human sexuality."
The Rt. Rev. Quintin E. Primo, suffragan bishop of Chicago, was primary celebrant during the concelebrated Eucharist on Saturday morning. Some 15 clergy attending the convention concelebrated with the bishop.
A number of workshops were conducted during the three days covering such topics as "Problems in Counseling for Gays," "Gay Community Cultural Involvement and Responsibility," and "Concepts in Moral Theology."
During a business meeting which wrapped up the convention, the group decided to hold a convention next year but did not decide on its location. [Editor's note: two tentative invitations are already in; others wishing consideration should contact the officers through the national office in Fort Valley immediately.] The Education Committee suggested ways of informing both Gays and heterosexuals about the Christian Gay Community.
Members of DIGNITY, the Roman Catholic homosexual organization, and other denominational groups were thanked for their assistance and participation.
INTEGRITY plans to have either transcripts or tapes of Dr. Pittenger's talk [and most other events..Ed.] available to the general public in the near future.
Dr. Pittenger was preacher for the regular 11 a.m. Mass at the Cathedral Church of St. James on Sunday, August 10, and was also celebrant for a 9:30 a.m. Eucharist.
He spoke Sunday evening to the congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church of Chicago, a primarily homosexual denomination.
[Mr. Rodehaver is communications officers of the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Southern Ohio and editor of the diocese's publication, INTERCHANGE. Mrs. Rodehaver is a contributing editor for the publication.]
MICHIGAN NOW!
MICHIGAN. Informed sources from across the country, but particularly Gay persons in the national office in NYC have repeatedly informed us that the main Gay focus right now in our Church is on the action of the delegates at the October Convention of the Diocese of Michigan.
As reported in the very first issue of FORUM, last year's Convention in Michigan insisted on bringing to the floor for debate a four-part resolution that in May of 1974 the Executive Council of the diocese had voted to support, all four of which supported Gay persons, called for creating "an atmosphere of openness and understanding about human sexuality," for making "all ministries, professions and occupations ... open to otherwise qualified people whatever their sexual orientation," for making "all aspects of the Church's life ... available to all persons regardless of their sexuality," and for the Church "to speak publicly for repeal of all laws which make criminal offenses of private, voluntary sex acts between mature adults."
On the floor of the convention, the delegates voted to wait for another year of study before making their decision, though leaving in effect for the interim the action of the Executive Council.
Our members and other Gay persons in Michigan report, however, that very seldom have they been called as witnesses. In fact, little passing as genuine study has apparently occurred.
Opponents to the resolution have been quite vocal, particularly through the voice of THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE (see our notice of Fr. Ingalls [March 75, p. 10], his reply [April, p. 3]], and our notice of Mrs. Faber's attack [August, p.2]). Interestingly, while we have given space to these persons to make their statements, so far Mrs. Faber has refused to print our tame response to her attack.
The one person we know seeking ordination to this diocese during this period which allows it for openly Gay persons, has been delayed in his efforts.
No major conferences on Gay sexuality have been held in the diocese. None of the Gay professional people in our Church has been called in from outside to speak at Diocesan functions. There have certainly been minimal subscriptions to FORUM from nonGays seeking to be informed of our point of view.
One of the lone voices crying in the wilderness has been that of Harry T. Cook, editor of THE RECORD, diocesan paper for Michigan. In a June editorial he argued "The Church's Integrity [is] at Stake": "How can the Church say, on the one hand, that it is OK to have heterosexual feelings and to express them physically in a loving relationship, but on the other, to say that it is NOT OK to express homosexual feelings physically in a loving relationship?"
Editor Cook has been answered with fulminations worthy of witch-burners.
One of the main arguments against even considering Gay evidence is that it is not polite to discuss such issues publicly; yet Gay people are compelled to a virtual feast of unloving prudery with no recourse.
Hopefully in the few weeks remaining the Christians of the diocese will make a genuine effort to become informed. Hopefully too the lesson those viewers watching from afar will learn from all this is that, win or lose, Michigan is at least showing the kind of first steps that must be taken immediately to bring justice to the 20 million Gay Americans for whom Christ died. It is immoral for bishops, laity, and clergy (Gay as well as nonGay) to sit back waiting for Michigan or any other place to give them the cue for their own actions. Christ gave the only cue ever needed: "Do you love me? Feed my sheep." Twenty million sheep are wandering the American wilderness hungry for justice and righteousness. Even those who say they "love the sinner but hate the sin" in Michigan have made no conspicuous effort to demonstrate that love. If these would just show force in trying to remove the heinous Sodomy statutes in Michigan one might more charitably receive their theological condemnations.
UCC
MINNEAPOLIS. The Tenth General Synod of the United Church of Christ meeting here recently passed by an 80% favorable vote a pronouncement on civil liberties without discrimination related to affectional or sexual preference. The lengthy statement concluded: "Therefore without considering in this document the rightness or wrongness of same-gender relationships, but recognizing that a person's affectional or sexual preference is not legitimate grounds on which to deny her or his civil liberties, the Tenth General Synod of the United Church of Christ proclaims the Christian conviction that all persons are entitled to full civil liberties and equal protection under the law.
"Further, the Tenth General Synod declares its support for the enactment of legislation at the federal, state, and local levels of government that would guarantee the civil liberties of all persons without discrimination related to affectional or sexual preference.
"Further, the Ten General Synod calls upon the congregations, Associations, Conferences, and Instrumentalities of the UCC to work for the enactment of such legislation at the federal, state, and local levels of government, and authorize the Secretary of the UCC to commend this Pronouncement to the Conferences for distribution by them to their respective state legislators and representatives in the Congress of the United States.
DC
WASHINGTON. A Bicentennial Conference on Gays and the Federal Government will be sponsored here by Gay Activists Alliance of Washington (Box 2554, 20013) on Columbus Day Weekend, October 10-14. The aim is to define the goals of the national Gay community in relation to the federal government. Under consideration are the national civil rights bill, immigration and naturalization, federal funding for gay projects, privacy, federal prisons, military and civil service employment, and others.
MI
DETROIT. Roman Catholic brother Brian McNaught urges all persons to type the following statement as a petition, to which as many signatures as possible can be added: " ... we have a serious obligation to root out structures and attitudes that discriminate against the homosexual as a person. We will exert our leadership in behalf of this effort." Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and Bishop Joseph Imesch, Archdiocese of Detroit: "We too": [plus signatures].
All petitions should be returned to Brian (2044 Clairmont, Detroit, MI 48206) as soon as possible, preferably by mid-September.
The petitions will be presented to the Roman Catholic bishops in the United States when they meet in Washington in November.
The Gumbleton-Imesch quotation is from their letter to McNaught on Oct. 2, 74, which had the intention of terminating McNaught's water fast directed against the Church's oppression of the Gay community [See INTEGRITY, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Nov. 74), 2].
NYC. The National Gay Task Force has called upon the Gay community to write our congresspersons urgently requesting our support for HR-5452, the national Gay rights bill which would extend the coverage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act to Gay persons. This bill could well be the most important legislation affecting us in our lifetime.
OUR PARENTS
WASHINGTON. Mrs. Betty Fairchild, founding member and leader of the important new group Parents of Gays, has issued an invitation for manuscripts that show correspondence between Gay people of all ages and their parents and others. The book envisioned will be a sympathetic and realistic presentation of the variety and scope of personal experiences, problems, and feelings of various family members in dealing with the presence of Gay sexuality.
In addition, short essays or poems directly dealing with parent/Gay child/family relationships will be of interest.
Address: Betty Fairchild, 3700 Mass. Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016.
MSS
FT. VALLEY. GAY EPISCOPAL FORUM anticipates several special issues in the coming Vol. 2, and would welcome submissions, queries, and the like.
"Problem of Black Gays" will be edited by Black Episcopalians and will focus on the double jeopardy of this most ignored minority.
Our president Ellen Barrett will edit a second Lesbian focus [see Vol. 1, May 75]. She is particularly interested in seeing materials that relate to counseling the parents of Lesbians. Most of the materials for parents of Gays have focused on Gay male children. Possibly a separate booklet will result as well, if enough materials are forthcoming.
Additional focus, if not whole issues, is anticipated on the problems of aging Gays, alcoholic Gays, indigent Gays, et al.
INTEGRITY feels that we have a Christian obligation to be responsive to the needs of all in our community, that there is a danger of our becoming just another Church club of irrelevant concerns.
UPC
CINCINNATI. On May 17th the United Presbyterians voted not to recognize the Presbyterian Gay caucus as an unofficial organization of Presbyterians related to the church.
HUD & INTEGRITY
MACON, GA. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has found on behalf of INTEGRITY founders Ernest Clay and Louie Crew in the complaint that they were discriminated against by a local realtor after he discovered them to be a Gay integrated couple.
Initially housing was denied altogether, but after a supportive query from HUD the couple was offered a lease with special clauses added that HUD later found indeed had not been a part of leases signed by other tenants before or after the occasion.
Efforts at conciliation have failed. HUD's agreement would require the realtor's signing an affirmative action report periodically, as well as making a modest payment to the couple for the expenses in the case.
No lawyer in Macon has been willing to take the couple's case for contingency fees. Juries here have almost never awarded more than $25 damages when deciding on behalf of unpopular complainants. HUD itself has no enforcement powers other than persuasion.
CAUCUS ON HUMAN SEXUALITY
FLORENCE, AZ (P.O. Box 906). The leader of "Caucus on Concerns in Human Sexuality" has released the following statement of "opinions and purposes":
"CCHS has grown out of dialogue between persons in all parts of the Episcopal Church who are concerned with various problems in human sexuality.
"It is our common opinion that the Church has cruelly suppressed human sexuality for many centuries. We find nothing in the gospels to authorize such action. The Church further has victimized and harassed large numbers of people, and has often destroyed the bulk of evidence, the punitive tradition resulting from this historical persecution still continues to influence large numbers of people today.
"In contrast, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ urge us to love one another and to judge not: Jesus condemned the very same legalistic mentality which even today enjoys quoting chapter and verse prohibitions, without thought, without vision or understanding, and totally without love.
"The subjects of our concerns may become threatening to people who lack insight into themselves; merely to accept the reality of human sexuality is perhaps a big step for any church that is steeped in the almost incompatible combination of cultural heritages from Israel, Greece and Rome. It is to the contradictory aspects of that combination that we address our basic questioning.
"Examination of the conflicts in basic thought will result in changes which it would be now premature to describe and presumptuous to demand. It is our intention to do what we can to raise up those people and those structures which will bring about a serious consideration of problems in sexuality. These last decades of the twentieth century are troubled times for all institutions, and we are hoping to be a part of positive change within the Church, so that the Church may again conform to the will of the living God."
CANCELLED
SAN JUAN, P.R. Rafael A. Cruet, president of Comunidad de Orgullo Gay, reports that the proposed Second International Gay Rights Congress scheduled for 1975 in San Juan will not take place.
He complains that the Congress which was supposed to remain in Edinburgh until transferred has been completely dissolved and that San Juan Gays "have so much work to do locally that we do not have the time to work in an International level." A Latin American Gay Congress, however, is tentatively scheduled for April 1976, and information may be had from Sr. Cruet, Apartado 5523, Puerta de Tierra, SJ, PR 00906.
FORUM
I would like to take this opportunity to send you every blessing in your own important work and hope that we might meet some place in the future. With every good wish and blessing.
The Rev. Michael Marshall
Vicar of All Saints, London and
Bishop designate of Woolwich
I wish you every luck in your important work. The fight against cultural stereotyping is long and hard, and often discouraging. Keep up the good work.
Catharine R. Stimpson, Editor
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society
I just take issue with two statements made in the editorial "One Fold, and One Shepherd" [June-July]. First, "our sexual longings are very sacred because they are in the image of the creator who Himself made man to relieve His own loneliness." One's sexual longings may be considered sacred because they are a natural and very integral part of his being, but not because they themselves per se (divorced from her personality and considered separately), are in the image of the Creator. It is our entire being which is in His image.... God has "neither body, parts, nor passions." God is not a sexual being.... God did not make Man to relieve His own loneliness. We are taught very strongly by the early Fathers that God is, and always has been, complete and all-sufficient, and that we are created and are being continually held in creation through his Love and through His joy in creation and creating.... This same idea, coupled with that of the sacredness of our sexuality because of its being a part of our being, which is in the image of God, is a very important concept for us Gay Christians to ponder, as it allows us to surpass the hassle of accepting our sexual natures, by realizing that God accepts and loves and takes great joy in us by virtue of the fact that we are us, His creation.
Second, you mention "our God-given sexual identification" and "God-designed homosexuality." Do we know this to be true? What is God-given is our being in his image.... Our sexual identification per se is not in this image.... God certainly gave to us our sexuality, the fact that we are sexual creatures, but we do not know whether our sexual longings, identification, or orientation is something with which we are born, or something which is a developmental phenomenon.... The important part is that our sexual orientation is very much a part of us, a part of our being, which is held lovingly in the sight of God. If we try to deny our nature, or any part of our nature ... what we are actually doing is just the reverse of what we should be doing, which is loving and glorifying God, and loving our neighbor as we should love ourselves (since God does), with all that we are, and giving thanks to God that we are, and making the best of what we are, by the grace of God.
It is a fundamental part of Gay Christian wholeness to realize that God does love us completely, and that even through our being Gay we can show forth His love, because doing that involves our total personality.
Keep up the good work.
Charlie
Be assured of our daily commemoration and remembrance at our altar on Sundays. I have many and mixed feelings about the Episcopal Church, but your work seems a kind of saving grace, in more dimensions than one.
Fr. Joseph
St. Nicholas' Orthodox Catholic Parish
Milwaukee
I am especially interested in articles on alternatives for Gay persons, working on making relationships last, why so many Gay people [and nonGay people? --editor] find it difficult to have a lasting relationship, and articles on middle age.
Mary
I am a vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexuality in U.K. In fact it began in my office!
May I wish your movement in PECUSA well, though I expect it will encounter many rocks and misinterpretations as it proceeds. The massive ignorance about homosexuality is frightening, particularly, I think, in the Church where it is intensified through a widespread hang-up about sex in general.
May I presume to say that a Christian pressure group needs to be very skillful. On the one hand it has to counteract the false views of sexuality that have so deeply marked Protestant and Catholic traditions (different though they are). And yet, on the other hand, without falling into the trap of suggesting that "anything goes" -- which is the widespread secular view of sexuality in revolt against bad Protestant thinking. There are elements in Gay Liberation that Christians should view with some alarm. The very terminology straight and gay coming into usage through that movement is unfortunate and suggests a spurious dichotomy that does a disservice to both homosexuals and heterosexuals.
I believe a campaign for homosexual equality and liberation should be resolute and firm, positive and responsible, and with a rather low profile. It must beware of getting sex on the brain! This is a difficult position to hold, but I think it should characterize the Christian component in the homophile movement. We have a great deal to contribute to it but we cannot do so without a recognition of the distinctive contribution we have to make.
With good wishes, yours sincerely,
The Rt. Rev. E.R. Wickham
Suffragan Bishop of Middleton
Manchester, England
Isn't is great that we do not have too many like Bishop E. Paul Haynes [See FORUM, June-July, 75, p. 3]? I think that the answer you sent him was very truthful. When I was just beginning my medical training, I was amazed to find so many of the students themselves doing research. I wish that Bishop Haynes would search himself. Gays only want to be treated with respect, as we would treat him. We have no need to discover and conform to other persons' norms.
Barbara Francis Jones
How sad it was to read of your local priest's paranoia! We shall pray for his enlightenment and for your sacramental needs as well.
Larry
I am deeply grieved to read of your troubles with the priest in your home parish. To be cut off from the local gatherings of the Body is bad enough, but to be cut off by the actions of a priest, in what I consider to be a violation of his ordination vows, is downright scandalous. I will pray for you and him.
Fr. Dunstan
I was sorry to read of the trouble you and your lover have been having with your local church. Though it must be painful up close, remember that from afar the struggle has its beautiful aspects in the honesty and patience that put such people as Fr. Cowan to shame. Keep up the good fight.
Arnie Kantrowitz
I am deeply grieved that you do not have any sort of support for your ministry from your local clergy. The most discouraging aspect of the Gay problem to me is the lack of Christian leadership within the clergy. I will remember you, Ernest Clay and Fr. Cowan in my prayers.
Glynn, a seminarian
[Note, because of the loving counsel of brothers who were priests at Chicago, Louie Crew is refusing to honor the de facto excommunication (last FORUM) and will continue to communicate at local St. Luke's when the sacraments resume, following the priest's holiday. It is Christ alone who issues the invitation and Christ alone who makes first class sinners of us all.]
Little will be solved until the bigots face their own problems and that is doubtful. I have found that those who go on witch-hunts, those who continually have to have some scapegoat, somebody else to punish and burn at the stake are always the very persons who are hiding themselves and who would merit the burning at the stake themselves if the thing they are hiding every became public. Thus homophobia is nothing less than homophilia in chains, and I have usually held that those roughies and toughies who constitute our police-military-mafia hunt and gun club types represent nothing less than a suppressed homosexuality, and the truth of the matter is they would be far happier in the barracks than in the boudoir. But alas! they know not what to do in either and that's why they're so mean and miserable. They comprehend neither man or women; therefore they can't appreciate or love either.
Fr. Jon
Bill says that Chicago was a triumph. I understand that Primo was the man who expelled the Gay group in Detroit five years ago. Bill says Pittenger impressed everyone immensely and is a fine human being. Alas, none of this comes across in the mimeographed report which makes him sound soppy and pretentious. Why are theologians addicted to Latin and precious phrases? The evangelists managed to get along without them. Back to the Bible is my slogan.
Professor Larry
I very much enjoy reading INTEGRITY, and I would like to congratulate you on the organizational work which you have undertaken.
As an aside, I think it might be of some value to point out that as an Anglo-Catholic I am in political and social matters a liberal social democrat with a great deal of support for the cooperative movement [in Canada]. This does not mean, however, that there is any contradiction whatsoever in my conviction that the Episcopal Church must resist an erosion of our sacraments, spirituality, aesthetics and liturgical heritage. We are not helping ecumenism by disintegrating into an individualistic, congregationalist cult that has no direction, form or identity. There must be diversity within the overall unity of Christendom, and cooperation, but not the uniformity of the big business monolith. Retention of the Prayer Book, which is essentially a catholic document, and its magnificent prose, is only one example of what I feel would be a number of worthwhile considerations for Integrity.
Silas
It is heartening to realize that there are others like oneself, sharing the same faith and the same sexual orientation.
I have believed in Sexual Freedom for many years. Since my wife and I have been practicing sexual freedom, our personal relationships have been infinitely more colorful and joyful and free. Being free to relate sexually to both sexes has been so wonderful that it seems to me that it cannot be in transgression of God's will. The thing that keeps me from feeling totally at ease, however, is that my wonderful wife has not been able to share my views completely, having received a very puritanical upbringing.
Fr. Gemini
I must admit as a bisexual myself that I have never understood why my sister/brother bisexuals make a particularly strong issue of bisexuality. Very few people are not bisexual if we consider biological definitions of sexuality. But I have not personally experienced oppression for my bisexuality; I feel no more compulsion or necessity to state that "bisexuality is good" than I do that "white is good." In fact, I am always afraid that the nonGays of the world would misread my affirmation as tantamount to a high yellow claim to respectability and acceptance; and I am also concerned that it would, in our culture, obscure for me my need to affirm more essentially that predominant Gay orientation of mine which society devalues.
Bisexuals also seem to be in an awkward moral position in that society will support our heterosexual encounters more than our Gay ones, often with the result that the Gay partners take on the devalued roles of hidden or secret mistresses, while the heterosexual partners often have an equally devalued role of sexless saints on pedestals -- again, much the way that honkey Southerners for centuries have relished Black sex (devalued) and brought only impotent respect for the enthroned (and devalued) Belles. Somehow we must find ways to value persons as whole human beings.
Louie Crew
I am trying to work out ways in which I can be helpful to the Gay movement within the Episcopal Church without compromising the broad thrust of my ministry in unhelpful ways. I suspect that I am one among many in this position.
I find it helpful to make a distinction between being "in the closet" and "going public" as the former tends to be used with little precision. By "coming out of the closet" I mean facing up to one's homosexuality/homophilia, accepting it, and integrating it into one's whole personality. A more colorful way of putting it is "getting your shit together" sexually. This is, I feel, vital to everyone and something that all people need encouragement to do. On the other hand, coming out is often equated, in the Gay movement, by what I call "going public," i.e., telling friends, family, associates, parishioners, the world, etc., that one is Gay. This, too, is very important for some people to do. Otherwise we could not have a movement for the liberation of all God's children. However, I fear that often Gay activists equate the one with the other, so that I get the feeling that a person is seen as being in the closet unless he goes public. This I very strongly disagree with.
Clearly this is a personal matter for me. I am Gay, or more accurately, bisexual. But I am a lot of other things. First, I am by the grace of God, a priest, called to minister to a wide variety of people and to proclaim the Gospel to a wide variety of situations. I believe that I have a vocation to the priesthood.... I seriously doubt that I could continue as Vicar if I went public. Then, too, God has also called me to the state of Holy Matrimony and that is a truly significant vocation. After six years of marriage my wife and I have worked out the problems that go along with my sexuality, and the marriage grows stronger and a more wondrous sacrament of God's presence with each passing year. I could not go public without grievous injury to my wife and a violation of that vocation. And I am many other things as well. What I am trying to say is that, for me, to go public at this point in my life would probably violate the integrity of my personhood by forcing me to identify myself chiefly in terms of my sexuality. I really don't think that God is calling me to do that now.
Yet, on the other hand, I deeply respect the actions and self-sacrifice of those whom God is calling to a public witness in this matter. That, too, is a divine vocation. You, the public activist, and I, the private priest, are part of the same Body of Christ and each of us must be true to our individual calling and yet loving and supportive of one another.
St. Paul wrote that "there are varieties of gifts but the same spirit" and I think that principle applies here. How then can those of us who have indeed come out of our closets (and after six years of prayer, reflection, reading, conversation, and even psychotherapy, I have definitely come out), yet who have not seen fit to go public, share in the ministry of those who have been called to a more visible witness? Part of the answer lies, I suspect, in being available as counselors, advisors, chapter members, correspondents, and the like. At least, that is what I feel I am called to do.
Fr. Dunstan
Dear Fr. Dunstan,
Indeed, we welcome your participation from what is your own position of strength, and I will in confidence share with inquirers from your area the fact that you are a contact to be trusted.
As I see our plight at this moment, we are operating an underground railroad, and we need persons at all stations. We cannot afford to waste our energies attacking each other. My motivation in going completely public was never intended to intimidate those who for a variety of reasons (some self-liberating, some self-destructive some ... ) are not in the position to make the same move. I personally believe that one should always decloset from a position of strength; we have enough martyrs not to need those whose martyrdom or endangerment does not further their own health or that of the Gay community. I personally came out completely to celebrate and give room for growth a relationship that is too beautiful to flourish in dark corners. (How could a Black man and a white man hope to cohabit in secret in middle Georgia?) I was also given the opportunity to edit some important scholarship on homosexuality for College English (Vol. 36, No. 3, November 74) with Dr. Rictor Norton, and I knew that this work would be infinitely more effective by an open Gay professional stance. Now out, I have discovered reserves of strength that I did not know I have, or more appropriately "that the Holy Spirit supplies," but I still feel that I personally knew in advance that I at least had the strength with which to prime the pump. I worry lest someone without strength suicidally jump out here where the pressure is indeed infinitely greater.
None of us stops being infinitely complex, and while even the best of friends in the Gay movement will look at those of us out as primarily a sexual witness, we must ourselves continue to be in touch with all parts of our personality. We very much need the support of your prayers in this effort.
It is unfortunate that some who use your analysis do so from positions less strong, and use it as a means of attacking sisters and brothers for going public rather than a means of discovering their own reserves from which to contribute to the liberation. These are they who, recognizing the essentially private and personal quality of liberation, deny the epiphany, deny too that we are our sisters' keepers.
Still others unfortunately abuse your position by trying to use their greater privacy to control what is heard from the Gay community; these are those who behind hushed doors try to speak for the Gay community to a private few, thereby denying access to the powerful or the sources of power for those of us who have really tried to do our homework by becoming more actively involved in the process of knowing the diversity of our Gay community. Sisters and brothers in the relative closet may thereby better work in white folks' kitchens, but they don't have to jump to lie to protect their position by saying none of us Gay folks really want to eat at Howard Johnson's or go to school with white folks or have our culture faithfully aired on TV too....
The Gay community is catholic and needs everyone of us, each encouraged first to be fully complete in her own way, while exhorted that freedom is always discovered in service.
Louie Crew
I can respect, love, feel supportive, etc., to those who say they don't want to come out or are afraid to, but not the I-can-do-it-better-under-cover" people. Dammit, "coming out" IS going public.
The bisexual trip doesn't seem to me very secure grounds for any kind of "permanent relationships." If anyone is asking for a license to lust, it would be bisexuals. Who is the bisexual sexually or spiritually responsible to? His//her wife/husband? The lover? Usually the wife/husband gets first priority while the lover gets a week night now and then with Christmas and Thanksgiving and all the weekends in between to sit along with his Accujac! If that's not using someone sexually -- but then I guess this is my WASPISH puritanism speaking!
The open Gays take the flack while hidden bisexuals purr their lives out in their comfortable, respectable pews, not having to answer to themselves or the world.
Gene Harlot
We are still in orbit here in Chicago and hope to make re-entry from the Convention by spending some time in the northwoods. The Convention changed our lives, and we will never again be the way we were before it. It was, to use a term we learned in seminary, "proleptic" -- for it grabbed the future bodily and dragged it into the present where we could foretaste it. It answered questions none of us had yet had the courage to ask! And all of us will be living in the warmth of its glow on many cold days to come.
Fr. G.
MEDIA
THE LESBIAN IN LITERATURE, 2nd ed, by Gene Damon, Jan Watson, and Robin Jordan. Reno, NV 89503, PO Box 5025 (c/o THE LADDER). This highly significant volume is being praised throughout the Gay and academic press and should be owned by all wanting to be informed even minimally about Gay literature. LC
GAY BIBLIOGRAPHY (5th Edition) is now available from Barbara Gittings, Task Force on Gay Liberation of the American Library Association, PO Box 2383, Phila 19103. 25¢ per copy, $1 for copies. This is a much expanded version of this most widely circulated bibliography, and all Gay people ought to own a supply of these for poking into mail addressed to persons needing to be informed. INTEGRITY is now listed thereon. LC
COUNSELING PARENTS OF GAYS by the Rev. Paul R. Shanley. Ampro Audio Cassette, 101 Tremont St., Boston 02108. 60 minutes cassette, $8.95 postpaid. This is a followup to Roman Catholic Fr. Shanley's earlier and successful tape "Straight Talk About Gays" [see FORUM, I, no. 5 (March 75), p. 10]. Fr. Shanley is much more aggressive and less defensive of his concerns for Gay people here. I liked it so much that I sent the tape to my own parents for their reactions. My father responded: "Mr. Shanley presents the matter in an intelligent and persuasive manner. When I tried to find pertinent information several years ago [when you told me you are Gay], I could find none such." Prejudice and hate spawned by fear are as old as the human race. Perhaps this counselling may remove some fear in parents and children." Mother added: "It was very informative. I wish more people could hear it." LC
AN EVANGELICAL LOOK AT HOMOSEXUALITY by Dr. Ralph Blair. Homosexual Community Counseling Center, 30 East 60th Street, NYC 10022. $1, 11 pp. This very small booklet should be in the hands of all evangelical Christians, a group not known for their homophilia. Dr. Blair has impeccable credentials with the evangelical scholarship community, having studied at Bob Jones University and at Dallas Theological Seminary (where many of the preachers proudly preach with open Greek NTs for simultaneous translation). He is also one of the more dynamic leaders in the Gay community. Few Episcopalians will hold the Biblical literalism to which Dr. Blair is addressing himself -- except when Episcopalians view Gays, at which point they become typically very fundamentalist -- but all of us daily come in contact with persons who are literalists and say that they could not listen to those who don't accept their premises. To such tract users, give a copy of Dr. Blair's book and invite them to come back for a chat. Buy a copy for each fundamentalist preacher in your yellow pages and invite each to a discussion afterwards. Even those who berate us the more vehemently the following Sunday will merely be calling attention to their own unloving attitudes, separating themselves more clearly from any deception that they are loving persons to be trusted. LC
FLIGHT FROM HOMOPHOBIA
By Fr. James Henry
[Editor's note: Fr. James Henry and his wife together wanted us to give his real name here, but have agreed for the time being to the pseudonym. The reasoning in our thus advising is the same as that used in our response to Fr. Dunstan. Fr. James Henry's bishop has already asked one Gay priest in his diocese to renounce his ministry. Right now Fr. James Henry enjoys great nobility in the Church and holds an influential post, all of which will be jeopardized severely if and when he goes public. The gain to himself or the Gay community would be small from his going public in FORUM, hardly worth the high stakes. While FORUM is available for those who want to use it as a vehicle to go public, the editor strongly feels that first persons should seek ways of greater advantage. In operating an underground railroad, success often depends on strategy. We are at war for the right to be who we are, and our enemies should have to give us considerable ground for each revelation of ourselves. The closet metaphor won't seem confining or demeaning if into that closet we take this kind of telegraphic communication, sending out the message in the most perspicuous code to every sensitive soul along the underground railroad: "Let my people go!"]
When I began my ministry, I was probably one of the most pharisaical priests in Anglicanism. My moral theology was very simple. Everything was divided into two categories -- something was either right or wrong. No shades in between!
Then I went to South Dakota to work with the Indians. But it was not until I was there for two years that my normal theology was shaken to its foundations. I have "Johnny Two Feathers" to thank for that.
It all began at 3 a.m. in February. It was about 30 degrees below zero, and the ground was covered with the snow of a recent blizzard. I had worked late even though the next morning I had to fight the weather to get to my mission stations. But that was tomorrow, and in the meanwhile I was snuggled close to my wife when someone loudly knocked on my study door. My first impulse was to ignore it, but I angrily got out of bed and stormed downstairs. I opened the door, and in rushed wind, snow, and the stench of cheap Muscatel.
It was Johnny, and he was drunk. He said he had to see me. I told him that inasmuch as I was coming to his chapel in the morning, and it was so late, what he had to tell me could surely wait until the morning. He started to cry hysterically. I let him in.
After a pot of coffee and a half dozen attempts to tell me what he wanted, he finally blurted out that he was in love. I exploded.
I said, "Johnny, I'm glad that you're in love, and so am I. But you could have told me that tomorrow after mass."
"But, Father, you don't understand! I'm not in love with a woman but with a man!"
"You're what?" I asked.
"I'm in love with a man. And I wanted to ask you if we would live together, could we continue to receive Holy Communion?"
""What do you mean, 'live together'?"
"Like husband and wife."
"And this would include sex?" I emphasized.
"Yes, Father!"
I proceeded to give him a refresher course in moral theology. I then turned my attention to ascetic theology. Repentance ... leading a clean life ... contrition ... leading a clean life ... forsaking the occasion of sin ... leading a clean life.
He listened to me with downcast head and eyes. When I was through with the lecture, he sobbed and asked again if they could continue to receive Communion, because they love each other, and they could not part.
I said, "Johnny, you're going to have to choose between the pure Jesus Christ and this dirty affair. What you need to do is to find a woman and get married."
Johnny got up and started to leave. Before he left, he turned to me, sober by this time, but with scalding tears, said, "Father, before I go, there is something I want you to know. I was born without any testicles!" I never saw Johnny again. I never gave him Holy Communion again. I wonder if he has ever been back to God's altar.
I went back to bed for about an hour, being awakened later from a sleep of exhaustion by the alarm. When I got up, I did not even remember the incident with Johnny.
Late in the spring it began to happen. For some mysterious reason I was awakened sharply at 3 a.m. This went on week after week. It did not matter when I went to bed. I had an alarming loss of weight. I was exhausted. I could not even think.
The next thing I knew I saw a sister in a white habit bending over my bed. I was in the psych ward in Sioux Falls. For about two weeks I continued to awaken at 3 a.m. I would always go down to the chapel and pray for hours -- trying desperately to understand what was happening to me. I prayed until the conventual mass. How I can remember how much I wanted to receive communion but could not because I was Anglican and the institution was Roman.
Under drug therapy I was patched together, stopped waking up at 3 a.m. and returned to my work. I asked for a leave of absence from the bishop and got a job on an English faculty at a university near me. At the end of two years I wanted to take a parish again, and was elected Rector of St. __________. For four and one-half years I was a worker priest.
Toward the end of my ministry there, it all started again. 3 a.m........3 a.m........3 a.m........3 a.m........ I ended up n the psych ward again. Same story. Patched together. No real answers.
After my release from the hospital and after a few more months of work, this time as a full-time parochial priest, for the parish had grown, I was called to become a staff member of the Cathedral. This was in February. Late in the spring my merry-go-round started again. 3 a.m........3 a.m........3 a.m........ Two breakdowns. I could not afford a third. I called the dean and asked him to get me a psychiatrist, fast! He did. I had only three sessions with him. It was the second one that paid off. It was in the midst of role-playing that I relived the whole terrible experience. I remembered Johnny. I remembered something else that I had never permitted myself to think of. That night when I went downstairs, I had just thrown a bathrobe over my nude body. During that session with the psychiatrist I suppressed the thoughts no longer -- I had wanted Johnny for myself! Tears of release flowed. Then tears of cleansing. Tears of joy. Tears of sorrow. Tears and more tears. I had only one more session with the psychiatrist. He told me that I did not need him anymore. And I didn't. I was at last a complete person. My phoniness was gone forever.
I then started reading everything I could find on homosexuality. I met bisexuals, homosexuals. They started to turn to me for counseling. The phone at my home was always ringing. I joined the Lambda Society. I was at the first Gay Awareness Conference in my area.
I have just returned from the first national convention of INTEGRITY, held at St. James' Cathedral in Chicago. The concelebrated mass with Bishop Primo was the most moving experience I have ever had. Moving down the central aisle of the nave behind a banner that said, "Gay Episcopalians," walking beside a brother priest, looking up at the window of crucifixion, hearing those words I have heard and said for countless times, "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid." I prayed with my whole heart, "Lord, I tried so hard to stay in the closet, but you have brought me out." Across the Red Sea ... across the burning Sinai.
Years ago when I was a curate, I felt conscience bound to go to Selma during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. I was informed that were I to do so, I might not have a job to come back to. I have always been sorry that I was such a coward. I am not a brave person. I know that when I stick this manuscript in the mailbox, my hand will tremble. I have no idea what future I will have in this portion of Christ's Body which I love so desperately and for which I have, I think, worked hard. Nevertheless, my beloved wife and I agree that I can do no other. My story is now told. I have integrity! It's a great feeling. God grant that our beloved Zion will deal graciously with my sisters and brothers. Allow us to come to the altar with integrity. Allow us to celebrate with integrity. Allow us to commune with integrity.
One final and personal note: "Johnny," wherever you are, if you read this, will you please forgive me, for I really did not know what I was doing!
WHO AM I?
By Fr. Anthony
One of the most difficult questions any of us sets out to answer in a lifetime is "Who am I?" Hot on the heels of this pervasive query is the equally difficult "Where do I belong?" Many persons in our time have found the word homosexual included in the answer to "Who am I?" Inasmuch as the answer to "Who am I?" most definitely affects the answer to the question "Where do I belong?", it seems the Church might do well to consider its role in each person's confrontation with these difficult questions.
We have grown up in a culture that loves shortcuts and organizational simplicity. When confronted with the complexity of another human life, we are prone to pigeon-hole this person's identity by assigning him or her a label, much as a botanist might label his lab specimen. Perhaps we should remember that words like Christian and homosexual are most properly adjectives, not nouns. Used as modifiers they may often appear in tandem. In any and all cases, we might gain much by abandoning the practice of using these words as nouns. When we speak of Christian persons and homosexual persons we do not lose sight of the basis for all identity: personhood.
Homosexual persons too often muddle the identity question by zeroing in on the matter of their sexuality and selling their birthright as persons. Sexuality is but one facet of any person. As we grow to see that we are persons first, we find that we can indeed be many things at one and the same time. Once we establish that we are persons, we can begin to deal with the question "Where do I belong?", the question of relationship to others. It is at this point that the Church often muddles the issues. The Gospel is addressed to persons, without modifiers. If and when the message of the Gospel reaches the person, the primary relational bond is revealed and s/he learns that each person belongs to, is actually a child of, God the Creator. When the person further learns that s/he belongs to God the Redeemer (Christ) and God the Sustainer (Holy Spirit), s/he may respond by sealing that relational bond by Baptism. At this point, the person may add the modifier "Christian" to her/his person.
Traditionally, the Church has professed this fundamental relational bond to be indissoluble. Once baptized into relationship, into belonging to God, the person can never be wrenched from that bond. Furthermore, since the gospel is addressed to persons by God, there is no manner by which it can be selectively distributed or revealed save through God's will. The Church has, however, attempted such selectivity by excluding certain persons from God's family of children. Likewise, some persons who feel excluded feel compelled to recast the words of Scripture. With erroneous insertions of modifying words these revisionists aim at establishing a sense of belonging or legitimacy by practicing an "exclusive" tactic. It would perhaps be best to remember that God's message is addressed to persons, without adjectival selectivity, and should be allowed to stand purely and simply as it was recorded. Retaliation of this sort does little to heal and has no place within the family of God.
Those persons who find that they are both Christian persons and homosexual persons pose a question for the Church: Are we either/or, or are we both/and? This is the real question which we must confront. We may not be able to answer it conclusively, but the least and perhaps the most we can do is deal with it lovingly.
HIGH SPERM COUNT IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Believe me,
there exists a higher form
of love, gentle
men, one
not
fettered to the flesh. Plato, Saints
Augustine and Thomas -- all
wrote its beauty its
absolute endurance. Lecturewords
read from the braillenotes of
a sixty-some-year-old
jesuitfather with a clump
of white frizz just
above his pimpled forehead. Let us
analyze the Great
Chain of Being for a clear
perspective of man as
rational animal. Ballpoint
click records
the fact that the human
being (on a vertical
scale) resides between
a pregnant hamster and Michael
the Archangel. I like
my lips and almost
wet my pants as
the young seminarian beside
me spots
his open fly. He reddens as
I scratch
my earlobe bitten
by some hungry
insect. Do Catholic
sophomores realize
fully
how
many sperm can swim and survive
on the head
of a pin? Aquinas, had
he attacked that
at bedtime
in a sweaty pillowcase (imitating
my twice-a-week roommate) would have had
bad results.
--J.D. Butkie
ONE WOMAN'S INTEGRITY
By Ellen Barrett
Our National Co-President
What am I doing in INTEGRITY? Why am I spending my energy on a group that is mostly men, a fair percentage of whom probably agree with the Church party that says to me that I should know my place (subordinate) and stick to it? Why, my sisters ask, do I waste my strength when my sisters need me?
Obviously I do not feel that it is a waste for me to work in INTEGRITY; but the "why?" is less obvious.
I am a woman, and my primary experience of oppressive structures and people is as a woman. Even if I hid the fact of my Gayness (which I do not), I could not hide the fact that I am woman. But that would be a purely negative reason for being a feminist, and I am sick of the kind of reasoning that says that women only come together faux de mieux. It is most especially as a Lesbian, as a woman who loves deepest with another woman, that I affirm woman-nature. By struggling together with my sisters to shed the crippling mold of sexist conditioning, I become slowly and painfully, but Oh! how joyously, a truly "woman-identified-woman." I become myself. This can only be accomplished with other women, free as I can make myself of the encroachments of societal patterns that call forth the old knee-jerk reactions.
Why, then, INTEGRITY? Why not a "separatist" organization? Perhaps it is as simple or as complicated as being a committed Christian. The Church being so reflective of our society, it is difficult to be a woman-identified-woman and still hold on to institutional Christianity. But somehow I do, and I am not only a Christian, but a twentieth-century Christian. As I read the New Testament, the fundamental law of God is love, and love that is all-inclusive and nondiscriminatory. None of us deserve or can possibly earn it. It is a gift freely given by God, who became human flesh in Jesus Christ in order to teach even our hardened hearts to love. "Love one another as I have loved you." And even less in our age than in times past it is possible to ignore this imperative of love -- the world is simply become too small to allow anyone the luxury of total separation, however vital it is in the building of one's own self-affirmation. Like the greatest of the bodhisattvas, we must turn back from the merely personal achievement of Nirvana and return to the struggles of our fellow human beings. "That all may be one."
So I feel, paradoxically, that the greater my commitment to women, the stronger my calling to work together so that all people who are oppressed in one way or another can enter into the freedom of love. For we are none of us free until all of us are free, and freedom is our birthright, as children of God. "For freedom Christ has set us free, hold fast then, and do not submit again to any yoke of slavery." Most especially I must work together with my Gay brothers, as well as my sisters, both to help them shed the bonds of sexism that damage them as well as me, and to break the Church's traditional homophobia. Their struggle is mine, as a gay woman and a Christian. It is not a calling all Gay women will feel, nor should they necessarily. "There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit." One must follow the integrity of one's own vocation, and this is mine: to work with my brothers to free us all from the Church's institutionalized sexism and homophobia, and at the same time to work to make INTEGRITY a real contact point and an open and supportive place for Gay women who want also to affirm ourselves as Christians, as Episcopalians.
Many of these women may be isolated from their sisters by distance or by the need to remain hidden, others may choose to put their energy into specifically women's groups. But INTEGRITY is theirs as well as mine; to maintain the integrity of its vocation, too, its ministry must overflow in love beyond its membership.
BEAUTY AND THE ANGLICAN BEAST
Dear, sweet, bothersom Muse
you are
Fourteen
and your
Feathers are broken / and yr fur
is
Ruffled ...
yr
Pearls are less than Scripture promised
but
Sitting on th wall of St. Mark's Church
yr
Body is th vessel
of my
Salvation.
if
Jesus loiters anywhere
he's
Sitting on the grass beside
you/
Blessing th profanity of yr ass
to which I write, O
Lord
"Amen."
(Make
me, dear child, yr quondum pig
and I will pretend to
Rend
you)
--Jim Eggeling
EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMEBODY TO LOVE (Song)
1. Everybody in this whole wide world needs somebody to love,
There's boys and boys and girls and girls
And boys and girls in love,
And who are you that you can judge
When you don't wear their shoes
There's already too many lonely hearts
Out crying and singing the blues.
2. If the do-good gossipers in this land would clean around
Their own back door--there'd be more love in this old world,
And no more cause for war.
3. If the saints in our society would live and just let live,
There'd be less hurt and so much love,
For hearts to take and give.
4. Everybody in this whole wide world needs somebody to love,
There's boys and boys and girls and girls
And boys and girls in love.
Repeat 3 & 4
--Jo Ann Box
-----------------------------------------------------------------
During one of the lighter moments at our Convention, Dr. Pittenger was expounding that the Lord can speak to us through our sucking, our fucking and our rimming. One guest leaned towards another and said, "But what is rimming?" "I don't know," was the reply; "I'm not an Episcopalian."
--------
Early in the century Punch carried a cartoon of a person staring at the rhinoceros cage at the zoo. "And how do you tell the difference between a male rhinoceros and a female rhinoceros?" the inquirer asked the zoo keeper. The keeper replied, "I should think that that would be of interest only to the rhinoceros."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FINANCIAL STATEMENT
Louie Crew, Editor of Gay Episcopal Forum, has released the following financial statement, covering FORUM's account from its beginning on 8th October, 1974 through publication of this the last issue in volume 1, as of 29th August 1975. As of 29th Aug., INTEGRITY has 402 members and distributed another 300 copies in exchange or promotional way.
RECEIPTS
Subscriptions
(Including early renewals) $2350.83 (87%)
Gifts 276.10 (10%)
Special Orders 39.95 ( 2%)
Local chapter dues 30.00 ( 1%)
$2696.88
DISBURSEMENTS
Ads $ 644.28 (25%)
Bank charges 24.77 ( 1%)
Local dues returned to chapters 30.00 ( 1%)
Printing and (c) 655.09 (25%)
Secretarial help 35.00 ( 1%)
Stamps 659.52 (25%)
Supplies 242.45 ( 9%)
Travel 144.20 ( 6%)
Miscellaneous operational 188.46 ( 7%)
________
$2623.77
Total Receipts through 29 Aug. $2696.88
Total Disbursements through 29 Aug. 2623.77
Cash on hand on 29 Aug. $ 73.11
HOMOSEXUAL LABORS TO UNITE GAYS, CHURCH
By James H. Bowman
Chicago Daily News Service
CHICAGO -- Louie Crew lives in a small Georgia town where, when he goes jogging at night, children follow him on their bicycles shouting obscenities at him while their parents look on unconcerned.
This is because Crew is a homosexual, or gay, person living openly in that neighborhood with his male lover, who also happens to be black, which doesn't help either.
Crew, who teaches English at Ft. Valley (Ga.) State College figures the parents -- middle class white-collar and working-class people -- let their children behave this way as possible antidote to their becoming gay like Crew.
It won't work, he said in Chicago recently while discussing homosexuality and the church.
Crew is founder of Integrity, the national organization for Episcopal gays and their friends.
Straight heterosexual parents of gay children are one group of people that Crew, 39, is concerned about.
His friend and workshop companion, the Rev. Dr. Norman Pittenger, a theology teacher at Cambridge University, England, said those who find moral objections to homosexual behavior make two mistakes:
-- They quote Scripture out of context, the fundamentalist error.
-- They read "natural law" as an unbending norm rather than as a general one to be applied differently to different times and places.
Young people who discover their homosexuality are clobbered on the one hand by a sense of guilt which the church generously provides, Crew said, and on the other by loneliness.
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sun. Aug. 3, 1975
EPISCOPAL BISHOP DEFENDS HOMOSEXUALS' CATHEDRAL USE
By Roy Larson
Sun-Times Religion Writer
The Episcopal bishop of Chicago Saturday defended a decision to use the Cathedral Church of St. James as the site of a national convention for homosexual Episcopalians.
In a letter to diocesan clergy, the Rt. Rev. James W. Montgomery said: "Neither the diocese nor the cathedral is sponsoring or endorsing the meeting. We are providing a place for it.
"Years ago Bishop (Gerald Francis) Barrill laid down the policy, which I have continued, that the cathedral should be available for use by any responsible recognized organization in the Episcopal Church. This is especially true when services of worship are part of the program, as well as lectures and workshops."
The first national convention of Integrity will take place in the cathedral, 65 E. Huron, Friday through Aug. 10. The Rt. Rev. Quintin E. Primo, suffragan bishop of Chicago, will be the primary celebrant at a concelebrated eucharist Saturday morning. The Rev. Grant M. Gallup, vicar of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, 48 N. Hoyne, and one of the local planners of the convention, said he expects a dozen priests will concelebrate.
Besides the liturgical rites, there will be panel discussions on homosexual couples, homosexual celibacy and civil rights for homosexuals. Workshops are planned for priests ministering to homosexuals and parents of children who have become homosexual.
In a telephone interview, Bishop Montgomery said he has received "some calls" objecting to the use of the cathedral for the convention. His letter to the clergy, he said, was designed to anticipate further criticism and explain the rationale for his decision.
"Most major Christian bodies in this country have organizations for homophiles and those who have the responsibility for ministering to them," the letter says. "Our national church has a special commission dealing with the subject. At a recent meeting of bishops, we devoted half a day to the question of the Christian understanding of homosexuality.
"I am aware this is a sensitive issue. Some attitudes and views of extremely vocal members of the gay community are not in keeping with Christian doctrine. For example, I do not believe that any commitment, however deep and meaningful, between two persons of the same sex can be called 'marriage' and given the sacramental character of that union of man and woman which Our Lord sanctified."
According to Bishop Montgomery, the laws of the Episcopal Church do not specifically prohibit the ordination to the priesthood of homosexuals.
LOCAL CHAPTERS
INTEGRITY/Atlanta. Co-Convenors Dr. Ara Dostourian (Dept. of History, West GA College, Carrollton, GA 30117) and Steve Matthews (404-351-1943).
INTEGRITY/Austin. Convenor Adam F. Stricker (Box 14056, Austin, TX 78761).
INTEGRITY/Boston. Convenor Joe McCauley, Box 2582, Boston 02208.
INTEGRITY/Chicago. Convenor David Williams (Box 2516, Chicago 60690). Meets. weekly.
INTEGRITY/Denver. Convenor The Rev. Thomas Dobbs (1958 Emerson Street, Denver 80218)
INTEGRITY/Jacksonville. Convenor psychiatrist Dr. Robert Ragland, Box 5524, Jacksonville, FL 322070.
INTEGRITY/Minneapolis. Convenor Frank R. Eggers (26 Arthur Avenue, Box 203, Minneapolis, MN 55414)
INTEGRITY/NYC. Convenors The Rev. Michael G. Koonsman (31 Stuyvesant Street, NYC 10003).
INTEGRITY/Lexington. Convenor Philip Mitchum, (1220 Octavian Circle, Lexington, KY 40502).
INTEGRITY/Philadelphia. Convenor The Rev. John Lenhardt (4711 Baltimore Ave., Phila. 19143, tele. 726-1089).
INTEGRITY/San Diego. Convenor The Rev. H. C. Lazenby, ACSW (4645 West Talmadge Drive, SD, CA 92116).
INTEGRITY/San Francisco and Bay Area. Co-Convenors Jim Frooks (1256 Page Street, No. 1, SF, CA 94117, 415-621-0182) and The Rev. Richard Younge (P.0. Box 6444, San Jose, CA 95150).
INTEGRITY/Washington, DC. Convenor Dr. Robert Bissell (11917 PH1 Winterthur Lane, Reston, VA 22091)
Additional convenors have contacted us about the possibilities of new chapters in the places below. Address all queries c/o Fort Valley office: