By David Edward Clark

Bishop Gene Robinson at Finney. Photo by David Roswell.

Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire spoke to Finney Chapel on Tuesday.  His talk centered on his experiences being the first openly gay bishop in a major Christian denomination.

He began his story by describing his origins.  “Talking about the era in which I grew up is not unlike, I dunno, talking about the Roman Empire,” Gene said.  He grew up in Kentucky, a time and place where “gay” was a word still used to describe fun parties, and homosexuals were simply referred to as “that way.”

From childhood, the church played a central part in his life, although these early experiences were unfulfilling.  “The reason that I was looking for a different church [in college] was that I would ask my tough questions, you know, because at age 18 and 19, I knew everything there was to know,” said Gene.  “I would rant and rail at the church and I would be told that there were certain questions that I shouldn’t ask.”

Gene found his was into the Episcopal Church during college.  He was attracted to it because he thought it didn’t require him to check his brain at the door and “was struck at the kind of non-defensive nature” of the Episcopal Church.  He was confirmed his senior year of college and after college, he went to Seminary to be ordained as an Episcopal minister.  At this point, “I was beginning to own up to the fact that I had been sitting on my sexuality for all that time,” said Gene, “and it scared me to death.  I was terrified that I might be ‘that way.’  And so I got into therapy to get myself cured.” He added, “I’d love to have all that money back, not to mention get my hands around the neck of that therapist.”

Gene met a woman after therapy, and the love that they had for one another led to their wedding.  He explained his previous relationships with men early on in their relationship, and when he broke down a week before their wedding, she reassured him that they would handle whatever happened together.  Thirteen years and two daughters later, he couldn’t do it anymore and they separated in 1986.  Gene said, “I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that my life as an ordained person was over.”

New Hampshire elected a new bishop in 1986, and Gene talked his way into an assistant position.  “At that point, I was the only openly gay person serving in any Bishop’s staff anywhere in America,” said Gene.  In 2003, the Bishop retired.  In the Episcopal Church, the process of selecting a new Bishop falls democratically on the clergy and laypeople of the diocese.  Gene had gotten to know everyone in the diocese well through his many years working for the Bishop and seemed like the obvious candidate.  “Honestly, neither they nor I thought we were doing anything all that remarkable…Boy were we wrong.”

“It’s been my experience over the last six and a half years that this event, and everything that it’s kind of triggered, while causing lots of pain and confusion and conflict, has also brought enormous hope to just so many different people,” said Gene about his position.  He received a note from a woman in the New Hampshire State Women’s Prison about three days after his ordination.  “It said, ‘I am neither gay nor particularly Christian, but there is something in your election that makes me believe that there might be a community out there who could love me despite what I’ve done.’”

Abuse was quick to come as well.  “I was getting calls from archbishops from around the world, as well as people just sitting in the pews from around the world telling me not to do this, that I would irreparably damage the church,” said Gene.  Through it all, “The only way that I’ve really been able to do this is that God has been so palpably close during this whole time.  Sometimes prayer seems redundant.”

After a diocese elects a Bishop, the Church must consent to the decision at a national convention.  False charges of sexual misconduct as well as ties to a pornographic website were brought against Gene at this convention.  While the issues were being investigated, one of Gene’s priests gave him a piece of calligraphy that has become his mantra for the past six years: “Sometimes God calms the storm, and sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms his child.”

“The controversy [over the ordination] went international,” said Gene.  “We began hearing from our brothers and sisters, particularly in Africa and Asia, that this was beyond the pale, that the American Church had gone off the deep end.  Statements were made by archbishops that when I was consecrated that Satan had entered the Church, that gay people were lower than dogs, lots of Christian comments like that.”

Gene described the current situation of the Episcopal Church using the founder of Clergy Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Jane Tully’s, analogy.  “What’s going on in the Anglican community is exactly what goes on in a family when a kid comes out.  A son or daughter comes home and says ‘Mom, Dad, I’m gay.’  The family goes into this kind of chaotic period in which they’re trying to figure out how deep, how broad, how expansive is their love and whether or not they can incorporate this new reality into the life of the family,” said Gene.

Specifically, “The gay kid, the Bishop of New Hampshire,” said Gene, “comes home to the dad, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and says, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’  And now the family is in turmoil trying to figure whether this is beyond the bounds or not.”

Gene also spoke more generally on the state of LGBT issues nationally.  He said that homophobia is less accurate for the current situation than systematic heterosexism.  Like any “ism,” it is formed by the combination of prejudice and power.  “What we have is a prejudice for heterosexual people and the power to enforce it, so it is done at the expense of those who are not heterosexual.”

Gene used racism as another example about the way in which power hierarchies work.  “I don’t have to say anything bad or mean or hurtful to any person of color to benefit from being white.  All I have to do is wake up in the morning…and I benefit everyday from a culture that is set up to benefit me as a white man.  Until I start working to dismantle that racist system, then I am continuing to participate in racism.”

Now the fight for LGBT rights “is the beginning, just the beginning, of the end of patriarchy,” said Gene.  Decisions are increasingly being made by people of color, women, and the LGBT community, in addition to Western, white, educated, straight males, “and the world is never going to be the same again when you have all those voices at the table.”

Gene recognized that he in no way achieved anything by himself.  “I’m standing here tonight as the Bishop of New Hampshire, who happens to be gay, because a bunch of drag queens got sick and tired of being harassed at this one small bar in 1969 in New York.  And we’re here because Harvey Milk did what Harvey Milk did.  And we’re here because countless people who, in living rooms all across America, went home to say ‘Mom, Dad, I’m gay.’”

Q+A

Photo by David Roswell.

A student asked: “Last month I told my parents that I was in a serious relationship with my best friend who also happens to be a woman.  They weren’t upset with me, they weren’t angry or anything, they were just ‘concerned for my safety,’ and I said ‘I’m not going to live in Alabama,’ and my mom said “Yes, but the whole world is like Alabama.’  I was wondering what your response is to that.”

Gene answered her question from a Christian angle.  “One of the things that I believe is true is what Jesus kept point to, which is basically, if you’re doing the right thing, you’re going to get into trouble.  I mean, it was true for him.”  Gene agreed that people aren’t as safe when they are out, “but that’s sort of irrelevant, isn’t it?  I mean, if you’re happy, and you’re you, that’s what matters.”

Another student asked, “How did you make the spiritual transition towards acceptance of homosexuality in your personal life?”

Gene’s answer had numerous parts.  The overarching answer was that scripture must be kept in its context.  Gene started by giving an example of someone from the year 3000, hundreds of years after the game of baseball is lost, reading a book from 2000 that describes one of the characters being “out in left field.”  Yes, the reader knows what “left” is and what a “field” is and so believes they know what the author was talking about.  “But unless you know the game of baseball, you don’t know that most batters are right handed, the left fielder backs up to be able to catch a fly ball and that it’s become a symbol for being out of touch, isolated, out of the mainstream and so on,” said Gene.

2000 years ago, heterosexuality was seen as the only sexuality, “so everyone being spoken about in those seven verses are heterosexual people who are acting against their nature to act in a homosexual way.”  Also different were notions of science, especially surrounding procreation.  People have downplayed the fact that “spilling your seed on the ground” via masturbation or pulling out held the same death penalty as homosexuality during a time when populations were less stable and nations needed as many babies as possible to continue.

Additionally, some words that appear in the New Testament are mysteries to modern scholars.  “We think that they refer to a practice that would have been known by Paul in the Greek and Roman culture, where an older man would take an adolescent boy under his wing, use him sexually, teach him the ways of the world, etc. etc. We would call that child abuse,” said Gene.  In some of the newer translations, however, those words have been translated simply as “homosexuality.”

“You can’t take a modern day concept and plug it back into an ancient text without doing violence to the text itself,” concluded Gene.  “Those seven verses are all negative.  There’s no question about that.   The question is, do they apply to what we’re talking about today?  Life long, committed, faithful relationships between people of the same sex.  And what I would say is, the Bible simply doesn’t address that.”

The last question enabled Gene to end on a positive note.  The questioner wanted to hear some of the humor that Gene has experienced in the past six years.  Gene spoke about meeting Barack Obama during his campaign.  “It was just the two of us, and his two security people, and we talked about what it’s like to be first,” said Gene.  He visited an exhibit in London featuring portraits of gay icons with Ian McKellan (Gandolf), in which they were featured.  He mentioned sharing a dressing room trailer with Tiger Woods at Obama’s inauguration and being included in a U2 prayer circle shortly thereafter.

Gene’s final words of the night were, “Sometimes people ask me ‘Well, when’s all of this going to be over?’ and what I say is, ‘It’s not going to be all over,’ because just as soon as we get a leg up on this gay and lesbian thing, God’s going to show us somebody else we’ve been overlooking, and it won’t be over until there’s no more them and us.  It won’t be over until it’s just us, until we’ve moved that fence further and further out so that everybody’s included.  That’s great work to be involved in, and it’s my privilege to play my part in it.”