Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [44]
“MCC. May I help you?”
“I’m…I’d like to talk to your minister.”
“One moment please. Reverend Whitsell will be right with you.”
When Larry Whitsell got on the line, Mary said, “I’m the mother of a gay son.” She hesitated. “He killed himself.”
“I’m truly sorry to hear that,” Whitsell answered. “There unfortunately are so many like him.”
“Yes. I…was wondering, could I come and talk to you? I’ve had to do a lot of thinking and…”
“By all means,” he jumped in. They made an appointment, and Mary breathed a sigh of relief.
Larry Whitsell had been a gay activist for eighteen years, twelve of them with MCC, and seven as pastor. He presided over a congregation of mostly closeted gay and lesbian professionals who lived quietly in the suburban setting in and around Concord. That peace was in the process of being shattered.
At the time Mary phoned Whitsell he was embroiled in controversy over the suicide of a young black gay man in the parking lot of the Concord mass-transit station. Concord was soon to become an unlikely battleground between far-right religious conservatives and the moderate center over the issue of gay civil liberties—a struggle that would expand across the nation over the next decade.
Ed drove Mary to the Metropolitan Community Church, which was housed in an old one-story wood-frame cottage on Concord Avenue. It consisted of a living room that served as the sanctuary and two or three small offices in the back. She entered with trepidation. She expected Whitsell to look and act different from “ordinary” people, and that made her uneasy. But when Whitsell came forward to greet her, he looked quite ordinary: slender, of medium size, with brown hair and a beard, dressed casually. His appearance put her at ease. They sat in his office drinking coffee. He mostly listened as Mary told her story.
They talked for three hours. She had done something wrong, she acknowledged. But what was right?
She had had no guidance. Her church offered nothing on the subject. She was going strictly on her limited knowledge. “I did something wrong,” she said, weeping, “and look what happened to my boy!”
Whitsell tried to comfort her, but Mary was looking for information rather than sympathy. She wanted to know about Sodom and Gomorrah. How could he as a minister justify homosexuality in light of what happened there? How could she make peace with her son’s memory, with such condemnation hanging over it?
Whitsell proceeded to explain the modernist view of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a story that, he noted, had been handed down as an oral account before it was codified in Genesis. Progressive biblical scholars interpret the sin of the cities to be inhospitality rather than sodomy. In biblical times, the refusal to grant hospitality was an extreme breach of the social contract. The act of the townspeople in threatening the angels—whether it had been rape, murder, or some other form of violence—was in this view the essential sin of Sodom, the kicker that assured God’s action. In that era, when consensual homosexual activity did not exist as a known “condition,” rape of any kind would have been seen as a society-threatening deviation—an abomination, the most extreme act of inhospitality.
It was not until the Christian era that the sin of Sodom became connected with homosexuality as a practice, Whitsell explained. The Roman historians Philo and Josephus, writing in the first century A.D.—a period of great moral turmoil—were responsible for linking the Sodom story (which had occurred two thousand years earlier) to some of the Dionysian excesses of the era in which they lived. This interpretation was adapted by the fathers of the Christian church, and the tradition became fixed for all time.
Mary was stunned. The possibility of an alternative view of the Bible was, in itself, a major revelation. Why then had the existence of such a view not been made known to her and her fellow parishioners? Yes, it was unacceptable to traditionalists, but why