This talk was first delivered at
St. John's Episcopal Cathedral in Denver on September 18, 1994.

As many of you undoubtedly know, to talk to straight people about being a gay person, and especially to talk to straight Christians about being a gay Christian, can be frustrating and painful. There's an incredible amount of misunderstanding and discomfort in our society surrounding the subject, and good people can say hurtful things without even realizing it. In approaching encounters such as this one, I find it helpful to remind myself that coming to understand and be comfortable with homosexuality can be a long and difficult process not only for most straight people but for most gay people, too. In fact it's the same process, except that for gays it's imperative, if we want to live emotionally whole and healthy lives, to try to understand and come to terms with homosexuality, because it's something that society has conditioned us to think of as a bad thing but which is inside us and integral to our identities. For straight people, it's something that you can choose not to think about. Unless, of course, the subject touches you closely because a close friend turns out to be gay, or your sibling, or your child.

I begin my book A Place at the Table with an anecdote about such a child--a teenager, actually. One day when I was in my mid 20s I went into a bookstore in New York and saw a well-dressed, obviously well-loved and well-taken-care-of boy of about 15 standing alone at the magazine rack. As soon as I saw him I felt a rush of awareness, a sense of intimate and absolutely certain knowledge that stunned me and that forced me to stop what I was doing. I stood there watching while he picked up and glanced at one magazine, then put it down and did the same with another, and another. I knew he wasn't interested in those magazines but was trying to work up the nerve to read something else. I stood there because I wanted to see if he'd work up that nerve.

He did. He picked up a copy of the New York Native, a gay tabloid. If he'd just paged idly through the other publications, he went at the Native with a thirst like that of someone who'd crossed a desert and stumbled on a flowing stream. I was proud of him. Because I'd known from the moment I saw him that he was gay, not because he displayed any stereotypical characteristics that might jump out at some of you but because there was something about him that resonated powerfully with me, that connected with my memories of myself at that age, that communicated a fear, a curiosity, a tentativeness, an intense aloneness that I recognized and identified with. In any event, I knew in that moment that he was gay and that he was beginning to realize that fact, and I knew also that there was nobody with whom he felt he could talk about this momentous discovery he'd made about himself. And so he'd come to this bookstore.

But what had he found? Standing there I could see some of the pictures in the Native. There were ads for strip clubs, for drag shows, for leather bars, for escort services and phone sex, all of them illustrated with photographs of near-naked men, some of them in leather, some of them simulating sadomasochistic sex acts, and so forth. This wasn't the sort of thing I'd been looking for at that boy's age, and it wasn't anything that I or most of my gay friends could identify with, and I suspected that boy wasn't looking for that sort of thing either. He was confused, and such images could only aggravate his confusion. I know that in his shoes, looking at those pictures, I would've said to myself: "But that isn't me." I worried that he might be thinking: "Well, if that's what it means to be gay, then I guess I must not be gay." Or: "Well, I'm gay, so I guess I'd better try to become like that." Or: "Well I'm gay but I refuse to become like that, so I guess the only alternative is to repress it and marry. "

The irony of it all was that there I was, standing there. I could've explained things to him. I could've told him that gay life is a spectrum just as straight life is. Yes, there are gay men who are into S&M, or cross-dressing; gay men who are very promiscuous. And there are also straight men into all those things too. But most gay people are in most ways pretty much like most straight people. The main difference is that they're virtually invisible; they're essentially silent about being gay; so that the basically mainstream-oriented majority of gay people don't contribute very much to the public image of -- or the public dialogue about -- what it means to be gay. The image is formed, rather, and the "gay" end of the dialogue largely carried out, by that very visible and extreme segment of the gay population. Standing there behind that boy, I realized what a bad thing it was that that was the case. Because by being silent I was powerless to help him, to correct the images formed in his mind by those pictures in the Native. If I dared to speak to him, he might think I was trying to pick him up -- and that thought would probably terrify the hell out of him. I wished at least that I might be able to hand him a book that might help him to understand who he was. But there wasn't such a book. That's why I eventually wrote one.

There's a line in Shadowlands, the movie about C.S. Lewis: "We read in order to know we're not alone." One of the loneliest things you can be in this world is a young person who's begun to realize that he or she is gay, who doesn't have any idea what that might mean in terms of his or her future, who doesn't know what to do about it, and who has nobody in his or her life, no parent or teacher or clergyperson, with whom he or she feels that the subject can be safely raised without fear of estrangement, rejection, condemnation. That's why the boy went to that bookstore and stood at that magazine rack and worked up his courage to read the Native.

Many gay readers have responded very strongly to that anecdote. When I handed the manuscript of the book in to Simon & Schuster, my editor sent copies of the first twenty or so pages around the company. In the next few days, she said, virtually every gay man at Simon & Schuster came in to her office and said to her, "That boy was me." And in the six months since this book was published, I've met several gay men who have said the same thing to me, "That boy was me." They don't mean it literally, of course; they simply mean that they identified with that loneliness, that need to understand and be understood.

A couple of straight readers have protested to me that they had similar experiences at that age, sneaking a look at Playboy or whatever. But that's different, and it points to the real difference between growing up gay and growing up straight. A straight kid is surrounded by images of what it means to be straight, surrounded by potential role models. His parents, his parents' friends, the couples on TV shows and in movies, the relationships that are sung about on the radio and MTV, the family situations in the stories and books that he's given to read in school. His inner sense of himself, of his sexual identity, is reflected all around him in a spectrum of images of which Playboy is only one extreme. For a gay kid, things are utterly different. It's not easy to explain how different it is, and how it feels. To be a gay kid in most families is to grow up very confused. It's to find an utter contradiction between your very powerful but unarticulated inner sense of who you are and the notions of who you are that are communicated to you by your parents and other people in your life and in fact by the whole world. It's to look around and see all these images of men and women sharing their lives together and being intimate, and to feel an utter lack of identification with those images. From infancy onward, your parents assume you're straight. It's expected that when you reach a certain age you'll want to start dating someone of the opposite sex. Everybody asks what kind of girl you like and if you have a girlfriend. And somehow, even if you haven't figured it out yet and connected who you are with that funny word "gay," it all feels WRONG, as if somehow you'd been set down on the wrong planet.

For too many gay kids, there's no one in their lives to make them feel RIGHT. Try to imagine what it feels like to be a gay kid of 13, say, who's struggling to understand his feelings when he's surrounded by things like an ad I saw in the New York Times a week or two ago. It's an ad for "Partnership for a Drug-Free America" and it shows a boy of about 13 who's preparing to snort a line of cocaine. The caption reads "It used to be, at 13, little boys became interested in little girls." To a 13-year-old boy who's started to become interested in other boys, this ad is one more message that tells him there's something wrong with him, that he just doesn't fit in. Nobody meant any harm with this ad, of course: it's trying to do good. That's the whole point: we send these messages out without even realizing it. Just two or three nights ago, I saw a TV commercial for a movie called Blue Sky in which one character said to another, "You are the reason that men like women in the first place." My point isn't that references to heterosexuality should be banned or censored; and it's certainly not that gay men don't like women. It's just that we could be more sensitive to the consequences on gay kids of this steady stream of media and pop-culture signals that tell them over and over, with very few exceptions, that all men fall in love with women and all women with men, period.

As the House of Bishops' new pastoral study document, "Continuing the Dialogue," observes, "Our society ... acculturates all youth to presume they are heterosexual. Advertising, movies, romance novels, and virtually all of our educational programs (secular and religious) presume heterosexuality.

For most of those adolescents who are homosexual, the already difficult adolescent experience becomes a nightmare.

A novelist named Robb Forman Dew has just come out with a memoir entitled The Family Heart, about how she felt and what she learned after her son came out to her in 1991 when he was a sophomore at Yale. After talking to him over a period of weeks and months, and after meeting the parents of other gay kids, and hearing about the problems and the suicides of some of them, she came to realize that "gay children grow up alone" and that "parents' assumptions of the heterosexuality of their sons and daughters ...are a threat to their children's lives." She also came to be very angry at Dr. Spock and other child-care "experts" who don't mention the very real possibility that any parent's kids might grow up to be gay, and don't talk about how to deal with that. Mrs. Dew writes: "I find their irresponsibility shocking; they might have saved lives."

Every day gay kids all over the country come out to their parents. Every day gay kids commit suicide because they've been rejected by their parents, or are terrified that they will be. And it's all so unnecessary. There's no need for them to go through the loneliness and confusion they experience. The only reason this happens to them is that there's still so much discomfort, confusion, rage, insecurity, unconscious prejudice, automatic disdain and condescension on the part of a lot of straight people when it comes to homosexuality. When most parents think of homosexuality, if they think of it at all, they think of it as something out there that their kids have to be protected from. But the fact is that if your son, say, turns out to be gay, it's not because of something or someone out there, that infected him or recruited him. It's because of something inside him that he's likely been aware of, in some way, from a very early age; and because neither his parents nor his teachers have ever prepared him for this or explained to him what this feeling might be, he feels incredibly alienated, different, weird. It's probably taken him years to put a name to this feeling, and perhaps years more to work up the nerve to mention it to anybody.

Though homosexuals as ordinary people in daily life remain almost invisible, homosexuality as an "issue" has been all over the media. It's a staple on the daytime talk-shows. The news media cover gay news much more extensively than they did a few years ago. Some straight people have learned a good deal; some people's prejudice has diminished or even, in some cases, dissolved. But there's still an incredible amount of misinformation and discomfort. Some people are tolerant, but not yet accepting. They don't like the idea of gay people being as open about their lives as straight people are. Deep down, they may suspect that someone close to them is gay but they simply don't want to think about it. Until those people move beyond prejudice, or beyond a grudging tolerance, the lives of their gay children or friends or siblings will continue to be more difficult and more lonely than they have to be.

Public discussion of the subject of homosexuality has been controlled mostly by ideological extremes: the extreme gay left and the extreme antigay right; and the debate between these two extremes has shed more heat than light. There are those who, in the name of God, go out there and tell lies about what it means to be gay. Not only do they tell lies; the whole way in which they discuss the subject is a lie. They have a lexicon of words that a lot of people who mean well have unconsciously taken up--and even to think about the subject in such terms is to distort it utterly.

They speak of homosexuality as being a "choice" when it isn't. They speak of the "gay lifestyle" as if all gay people lead the same kind of life. They speak of gays "promoting" and "advocating" homosexuality and "recruiting" young people into it, which makes no more sense than advocating being lefthanded or recruiting people into having blue eyes. They speak of gays "shoving a homosexual agenda down their throats": wanting to live your life honestly and to be respected is not an agenda.

This kind of rhetoric politicizes the subject of homosexuality, dehumanizes it, makes it easier to put out of one's mind that we're talking about people's lives. Homosexuality is described as a threat to the family. Yet those who attack homosexuality and gay rights in the name of "the family" are precisely those whose kids, if they turn out to be gay, are most likely to end up as runaways, prostitutes, drug addicts, suicides. It's antigay rhetoric, not homosexuality, that's a threat to the family. Some people say gays want "approval." No. You can approve or disapprove of an act; you can't approve or disapprove of a fact. In my book I speak of acceptance--meaning, accept the simple fact that this exists, and that it is what it is, and not what some hateful people say that it is and that certain understandings and adjustments must of necessity and out of a concern for justice, follow from that acceptance.

The phrase "moral equivalence" comes up a lot. Perhaps the cruellest single comment that I've had as a consequence of my book was made by a former editor of mine. I quit his publication several years ago when he refused to run a very tame review that I'd written of the movie Longtime Companion, which was about several gay male couples' experiences with AIDS. When a reporter called him for an explanation, he said: "Bawer's review was striking a total equivalence between a heterosexual couple in love and a homosexual couple in love. I think that's not convincing. I haven't come across it." Well, I have. I've lived it. Love is the same, gay or straight. A lot of people just don't see that, or don't want to. They feel a strong compulsion to see the personal lives and feelings of gay people as being somehow different from their own. They say, in effect, "You can be my friend, you can work for me, you can belong to my church -- but your life by definition is tinged with sinfulness in a way that mine is not." When they think about sex in their own lives, they place it, quite properly, in the context of their loving relationships; when they think about sex in gay people's lives, they often isolate the sex from the life in which it occurs and the love of which it is an expression, and they call it "sexual behavior" or "conduct" or "practice." Imagine such terms being applied to the sexual component of your own loving committed relationships and try to understand how demeaning it is to be thought of and talked about that way.

The whole thing comes down to a basic fact: homosexuality is a naturally occurring variation in sexual orientation. It may not be natural to most individuals, but it is, like lefthandedness, the natural condition of a significant minority. Homosexual people are as capable of love as heterosexuals and need deep, committed human attachment in the same way that heterosexuals do. Sexual activity is not the only element in such relationships but it's an important part of them. The bishops' study document quotes a 1958 document in which the Lambeth Conference describes the role of sex in marriage. "Sexual intercourse," it says, "is not by any means the only language of earthly love, but it is, in its full and right use, the most intimate and the most revealing; it has the depth of communication signified by the Biblical word so often used for it, `knowledge'; it is a giving and receiving in the unity of two free spirits which is in itself good (within the marriage bond) and mediates good to those who share it." This is as true of a loving, committed union between two homosexuals as it is of one between two heterosexuals. Homosexuals are created in such a way that the only kind of marriage in which this kind of bond can truly exist for them is a homosexual marriage. In fact, what sexual orientation is ultimately about is not sexual capability or sexual pleasure, because many straight people are capable of having and receiving pleasure in homosexual sex under certain circumstances and many homosexual people are capable of having and receiving pleasure from heterosexual sex under certain circumstances. Sexual orientation is essentially about how an individual loves; it's about the kind of unity of two free spirits that a given individual is, by his or her intrinsic nature, capable of forming.

To my mind, these truths lead inexorably to a recognition that the only Christian way for the Church to respond to the fact of homosexuality and the identicality of homosexual love and commitment to heterosexual love and commitment is to bless gay unions and to allow the ordination of openly gay clergy.

It's taken me a long time to arrive at this place. I'm a product of a denominationally mixed marriage. My mother was baptized in the Southern Baptist Church; my father was raised as a Roman Catholic. As a child, I attended a Lutheran Sunday school for several years, which was chosen mainly because it was around the corner from our home. We weren't a regular churchgoing family but I said my prayers every night with great conviction. And I did so right up until the night before the day that I realized I was gay--or perhaps I should say the day I accepted consciously that I was gay. I stopped cold, and didn't pray again for nearly ten years. Why? Because everything I had ever been taught made me believe that you couldn't be gay and Christian. The moment I realized that I was gay, I also realized that it was an essential part of me and that there was nothing wrong with it. In fact, that realization was such an extraordinarily positive and beautiful experience, it was about wholeness and self-knowledge and truth and the possibility of love and I couldn't imagine believing in any God that would ask me to deny these things. So instead I rejected Christ.

Thankfully, that wasn't the end of it. Years later I fell in love with someone who had been brought up in a Seventh-day Adventist faith community and had left that church after realizing he was gay. Together he and I found our way to the Episcopal Church, and it was our love that served as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. It wasn't until then that I was able to understand to the depths of my being what it means to say "God is love." For me, those three words bring everything together; they make sense of it all for me. Yet there remains a tension for me, as for all gay Christians, because while our committed relationships seem for us to reflect God's love more truly than anything else in our lives, the Church as a human institution continues to suggest that the very aspect of us that makes that love possible is profane in the eyes of God. A priest can bless our cat or our apartment but he can't bless our relationship with each other.

Last year Andrew Sullivan, the openly gay editor of the New Republic and a practicing Roman Catholic, gave an interview to the Catholic magazine America about being gay and Catholic. He describes how difficult his coming out was because of the teachings of his faith. But he goes on to say that "as soon as I actually explored the possibility of human contact within my emotional and sexual makeup--in other words, as soon as I allowed myself to love someone -- all the constructs the church had taught me about [homosexuality] seemed just so self-evidently wrong that I could no longer find it problematic. Because my own moral sense was overwhelming, because I felt, through the experience of loving someone or being allowed to love someone, an enormous sense of the presence of God--for the first time in my life." I identify very, very strongly with that.

Sullivan says of the Roman Catholic Church that "it defines gay people by a sexual act in a way it never defines heterosexual people, and in this the church is in weird agreement with extreme gay activists who also want to define homosexuality in terms of its purely sexual content. Whereas being gay is not about sex as such. Fundamentally, it's about one's core emotional identity. It's about whom one loves, ultimately, and how that can make one whole as a human being." Indeed, he says, "the moral consequences, in my own life, of the refusal to allow myself to love another human being were disastrous. They made me . . . frustrated and angry and bitter. It spilled over into other areas of my life. Once that emotional blockage is removed, one's whole moral equilibrium can improve, just as a single person's moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas can improve with marriage, in many ways, because there is a kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one's moral and emotional life. To deny this to gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view. It is incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general. Does that make sense? These things are part of a continuous moral whole. You can't ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being and then to lead blameless lives. We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others -- in order to be good Christians! What the church is asking gay people to do is not to be holy, but actually to be warped."

Many heterosexual Episcopalians have come to recognize that there's something good, and dare I say holy, in the loving committed relationships of gay people. Yet many of those same straight Episcopalians have a residual discomfort with the whole business, and a residual attachment to old ways of thinking about things, that keeps them from following through logically on their increased understanding of gay people and relationships. They accept homosexuality as a constitutive, unchangeable, intrinsic characteristic, yet they can't bring themselves to countenance the adjustment of conventions and institutions in such a way as to truly acknowledge the existence of homosexuality and make a real, full, and equal place for homosexuals who seek to lead whole Christian lives. And the tension between the ability of many heterosexual church members to perceive what's fair and right and their attachment to old ways of thinking can give rise to resentments, can make them feel as if gay people are causing trouble, pushing their private lives in other people's faces, trying to destroy things that are familiar and precious. I know that some straight Episcopalians look at homosexuals and think: "How much do these people want? Why can't they leave well enough alone?" They worry that the Episcopal Church is being turned from a Church into a social-services organization, and that gay people are less concerned about their responsibilities as Christians than about their rights as members of an institution. Many of these people get tired of hearing about sensitivity to gays and lesbians.

I certainly know that I get tired of talking about it. But there's still much to be talked about, because to a large extent when gays and straights talk about these things we're still speaking two different languages. You and 1, if you're straight, can hear a sermon and have two very different experiences of it, because it may contain a phrase or a line of argument that doesn't trouble you because it conforms to a truth about your life but that makes me feel excluded because it implicitly rejects a truth about my life. This sort of disjunction can be especially pronounced at ceremonies like weddings and funerals. For me, at least, my happiness at the wedding of straight friends is always mixed with a constant awareness of the difference between the Church's view of my relationship and its view of theirs. From the moment that couple walks back up the aisle together, they're viewed as a couple by the Church (and the State). Their relationship is official. From that moment on, they take for granted a universal acceptance of their membership in each other that to a gay person in a loving relationship seems beyond one's wildest hopes. Yes, there are gay people who have wedding ceremonies, and some Episcopal priests are even willing to perform them. But it's not the same. The Church and State don't recognize it, and neither do most Episcopalians. Think about how often you're asked to check a box on an official form: "single," "married," "divorced," "widowed." In my heart I'm married; on the dotted line and in the list of my church's members, I'm single. That's not wholeness.

The Episcopal Church, in short, is our family. And it's a tolerant family. And some members of it are loving in their acceptance. But the family itself isn't yet fully accepting.

The usual way of defending this lack of acceptance is to turn to Scripture. Of course the Bible has been used to justify slavery and polygamy, among other things, because there are passages in which those practices are treated as acceptable. Also, while Christ taught us to love our enemies rather than make war on them, and taught us also not to store up treasures on earth, you don't see members of the religious right protesting outside military bases or the houses of millionaires with placards bearing those quotations the way they protest at every gay pride day march with signs bearing quotations from Leviticus and Romans and the handful of other Biblical passages that supposedly condemn homosexuality. Few things have been more widely taken out of their historical and textual context and more dishonestly and maliciously misused than those passages. First of all, exact translation of them is difficult, if not impossible, because most of the ancient words pertaining to sex roles and sexual identity have no exact modern equivalents. This makes sense, since ancient societies had different sex roles than ours does, had different understandings of sexual relations, and had no concept of sexual orientation. Some ancient cultures had male temple prostitutes, for example, and publicly recognized man-boy relationships, and the terms used to refer to those roles and relationships in certain New Testament passages have often been mistakenly translated as "homosexual." As the House of Bishops' study document says, "the biblical views about sexuality are thoroughly enmeshed in cultural and historical circumstances .... Sexual mores are governed or influenced by various taboos and concerns about ritual purity ....Procreation and the continuation of the people are, understandably, important concerns." Another concern was that the Israelites distinguish themselves from the Canaanites, whose social and religious practices included all sorts of things, including homosexual relations.

A concern for ritual purity informs Leviticus 18:22, which reads: "You may not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination." This, as the bishops' document notes, occurs "in a context of teaching about ritual and moral holiness," along with passages that forbid eating pork or wearing a garment containing more than one material or sowing fields with two different kinds of seed. These injunctions were laid aside by early Christians; yet 2000 years later people still quote Leviticus 18:22 against homosexuality.

Genesis 19, the story of Sodom, is also used against gays. Sodom is destroyed because the men of Sodom attempt to gang-rape two angels not known to be angels who have been taken in as guests by Lot. Most serious Biblical scholars agree that the homosexual element, however much it might turn the heads of certain readers, is not the point of the story. It's not about homosexuality; it's about a breach of hospitality, which was a sacred trust in Biblical times. It's obscene, in any event, to suggest that a story of an attempted violent gang rape is intended to convey to us God's view of a loving committed relationship between two men or two women.

Similarly, Paul's reference in Romans to how "God gave [the Gentiles] up to dishonorable passions," exchanging "natural" sexual relations for "unnatural," is not a judgment on homosexual orientation, or even on homosexual acts per se; rather, Paul uses the debauched life at Rome, which included homosexual relations, to support an argument for Christianity and God's natural order and against Roman paganism and what they saw as unnatural. Of course the ancients, Paul included, didn't understand that there are some people for whom homosexuality is natural; he assumes the Gentiles to be people for whom heterosexuality is natural but who give themselves up to something which for them is unnatural. In any event, the ultimate point of this passage, which many people hurl at gays, is precisely that people shouldn't use such passages to judge others, but rather as aids in examining their own morality, "for," as Paul says, "in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself." (Romans 3:10)

Jesus himself said nothing directly about homosexuality, though the Bishops' study document cites his quotation of the line in Genesis saying that "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." Yet Christ wasn't insisting here that all men must marry women (he didn't); rather, he was replying to a question about divorce by making the point that marriage should be regarded as indissoluble. Indeed, while Jesus never condemned homosexuality, he was very blunt in forbidding divorce. As the Bishops note in their document, "perhaps the most obvious discontinuity we currently live with in the area of sexual relationships is the practice of divorce and remarriage which stands in the face of Jesus's explicit prohibition against both the dissolution of and the contracting of subsequent marriages."

Christians who reject the ordination of homosexuals or the blessing of committed homosexual relationships, even though they accept that it is better for some marriages to end in divorce, have to ask themselves honestly if they're taking these positions because they've read their Bibles and feel morally compelled by what they've read to take these positions or if they've gone to their Bibles to find or fabricate scriptural support for a pre-existing prejudice or discomfort, an attachment to the familiar, a fear of something that just seems too radical or alien or outrageous.

For the fact is that when you listen to some Christians talking about homosexuality, and then turn to the gospels, you find an absolute divergence in tone and emphasis. When Christ talks about good and evil, he doesn't focus on sex. It's clear from his preaching and his example that for Christ morality means being kind, gentle, responsible, considerate, and generous of spirit. It means being willing to rethink your assumptions, reject your traditions, and act boldly in the cause of God. As Christians we're very diverse but we share two things: our baptism and our moral obligation to the Summary of the Law, which tells us to love God and to love our fellow human beings--and tied up in the pairing of those two loves is a recognition of human love as a reflection of divine love--and implied in that recognition, it seems to me, is an obligation to honor and to take joy in the love that other people bear for each other. Christianity is all about the struggle to get beyond your prejudices and to look into the eyes of the scruffiest, smelliest, most ornery and obnoxious stranger and to see God and to feel love. To say that someone is straight or gay is to say that they've been made to love in this or that way. Not to embrace that love and recognize a commitment based upon it is to condemn love, to demand that certain people live without love, and nothing could be more un-Christian.

How can we live this out in the Episcopal Church? How can we be more inclusive? Well, first of all we must recognize what inclusivity is and isn't about. Inclusivity in the Episcopal Church isn't an open-ended accommodation of all human beliefs, dispositions, moral commitments, and needs for ritual. Certain things are required of all members: that they be baptized; that they acknowledge the scriptural authority of the Bible and that they read it intelligently, thoughtfully, and critically; that they attend to the importance of tradition including the creeds, prayer book, and catechism, while recognizing the fallibility of all human institutions and interpretations; and that they employ and respect the human faculty of reason, which includes bringing to bear on Scripture and tradition the lessons learned from real-life experience, the illuminations yielded through scientific discoveries, and the information provided by social and historical research. Inclusivity is about agreeing to differ within an informed framework, and to strive corporately toward the justice and respect for individual dignity we promise one another in our baptismal vows. That said, here are a few specifics. The idea, first of all, should not be to accept gay people as gay people, but as Christians who happen to be gay. Avoid an "us" and "them" mentality, a special-interest mentality. Instead of thinking in terms of "welcoming gays and lesbians into the parish family," think in terms of welcoming people into the parish without regard to their sexual orientation. And also of making sure that gay people who are already members of the parish family, but who keep their homosexuality to themselves, feel free to be as open about their sexual orientation as straight people are about theirs. In any case think of all the members of the congregation as individuals, some of whom are in the natural order of things going to be gay--are going to be individuals who have the same capacity to love, the same need for relationships, the same human dignity.

Not long ago I read a memoir by James Ferry, an Anglican priest in Canada whose bishop defrocked him for being gay. He had the support of many people in his congregation. For me, the saddest line in the book was something that one of those people said to him after he learned that a small group of parishioners was going to complain to the bishop about his homosexuality if he didn't resign first. That night he was going to preach at the local Metropolitan Community Church, which is a mostly gay denomination. When he mentioned this to that parishioner, she said kindly, "You'll be with your own people tonight. I'm so glad." She didn't mean to hurt him, but she did. Because she didn't understand that to him, his sexual orientation didn't determine who his "own people" were; his parish family were his "own people." That woman loved and respected him as a priest and friend, but for her, his homosexuality still made him different in some way, made him a member of some other group. That's the kind of thinking that we have to be aware of in ourselves, and that we have to learn to get beyond.

Part of this has to do with what's said from the pulpit. Many clergy who have the best intentions toward homosexuals nonetheless give sermons that presume the congregation's heterosexuality, addressing parishioners in a way that assumes they're married to, or will be or have been married to, someone of the opposite sex, and using the word "family" to mean nothing other than a man and a woman and their children, if any. Many clergy will deliver sermons that specifically and positively address gay issues but will then in the next sermon go back to saying things that unintentionally make gay people feel excluded. One of the more moving experiences I've ever had in church took place several years ago in the company of a conflicted young gay friend of mine, who'd grown up in the parish I now belong to but who'd left it as a child and, at the time I attended that service with him, had recently become involved in a committed relationship that he felt had cut him off from God even though it felt to him intensely holy. The preacher at that service was Paul Moore, Jr., who was then the Bishop of New York. It was the day of the solemnity of the conversion of Saint Paul, and the bishop talked about his own road to Damascus, about the experience that had made him accept his vocation and become a priest. As an Army nurse in World War II, he treated men whose shattered bodies were the most horrifying sights imaginable. He realized afterwards that when he'd looked into those men's eyes, he'd been looking into the eyes of God. For, he told us, "that's where God resides: in the flesh, in the corrupt, imperfect flesh, in the flesh of everybody around you--your closest friend, the homeless man on the curb, your husband, your wife, your lover." Yes, that was the word he used, "lover." And when he said it, I turned to my young spiritually tormented friend, and I saw that his eyes were full of tears, because, with that one word, "lover," the bishop had included him, embraced him, and acknowledged the holiness that he himself felt to be present in his committed relationship but that the Church, as an institution, refused to recognize.

There are a number of ways in which various churches have shown their inclusivity. Their parish bulletins or service announcements acknowledge anniversaries not only of heterosexual marriages but of gay unions. They publish newspaper ads that include sentences such as "Men and women of all sexual orientations are invited to participate in the life of our church." They offer counseling to gay couples of the same kind that they offer to straight couples.

And of course in some churches the clergy bless gay unions. Most don't, of course. And to be gay and to sit in the church week after week beside your partner of 5 or 10 or 30 years and hear announcements of weddings and to know that the two of you can't be married in the Church is to be reminded that you're not really full, equal members. As a heterosexual you take for granted that you can walk into a church as a couple, hold hands in the pew if you're moved to do so, introduce each other to other members as "my husband" or "my wife" and not have to steel yourself waiting to see how people will react, whether they'll even speak to you. Of course the priest will marry you; of course the congregation will accept you as a couple, a family, as two people who belong to each other. For gay people in the Church, that's not yet a reality.

Then there's the question of ordination. In 1991 the Church's Commission on Human Affairs recommended "that the Church be open to ordaining gay men and lesbians otherwise qualified who display the same integrity in their sexual relationships which we ask of our heterosexual ordinands. We recommend this because we consider the opening of the ordination process to gays and lesbians a matter of justice when justice should no longer be denied ....Explicitly opening the ordination process in this way is desirable to clear the Church of the taint of hypocrisy, since the presence of gay men and lesbians among the clergy is no secret." The report also mentioned "the irrational fear and hatred of gay men and lesbians rampant in our society" and said: "We cannot effectively advocate civil rights for gay men and lesbians in society at large if we appear to deny such rights within our fellowship." I would add that permitting the open ordination of openly gay men and women would make a big difference to the emotional health, pastoral effectiveness, and spiritual integrity of clergymen and women who happen to be gay. A disproportionate number of the letters I've received about my book have been from gay Episcopal and Anglican priests, some of whom are married and who say that I'm the first person they've ever told about their homosexuality; some of whom are in committed gay relationships--who have beautiful, loving domestic lives that they're compelled to keep secret from everybody except a small circle of highly trusted friends. And some gay priests feel that it would be such a risk to attempt to live in a committed relationship, or haven't found anybody, understandably, willing to live in such secrecy, that they've pursued sex lives--not emotional relationships, but fleeting sexual encounters--furtively, guiltily, in inappropriate places and with inappropriate strangers. The torment and loneliness in which all those gay priests live, and the deep sense of guilt over the duplicity forced upon them by the Church's "don't ask, don't tell" approach to gay clergy, is indescribable. What impressed me so powerfully about the letters I've received from those priests, however, is the strength of their faith, their sense of pastoral duty, and their love for the people that they serve.

I'll close with a quote from the bishops' pastoral study document.

"...understanding develops through prayer, Scripture study, worship, life in a community, mission, and in confrontation with the realities of history. Such realities of history include the many critical questions Church and synagogue have had to face at other historical crossroads. In reality, theology is generally done in response to questions raised either inside or outside the community of believers that come to challenge the current understanding of the faith.

"The Jerusalem Church early faced the issue of whether and how to overcome the religious barrier between Jew and Gentile ...so that the latter might be admitted to the Christian community without first being circumcised ....

"Galileo's and then Darwin's theories forced the Church to review and revise the theological understanding of their time about the nature of the world. They required serious and painful adjustments which in some ways we are still working through. Today's questions are also painful and raise issues with which the Church would rather not deal ....What is clear is that challenges are not new, that the function of theology is to grapple with such challenges, and that the questions being asked of the Church today, like some of those of yesterday, may result in new insights and a deeper and more comprehending faith." Amen.