Storming the Gate: Fighting Religion-based Oppression with Soul Force

By Mel White and Hedges Chris

Storming the Gate picks up the story forty years after the publication of Stranger at the Gate (1993). Mel and his husband, Gary Nixon, have founded Soulforce and recruited an army of volunteers to help end the lie. Their nonviolent protests made headlines across the nation. These are the heroic and sometimes hilarious stories of Mel, Gary, and their volunteers being harassed, arrested, tried, and jailed for doing battle with the lie and with the Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical liars who know the truth but refused to tell it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666749373

Mel White

Rev. Mel White is a clergyman, author, and activist. On Pride Sunday, June 27, 1993, Mel was installed Dean of the Cathedral of Hope Metropolitan Community Church in Dallas, where he came out publicly with his own, heart-felt statement of faith: “I am gay. I am proud. And God loves me without reservation.” The Cathedral was and continues to be the nation’s largest gay-lesbian congregation serving approximately 10,000 congregants in the wider Dallas area. He is the bestselling author of five books, including Stranger at the Gate, 6 Angry Evangelicals, and The Miracle of Molokai.

Book preview

PART 1

Gather the Evidence

CHAPTER 1

Revolution in the Air

On April 4 , 1968 , I bounded up the steps of our second-floor apartment in Pasadena, California. It had been a good day as in Have a good day. My grad studies were progressing. My thesis was coming together. My wife Lyla and I had plans to go out to dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant and see a movie (probably some foreign film with subtitles—our grad-school obsession). But as I entered the apartment my good day derailed. I found Lyla staring at the television screen. She looked up. I could tell she was in shock. She didn’t speak, but her eyes said it all. Something terrible had happened. The television anchorman was speaking in those solemn, carefully measured, Walter Cronkite tones, but I couldn’t piece together exactly what he was saying—something about Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Memphis, Tennessee, the Lorraine Motel. About that time Lyla said words that I hoped I would never hear. Dr. King has been assassinated. The groan that came up out of me must have scared our neighbors. I began to sob almost hysterically and, of all things, to kick the wall. I just couldn’t stop kicking it.

Not Dr. King, I remember saying. Oh, please, God, not Dr. King.

The hysterics were real. To that day, no man alive had influenced my understanding of Jesus more than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and now he was dead. My relationship with Martin began the summer when the American Friends Service Committee gave me and about a dozen other high school juniors from around the country a rare chance to live for a week with King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, at a beachside resort in Carmel, California. Dr. King’s face had just been featured on a Time magazine cover. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know much about him until I read Time’s story. In person, he seemed so young to have accomplished so much.

Less than three years earlier, on October 13, 1954, King was just twenty-five when he was installed as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama; on June 15, 1955, he finished his doctoral degree in systematic theology from Boston University; on December 1, 1955, he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott; on December 21, 1956, the boycott prevailed and the Montgomery Bus Company announced the integration of all public buses; on February 12, 1957, Martin was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); and on February 18, 1957, Dr. King appeared on the cover of Time.

With all those accomplishments, he was just twenty-nine years old when I met him in Carmel during the summer of 1958. I had just turned seventeen and I’m ashamed to admit how little I knew about the man or the civil rights struggle he was leading. I was too busy winning the world to Christ to pay much attention to Martin’s civil rights activism. That first meeting in Carmel began a slow-but-steady paradigm shift in my life from soul winner to civil rights activist. I’m writing the next few paragraphs of personal history to help explain how in just thirteen years (1955–68) a young black Evangelical preacher transformed my understanding of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian.

Unless you’ve been a child of a very committed Evangelical family, you won’t understand why I knew almost nothing about Dr. King or his struggle for civil rights. My life in Santa Cruz, an Italian fishing village on California’s Monterey Bay, revolved around our little Evangelical church where we spent Sunday mornings at worship, Sunday evenings at revival services and later at Youth Fellowship meetings, Tuesday nights at choir practice, and Wednesday nights at prayer meeting. Thursdays after school I led a Bible club at Santa Cruz High. Saturday nights I spent at Youth for Christ in nearby San Jose with hundreds of enthusiastic Evangelical teenagers. During the week I memorized whole books of the New Testament to keep my place on the five-person YFC Club Quiz Team. Summers were spent at Monte Christo, a Christian camp in the hills above our hometown. And (almost) every day I tried to spend time reading the Bible and other devotional books, praying for every name on my prayer list, keeping a spiritual diary, and bearing witness to my Christian faith to friends and total strangers alike. With my classes, homework, playing trombone in the marching band, and running the mile for the SC thin clads there was very little time for anything else. This is not a legitimate excuse for my ignorance about the African American struggle for civil rights, but there were 2,375 miles between Montgomery and Santa Cruz, while segregated busses, drinking fountains, and dime-store counters seemed a million miles away.

All through my youth and young adult years my life was committed to Christ. Evangelicals then, even us teenage Evangelicals, had one primary task: to share the good news that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and that by trusting him as Lord and Savior we are saved from eternal damnation. Getting people saved through an act of personal conversion was our primary obligation. Doing good deeds was important but secondary to getting people into heaven. Progressive Christians loved to say that Evangelicals are so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good. Although clever, the statement was not exactly true or fair. In fact, those soul savers I grew up with were also interested in doing good works, but when good works became more important than saving souls the gospel of Christ became the social gospel and no self-respecting Evangelical wanted to be associated with the social gospel or its liberal leaders.

The social gospel appeared in the early twentieth century when there was a major shift of priorities in mainstream US Protestant churches from saving souls to doing justice. Instead of just talking about his death on the cross, they began to think seriously about what put Jesus on that cross. What had he said and/or done that made the religious and political leaders of his time so angry that they killed him? Progressive Protestant leaders began applying Jesus’ teachings to major social problems, from race and poverty to economic inequality, violence, and war. Leaders of the social gospel movement quoted Jesus’ words in his parable on the last judgment when God rewards the good guys (the sheep) but sends the bad guys (the goats) to hell.

Come, you who are blessed by my father; take your inheritance . . . for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, was a stranger and you invited me in, needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. . .I tell you the truth when you do it for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me. (Matt

25

:

34–40

)

The same year I met Dr. King my father was accused of giving in to the social gospel when he ran for mayor in our hometown. Carl, his Evangelical friends warned, if God wants things to change in Santa Cruz, God will do it. Your job is to win lost souls and not get involved in politics. You can imagine what my fellow evangelicals thought of Dr. King, who in their view had walked away from his own Evangelical roots. They were concerned that I might be converted to the social gospel by spending a week with a black civil rights activist who had tarnished his Evangelical reputation by going political. And, in a way they were right.

I admit that my conservative Evangelical friends had made me a bit nervous about meeting this liberal practitioner of the social gospel. I was determined that Dr. King would not dissuade me from my simple faith in Christ. The first Bible verse I learned as a child summarized the path to salvation: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). I had confessed my sins and been forgiven (dozens of times at the altar in my home church and at youth camp). I had been baptized in water (the San Lorenzo River running through Santa Cruz) and then baptized with the Holy Spirit (in a revival meeting at Beulah Park Christian Campground). I had written the date and place of every event on the inside cover of my blue leather Bible. I had underlined the appropriate texts that lead the way to salvation so that I could describe each step to a person to whom I was witnessing. As one gospel chorus summarizes that journey, I was saved, sanctified and on my way to glory."

To that naïve high school senior from a rather isolated village on the California coast, John 3:16 was the gospel, pure and simple. In fact, they’re still holding up John 3:16 signs at football games and along parade routes. During that next week I learned from Dr. King that John 3:16, getting saved, may be where the gospel begins, but it certainly isn’t where the gospel ends. If I remember correctly, and that was only sixty-two years ago, Dr. King knew that John 3:16 was the one verse every Evangelical learned from childhood so he started with that all-too-familiar text, For God so loved the world, but then spent the next week helping us understand what Jesus meant when he instructed his followers that they too should love the world as God loved it.

Dr. King’s social gospel was condemned by many Evangelicals, but I learned that summer that King’s work as a civil rights activist was not a departure from the so called simple gospel. He was showing the rest of us by example that following Jesus was not as simple as we believed. As I was kicking the wall and sobbing on the day of Martin’s death, I realized that his attempts to love the world as God loved it got him killed, and I couldn’t stand the irony that his love could generate so much hate.

At that retreat in Carmel, I learned for the first time that love had three very different definitions in Greek, the language of the New Testament: eros (erotic love), philia (the love of friends), and agape (the love of God operating in the human heart.)¹ Obviously I can’t remember exactly what Dr. King said about agape love as we sat around him on a Carmel beach on a rather dismal day. I do remember that it wasn’t easy to hear him above the sounds of seagulls, a distant foghorn, and the not-so-peaceful Pacific. But I remember the twelve of us leaning forward, straining to hear Dr. King define exactly what God’s love meant to him.

On the beach that day, Dr. King laid out his plans to demonstrate the love of Jesus in the Civil Rights Movement he was leading. Segregation was the enemy, not segregationists. King described three ways for African Americans to respond to the Jim Crow laws that mandated segregation and men like Sherriff Bull Connor and Governor Orval Faubus who were determined to keep those laws in place: 1) . . . rise up against our oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred; 2) . . .acquiesce and give in, resign yourself to the oppression; or 3) . . . organize mass nonviolent resistance based on the principle of love.

When I was just eighteen, sitting on the white sandy beaches of the Pacific Coast, I heard for the first time that the cross stood for much more than the blood that was shed for our salvation. The not-so-simple gospel was far more than getting saved, far more than a favorite text written inside a Bible’s front cover. Dr. King’s work as a civil rights activist demonstrated the gospel’s ultimate goal. The real way to salvation for ourselves and for our planet was to love each other as individuals and as nations. Jesus warned us about those who talk about God’s love but don’t demonstrate it. To take seriously God’s kind of love requires that we seek justice for those who are being treated unjustly. Jesus talked about God’s love in such a radical way that the powers, both religious and political, had to kill him to silence his call for justice. Then, almost 2,000 years later, Dr. King also spoke of God’s love in such a radical way that the powers had to kill him, too.

At Carmel we heard Dr. King explain that love begins when we seek justice for our enemy. But we also heard what doing justice looks like when it moves from the pulpit to the streets. Martin explained that Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of relentless nonviolent resistance were a major influence in shaping the Montgomery bus boycott. King was first introduced to those principles by Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the principal of Morehouse College, where King graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1948.

Jesus’ command to love your enemy captured the heart of Gandhi and then King.

1.We don’t accept the violence against us, violence of the tongue, heart and fist.

2.We don’t respond to the violence with violence of our own.

3.We use relentless nonviolent resistance; we obey Jesus’ command to love our enemy.

Here’s a strange but appropriate little memory from that week with Martin. The other students had flown to Carmel, but I had driven the short sixty-mile trip from Santa Cruz. Because my car was available, I had the chance to drive Dr. King, Coretta, and several students to a local restaurant. On that short drive, I flashed my headlights at the driver of an oncoming car who hadn’t remembered to dim his lights for oncoming traffic. I was mortified when Dr. King noticed and said quietly, That was an act of violence. It was my first clue that nonviolence was far more complex than Thou shalt not kill.

During our week together, Dr. King repeated his warning several times that nonviolence is not a tactic. It is a way of life. I was a junior in high school. There was no way for me to understand in 1958 the importance of Dr. King’s determination that the African American struggle for civil rights would not be won by guns and bombs but by a complete commitment to nonviolence. And yet the 1960s became one of the most violent decades in US history.

At the end of the week in Carmel I returned to my home at the other end of Monterey Bay, looked over my notes and realized that in six days my simple gospel had been turned upside down. In one year, I would graduate from high school and move on to college. I thought about postponing my education to join Dr. King in the South. On September 4, 1957, just before I began my senior year at Santa Cruz High, I watched the Governor of Arkansas and a small army from the Arkansas National Guard block the entrance to Little Rock High to prevent nine African American students from entering. After that week in Carmel, the ugly acts of intolerance and discrimination in the South were no longer a million miles away. I wanted to be there working with Dr. King, but instead of listening to my heart I decided that I was too young and that it was more important to spend that last year finishing my high school degree.

I graduated in 1958 and was excited about accepting a scholarship to Stanford University when my parents, my pastor, and most of my religious friends warned me that I could lose my simple faith in that secular school. Wanting to please them, and of course still wanting to please God, I enrolled at Warner Pacific Bible College in Portland, Oregon. From 1958 to 1960, the sit-in movement spread across the South while I was earning my way through Bible school as the host of a local Youth for Christ weekly television program on KGW-TV and emceeing Saturday night YFC rallies in Portland’s Civic Auditorium. I was convinced that these two amazing opportunities to witness for my faith were signs from God that staying in Portland was even more important than dropping out of school to help integrate lunch counters in Greensboro, Nashville, or Atlanta.

During my junior year, Warner Pacific Bible College became Warner Pacific College. By staying just two more years I would receive a fully accredited degree. That meant I would miss volunteering for the Freedom Rides that were testing the Supreme Court ruling that integrated interstate bus travel. Then, in 1961, I saw Freedom Riders John Lewis and James Zwerg beaten almost to death by a mob in Montgomery.² There is an iconic Life magazine photo of Lewis and Zwerg standing together covered in blood. Zwerg was eating an apple. I wondered what it took for a blond, white Fisk University student to leave his classes and risk riding with the mostly African American Freedom Riders. Once again, I wanted to take the risk, postpone my college degree and volunteer for a Freedom Ride, but I had just been appointed advisor to YFC clubs in Portland and I couldn’t just walk away from this new opportunity to share my faith with so many teenagers. And so, time passed.

Year after year I watched other students taking their place in the front lines of the civil right struggle. From a distance, I watched the courageous James Meredith risk his life to enter the segregated University of Mississippi. From a distance, I watched the bodies of three other courageous college students who volunteered to register voters being dug out of an earthen dam. From a distance, I watched volunteers, black and white together, face an army of Alabama State troopers as they took that first fatal step across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then, from a distance, I watched the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after he had been assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

While watching from a distance, making excuses along the way, I missed my chance to march side by side with Dr. King and thousands of others who joined him in the struggle for civil rights. I was busy finishing my graduate and postgrad degrees. I was busy getting married, having children, earning a living, and ghostwriting autobiographies of leaders on the fundamentalist Christian Right in order to pay school bills and living expenses. I was busy being a senior pastor and seminary teacher. And through it all, I was busy trying to reconcile my Christian faith with my homosexuality that my church had labeled sick and sinful.

It is tragically true that the struggle for civil rights didn’t end with Dr. King’s assassination. There was plenty of work to be done. But I was still too busy to join the movement. Now I can hardly remember what I was doing that seemed so important at the time. My excuses became a way of life, and so I missed that rare opportunity to follow Dr. King from that Carmel beach into the most important struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century.

If you’ve read Stranger at the Gate, you know what happened during those long desperate years I spent trying to overcome my overwhelming need for same-sex intimacy. But when those years ended and I accepted my homosexuality as a gift from God, everything changed. After dating several good men, I met Gary and we began our life together. Early in our relationship I realized that a large percentage of my personal suffering had been caused by leaders on the Christian Right whose autobiographies I was ghostwriting. It was their campaign against homosexuality and homosexuals that had turned both church and state against me. Something had to be done and I knew that my association with the Christian Right had prepared me to help do it. I knew those guys. I knew they were sincere, though sincerely wrong. I knew they believed the lies they were telling about queer people, but I also knew that they were using those lies to raise money and mobilize volunteers. Feeling guilt that I had helped those leaders of the Christian Right, if only to ghostwrite their histories and their autobiographies, Gary and I began our experiment in doing justice.

When I heard that Dr. King had been assassinated, I didn’t weep and kick the wall simply because this good man had died. I was weeping and kicking the wall because I had missed my chance to stand with him. I found endless excuses not to join Dr. King in the most significant civil rights campaign of the twentieth century. Now, after twenty-five years fighting for the rights of LGBTQ people, I know why I should have stopped making excuses, listened to my heart, and joined Dr. King.

It wasn’t that I was needed in Birmingham or Selma or Montgomery. It wasn’t that I would have made any difference if I had been there. It was the difference that being there would have made in me. Now I know that Dr. King wasn’t doing it to end segregation or to integrate the buses or to get civil rights legislation passed . . . not really. He was doing it because God created him to do it and when he did what he was created to do, his life was given new direction, new meaning, new power. By doing it, Dr. King’s life was empowered and enriched by the Spirit of Truth working in and through him.

I didn’t spend the last twenty-five years trying to change the antigay beliefs of my fundamentalist Christian adversaries or to win our rights to marry or to be ordained or to serve in the military . . . not really. Somewhere along the way, I learned that doing something for others was in fact doing something amazing for me. I was seeking justice for others because God created me for that purpose, and when I did what I was created to do, my life, too, was given new direction, new meaning. By doing it, I, too, was empowered and enriched by the Spirit of Truth working in and through me.

We don’t have to ask ourselves what the purpose of life is. The Jewish prophets and Jesus made it very clear why we were created. Do justice! (Micah 6:8); Seek justice! (Isa 1:10); Let justice roll down like water! (Amos 5:24); Execute justice on the earth! (Jer 7:22); Too bad for you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith (Jesus, in Matt 23:23).

When I finally quit making excuses and joined the struggle to end religion-based bigotry, I learned why these great voices from the past all called us to join them in doing justice (in making things fair for people who are being treated unfairly). They knew the secret. They were simply doing what they were created to do, and in doing it their lives were transformed.

There is revolution in the air. A new kind of Civil Rights Movement is being born. People seeking justice for themselves are coming together to seek justice for all. With or without knowing it, they are doing exactly what they are created to do. And somewhere along the way they will realize the amazing changes that have come in their lives by doing it. They will discover their own soul force.

No, I cried and kicked the wall because I missed the most important Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century. But I was given a second chance. Don’t let excuses keep you from joining the Civil Rights Movement being born in the twenty-first century. Listen to your heart. Trust your intuition. Take that first small step. The rest will follow. Don’t look back and regret missing your opportunity as I missed mine. Take your stand for justice before our democracy is destroyed and our planet is ravaged. Even more importantly, take your stand for justice, because in the process you will discover why you were created and what it means to be fully human.

1

. King, Love, Law and Disobedience, a speech by Dr. King to the Fellowship of the Concerned (November

16,

1961

)

46

.

2

. The story of Fisk student James Zwerg, his near-death beating on the Freedom Rides, and the long-term consequences of his decision to risk his life to participate in the Civil Rights Movement is told in John Blake’s

2004

book Children of the Movement but reprinted on the CNN web site. It is an amazing story. Reading it has given me new perspective on the Freedom Rides. See Blake, Shocking Photo Created a Hero.

CHAPTER 2

The Accidental Activist

Coming out was the beginning of a whole new life for me.

When I wrote my autobiography, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America, I had no idea that it would draft me into the front lines of a war being waged against my LGBTQ sisters and brothers by right-wing Christian leaders, Catholic and Protestant alike. It was meant to be a simple memoir, a very personal account of the long years it took for me to finally accept my homosexuality. As one reader wrote to me, Damn. You’re slow. Why did you put yourself through so much pain and suffering before you accepted the rather obvious fact that you are a gay man? I wrote Stranger to answer that question.

To make it simple, it took all those painful years because I was a near-fatal victim of two religion-based lies. First, I believed the lie that homosexuality was a sin that needed to be forgiven. Second, I believed the lie that homosexuality was a sickness that needed to be healed. Like millions of my LGBTQ sisters and brothers, I grew up in a Christian family. I trusted blindly the religious authority figures in my life, and it took all those years to realize that they were wrong, that my homosexuality was neither a sin nor a sickness. My sexual orientation was just another mysterious gift from my Creator. Stranger is the story of my long, painful struggle to get past the lies and accept the truth; however, there was much more I needed to learn.

I had no idea that so many people were also victims of those same two lies. In Stranger they were excited to hear the truth, many for the first time. It was a shock to learn that my autobiography had become a bestseller. In fact, I was certain that no one would read it. That’s why I couldn’t believe what happened in the lobby of Lowe’s Anatole Hotel, a five-star luxury palace on the North Stemmons Freeway not far from DFW (the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport) in Texas.

Gary and I were late to a luncheon of the national board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. One of the HRC directors had read our story in the Dallas Morning News and had convinced the others to invite me to keynote their annual event. I was surprised that the leaders of the nation’s largest LGBTQ organization wanted to hear me speak and even more surprised by what happened to us in the hotel lobby as we entered.

As we approached the Anatole, we saw television crews gathered around the hotel’s main entrance. Although we were curious to see what all the commotion was about, we didn’t want to pass through the rather large crowd of cameramen and reporters who were blocking our way. I supposed that they were waiting to interview their new governor, George Bush, who had defeated Ann Richards, one of my political heroes.

We were trying to find a way through the crowd when I heard Dr. White, over here. Someone from HRC had appeared just in time to guide us around the news teams and across the lobby.

What’s all the fuss, I asked our HRC host.

They’re here for you, he said, leading me into the vast atrium.

My look of surprise mirrored Gary’s wide eyes and open mouth as the camera crews began to recognize us from newspaper photos. What was happening? As we walked, boom mikes were suspended above us. Cameramen walked beside us, balancing their heavy cameras. Several walked backwards to film us head-on guided by a member of their crew. Reporters were asking questions. The lobby was in chaos, but our HRC guide didn’t even pause. He led us directly toward the elegant meeting room where HRC Board members were finishing up a luncheon.

I found out later why this sudden unexpected rush to notoriety. Stranger at the Gate was about to be released by its publisher, Simon & Schuster, one of America’s oldest and most esteemed publishing companies. PR experts at Simon & Schuster had built a marketing scheme around the notion that I was a leading fundamentalist Christian who ghostwrote books and speeches for fundamentalist Christian celebrities, televangelists, and megachurch pastors. Supposedly, I had been a major voice for the Christian Right. Now, with Stranger at the Gate’s release, I was turning on my old clients. I was betraying these powerful religious leaders and at the same admitting that I had fooled them, pretending to be a heterosexual while I was in fact a gay man.

Almost none of it was true. But true or not, we were about to discover the power of media. Gary and I had packed our possessions in Laguna Beach and driven across the country totally unaware that a growing number of newspapers, newsmagazines, radio talk show hosts, and television producers were beginning to believe that I was a good story, a fundamentalist leader who was, according to the publisher, using this moment to confront my former fundamentalist employers.

Twenty-five years later, I’m still being introduced as a former fundamentalist ghostwriter who penned speeches, sermons, and books for leaders of the Christian Right and then betrayed and condemned his old colleagues when I came out as a gay man. In fact, I was not a fundamentalist. I was an evangelical, a real one. I was raised by an evangelical (not a fundamentalist) family and grew up in a wonderful evangelical (not a fundamentalist) church, and I never wrote a speech or a sermon for a fundamentalist, ever. I was hired by publishers to ghostwrite their autobiographies, or—in Pat Robertson’s case, Dates with Destiny—spiritual truths that have shaped the nation’s past. I was beginning to realize that these same fundamentalist leaders were my enemy and the enemy of my sisters and brothers.

During the election of Donald Trump, these fundamentalists were called evangelicals. Most fundamentalist leaders come from evangelical traditions, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. These two religious labels—fundamentalist and evangelical—are constantly being misused and misunderstood. Dr. John Edward Carnell, a professor colleague of mine at Fuller Theological Seminary, defined fundamentalism as [evangelical] orthodoxy gone cultic.

Real evangelicals believe that the Bible is to be taken seriously but not literally. We believe that Christ will return, but we have no idea when or where, and while we are waiting, he calls us to bring hope and healing to the world. Fundamentalists are preoccupied with end-time predictions, with raptures, tribulations, and thousand-year reigns. Evangelicals share the love of Christ gently without forcing anyone else to believe or condemning others for their beliefs. Fundamentalists seek to impose their single truth on a plural world and are willing to use political force to see their views triumph.

I am a progressive evangelical. I have never been a fundamentalist. And I didn’t write antigay propaganda for any of them. When I was ghostwriting, my former wife Lyla and I were still married. Our kids were in school. I needed to support my family. To help pay the bills, my agent, Irving Swifty Lazar, hired me out to ghostwrite Jerry Falwell’s autobiography. I didn’t write anything about homosexuality or homosexuals, neither for nor against. It just didn’t come up.³ I’m sorry if I sound defensive, but I’ve been introduced endlessly as a fundamentalist who wrote sermons for Jerry Falwell, and that makes me crazy. Oh, well.

It wasn’t difficult to write their autobiographies or histories when I, too, believed that homosexuality was a sickness and a sin. I had taken the ex-gay cures, including various aversive therapies, electric shock, and exorcism, both Catholic and Protestant, to rid myself of the demon of homosexuality. I had been in counseling for thirty years with Christian counselors who assured me that if I just took more cold showers, read and memorized more Bible verses, and prayed more diligently to overcome this curse, I would change. They promised that even if I didn’t change completely, I could learn to conquer my temptations and for all practical purposes live the life of a heterosexual man. Somewhere along the way, I slashed my wrists with a coat hanger and began to sob.

My wife Lyla and I had been seeing Christian counselors together for most of our marriage. We had developed a pattern. When I got hysterical, she got very calm. When she got hyper, I went silent. Lyla bandaged my wrists and said quietly, Mel, let’s face it. You’re a gay man. I like gay men. I just hoped that you weren’t one, but you are. And it’s time you quit trying to change. You deserve to have a life of your own, the kind of life you need. And, by the way, she added, I also deserve to have a life of my own, the kind of life I need. Just remember, this whole process has been as hard on me as it has on you.

You can find the story of our painful separation and my first attempts at being a gay man and finding another gay man to love in Stranger at the Gate. Separating from Lyla and the kids was traumatic. I loved them. I wanted to care for them. But it was time for Lyla and me to begin our new lives. I moved down the hill just a few miles from our family home. Though we were separated, Lyla and I continued to volunteer as room parents, took our kids to church, and celebrated the holidays together as a family. I was determined to keep all the wedding vows that were possible to keep in my new life. A few months into our separation, Lyla gave me a ring with an American gold coin mounted on it. The surface side featured the word LIBERTY over the traditional Lady Liberty carrying a torch in one hand and a branch of peace in the other. Let this coin symbolize your new freedom, Mel, but remember on the back of the coin is a male eagle hovering above a female eagle and her chicks in the nest.

You are free, Lyla said, but don’t forget you still have a family. Lyla wrote the introduction to Stranger at the Gate. Without her loving support during our separation and divorce, I could never have written my autobiography, and though there are those who criticize her for it, she remains a faithful friend and supporter to both Gary and me.

Launching their campaign to sell Stranger, the publisher had alerted the networks that my first public appearance would be at the HRC event at the Anatole Hotel in Dallas. Networks and local television stations interested in my story sent camera crews to cover the event. At the time I didn’t know that when I signed the contract with my publishers, they literally owned my life story. Network programs like 60 Minutes, Larry King Live, 20/20, Front Line, and the others had to bid for the right for an exclusive until Simon & Schuster decided who would cover the story best. That decision had not been made, so the national networks and the local television stations were determined to cover this first appearance in Dallas just in case they were given the exclusive to cover the story in full. That’s why eight television crews ambushed us as we arrived at the Anatole.

We walked through the elegant lobby and down a long, artfully decorated corridor to the meeting room where members of the Federal Club had assembled. As I walked through the door, those generous HRC board members gave me a standing ovation. I was stunned. I had no idea that suddenly and totally without warning I would become a rather well-known gay activist and at the same time a very public enemy of the Religious Right. I didn’t know anymore about activism than I knew about publishing. I was about to come out to the nation, and I was not prepared for the shocks that followed.

Within days of that surprise reception at the Anatole, someone from the CBS Television Network called to say that Simon & Schuster had selected 60 Minutes to tell our story and that a 60 Minutes producer would be calling to set up a schedule for interviews with Morley Safer. They wanted to know my schedule and warned me that I should expect a TV crew to appear at a moment’s notice or with no notice at all at our home—at the Cathedral of Hope, on the road when I was traveling or at a church or university where I might be speaking.

It was a real hoot to board an airplane or attend the Cathedral or go out to lunch in the no-star Mexican café in Ennis surrounded by a soundman, a cameraman, and a producer from 60 Minutes. People would stare at us, wondering, Who is this celebrity? When they asked us, we answered We don’t know either. It was true. We were neither famous nor celebrated persons. We were two gay guys trying to understand our role in the world, and we found it as weird as the other folks that we were being followed around the country by a television crew.

One evening the 60 Minutes producer, Patty Hassler, called to say that Morley Safer and his entourage would arrive at our home early the next morning. The entourage arrived first. Cameramen, soundmen, lighting men, grips, and gaffers invaded our Circle H Ranch. They turned our living room into a television studio. Cameras were set. Mic booms hung. There was a scramble to finish lighting our living room when Morley Safer, the distinguished reporter on 60 Minutes, arrived at our front door. I was nervous. An estimated ten million viewers of America’s Favorite TV Newsmagazine would be watching.

Mr. Safer was one of those celebrity reporters whose presence is rather intimidating. Just minutes before the interview began, Gary and I had welcomed him to our little ranch. Safer smiled, shook our hands, and greeted us like a kindly grandfather. But when