GCN Radio - July 7, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

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JUSTIN: Welcome to another edition of GCN Radio. I’m Justin…

BRIAN: …and I’m Brian. It’s nice to have everyone listening for our 17th show. So, how’s your day going, Justin?

JUSTIN: Fairly uneventful. [laughs] For the most part, that’s probably a good thing.

BRIAN: Well, that’s nice.

JUSTIN: Of course, today I’ve been spending all day dealing with technical issues, so… That’s the fun part of being the technical guy and everything else. Well now, I understand you’ve got some stuff going on with you, though?

BRIAN: Well, I am closing on my house!

JUSTIN: Congratulations.

BRIAN: It’s so exciting! My first house! I’ll move in in a couple of weeks, which means now I get to start packing.

JUSTIN: Yeah, that’s the fun part.

BRIAN: Oh, my goodness sakes. So anyone from GCN is welcome to come to Muncie and help me pack. We’ll have a great big packing party!

JUSTIN: Oh goodness.

BRIAN: But we’ve got a great show today, Justin, someone very special on our show.

JUSTIN: We’re very, very fortunate to have Reverend Mel White with us today. Reverend White is the author of Stranger at the Gate and founder of Soulforce and just an all around great guy. How are you doing today?

MEL: I’m doing fine, how are you?

JUSTIN: I’m doing well.

MEL: Good.

JUSTIN: We were just a few weeks ago interviewing Jason & DeMarco, a gay Christian pop group, and Jason of the group was talking about how he had been in the closet and your book had meant so much to him. And I know it has to a lot of other folks at GayChristian.Net. For those who haven’t read the book yet, can you tell us a little bit about it and what you personally went through?

MEL: Yeah, I grew up in a wonderful evangelical Christian family where we went to church every time the doors opened and I loved it. But at about 13, I went to the Boy Scout Jamboree in Irvine Ranch, California and found myself infatuated by my tent-mate, and was stunned to have a crush on a man instead of on a young woman. That began a pilgrimage of denial, and of self-hatred, and of fear and guilt that lasted for about 25 years. During that time I went through exorcism with a Catholic and a Protestant, I did electric shock, I did every kind of aversive and ex-gay therapy known to try to get over being gay. And then after slicing my wrists and ending up in the hospital, my wife of twenty years said, “You know what? You’re gay. And I like gay people, I just didn’t want you to be one.” So we separated amicably, she wrote the forward to my book, and my family and I have been reconciled. I tell the story of all those years of trying to accept the gift that God had given me instead of giving it back.

JUSTIN: And you were not just any old person who went through all of this stuff, because you started off with a lot of connections in the very conservative Christian community, with Jerry Falwell and others.

MEL: I worked in television and film production, and then in writing and wrote books for a number of clients. I wrote the biographies for people like Falwell, and Robertson, and Billy Graham. As a ghostwriter I was struggling with my own sexuality, thinking that I was both sick and sinful. Working for them gave me a really interesting perspective on them. I think I know them better than they know themselves, because I had to make up some of their stories. [laughter] So it was really an interesting kind of paradox that I would later come out and be able to accept my sexual orientation as a gift from God and then be able to deal directly with these guys who are such a source of misinformation about gay people.

JUSTIN: What’s that been like? I know you’ve had some public conversations with Jerry Falwell since that time. What’s that been like?

MEL: My partner of 23 years and I moved to Lynchburg, Virginia a year and a half ago to live permanently across the street from his church. We attend on Sunday mornings and when he goes into his anti-gay stuff, we stand up in silent protest. The interesting this is that the responses from the people in church are even, “Well, thank you for coming.” One usher said to me, “You did good work today.” I think that Jerry and the other fundamentalist leaders have more and more people in their congregations who are wising up to the fact that this is a phony issue, that the Bible does not speak for or against homosexual orientation as we understand it today. They have so many gay people in their congregations, and their television audiences, and their universities that they’re going to have to finally say—Well, this is my prayer: I pray that Jerry Falwell has twin lesbian granddaughters [laughter] and with that he’s going to understand how awful he has been and change, I think.

BRIAN: I wanted to ask because we have so many people in our community who have been kicked out of their church or kicked out of their school, what would you like to say, or what can be said to those administrators who make those decisions, and where is that change going to start? Certainly we’ve seen some progress, but there are places where we have a long way to go. What do you say to that?

MEL: I think that the church has become the number one enemy of gay people, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered folks. I think that the main source of misinformation that leads to all forms of homophobia, even suffering and death, suicide and murder, come out of the church’s belief that we’ve made a choice and the choice is evil and that we recruit and molest and abuse and that we threaten the American dream and undermine the American family—all of that stuff that they have invented out of whole cloth with no evidence. None! In fact, there’s a huge historical avalanche of evidence that says it is as natural to be gay as it is to be left handed and that we are at the heart of this great country and at the heart of the great cultures and that we have always been positive contributing folk. I think that if they don’t catch on fast they are going to simply put the church out of business. The Pope, John Paul II, and the bishops who are now saying that if you don’t vote or stand for church policies we’re going to kick you out…there’s going to have to be a new church and I think that people who are sexual and gender minorities are at the heart of the new church, of the new community of faith where denominationalism is not important and where we get together even in interfaith communities. I would rather be free to share my witness with a pagan lesbian and have her share her witness with me and then go out to dinner knowing that the Spirit of Truth is responsible for changing minds and hearts. We’re not out to have an agenda for everyone we meet. The only agenda should be of acceptance, of love, and of inclusivity. Gandhi says if you’re going to be a Christian, be the very best Christian you can be, and then learn to listen. And that’s the way I picture it. I think gay and lesbian people have been kicked out of the church and I think God is behind it in some ways so that God can get a church that works.

JUSTIN: Speaking of Gandhi, in 1998 you founded an organization based on the principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., called Soulforce. What is Soulforce’s mission?

MEL: ‘Soul force’ were the two words that Gandhi used to describe relentless, non-violence resistance to injustice. It came, as much as anything, out of his confrontation with the Sermon on the Mount. Here a Hindu is reading a Jewish teacher from the first century saying to love our enemies and to do good to those who persecute you and pray for those who spitefully use you and turn the other cheek and go the second mile and give a coat where the cloak was. And he said, “My heart stopped when I read Jesus’ words and I awakened the next morning to turn those principles into practice.” I think that’s one of the weaknesses of the Christian church is that we talk about principles and we don’t ever learn to really practice them. So he set about to create a non-violent force and he called it the Force of Truth, Satyagraha, or, as he spoke of it all through his life, the Force of the Soul. And because ‘God’ creates so many enemies in the world, the word ‘God’ divides and twists and confuses, he called God the Soulforce at the center of the universe, the Truthforce at the center of the universe. So we’ve been applying these principles as much as we can, as feebly as we can, to the problem of homophobia in the churches. Meeting with denominational leaders: bishops, and cardinals, and moderators, and pastors and laity alike, trying to help them understand the terrible spiritual violence that flows out of teachings that says we’re incompatible with Christian teaching. And in the process of doing that, Gandhi says that your own soul will be ennobled. So now I’m here recruiting and training people to do justice, because it’s for them. If we never have a victory with Jerry Falwell, by standing in that service for forty minutes in quiet, prayerful protest, we are doing something for our own soul that is hugely inspiring and that ennobles us and helps us find out why we were created.

JUSTIN: There are so many folks who have been so touched by your story. I know I’m one of the folks who, when I read your book for the first time at a time that I was considering going down the ex-gay path, reading what you had been to meant so much to me to see other folks had been here before me and that it really didn’t work. Do you have any advice for those toying with the idea of still getting involved in an ex-gay ministry, trying to look toward possibly getting married to someone of the opposite sex?

MEL: I have to tell you that I believe that the ex-gay people are sincere, that they really mean well, and that they’re sincerely wrong. To me, the ex-gay movement is very much like the lobotomy movement or the leeches movement, that they really thought that those were medical procedures that were helpful, but when the American Medical Association calls ex-gay therapy medical malpractice, and when the American Psychological Association says great bad can come out of this and very little good, and when all the major psychological and mental health organizations condemn ex-gay treatments, then it seems to me that people ought to listen to that. If we go to a medical doctor and take his word, but we don’t believe in all these million and a half mental health professionals that have tested this and found it wanting. So the first thing I would say to a young person or an old person thinking of going in to the ex-gay movement is consider the evidence! Consider the scientific and historic and psychological and medical and psychiatric evidence that says, “This is harmful.” That you’re maltreating your own dear, sweet soul. The second thing I would do is look into the ex-gay history. All of the leaders… there’s a new crop of elders that crop up every year and then they disappear. Why did they disappear? Where did they go? Why does it fail in so many lives, even if they’re leaders? Then I would say, look for Christian gays and lesbians and bisexual and transgendered people and find an MCC church or a welcoming and affirming church from welcoming and affirming Methodists, and Baptists, and Lutherans, and Catholics, like Dignity and Integrity. Find a group of gay people who are also people of faith and realize that the rumors are not true that we are an irresponsible and promiscuous culture that’s a threat to children and so forth. So if you start looking at the evidence all around you… see, the people that go into the ex-gay movement are people that are so sincere, and that’s what makes them even more vulnerable to hurt.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I think that’s very true.

MEL: By the way, on our webpage at Soulforce.org we have lots of evidence from all of these societies, health societies, and mental health professional groups that talk about what the ex-gay movement does to people. That it creates great chaos and catastrophe in so many lives.

JUSTIN: There are a lot of great resources on the website, and that is http://www.Soulforce.org. And there’s information there about your ministry and videotapes and all kinds of things there. There’s one video there that I just want to promote because I love it so much, at least I hope you still have got it, it’s “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”. That was with Lewis Smedes, who I was very sorry to hear that he passed away not long ago. But in that video he talks about Romans 1 as a straight Christian pastor—just amazing to me, that whole interview.

MEL: Yeah, Lewis Smedes was a heterosexual professor of ethics at Calvin and at Fuller who studied the Bible very carefully. His popular books are best-sellers all over the country. And he sat down and looked at the text very carefully and he came out to say this is a great heresy to call homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching, and the little video, “Wideness…” just brings Lew’s heart to the world. There are other people, like Walter Wink, the great writer, and William Sloane Coffin, who was arrested with us the other day at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops… great people of faith who are heterosexuals who are helping the church understand and even going to jail to stand up against the injustice.

JUSTIN: As we wrap things up here, do you have any advice, any last comments you’d like to say to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered Christian youth who are listening? You have an open mic here.

MEL: The only problem we have, guys, is that gay people stay in the closet. That if we would come out and be real, then high school kids who were gay wouldn’t be killing themselves, and lesbian and gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who are people of faith wouldn’t be lost without models. Instead we live in two different worlds and to protect our salaries or to protect our promotion or to protect our reputation, we refuse to be who we are. And it’s really a terrible shame, because living in closets cripple the soul, and cripple those who are looking on. To add one last word, it’s “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Pay the price right up quick if there’s going to be any price at all. And by the way, you’ll be surprised at how accepted you are by so many people. But those who don’t accept you are simply victims of misinformation and by coming out you start them on a journey of discovery that is so important. God created you gay or lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered because God has a dream for your life and that dream is to have those great feelings in you realized and to create wonderful truth in the world, so get out of the closet!

JUSTIN: Thank you so much, Reverend White, we really appreciate your taking the time to be on the show with us today.

MEL: And any time you want to come to one of our national actions, or we have local Soulforce resistance groups in thirty cities now, come on board. It’s a fun time.

JUSTIN: All righty.

MEL: Talk to you later.

JUSTIN: Well, that wraps it up for this edition of GCN Radio. Remember you can listen to us every week on the web at http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. Send your comments and questions to gcnradio@gaychristian.net. So for this week, I’m Justin…

BRIAN: …and I’m Brian. We hope you’ll turn in next time. Thanks!

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