A Long Road Traveled
The last time I got as close to the White House as I did this week was many years ago—six years after the Stonewall riots, when I was a 13-year-old National Spelling Bee participant from St. Margaret’s School in Lowell, Mass. We spelling bee kids didn’t make it into the White House that day—we stood outside as first lady Betty Ford spoke to us from a balcony. By then I already knew I was gay. Raised in a staunch Catholic home and taught (and tormented) by nuns, I was certain that an open homosexual (that was the only term I knew back then) could never be allowed inside the White House. I knew nothing of the nascent gay-rights movement—it hadn’t reached Lowell in 1975. All I knew was that that whatever words there were to describe what I was, it would have to be suppressed forever. I assumed that I would have to either become a priest or figure out some other way to hide.
Thankfully, time marched on, and I eventually became a politicized college student rather than a candidate for the priesthood—and ultimately I kicked open my closet door and came out. But I can’t help thinking about that personal history as I replay the reel of yesterday’s visit to the White House in my head. As the executive director of SAGE, an advocacy group for LGBT senior citizens, I was invited, along with some 200 other LGBT leaders, to join the Obamas in commemorating gay pride—which falls this year on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
I was accompanied by three SAGE members: a lesbian couple who are 86 and 91, who reminisced about voting for FDR and described Barack Obama as “the most inspiring politician since Adlai Stevenson,” and a Stonewall veteran and founder of the Gay Liberation Front, an activist group formed in the aftermath, who proudly chose his SAGE T shirt over the ties worn by every other man in the room.
Apart from celebrating, we had gone to the White House to make a point: that older people have to be included in the Obama agenda for LGBT progress. And we did what we came to do, with one of our members (the Stonewall vet) even receiving a personal meeting with the president and Mrs. Obama. But as I stood with my partner, in the front row, some five feet from the presidential podium, I realized how intensely personal this experience was for me. I thought about how each member of the SAGE contingent has had our own life’s journey—and each of us was moved deeply and differently by that moment.
See A Long Road Traveled Newsweek
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Vatican: ‘Homosexual behavior’ in decline
(Washington) A Vatican office that evaluated U.S. Roman Catholic seminaries says the schools have made improvements in halting what they call “homosexual behavior” among students.
The Vatican also says seminaries are doing well in teaching about celibacy and are generally effective in screening candidates for the priesthood.
The Vatican ordered the seminary …
Tags: Celibacy, Decline, Homosexual Behavior, Improvements, Priesthood, Roman Catholic Seminaries, Screening Candidates, Seminary, VaticanGay Episcopal priest to be ordained in Denver, ending ban on gay ordiantions by Episcopal Diocese of Colorado
Ending several years of restraint by the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado in ordaining openly gay and partnered priests, Bishop Robert O’Neill will ordain Mary Catherine Volland, along with three others, to the priesthood at St. John’s Cathedral on Saturday.
Volland, a longtime resident of Colorado and partnered lesbian, was a candidate for ordination in the Diocese of Minnesota, but has been called to serve as an assistant priest at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Denver, said Beckett Stokes, spokeswoman for the 30,000-member Colorado Diocese.
Despite nationwide controversy that has splintered Episcopalians, the church does ordain gay and lesbian priests. The bishop has the option of deploying them to Colorado congregations when it makes sense, Stokes said. Several Colorado congregations are served by gay priests.
O’Neill, who previously had suspended gay ordination out of sensitivity for churc See Gay Episcopal priest to be ordained in Denver Denver Post
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