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BY COLLEEN O'CONNOR Colleen O'Connor: How do you assess the reaction of America's mainstream churches and synagogues to the recent murder of Matt Sheppard? Mel White: I was glad to see that they were grieved by Matt's death, but their angry cries for hate crime laws led me to believe that they don't really understand how much they contributed inadvertently to Matt's death. When the Episcopal church, the Anglican church worldwide and the United Methodist Church of America voted in the last few weeks to condemn practicing homosexuals, to refuse them ordination, to refuse them marriage rights in the church, they're doing the same thing that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell do in demeaning and condemning it unfairly. And so they create inadvertently the tragic toxic environment in which a Matt Sheppard is killed. CO: Your strategies for dealing with such tragedies have changed a lot from when you wrote "Stranger at the Gate." MW: Well, after I had said to my friends, 'I'm giving up on Pat Robertson and the religious right, they're hopeless,' Coretta Scott King called me to say that that was an act of violence. When I asked what's violent about giving up on someone, she said, 'What do you know about the rules of non-violence?' I said, 'Nothing, except you're not supposed to kill people.' And she said, 'Non-violence is much more sophisticated than that. You need to read Martin Luther King.' Reading King, of course, led me to Gandhi. I spent three years really getting into Gandhi, and then I went to India for a month with Gandhi's grandson and studied Gandh's techniques. I realized that giving up on someone is the same as an act of violence because we're left then with nothing more but to be violent. When we see someone who's a victim of misinformation, like Pat Robertson or the Methodists or Episcopalians, then to give up on them is to only make violence more possible between us. But to reach out and try to bridge the gap between us, that's non-violence. That's saying, 'I will be a peacemaker. I will not walk away.' CO: How is the gay community responding to this message? MW: I've been trying to create an outline of Soul Force principles out of the Gandhi and King literature, and I put that on the Web, and I've lectured across the country. Now I'm writing my sequel to "Stranger at the Gate" which is called "Storming the Gate: Discovering the Soul Force Principles" because I believe we all have a vague feeling of what King, Gandhi, and even Jesus taught. Like Gandhi said, he read the Sermon on the Mount and was determined to transform those principles into practices. He spent his lifetime in South Africa and India, bringing the Sermon on the Mount to life. That's why I'm going back to a literal interpretation of the Bible, too. Like the fundamentalists, I believe in interpreting literally that when Jesus said, 'Feed the poor and clothe the naked,' he meant that literally. That's what we should take literally in the Bible, not these four or six little passages supposedly against homosexual orientation. It's been hard to get people to understand that non-violence is not pacifism, that we do not acquiesce to violent rhetoric or to rhetoric that leads to violence. We confront it. That's why I went to jail in Virginia Beach and then to jail across the country, simply saying, 'We will stand here because this law is unjust or because you refuse to hear the truth.' It will require a lot of us to suffer before the minds and hearts of the American people are changed. It is not legislation that needs to be changed. I celebrate all the lobbyists in Washington and New York who are doing it, and in local cities and states. But we cannot legislate morality down, we've got to help people understand that we are God's children too. CO: That reminds me of your statement that homosexuality is a gift of God. MW: When someone calls himself or herself a homosexual, he or she is going by a construct that limits instead of liberates. I am not a homosexual first. If you want to caricature me, call me a homo-spiritual person. Because throughout history, gay and lesbian people have been at the center of great faith movements. If all the gay organists were to quit playing on Sunday morning, the church would be almost silent. The Catholic church is filled with gay men who are priests, and in the Protestant world, some of our best pastors are lesbian women. The fact is that from history we've seen ourselves as leaders of these movements, and this must make us think about the possibility that we are created to be special. There's a book called "The Spirit in the Flesh" by Walter Williams that's a study of gay or lesbian children in Native American tribes. For example, the little boy who played with feathers and the little girl who played with horses or whatever--they would say, 'A-ha, there's a double-spirited one.' They saw us as double-spirited, with some of the male and some of the female. That would make us much more open, empathic, and loving, because we understand both sides of the story. That's what a pastor is, or a priest or a rabbi needs to be. So to embrace our gifts from God as special, to see ourselves as special, is the beginning of Soul Force. We are created by the Creator with special gifts. And I think one of those gifts is to be peace-makers. CO: How does this apply to gay men and women who feel rejected by their churches? MW: Soul Force says we work first to renew our own spirit. In this process, if we realize we're vulnerable and we're in a church that is bashing gays, then we shouldn't go back. There is no reason to open ourselves to more punishment. We've already suffered enough. So until you're strong enough to take them on, you need to get into a community like P-Flag, Metropolitan Community Churches, or churches like Grace Cathedral with a bishop and a pastor and a rector who are open and affirming. But it seems to me that MCC has become a church of transition. We have a lot of people stagger into our little churches across the country who need to feel totally accepted as they are. After they get healthy in our churches, they go back to their churches. We've seen this as a kind of a loss, but I say instead of seeing it as a loss, we should see ourselves as M.A.S.H. units on the front lines on the war being waged against us, and celebrate when we prepare people to go back to the Methodist or the Episcopal or the Assembly or God or the Baptist church. CO: How can the general public, both gay and straight, help create justice for the gay community?
MW: The only way we can change the minds and hearts of anybody is to come
out. If you're a gay or a gay supporter, you need to say so, if you're
ready. But at the same time, so many of us are cautious, and in being
cautious, we lose our own souls. I waited so long to deal with it. But
it wasn't a matter of staying in the closet because I was afraid to come
out, it was a matter of staying in the closet because I thought it was
evil. Once you know it's not evil, but you still go to the gay bars on
Saturday night, or into a gay safe church on Sunday morning, and then
go back to the world and hide, you are your own worst enemy. This is like
1932 and '33 in Germany, and gays and lesbians are being set up as the
blame agent for all that's going wrong with the world. And unless we come
out and say who we really are, we can't change. The only way people are
changed about us is to know a gay or lesbian person personally. All the
studies show that. Once they know you as a person and love you, then the
rhetoric doesn't work for them. So straight or gay, what we can do is
stand against anti-gay humor, and confront people when their television
and radio programs or direct-mail appeals use this fear to raise money
and mobilize volunteers. We have to take stands against these sources
of intolerance in our churches and in our television stations. We've got
to go to work, and not let the rhetoric go unconfronted. |
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