Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:57:00 -0400 From: Chris Ambidge Subject: *Integrator* files for 1990 INTEGRATOR, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto volume 90-1, issue date 1990 01 06 copyright 1990 Integrity/Toronto. The hard-copy version of this newsletter carries the ISSN 0843-574X Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9 == contents == [90-1-1] "CHRISTIAN LEADERS" ATTACK CELEBRATION '90 / by Mayne Ellis [90-1-2] ON EQUAL RITES / by Louie Crew [90-1-3] GIRAFFES ABOUT TOWN ======= [90-1-1] "CHRISTIAN LEADERS" ATTACK CELEBRATION '90 by Mayne Ellis Celebration '90, also known as "Gay Games III and Cultural Festival", is being held in Vancouver August 4-11, 1990. The Games consist of competition in 26 different sports and a wide variety of cultural events. To quote their own pamphlet, "Celebration '90 is centred on the principle of inclusion. Everyone is welcome - people of all ages, colours, sexual orientations ... and with all degrees of skills." This is the third such event. The first two were held in San Francisco in '82 and in '86. Up until Saturday November 4th organisation and planning for the Games had been going quite smoothly. Some, but not very much, resistance had come from the public. Full page ads in both Vancouver's two daily newspapers changed all that. *Mayne Ellis* , President of Integrity/Vancouver, picks up the story at this point. = = = = = = = = = TIME IS RUNNING OUT! A melodramatic hourglass showed the sands of time in big trouble. The text condemned both the 1990 Gay Games and homosexuality with stern sub-heads like "Judeo-Christian Values" "Biblical Definition of Homosexuality" "Judgement" "Sex and Marriage" and "Spiritual Warfare", ending with "You are the salt of the earth" (which I in my innocence at first took for a direct assurance to gay/lesbian people) and the standing-on-guard bit from O Canada. The fine print told us the ad was brought to us by "Christian leaders (no names mentioned) ... who love this city and its people." Well, some of its people, anyway. "Ah, jeeze," I thought, =E0 la Archie Bunker, "they're at it again." Last= fall, an article headed "Sodomite Invasion In 1990" was published in a hate rag from the suburb of Surrey. This full-page version, published in both Vancouver *Sun and *Province* proclaimed: "... these games will bring God's judgement upon us ... we therefore forbid them in the name and authority of Jesus Christ." Among "us" lesbian/gay folk, an interesting attitude coalesced, best expressed as "Batten down the hatches mates, avast, belay, we're rounding the Horn." Monday morning the storm hit with all its fury. But it wasn't "us" who blew it in. The "straights" beat us to it. People cancelled their subscriptions, wrote furious letters, telephoned the newsrooms, and circulated petitions. The ad, they said, was "reminiscent of Nazi Germany" and "creating paranoia"; it was "irresponsible of the *Sun* to run it"; the ad's creators were judged "not fit to wash the feet of the men and women they ... vilified." Even the editor of the Sun was "appalled". Not everybody was angry. At first Celebration 90 staffers were shocked. By Wednesday when I visited them, the atmosphere was almost festive. People had been calling all week, often saying, "I'm not gay -- I don't understand homosexuality, but I'm disgusted by that ad and I want to show my support." Donations and memberships have flowed in. Reporters checked Pacific Press' advertising department and announced that Robert Birch, pastor emeritus of the Burnaby Christian Fellowship, had paid "about" $15 000 to pay for the ad. It took the BCF over two weeks to reply to repeated media inquiries. "We don't want controversy. We want the ad to speak for itself." Others spoke for themselves. Harry Hill of *Angles* [local gay/lesbian newspaper] learned that the *Sun* had received fourteen letters praising the ad - and over a hundred (including two petitions) condemning it, and the *Sun* for running it. Many said, "This time its homosexuals, but it'll be someone else next time." Unfortunately, some blamed Christianity itself for the ad. And what of other Christian leaders? While some churches' comments ranged from annoyed to pusillanimous, Anglican clergy in this diocese condemned the ad roundly. The tone was set by Archbishop Douglas Hambidge: "May I, a Christian leader, dissociate myself from this unfortunate and vitriolic pronouncement?" In the ad, he found "no echo in the person of Jesus Christ as I meet him in the gospels, and I do not want it assumed that this is the voice of Christian leadership". Many of us who follow Christ have indeed not been happy to see Him so ill-served. We lesbian/gay Christians have not liked to hear the name of our Beloved used against us as a weapon. The clearest evidence of God's love in our lives is that we work to "loose the chains of injustice ... share our food with the hungry ... provide the poor with shelter."* Our job is not to quote Jesus, but to DO Jesus, something that can be done well whatever our orientation, age, skin colour, physical or mental ability. *Ed note: This quotation from Isaiah was one of the scriptures quoted in the ad. ======== [90-1-2] ON EQUAL RITES by Louie Crew "I wish more of my friends could see you two. Most gays I know are terribly promiscuous. People need to realise that some gays do live as faithful couples." Gay couples hear this so often that some of us are tempted to accompany the litany with an imaginary fiddle between thumb and index finger, the way as children in the 1930s and 40s we mocked schlock, "the world's saddest song on the world's smallest fiddle." How should fidelity parade? One of my friends, now in the 27th year of his gay relationship, jests that he may desert his male spouse to join the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (an order of gay male nuns) as Sister Monogamy. Perhaps straits [sic] see few lesbian and gay male couples as couples because many of us understand the only dynamics by which our relationships can survive: Love vaunts not itself, does not behave unseemly, seeks no mirror image. Society often peeks at lesbian and gay couples as if we're freaks at a circus. "Which one of you is the man, which the woman?" many ask us. Am I being the man when I take out the garbage, the woman when I sew? I should have thought it obvious that both of us are men, that we do not we mimic heterosexual unions. When roughly every second hetero marriage ends in divorce, when many of those which stay intact sustain great inequity for one of the partners, usually the wife, few heterosexuals are wise to seek a "normal" marriage either. Some gay couples yield, occasionally with painful consequences. In the mid 1970s, one couple I knew persuaded their parish to do a full-scale wedding. When the bishop tried to halt the ceremonies, the press gave them a page spread -- "better," they reasoned, "than sticking our wedding pictures just back in the society section." They invested much energy publicly asserting their equal rites. They even persuaded the telephone company to print their hyphenated name, which required an extra line of text to fit. Unfortunately, they allowed their public image to consume them. They let it tell them who to be, and neglected to communicate clearly who they were. They sacrificed marriage for Marriage. When their icon crumbled, few people remained to help them sweep away the rubbish and begin to recover their own worth as talented, hurting human beings. They had cultivated an audience, not friends. I do not oppose public rites. Like Jesus, I'll spike the punch at anyone's wedding. We human beings need all the help we can get when private selfishness begins to interfere with our unnatural, sacred commitment to respect someone else as an equal. But we need to understand marriage with more depth than we can get in soap operas and brides' magazines. In the old marriage ceremony, still used by many Justices of the Peace and by many Protestant ministers, the officiant says only "I now pronounce you man and wife." The couple say each to the other, "I you wed" even as they said "yes" earlier to the question, "Will you marry me?" They marry themselves! The officiant certifies their act, but does not effect it. Both civil and canon law recognise this distinction: the couple's private behaviour, or lack of it, may serve as grounds of annulment -- grounds for saying that marriage never existed. When the Episcopal Church met for General Convention in Detroit, in July 1988, several dozen lesbians and gay men told our stories. Since the Church has hinted that it might someday affirm, if not marry or bless, lesbians and gay males if we live in "committed, loving, stable" relationships, many witnesses reported how long they had coupled, what committees they had served on at the parish, diocesan, and national levels... Accept us, they seemed to say, because we're good enough, or at least as good as you. What a frightening spectacle! What an unhealthy space for any fragile, nurturing human relationship to occupy. A strait friend on the Commission which had promoted the session told me over lunch the next day, "I realise how unfairly we ask you people to speak publicly about matters private and personal." The Church does not say to heterosexuals, "We will accept you if you will prove your worth." Christ did not say, "Come unto me all who are good enough." Besides, gay males and lesbians sin in our relationships. Not one of us deserves to be called an "ideal couple." We sin not when a woman loves a woman or a man loves a man, but when we do not love the other enough, namely, as much as we love ourselves. There is no health in us, only in the Christ, our Redeemer. Have heterosexuals struck a different bargain? Heterosexual marriage often secures a male's position in the community and sometimes even in the professions. For example, many Episcopal parishes, scornful of their catholic heritage, will not hire an unmarried priest. Fewer Episcopal dioceses choose an unmarried bishop. By contrast, unions jeopardise gays, more than merely being gay could ever do. When the single doctor and the single lawyer share an apartment, few think anything of it, but when the two name themselves to friends and neighbours as a lesbian couple... Parishioners titter only mildly when the domestic worker reports that an occasional hitchhiker stayed overnight with Father Don, but when Captain William moves into the rectory as Father Don's spouse... My own relationship, a mere fifteen years old, could not survive the stress of public spectacles had we not long ago reserved both stretches of privacy and enough public air in which to breathe. As a black and white couple living first in rural Georgia, then in rural Wisconsin, then in Hong Kong,... we could not have hidden even had we tried, and why should we want to? We have endured occasional death threats, steady calumny, frequent underemployment and occasional unemployment... No price seems too much to pay for our union, but we're not masochists. We don't court hostility. The first time he saw the staff at the grocery store rush to the butcher's two-way mirror, my lover muttered, "You may gloat, honey, but we're the stars!" But we soon decided to leave the stardom behind most of the time, especially when we step across our own threshold. Even in public, we usually shop separately now and in dozens of other ways we accommodate the oppressor, not because the oppressor is right, but because we need peace and quiet. On most days Rosa Parks herself moved to the back of the bus. It beez that way sometimes. We require the privacy of home to work at justice, which we value far more than eros, as the touchstone of our relationship. How can we fully nurture each person's talents? How can we spend our money and our time equitably? Sometimes our commitment to justice with each other has forced us to live as many as twelve time zones apart for months at a time. Sometimes, the same commitment has led one of us to give up a good job so that we could be together in the same town. Many gays and straits do not want marriage, certainly not the hard work and wise husbandry that it entails for us. And some of us who do want the husbandry, do not care much either way about the rites. Some who think they want marriage, mistake it for giddy romance and public celebration. Others prefer to entertain occasional overnight angels. Cannot we affirm the dignity of all people? Must we require people to couple alike? Who among us easily understands others' private relationships, even those nearest? Viewed from outside, all intercourse looks like rutting. Who can fathom the holy mysteries by which human beings in all times and all places sometimes lovingly integrate spirit with flesh? Thank Goddess. One bishop, deeply moved by some of the lesbian and gay stories at General Convention, called in the Warden at his cathedral when he returned home. "I'm embarrassed to report to you and your lover," the bishop told his warden, "that we did not pass any resolutions affirming gay marriage rites." The warden said, "Bishop, that's kind of you to say so, but you must understand that while we know others for whom that would mean a lot, rites are not a high priority for the two of us." "But now the church speaks of `living in sin,' " the bishop said, pained. "Ah, yes, Bishop, we agree. But -- and forgive me for saying so -- the two of us don't think it is we who have been `living in sin' the twenty- five years we've been committed to each other." [AUTHOR BOX: LOUIE CREW founded Integrity in 1974, and now lives in New Jersey. This article originally appeared in the May 1989 issue of *Christianity and Crisis*. It is reprinted by permission] ======== [90-1-3] GIRAFFES ABOUT TOWN Giraffes seen once a year remain strange, exotic creatures. Giraffes seen every week become part of the background. *We are all giraffes* o For the past 52 years, Integrity/Toronto's host parish of Holy Trinity, has produced *The Christmas Story* every December. This is a mammoth undertaking, requiring many volunteers. Among those volunteers are people from Integrity. For a number of years now, we have been pleased to provide a team of ushers for both matinee and evening performances on one performance day. This is one way that we can thank the Holy Trinity family for their hospitality to us. o On December 20, the same nave which saw *The Christmas Story* was the site of Integrity's annual Interdenominational Christmas service of Lessons and Carols. As we have done for a number of years, members of many lesbian/ gay/ religious caucuses came together. We came to hear the story of the arrival of the Christ child, and to celebrate in song with the angels God's gift of peace on earth. A conscious effort was made this year to make the language of both the readings and the carols gender-inclusive: Jesus did come, after all, to redeem *all* the human race. That is no small task at the best of times, and when the words are as deeply printed as those of Christmas carols, it is even more so. This was an event of Toronto's Gay/Lesbian Interfaith Network, which has revived since last Christmas. God is perpetually giving us New Life! We can all draw strength from our sisters and brothers working in different parts of God's vineyard. o *Good news from the other side of Lake Ontario !!* The Diocese of Rochester is at it again. They have elected Bruce Colburn as one of their deputies to General Convention (the US equivalent of General Synod). Bruce is the Convener of Dignity-Integrity Rochester, and has been active in his diocese for years. He is the first openly gay deputy to General Convention ever elected. Other members of Integrity have been elected but these have been "supportive straights". Bruce is certainly not the first gay (or lesbian) deputy, either, but will be going to Phoenix in 1991 out about his sexuality. Congratulations! ======== End of volume 90-1 of Integrator, the newsletter of Integrity/Toronto copyright 1990 Integrity/Toronto Editor this issue: Bonnie Bewley comments please to Chris Ambidge, current Editor chris.ambidge@utoronto.ca OR Integrity/Toronto Box 873 Stn F Toronto ON Canada M4Y 2N9