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| Rev. Troy Perry, standing in the firebombed remains of his church. |
Readers of the journal’s February 12, 1973 issue saw, sandwiched between stories about box-office receipts and casting calls, a single page, with two columns of text and a mail-in coupon surmounted by a large photograph. The photograph depicted a stern-looking young minister, clad in black clerical clothes and, with his long sideburns and sculpted dark hair, looking a little like a beefier version of Elvis Presley. His arms folded, he stood amid the charred wreckage of a church that had been gutted by a major arson fire.
The minister was the Rev. Troy D. Perry, founder and leader of the Metropolitan Community Church – the same sect whose burned-out Los Angeles headquarters was depicted in the photo. According to the text, the church had been deliberately targeted by arsonists because it served a minority community, in much the same way that Black churches in the South had been bombed and torched during the darkest days of the Civil Rights Movement. Much like the African-American churches had done, Rev. Perry was asking for support from the majority population against the violence and hatred that were being used to intimidate his flock.
But the Metropolitan
Community Church had taken up an even more controversial cause, and served a
far less “visible” minority group. From
its founding a few years earlier, the MCC had pursued a primary (but not
exclusive) ministry to a population that had been condemned, disparaged,
marginalized, imprisoned, tortured and murdered through twenty-five centuries
of Judeo-Christian civilization: homosexuals.
And in early 1973, the
violence against the Church and its members was only beginning.
The sight of charred remains,
and the smells of ash and accelerant, must have brought back bad memories to
the Rev. Troy Perry. Twenty-one years
earlier, his father, Troy Perry Senior, had perished in a fiery car wreck along
with a cousin, Clayton. Perry Senior had
been the biggest bootlegger in Florida’s legally-dry Leon County, and when he
made the mistake of trying to evade a police pursuit, his car crashed, and
ignited two carboys of gasoline he was transporting to his farm.
His mother eventually
remarried, but her new husband turned out to be an abusive drunk who beat Perry
and his four younger brothers. After a
friend of his stepfather’s, who was staying with the family, raped Perry, the
12-year-old boy ran away from home, staying with relatives in Georgia and Texas.
Perry’s relatives were
Pentecostal Christians, and their emotional, passionate style of worship
appealed to the adolescent boy, who had been attending Southern Baptist church
and prayer groups since early childhood, especially in the wake of his father’s
death. Although he soon returned home
(his mother had wisely divorced the abusive stepfather), and moved with his
family to Mobile, Alabama, he carried the evangelical spirit of his country
cousins with him, and became a teenaged street preacher. So great was Perry’s fervor that at sixteen
he dropped out of high school and became a paid Pentecostal evangelist, even
though he was still technically a Southern Baptist.
Sectarian conflict wasn’t the
only inner battle Perry was fighting.
Apart from the rape, he had already logged several same-sex erotic
experiences, and was finding himself increasingly attracted to other
males. But late-Fifties Alabama wasn’t
the time or the place to come out of the closet, and largely because his Church
of God required pastors to be married, Perry started dating the daughter of a
Church minister. Worried and confused
about his homosexual feelings, Perry discussed them with his potential
father-in-law, but the older Pentecostal preacher just brushed them off, saying
that all he needed to do was to marry a good woman. And sure enough, at eighteen, he married the
minister’s daughter, all the while carrying on a secret relationship with a
young man in his father-in-law’s congregation, who he later dumped for an older
man in Mobile.
Perry and his wife moved to
Joliet, Illinois, where he found work, attended a Bible college, and preached
at a small Church of God congregation. Things seemed to be going well until one
day when a Church overseer called Perry into a private meeting, and confronted
him with evidence of his homosexuality.
Perry’s young boyfriend from the Alabama congregation, devastated by
losing his lover to both another man and a heterosexual marriage, had informed
on him. The nineteen-year-old pastor was excommunicated without an appeal, even
though he protested to the overseer that other pastors guilty of heterosexual
adultery had been forgiven, and allowed to return to the pulpit. But the church officials held firm: homosexuality
was too grave a sin to be forgiven a Christian pastor, and a first strike put
one out of the Church of God.
Although the tenets of his
faith were used to humiliate him and destroy his ministry, Perry felt the call
to preach more strongly than ever. He
joined the Church of God of Prophecy, a rival Pentecostal sect who welcomed the
ex-Church of God minister with open arms, unaware of the reason why their
competitors had bounced him from the pulpit. When his employer relocated to
Torrance, California, Perry and his family followed, and he found a nearby
congregation that accepted him as pastor.
Even though his flock grew
and thrived, Troy became disenchanted with the strictures of his church, which
forbade cosmetics, jewelry, dances, movies, plays, and other “worldly”
pleasures. His marriage, although it had
produced two small sons, was loveless.
Perhaps realizing that his
marriage and ministry were doomed, Perry didn’t try to run from his gayness any
more. When he read Donald Webster Corey’s now-classic The Homosexual in America, he realized he would never be “cured” of
his inclinations, and he couldn’t live in the closet anymore. Perry “came out”
to both his wife and his ecclesiastical superior with predictable results: he
was divorced, and excommunicated.
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| Perry's autobiography |
Freed from both familial and
ministerial obligations, the 22-year-old Southern Pentecostal preacher took his
first tentative steps into the early-1960s L.A. gay scene. In his autobiography Don’t Be Afraid Anymore, Perry recounted his maiden visit to a gay
bar, where he was terrified that God would strike him dead on the spot for
drinking his first beer!
Two years later, Perry was
drafted into the U.S. Army. Although he
continually insisted to his superiors he was a homosexual, they took his
assertions as a draft-dodging scam, and put him through boot camp and MOS
training as a teletype operator.
Stationed in West Germany, Perry discovered a thriving gay underground
in the Vietnam-era military; it was his first extended period among men who had
accepted their homosexuality and lived with it as best they could. He also attended local Pentecostal
gatherings, although half-heartedly, realizing he could never fully share in
their fellowship again.
Discharged from the Army in
1967, Perry returned to Los Angeles.
Rooming with an old friend, he found work, and once again dived into the
Southern California gay scene. In that
pre-Stonewall period, Southland gays mostly gathered in small, scattered bars
which were under constant siege by undercover police, and rarely stayed in
business more than a year. Vice squads
regularly set up entrapments against gays, and ruined lives and careers in the
process. Homosexual men were routinely
harassed, beaten, and even murdered by both cops and gangs of thugs. And all of this was justified by the
teachings of the Christian churches, which cited the tales of Sodom and
Gomorrah, the laws of Leviticus, and the Epistles of Paul as proof that God
reviled homosexuality as an unspeakable abomination.
Finally, in 1968, Perry got
pushed too far. Tony, a friend of
Perry’s, was arrested for merely buying him a beer in a gay bar, and threatened
with exposure and loss of his job.
Although Perry and some friends rallied to bail Tony out and cheer him
up, he remained distraught, especially when Perry suggested he pray for
strength and guidance. A Latino
Catholic, Tony had been excommunicated for his homosexuality at fifteen, and
couldn’t conceive of a relationship with God outside of a Church. What church could possibly minister to “dirty
queers” such as himself and his friends?
Perry, who himself was
recovering from a suicide attempt over a failed relationship, began to pray for
a church that would recognize that gays and lesbians were God’s children, and
deserving of his love as much as heterosexuals.
“Lord, you called me to preach,” he recounted praying in his
autobiography. “We need a church, not a
homosexual church, but a special church that will reach out to the lesbian and
gay community. A church for people in
trouble, and for people who just want to be near you. So, if you want such a church started, and
you seem to keep telling me that you do, well then, just let me know
when.”
And a still, small voice said
to the gay Pentecostal preacher, “Now.”
For the next two and a half
months, Perry prepared to hold the first openly gay-friendly Christian church
service in known history. He spread word
among friends and colleagues, and took out an ad in The Advocate, L.A.’s famous gay-oriented newspaper. He had no church building or meeting space,
so he readied the front room of his home as a chapel. (In the ad, Perry gave
his home address and phone number as contacts – an unprecedented act of bravery
in a subculture that thrived on secrecy and discretion.) And a sympathetic Congregationalist minister
loaned Perry a clerical robe, hymnals, and communion bread. Perry picked the name “Metropolitan Community
Church” for his group.
On the afternoon of October
6, 1968, the Metropolitan Community Church held its first service in Troy
Perry’s living room. That day, the erstwhile Pentecostal Perry donned
liturgical robes for the first time in his clerical career, knowing that most
of the twelve people who attended were disaffected Catholics and Protestants
used to garbed pastors and orderly services. He then conducted a service, with
prayers and a homily, while his roommate Willie Smith put on an LP of religious
music and led the group in hymns.
Reverend Perry’s sermon that
first Sunday was titled “Be True to You.” It outlined his threefold vision of
the Church’s ministry: 1) Salvation,
through the love of Christ, which did not exclude gays; 2) Community, for a sacred family of faithful Christians rejected by
the religious Establishment; and 3) Christian
Social Action, to fight the oppression and injustice that plagued
homosexuals. True to his word, all three aspects of the Church’s purpose would
define his mission in the coming years.
After that first meeting, the
Church grew rapidly. By the end of 1968, Perry and Smith’s house could no
longer contain the growing flock of gay worshippers, and they started renting
meeting halls for Sunday services. Most of these arrangements fell apart when
the owners realized they were leasing space to a “queer church,” so Willie
Smith put together a deal with his employer, the Encore Theater, where the
Church was able to use the cinema virtually rent-free for over fourteen months.
On Sundays nearly 200 gay men, along with a goodly number of lesbians and
heterosexuals, filled the theater’s seats for worship services.
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| The MCC grew rapidly under Perry's leadership |
Perry knew that he and his
flock were challenging one of the oldest and most ingrained dogmas in the
Christian tradition. Much of the wrath historically directed towards gays by
the Christian church was based in Scriptural injunctions that seemed to condemn
homosexuality outright. Whatever their other differences on Biblical teachings,
virtually every Christian sect taught same-sex relations were a grave sin.
The Bible-literate Perry was
aware of the chapters and verses cited by Christians as justifications for condemning
gays, and spent much of his ensuing career challenging orthodox interpretations
of them. Perry determined that there were a total of 362 admonitions against
heterosexual sex in the Bible, as opposed to a mere six against same-sex
activity, which seemed to imply that God gave straights’ sexual sins far more
attention than gays’. Was the traditional Christian prohibition against
homosexuality, he asked, based on ignorance and bigotry rather than on true
understanding of the Bible?
Often his critics invoked the
story of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of Biblical injunctions against
homosexuality. Perry answered that both Biblical citations (such as Ezekiel 16:
48-50) and modern scholarship implied that hostility to strangers, rather than
same-sex relations, was the “sin of Sodom” that brought God’s fiery wrath down
upon the “cities of the plain.” Certainly, the mob outside Lot’s door that
clamored to molest his angel-guests was far more in the spirit of a prison
gang-rape than a gay orgy.
When critics cited verses in
Leviticus which called same-sex relations an “abomination,” Perry replied that
the Old Testament’s laws also prohibited wearing garments of mixed materials,
or eating shellfish or rare meat. Viewed in context, Leviticus and Deuteronomy were
rulebooks for the people of the “Old Covenant” – the ancient Hebrews – and
Christians had been freed from such numerous and onerous prohibitions through
the New Covenant of Jesus and his sacrifice.
Perry would often go on to
say that Christ himself never explicitly condemned homosexuality – the sexual
sinners he concerned himself with, such as the woman at the well and the woman
caught in adultery, were heterosexual. Jesus, he said, spoke against lust,
which Perry believed was the sin of using people for sexual gratification,
rather than sharing with them the loving communion of sex, straight or
otherwise.
As for St. Paul’s seemingly
straightforward pronouncements against same-sex relations in Romans, 1
Corinthians and 1 Timothy, Perry maintained that the Apostle’s language was
ambiguous, and that he probably meant that sex with male pagan-temple
prostitutes, rather than simple homosexuality, was a no-no for the early
Christians. Perry also pointed out that Paul peppered the Epistles with all
sorts of statements – forbidding women to speak in church, condoning slavery –
that may have been acceptable in his time, but had historically been used as
justifications for oppression. For Perry, the time had come for Christendom to
abandon gay-bashing in the name of God, much as previous generations of
progressive Christians had rejected “Bible-justified” slavery, racism and
misogyny.
Perry’s revisionist teachings
became a major part of what would be known as “Gay Theology.” Much as the
“Black Theology” of James H. Cone had placed African-American political
struggles in the Christian theological context, identifying an oppressed people
with the Hebrews of Exodus and the sacrifice of Christ, so Gay Theology saw in
the homosexual experience the sufferings of rejected groups to whom Jesus
reached out and healed. Perry believed the Christian ministry was inseparable
from political action, and for the next decades he would be one of the Gay
Liberation movement’s most visible, articulate and militant figures.
Perry and the MCC made
national headlines in December 1970 when he attempted to perform a same-sex
wedding at a rented Washington, D.C. Episcopal church. Although he’d officiated
at a successful (if not legally binding) homosexual marriage a year earlier in
Huntington Park, California, the publicity-seeking Perry was intent on making
this provocative statement about gay religious rights in the nation’s capital,
using the facilities of American Christianity’s most blue-blooded sect. When
the local Bishop got word that one of his parishes was going to be defiled by
“perverts,” he locked Perry and his sixteen followers out of the building,
leaving them to perform simple nuptials and a communion service in the freezing
snow. Perry then led his little band on
an impromptu march to the National Cathedral, just a few blocks away, where
with the help of a sympathetic seminarian, they gained admission to the
Episcopal edifice. There, Perry stood at the altar and preached a sermon asking
for God “to cure the Episcopal bishop of his homophobia,” in front of a
Catholic rosary-prayer group and a horde of nonplussed tourists.
 |
| An early MCC gay wedding. |
The Metropolitan Community
Church grew rapidly in the early Seventies, after the Stonewall riots and the
general liberalizing of American society brought countless gay men, lesbians,
bisexuals and transsexuals out of the closet and into a conscious community.
Perry traveled incessantly across America planting new MCC congregations and
networking with homosexual Christians, impressing both allies and opponents with
his energy, charisma and political moxie. By early 1971, the Los Angeles Mother
Church itself was well-heeled and -attended enough to purchase a permanent
place of worship – an old church building at 22nd and Union, on the
edge of the L.A. ghetto. Over a thousand people were invited to its gala
opening ceremony in March, and the church received dozens of congratulatory
telegrams from public officials, including the arch-conservative, then-Governor
Ronald Reagan!
In Perry’s sermons there, as
well as those at the many gay and straight Christian groups he visited, the gay
reverend preached the concept of radical inclusion. To the MCC, God loved all
his children unconditionally, and invited all of them to Communion and
community. The MCC admitted its first female minister, the Reverend Freda
Smith, in 1972, and committed itself to gender equality and an increased
ministry to the lesbian and “woman-identified” communities. Blind and deaf
Christians, too often ignored by mainstream denominations, were also made to
feel at home at MCC services, and the Church regularly made use of Braille
materials and sign-language interpreters. Some congregations even welcomed
transsexuals and leather fetishists, then considered controversial in much of
the gay world.
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| The MCC's outreach to transsexuals was controversial even among gays |
Because of its inclusionary
ethic, as well as the diverse sectarian backgrounds of the attendees, MCC
services varied in style and content from flock to flock, and from Sunday to
Sunday. A Bible-based, bare-bones Baptist-like gathering might be followed the
next week by a High Church Anglican-style communion, and an quiet quasi-Quaker
sharing session could happen at the same church that celebrated a
smells-n’-bells liturgy cribbed from the Catholic Mass. Perry himself never
strayed too far from his Pentecostal and Evangelical roots at his own services,
and favored an emotional preaching style and a Christ-centered message of
personal salvation through God’s grace.
Despite its ultra-liberal stance in the fields of human sexuality
and social action, the MCC always retained a fairly orthodox,
Nicene-creed-influenced statement of faith as its primary raison d’etre. To Perry, the MCC was Christian first, and
gay-friendly second, although he did allow and approve of such innovations as
having handholding couples take communion together, and sermons with humor and
references drawn from, and directed to, the homosexual culture.
Community-building was an important element as well, and to this day MCC
congregations sponsor active social calendars along with their ministries.
One of the MCC’s unorthodox
evangelizing tactics was for ministers to visit gay bars on Saturday nights,
and witness to receptive gays with smiles, drinks and tracts like this one:
What are you doing tomorrow? Tonight you are having a good time, but will you have a good time tomorrow and all the tomorrows after night? Tonight you might find love, but will that love be with you tomorrow? There is one way to follow that will guarantee love and happiness for all the tomorrows in your life. That way is the way of Christ. His love can give you eternal happiness. Christ loves all men no matter what their race or their sexual inclination.
As might have been expected,
the backlash against the MCC by orthodox religionists was fierce. Some of their
opponents were outright thugs and terrorists, and MCC churches across America
were picketed, vandalized, and even burned.
Church contingents and floats in Gay Pride gatherings and parades were a
favorite target of Fundamentalist protestors, who sometimes physically assaulted
MCC ministers and laity at them. A lesbian MCC pastor in Houston had a cross
burned on her lawn; live ammunition had been fixed onto its crux, and the woman
and her partner were almost killed when the flames set off the cartridges and
sent bullets crashing through their windows.
Since the burning of the
Mother Church in 1973, seventeen MCC meeting places were torched by persons
unknown (three in 1973 alone), and it wasn’t until 1985 that the annual Church
General Conference went off without someone calling in a bomb threat.
All these incidents paled in
comparison to what happened in New Orleans on June 24, 1973. It was Gay Pride
Day in the Crescent City, and the MCC was having a post-parade beer bash in the
UpStairs, a French Quarter bar that had until recently served as the local
church’s worship spot. Located on the third floor of an old building, the party
was in full swing when someone opened the bar’s front door, and an immense
fireball roared into the packed room. The backdraft blew out all the electrical
lights, and spread flames and smoke all over the room. Patrons panicked in the
smoke, fire and chaos, trampling each other, and trying to squeeze through any
aperture that led out of the inferno. Investigators later determined that
someone had started the fire by pouring accelerant on the building’s stairs,
lighting it, and waiting for the flames to burn up to the third floor.
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| The aftermath of the UpStairs fire.The corpse of MCC Rev. Bill Larson is visible at the second window from the right, on the second floor. |
Although thirty-two people
perished in the fire – the deadliest conflagration in New Orleans history – the
press expressed little sympathy. Instead, local papers covering the story made
snide insinuations about the UpStairs and its patrons, and published a macabre
photo of MCC Rev. Bill Larson’s charred corpse trapped under a metal pipe in
one of the UpStairs’ windows. The city and state governments were even worse,
with nary a word of condolence for any of victims or their families from
elected officials, save for the Police Chief of Detectives, who called the bar
a hangout for “thieves” and “queers.”
Incensed, Perry and his
associates traveled to New Orleans, demanding compassion for the dead, and
respect for the gay community in the wake of the disaster. Although a local
Episcopal parish held an impromptu memorial service right after the fire, when
the MCC tried to organize a formal day of mourning for the victims, they were
barred from every religious building in New Orleans large enough to accommodate
the hundreds of mourners who converged on the city.
Ever the adroit publicist,
Perry made sure his media contacts were aware of the situation, and how it
illustrated that too many Americans treated gay men and lesbians as less than
human. He mentioned that several of the bodies from UpStairs were never claimed
by victims’ families, too embarrassed to acknowledge that their loved ones had
died in a “queer bar.”
By the time the formal day of
mourning arrived, the story had been picked up by the national wires, and news
crews surrounded the small Methodist church that had consented to host the
service. Knowing that mourners would be photographed as soon as they stepped
outside the building, Perry informed the assembled flock that the press was
waiting outside, and gave attendees the option of exiting out a hidden back
door. None took it.
The persecution of, and
attendant publicity campaigns and activism by the MCC, prepared it to take a
leading role in fighting the larger-scale and legal – but equally dangerous –
actions against the gay community. In Florida, Miss America finalist, singer
and evangelical Baptist Anita Bryant fought to repeal an
anti-gay-discrimination ordinance that had passed in Dade County. When she
succeeded, cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene,
Oregon also passed legislation that barred gays and lesbians from teaching in
public, parochial and/or private schools.
The groundswell of
anti-homosexual activism inspired California State Senator John Briggs to draft
an initiative that would have banned not only gays, but also anyone who
supported gay rights, from teaching in the state’s schools. Early polls
indicated that the now-designated Proposition 6 had an excellent chance of
passing when it appeared on the ballot in the very state that had birthed the
MCC and housed its Mother Church.
Once again, Perry sprung into
action. He kicked off his protest of Proposition 6, Briggs, and the homophobia
that fueled them with a sixteen-day public fast in front of Los Angeles’
Federal Building. The Church also helped organize groups and raise funds to
defeat the initiative. (Perry noted that since election law mandated that
anyone who contributed $50 or more to a political campaign had to be publically
identified, the No-on-6 forces were receiving countless checks for $49.99 from
closeted gays and their less-than-courageous allies.) Eventually, the MCC and
its allies had swayed public opinion enough to soundly defeat the Proposition
that November; even future-President Ronald Reagan had editorialized against
the measure. Senator Briggs’ career ground to a halt soon afterwards.
 |
| Rev. Perry and a clerical cohort at a gay-rights demonstration |
The Reverend Perry, on the
other hand, was quickly becoming a major political player. In 1975 he had
spoken for gay rights at a meeting with then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter; two
years later, he was invited to President Carter’s inauguration, as well as to a
White House meeting regarding the American gay political and cultural scene.
Perry later remarked that his appearance on TV emerging from the White House
not only helped bring countless gays and lesbians out of the closet, but also
finally convinced his socially conservative relatives that if Troy the Homosexual was good enough to
meet with the President, he was also good enough to be part of the family.
Two years later, he and
lesbian comic Robin Tyler, along with a sizable entourage, traveled to D.C. in
an old-fashioned whistle-stop cross-country train tour. At its conclusion, on
October 14, 1979 an army of 75,000 people converged on the Capitol in the
“National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.” Several successive
rallies in 1987, 1993 and 2000 would be attended by between 300,000 and one
million people – awesome shows of strength for a community that just a few
years earlier had been a hidden demi-monde
in American society.
By the 1980s, Perry and the
Church faced its greatest foe yet: the AIDS epidemic, which devastated the gay
community, and eventually killed thousands of Church members. Too, homophobia
was back under a new rationale: gays were no longer portrayed so much as a
moral menace, but as a disease-spreading health threat, victims of their own
unnatural and uncontrollable lusts. When radical cult politician Lyndon
LaRouche sponsored two California initiatives that would have put the AIDS
virus on a list of communicable disease (and probably led to quarantines of
HIV-positive people) the Church helped defeat the measures. When Fundamentalist
minister and conservative activist Jerry Falwell said that “AIDS is God’s gift
to gay people,” Perry excoriated him for his callousness, and debated him in
several high-profile TV appearances.
Within the gay world, the MCC
became an important provider of pastoral care, and source of spiritual
strength, for people suffering from the disease. In 1986 the San Diego Church
held a fifty-hour prayer vigil for AIDS victims, and their families and
friends, attended by faithful from many Christian and Jewish denominations.
Local MCC congregations developed active ministries and healing services for
people afflicted with the disease. And Perry and other gay theologians
challenged the view that AIDS was God’s punishment for sexual license, noting
that nowhere in Scripture did Jesus threaten sinners with disease, and that the
virus was nearly unknown among lesbians. (Ironically, female homosexuals became
very prominent in the MCC as ministers and caregivers to AIDS-afflicted gay
men. As of this writing, a majority of the MCC’s Board of Elders are women.)
Despite – or perhaps because
of – the AIDS epidemic’s devastating effects on the gay world, the MCC
eventually spread across not only America, but the world. By the 21st
Century, the Church called itself The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community
Churches, and claimed congregations in 45
U.S. States, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Internationally, the MCC could be found in 23 nations, from Nigeria to Romania,
and from Malaysia to Uruguay. Although the Church was rejected for membership
in the National Council of Churches, it was granted Observer status in the
World Council of Churches, further cementing its self-image as a mainstream, liberal
Christian denomination with a special ministry to an otherwise-neglected
population.
And Perry’s star continued to
rise. During the Clinton Administration he was a guest at White House
conferences on AIDS and hate crimes, as well as an attendee at a special
Presidential breakfast for religious leaders. Perry also wrote two
autobiographies, a collection of gay biographies, a book of gay-themed
Christian meditations, and contributed to books on gay theology. The 65
year-old reverend retired from Church leadership in 2005, but he continued to
speak before religious and political groups, and agitate for gay rights. He
also married his longtime lover Phillip Ray De Blieck in a legal Canadian ceremony, and
successfully fought the courts to have their status recognized in the State of
California (although the nuptials, along with those of over 18,000 other
married homosexuals, were ostensibly negated with the passage of California’s
anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in November 2008. Several years later the proposition was ruled unconstitutional.)
Perry’s life and work, as
well as the history of the MCC, were the subjects of a 2007 documentary, Call Me Troy. Along with anecdotes and
reminiscences about the Church and the rise of gay power and consciousness over
the last four decades, the award-winning film featured a surprising revelation
by the now grey-haired Reverend: when he wasn’t clad in his clerical collar in
church, or sporting an expensive suit at a White House meeting, he was often at
the local gay bar in full black-leather fetish garb, partying with gay male sadomasochism
enthusiasts.
 |
| Rev. Troy Perry today |
A proud “bear” (a burly,
hirsute homosexual male with earthy tastes unlike those of the stereotypically
effete “queen”), Perry told Canadian journalist Shaun Proulx that he was
impressed by the “spirituality and the care – especially during AIDS - of
leathermen, the owners of leather bars and clubs, just amazing…” The Reverend
mentioned that, “Some of the things I’ve seen and witnessed at leather
gatherings are akin to reading about the saints filled with rapture of being so
involved with God and God’s love,” and viewed the S/M subculture as a powerful
spiritual practice in its own right.
In the forty-plus years of
the MCC’s existence, Perry saw, and helped direct a massive change in not only
social, but religious attitudes towards homosexuals, with many mainstream
churches eventually soft-pedaling or even eliminating traditional condemnations
of same-sex relationships, and forming “welcoming” programs for
non-heterosexual seekers. Yet his Church remained as vibrant and healthy a sect
as ever, perhaps because it offered homosexuals and other “sexual minorities”
the only major organized religious community where they could follow a
Christian path without censure or judgment.
As with the original
Christian church of 2,000 years earlier, a meeting of twelve people and their
leader had led to a spiritual and social revolution. One can only speculate
where the ripples radiating from that simple gathering in a Los Angeles living
room will lead in the years to come.
Sources/Links:
The Metropolitan Community Churches (worldwide site)
Call Me Troy. Documentary film by Scott Bloom, 2007.
Perry, Troy, and Swicegood, Thomas. Don't Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Perry, Troy, and Lucas, Charles L. The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Know's I'm Gay. New York: Bantam, 1978
