The Metropolitan Community Church

Rev. Troy Perry, standing in the firebombed remains of his church.

It was one of the strangest full-page ads to ever appear in Variety Magazine.

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. 

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.

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 22^nd 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.

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.

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 21^st 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

The Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe

Lot and His Daughters (John Smith, ca 1720) -- a depiction of the Bible's most famous incestuous coupling

During the early 1990s, in a downtown Los Angeles retirement complex, a former United Church of Christ minister carried on a lonely battle against the ultimate sexual taboo.

Carl York Schmidt, founder and bishop of the four-member Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe, believed he could overturn what he saw as humanity's woeful ignorance and super­stition about kinship sexual relations.  Himself a married heterosexual, Schmidt claimed that both Scriptural and scientific evidence supported his contention that incest is harmless.

And he thought that the world was ready for his controversial message.  A Harvard Divinity School graduate and former minister in the United Church of Christ, the 80-year old Bishop Schmidt told the author he'd operated openly for many years, conversing with total strangers about his Church.

Said Schmidt, "I was surprised to find a Spanish man in the senior complex I live in -- a college-educated man, I think -- who, when I mentioned that incest does no harm, said, 'Of course not!  Anybody who does any reading in this should know it'. 

"I was in the hospital the other day, and I happened to show somebody my calling card, and she said, 'Well, that's interesting. It is true that there's no harm in incest, certainly in most cases.'"

Why was he so optimistic?  For one thing, he had already lived to see one supposedly universal and timeless sexual taboo lose most of its power.

Originally his ministry worked to legitimize homosexuality alone, back when same-sex relations were still looked on with the same kind of revulsion and horror reserved for same-family relations these days.

A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Schmidt had taken a doctorate of Theology from Harvard University, and had gone on to teach at Nashville’s Lipscomb University, and serve at the pulpit of the United Church of Christ. When the US entered World War II, the 30 year-old Schmidt preached against the conflict in the name of non-violence, and refused to join the military, or support its efforts.

Around this time, he began to doubt the truth of the Christian faith in which he’d been raised. As he said later, “I have studied the Bible carefully. My sober conclusions are that it was written by several people over many years and there is no God….I was a strong Christian and I was baptized when I was 14 years old. I have read the New Testament 37 times and Old Testament three times besides Bible studies. My reasons for discounting God are many.”

Schmidt pointed to the inconsistencies of Scripture, and the seemingly uncaring – if not sadistic – acts of the Biblical God, and maintained that the Good Book was exclusively the product of men. No Divine Being could possibly be behind such a mass of contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities, he maintained.

Yet Schmidt was still a trained minister who felt a call to preach – even if his message was essentially Godless and humanistic. In the 1950s, the only American organization with Christian credentials that could accommodate such a perspective was the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Schmidt moved to Los Angeles and took the local UU Church’s pulpit. 

A landmark to the Southland’s leftist/alternative community that hosted a never-ending parade of activists and heretics through its portals, the First UU Church was graced during Schmidt's tenure by a young, talented, male organist who was beloved by one and all. That organist was Bob Hull, cofounder of the Mattachine Society, an organization that discretely advocated for gay rights in the closeted pre-Stonewall era.

Disenchanted with the Unitarians, whom he believed “had (not only) lost faith in God but…had lost faith in humanity too,” Reverend Schmidt left Los Angeles for several years, and resumed his UCC ministry, albeit as a somewhat-closeted unbeliever. When he returned for a visit in 1971, he found out that Hull had committed suicide over an unrequited love affair.  It turned out that the young Hull had been in love with another young man, who'd gone and married a woman. 

This startled the Reverend.  He wasn't naïve – he knew about the games boys played with each other in adolescence.  But he was astounded that those feelings could persist into adulthood, and create such shame and pain that people could kill themselves when their desires were frustrated. 

Returning to his UCC ministry in Denver, Colorado, Schmidt asked a high-ranking "conference minister" if the homosexual sex act was contrary to Christian teachings.  Schmidt was stunned when his superior told him that being gay was acceptable under UCC doctrine, and that he might well profit by setting up a ministry to reach gays with the Christian message of love and tolerance.

Intrigued by this possibility, Schmidt studied the Bible for references to homosexuality.  Though the Old Testament had numerous condemnations of same-sex relations (particularly in Leviticus), only one passage in the New Testament -- Romans 1:26 -- seemed to look askance on the practice.  Reading the Four Gospels, and noting how often Jesus Christ's teachings seemed to supersede or reverse Moses', Schmidt decided that gay sex acts -- like non-kosher foods and other Pentateuchal peccadillos -- were really forbidden only to the Jews.  The New Testament made them okay for Christians.

While studying Genesis, Schmidt began to realize that an even bigger taboo was presented in a much different light than he'd suspected.  Researching the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and finding that the townspeople's "strange sin" was mistreatment of visitors rather than homosexual intercourse, Schmidt began to wonder about Lot and his daughters.  Here was a clear-cut instance of a real no-no -- incest -- being practiced under Jehovah's seeming approval.  Granted, Lot's daughters had gotten Dad drunk and seduced him, but no condemnation occurred.  What was going on?

Reading further, Schmidt found incest in the lives of some of the Bible's greatest figures.  In Genesis 20:12, Abraham married his half-sister Sarah, and instead of being damned by Jehovah like so many other Old Testament characters, went on to found the Jewish tribal-nation.  Later on, another product of an incestuous marriage was none other than Moses, whose father Amram married his aunt.

Even the story of Adam and Eve implied kinship coupling. If Eve was the mother of all living, where did Cain and Seth's wives come from? 

Schmidt felt he was onto something big, and expanded his ministry to include people in incestuous relationships.  Of course he realized such couplings were illegal, and made it clear that he did not advocate breaking the law.  But he felt that the laws against the practice were no different than the laws against "sodomy": statutes grounded in ignorance of true Biblical content, as well as in 19th Century Victorian anti-sex pseudoscience, and the general prejudice against "the different" of any society. 

Schmidt joined the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Church as an associate member, hoping to learn from their practices how to form a pro-homosexual ministry.  But the onetime Unitarian was dismayed by what he saw as an attempt to structure theology around same-sex relations.  He felt that religious convictions were a private decision, and that his mission was concerned more about people's behavior than their beliefs.

Exploring Denver's ecclesiastical options, Schmidt fell in with Mark Harding's Catholic Life Church.  An independent "Old Catholic" bishop with a checkered, controversial career, Harding accepted Schmidt's pro-homosexual cause and took him on as an assistant, but tensions between the two men eventually produced a falling-out and dissociation. 

Rev. Carl York Schmidt (r), around the time he founded Denver's Homosexual Church of the Universe

Soon, Schmidt formed his own group – allegedly with the blessing and support of the United Christian Church.  He named it "The Homosexual Church of the Universe”, and worked to legitimize Christian homosexuality throughout the 1970s in Colorado.

In a state still notorious for anti-gay sentiment, Schmidt found his ministry both rewarding and highly controversial.  He claimed to have received over 60,000 phone calls during his nine-year Denver tenure; the sheer volume of interest made him wonder if the famous Kinseyan "ten percent" figure was, if anything, a gross underestimate of society's gay presence.  He was on numerous radio and TV talk shows as well, parrying attacks by Fundamentalist Christians both behind the mike and over the phone lines.

Schmidt also found himself at the center of an embarrassing sex scandal. In January 1972 he was arrested, and accused of fellating two underage Denver boys, one of whom was a mere fourteen years old. Although he didn’t admit his guilt, the sexagenarian divinity defended intergenerational sex as “healthy” in The Advocate, the gay-oriented newspaper that reported on the case. When the case came to trial, Schmidt pleaded nolo contendere, and got a suspended sentence and $300 fine.

Schmidt returned to Los Angeles in 1982.  While teaching at Los Angeles City College, he slowly shifted the group's emphasis to incest, since he realized that homosexuality had become far more acceptable in American society since he'd started his ministry eleven years earlier.  Though the AIDS crisis had caused some backlash, Schmidt believed that gays and lesbians had more than enough large, powerful groups working on their behalf. 

So he began to concentrate on demythifying incest, as he had homosexuality, and renamed his ministry “The Incest and Homosexual Church of the Universe”.  Schmidt was careful to explain that he defined "incest" as marriage between closely-related, consenting adults. He had only pity and scorn for child molesters and rapists. 

As he put it, "Coitus by force is rape, but it's still coitus. Like both kinship marriage and molestation, the same act of incest takes place, but they're two different things."  (So much have the two been confused that Schmidt had considered changing his church's name to "The Church of Kinship Marriage," to avoid "incest"'s child-exploitation connotations.)

The Los Angeles incest ministry had been much more low-profile than the Denver homosexuality mission.  For one thing, close-kin sexual relations were far more controversial.  "There are many, many people who agree with us," Schmidt said, "but they don't dare show their faces to the public.  They'd be accused of being incestuous; there'd be calls for investigations, bad publicity, etc., so they just don't dare." 

But Schmidt never acted as if he had anything to hide.  He was aboveboard and public in promoting the Church, insisting that he has never advocated actually committing incest, a felony in most states.  The Church's phone number was even listed in the Los Angeles phone book's Yellow Pages!

One regular on the Church hotline was an anonymous non-member who gleefully spun tales of a long-standing affair with own his mother.  Schmidt didn't know the man's identity, nor did he want to.  If he did, he would have been legally obliged to turn him in to the police as a felon.  All he could do for such callers was to suggest legal alternatives, such as moving to countries where kinship marriage was not punished as severely, if at all.

Church services were held on Sundays at Schmidt's downtown apartment.  Usually there were only one or two attendees present. Meetings included a communion ritual with water -- the "universal element" -- instead of wine, and the singing of a pro-gay hymn that Schmidt composed to the tune of "America the Beautiful": "For love of man for man/All thee we rise and stand...." 

Even though his ministry languished in obscurity, Bishop Schmidt felt that the times would eventually catch up with his controversial ideas, and that kinship marriage would be regarded as the same kind of legitimate and -- possibly even mainstream-church approved -- lifestyle option that homosexuality had become. The octogenarian Bishop believed that California, the West's traditional launching pad for leading-edge ideas, was an ideal place to de-demonize the ultimate sexual taboo, and maintained his lonely mission through his eighties.

Like so many other liberal Christian ministers, Schmidt incorporated teachings from other faiths into his Church.  He favored Buddhism, possibly the only major world faith that didn't specifically condemn incest.  Bishop Schmidt advocated Buddhist-style meditation, citing the faith's almost complete lack of crusades, witch-hunts or jihads as a natural result of the inner peace the practice produced.

Schmidt as Buddhist monk Nashville Samitha, circa 2000.

True to his convictions, Schmidt eventually took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, joining North Hollywood's Sarathchandra Buddhist Center as a monk sometime in the early 1990s. He took on the monastic name Nashville Samitha, as a tribute to both his birthplace and his original surname, which had often been Anglicized as Smith.  

Venerable Schmidt/Samitha spent the rest of his life at the Center, passing into the Void on June 7, 2005 at the age of 94. He left nothing save for his earthly remains, which he donated to the USC Medical School, and a legacy as the onetime primate of one of the strangest religious sects to ever grace California.

Sources/Links
Bishop Carl York Schmidt, interview with the author, Los Angeles, 1991

Jayawardhana, Walter. "Buddhist Monk Turned Former Christian Minister [sic] Passed Away in North Hollywood." LankaWeb.com, n.d.

Hughes, David. "Profile: Wallace de Ortega Maxey." The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Religious Archives Network, 9/11/2013.

The Children of God/The Family

WARNING: ARTICLE BELOW CONTAINS EXPLICIT MATERIAL ON SEXUAL PRACTICES AND RELIGIOUS/CULT ABUSE OF CHILDREN

Children of God leader David Berg, surrounded by his
"Flirty Fish" female followers in Tenerife, Canary Islands

The video opens with a young man sitting at a small, cluttered kitchen table. Darkly handsome and clad in a red muscle-shirt, with a shaved head and bulging biceps, he looks as if he could be a new Marine out on his first liberty from boot camp. At first, he speaks haltingly to the camera, referring to vague “frustrations that I’ve had” while he fiddles with some objects on the table. He mentions something about an “opportunity” that’s just come up for him, alludes to unspecified childhood traumas he suffered with other kids, and muses on the proper way to commit suicide.

At about this time, the objects he’s been fussing with come into clear view: they’re ammunition rounds, and he’s been loading them into pistol magazines. He reaches to the side of the table, pulls out a Glock 23 semiautomatic, and praises the killing power of the .40 caliber round it fires. He also produces a Ka-Bar military knife, and boasts that he’s sharpened its edge to an angle perfect for “taking out the scum, taking out the fuckin' trash.” Minutes later, he also mentions that he’s got a stun gun, an electric drill, a soldering iron, duct tape and socks – all intended for use “to get the information” out of some unnamed person – information that seems to concern the whereabouts of “those sick fucks Mama and Peter,” and various other enemies. Still, he admits he’s untrained in the dark arts of interrogation and homicide, and may not be able to go through with it.

But the young man soon recovers his mettle. He says people near him are “dropping like flies,” and that he’s going to wage war against “…fuckin' perverts…[t]errorizing little kids.” After some more ambiguous reminiscences and references to pedophilia and child abuse, he seethes: “You know anger does not begin…to describe how I feel about these people and what they've done. You know, I mean, rage!...And uh, that's gonna feel good to do some damage even if it's not much. As far as I can go. That's what I'm gonna do. It's gonna feel so fucking good -- liberating.”After a few more words, the video runs blank.

Children of God "Divine Prince" Ricky Rodriguez. Several hours after
this video was made, he murdered his old nanny, then took his own life.

 The young man on the video is Ricky Rodriguez, AKA Davidito. Just three weeks shy of 30, he’s spent his entire life as the poster child, Divine Prince and Future Leader of a controversial Christian sect with a history of promoting open, “liberated” sexuality – even among small children. And now he is about to make a final, brutal, bloody gesture against the pain and rage he’s suffered since his earliest years.

Within 24 hours of making the video, he will lure his old nanny Angela Smith (formerly Susan Joy Kauten) to his Tucson, Arizona, apartment, and then stab her to death with the Ka-Bar knife. Then he will drive west, across the Colorado River and into the desert town of Blythe, California, where he’ll check into a motel around midnight. Minutes later, he will drive a few miles’ south of town, turn onto a dark desert road, park the car, and then blow his brains out with the Glock pistol. He will leave behind a wife, a half-sister and a circle of fellow “survivors,” as well as a series of email postings and the video for law enforcement and the media to peruse.

The saddest and most shameful legacy of the Children of God (AKA The Family) – the sect that Ricky grew up in – has come home to California, where it started thirty-seven years earlier in a quiet coastal suburb….

Hjalmer and Virginia Brandt Berg

The Children of God was in many ways the fruit of a Christian evangelist’s childhood traumas, combined with a serious midlife crisis. Its founder, David Brandt Berg, AKA Moses or “Mo”, was born in 1919, the son of traveling Christian revivalist Virginia Brandt Berg, who toured America with her husband Hjalmer as the “Berg Evangelistic Drama Company.” When they weren’t on the road, the Bergs conducted a large part of their ministry in Miami, where they spent the mid-1920s working out of a 4,500-seat theater and billing Virginia as “The Miracle Woman” and “A Modern Prophetess.”

Berg’s memories of his early years were colored by his odd relationship with Virginia. He recalled that as a child, he habitually masturbated, and was regularly scolded for this by his mother (according to him, she once even hauled him before the rest of the family, grabbed a knife and a washbowl, and threatened to emasculate him on the spot if he didn’t stop abusing himself.) Berg also said that his babysitter, a Mexican girl named Maria, would fellate him to sleep every afternoon until one day when Mama Berg intervened, and threw her out of the house.

A 1931 Bible pageant features a young David Berg (second from right). His father Hjalmer is at the far left.

 As Virginia’s marriage with Hjalmer disintegrated, her son David replaced him as both her lieutenant and constant companion. When he turned sixteen, David Berg left school, got his driver’s license, and then spent the next few years chauffeuring his mother to various revival gigs across America, and acting as her sidekick in evangelism. Berg said that on one cold Depression night in Northern California, the pair shared a bed for warmth, and that he got sexually excited lying next to her – a disturbing admission that foreshadowed his later alleged behavior.

In 1941 Berg, now 22, was ordained to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Four years later, after serving in the Army Corps of Engineers as a conscientious objector, he met Jane Miller at an Alliance Church in Van Nuys, California; they married shortly thereafter, and eventually produced four children.

After the war, Berg moved his family to the Alliance’s Valley Farms settlement in Arizona, a fundamentalist Christian commune where he found work as a pastor. However, in 1951 he left the community under a cloud of suspicion. Although Berg later maintained the split was over doctrinal differences, others alleged he’d been caught having an affair with a 17-year old girl who lived at the Farms.

Berg soon found a new job with Fred Jordan, one of the first televangelists. For the next sixteen years Berg worked for Jordan, helping him with his “Church in the Home” TV and radio shows, and managing one of his Soul Clinic missions. Years later, his eldest daughter Deborah claimed that during this period, he’d attempted to molest her several times, and had also started an incestuous relationship with her younger sister Faithy.

The Berg family in 1961

 Fired by Jordan in 1967, Berg looked for other missionary outlets. The former traveling evangelist went back on the road, this time with his family as a Christian singing group. Their act bombed everywhere they went, and in early 1968, Berg and his family retreated to Huntington Beach, California, where his mother was living.

Although retired, the elderly Virginia Berg had continued her evangelical work – this time informally, among the long-haired, scruffily-dressed young people who hung out along the beach boardwalk and pier. While still a suit-clad “square,” her son joined her on her missions to the beach town’s hippies and runaways. Many years later, he wrote of a vision he had then for a whole new way of evangelizing the alienated youth of late-Sixties America:

One dark night, as I walked the streets with these poor drugged and despairing hippies, God suddenly spoke to my heart and said, “Art thou willing to go to these lost sheep to become a king of these poor little beggars? They need a voice to speak for them, they need a shepherd to lead them, and they need the rod of My Word to guide them to the Light” And that night I promised God that I would try to lead them and do everything I could to save them and win them to the Lord and led them into His service…They’d been churched to death and preached to death and hounded to death by the System and it hadn’t done any good, so we just had to get out there and somehow love ‘em back to life.

Berg wasn’t the only evangelist reaching out to the California Sixties counterculture. Three hundred miles north of Huntington Beach, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, a small knot of converted hippies were witnessing to young people who’d been alienated from both mainstream America and the various come-ons of the “alternative culture.” Across the Bay, in radical Berkeley, Old-Time Religion met the New Left as Jack Sparks’ Christian World Liberation Front preached an activist Gospel that recast the Prince of Peace as a Che Guevara-esque revolutionary whose teachings opposed the violence and decadence of a corrupt empire, and who would lead oppressed peoples to freedom and equality. All over California, small Christian communes formed, likening themselves to the original cells of believers in first-Century Rome.

Dissatisfied with the Hippie counterculture, many "Jesus Freaks"
turned on to Christ, tuned in to the Bible, and dropped out of mainstream America.

 The so-called “Jesus Revolution” was underway, and its followers would be called “Jesus people,” or more derisively, “Jesus freaks.”

For the most part, these countercultural Christians identified not with the faith’s liberal or mystical tendencies, but with the evangelical, fundamentalist strain of American Christianity that stressed the “born-again” experience, literal Biblical interpretation, and apocalyptic “end-times” theology. Like the hippies themselves, this form of Christianity had been largely a mocked, marginalized subculture in secularizing, sophisticated postwar America, until its earthy, emotive spirituality was rediscovered by a generation of young people seeking authenticity and truth. Though few would admit it today, much of American Fundamentalist Christianity’s post-Sixties cultural and political power was forged in this unlikely alliance between youth rebellion and religious traditionalism.

Although nobody would become more identified with the “Jesus freaks” than David Berg, he started out slowly and modestly. After his mother passed away, he took over her ministry to Huntington Beach’s hippies, and opened up a Christian youth center called the Light Club at 116 Main Street, just steps from the beach and the pier. Every night between 8 PM and midnight, young seekers gathered at the funky storefront chapel, stretched out on its used furniture, sipped coffee and listened to Berg’s children Aaron and Faithy perform original Christian folk-rock songs on the low stage, which doubled as an altar in worship services.

But the real action at the Light Club came when David Berg mounted the stage. Emulating his young followers, he’d shed his three-piece suit in favor of jeans and a work shirt, and had grown out his graying hair and beard in the best Old-Testament style. In his sermons, the 50-year old father of four lambasted the “System”: the older generation, and the established churches, government, capitalist economy, and military that served their corrupt, worldly interests. Berg had rejected the role of mere Christian pastor – now he was a self-proclaimed Prophet, preaching a “Gospel of rebellion” and a “Revolution for Jesus.”

In the spirit of the times, Berg and his flock took their message to the streets. They demonstrated at mainstream churches throughout the Southland, accusing the established sects of heresy. When some of his followers were arrested at a local college for trespassing (they’d been leafleting students, and had refused to leave the grounds), Berg sent a platoon of his people, clad in Biblical robes, to picket the administration building.

Eventually the local officials and “System” churches tired of Berg’s antics, and he was forced to flee, with a few dozen followers, to his old haunts in Tucson, Arizona. There, Berg, his family and a few of the faithful camped out in a 26’ RV as he plotted his next move.

One of his closest followers in Tucson was Karen Zerby, a 22-year old from a straitlaced Christian background who’d joined his ministry to her more free-spirited peers. Soon she and Berg were lovers; when their affair became common knowledge among his flock, Berg justified it as a polygamous arrangement permitted for God’s true prophets. His legal wife Janet, he later told his lieutenants, was “Old Church,” and no longer relevant in his life, whereas young Karen Zerby (who was now calling herself “Maria”) was the queen of the “New Church.” The explanation seemed to satisfy both his followers and his wife, and Karen/Maria herself remained Berg’s common-law spouse for the rest of his life.

When the brutal desert summer arrived in mid-1969, Berg and about fifty followers traveled across the continent, meeting at a campground in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains. There, in his best King James Version English, Berg declared himself the spiritual leader of the world’s alienated youth – a latter-day Moses, with the hippies standing in as the Children of Israel:

I saw unto thee this night, my children of the hippie army, bow low before me, for I will give unto thee that which I have long desired to bestow upon My Children. I have said that in the Last Days, I would pour out My Spirit, yet the world has seen but a little sprinkling of the mighty showers. During this year to come right before you I shall pour out My Spirit in mighty waves upon you as you witness to the lost children whom the churches have created by their own whoredom.

Thou shalt see it flow as rivers in the streets, parks and highways. Lo, servants, My hippie children….I have seen thy tears in the night hours during all thy childhood. I have seen the burdens of thy heart. I have seen the in all thy struggles against the Evil One, and in thy heartaches, and when the Evil One hath sought to take thy life, and did seek to destroy many of thee through drugs. I waited for the congregations of the churches to minister unto thee. But they hardened their hearts and forsook thee!

Berg’s movement gained a name shortly thereafter. A reporter, writing about an encampment of Berg’s followers in New Jersey, was told by one of them that the Christian hippies “were not part of any church or group, just Children of God.” The name stuck, and became the sect’s formal title for many years thereafter.

Jesus' Staves: Sackcloth-clad Children of God in a street demonstration.

 The reporter’s piece was just one of countless media stories about the “Jesus Freaks,” and in particular, about the Children of God and their charismatic leader. During that period Berg was in full-on Prophet of Doom mode, telling both reporters and his followers that a devastating earthquake would push California into the ocean, that Europe and North America would incinerate each other in an orgy of mutually-assured nuclear destruction, and that the youth of the world had to repent and save their souls from the older generation’s Antichrist System. The Children, now growing rapidly in numbers, began to appear at demonstrations and government offices, wearing sackcloth, sporting wooden staves and ash-stained foreheads, and preaching their leaders’ apocalyptic creed. Thousands of youths, disillusioned with the increasingly drug-sodden, cynical and self-indulgent counterculture, followed them, including Fleetwood Mac guitarist Jeremy Spencer, who abandoned his band at a 1971 Los Angeles gig to join the Children, and remained with them for the next four decades.

By now, the main Children of God operation was at Fred Jordan’s old compound in Tyler, Texas. Berg had convinced his former employer to let him use the abandoned 400-acre ranch as an evangelical boot camp, open to all seekers. He also linked up with, and then absorbed a network of Christian communes organized by David Hoyt, a former Hare Krishna who’d converted to Christianity and had ministered to San Francisco hippies during the Summer of Love.

Scenes from the Children of God's Texas ranch, and evangelical work on the road

Hundreds of drug casualties, runaways and other young misfits were bused into these settlements by Children of God evangelists. The ones who stayed were asked to turn all their worldly goods to the group – such assets financed the Children’s growing number of collective settlements, and their increasing outreach beyond America. Seekers and camp-followers who fell in with the group’s communes and gypsy bands across North America and Europe were usually under the impression they had joined a leaderless radical Christian group, albeit one that stuck close to Fundamentalist teachings and an ascetic lifestyle. Many had never even heard of David Berg.

Berg was very much in control of the movement, however, via private communications called “The Mo[ses] Letters”. This was a series of hundreds of essays, screeds and rants written by Berg over a 25-year period, and intended for his committed followers’ instruction and enlightenment. Eventually anthologized into several thick volumes, the Mo Letters included such peculiar pieces as “I Am a Toilet -- Are You?”, a 1972 homily where Berg turned the act of defecation into a metaphor for Christian salvation, comparing himself to a bidet that was catching “the waste of the system” to purify it in God’s name, and urging the reader to become a fellow “Toilet for Jesus.”

A 1982 Mo Letter that reflected Berg's anti-Semitism

 Some of the Mo Letters’ nastiest materials concerned Jews. Berg, who had named his movement’s divisions after the Judaic Twelve Tribes, had gone to Israel hoping to establish kibbutz-style Children of God communities there. The government, perhaps fearing mass evangelizing of the population, turned him down. Berg never forgot the rejection, and for years afterward peppered the Letters with anti-Semitic vitriol, where he called the Jewish people “antichrist”, praised Hitler for attempting to check their power, and claimed that the Holocaust was a hoax designed to guilt-trip Christians into supporting Israel at all costs.

But Berg’s greatest troubles were coming not from Jews, but from nominally-Christian Americans. In San Diego, California, county government official Ted Patrick became alarmed when his fourteen-year old son came back from a 1971 Fourth of July gathering and reported that young people with “Bibles and guitars” had tried to lure him into their circle, telling him that his parents were “of the Devil” and promising him he’d never have to work or go to school again. Patrick investigated the Children of God, and even spent several weeks with them undercover as a new “disciple.” The experience convinced him that the Children were brainwashing their followers, and he soon learned of families who had “lost” sons and daughters to the cult, but couldn’t interest law enforcement in helping get them back.

Ted Patrick (r) "deprograms" a COG member.

 Patrick invented the process of “cult deprogramming.” For a fee, he and his associates would waylay members of the Children and other offbeat sects, and then hold them in seclusion while they confronted their captives, and tried to erase whatever indoctrination they’d received. As controversial a practice as anything attributed to the groups he fought, Patrick’s deprogramming work nevertheless earned him much fame, and brought the Children’s aggressive evangelizing tactics and weird beliefs into widespread public view. To mainstream America, David Berg looked less like a modern-day self-styled Moses, and more like a Pied Piper leading its children into physical, mental and spiritual slavery.

And the controversies were only beginning. In early 1974, Berg started teaching what he called “The Law of Love”: a doctrine that said the Children were “God’s last church…the last chance to prove that the ultimate Church can be trusted with total freedom in this last generation.” In this antinomian teaching, so long as one’s actions were motivated solely by love for others and for God, all Biblical legal restrictions were null and void – especially those pertaining to sex. One 1977 tract, “Love vs. Law!” proclaimed, “As far as the Bible says, for us there is no such thing as adultery! There is no such thing anymore as a Biblical law against adultery, as long as it is done in Love, because the ‘Law of Love’ supersedes all other laws!”

In the 1970s, Berg began to equate sexual and spiritual liberation

 The patriarch put this libidinous doctrine into practice with a novel evangelical technique that would be forever identified with his sect. On the move again, Berg and his close followers relocated to England, and with the hippie movement largely passé, turned their missionary attentions to London’s clubs and discotheques. When his female acolytes witnessed to single men at night spots, Berg noted that the males seemed much more interested in Dionysian Eros than Christian Agape. Was it possible, he wondered, to literally seduce people into the Kingdom?

There was only one way to find out. Berg instructed his female disciples that it was now their duty to become “heaven’s harlots”, and sacrifice their bodies for Christ, that they might bring men into the Church. Becoming something of a pastoral pimp, Berg instructed his “girls” on what to wear, how to witness, and how to turn a simple one-night-stand into a loving welcome into the Christian faith.

Mere necking wasn’t enough for potential converts. Berg went on record as telling his “hookers for Jesus” to perform “masturbation, sucking and actual intercourse…It's all, or nothing at all! Hallelujah!” He even told his female missionaries to expect situations where they might be raped, advised them to endure sexual assault as one might tolerate the greed of a starving child, and openly fantasized how forced gang-bangs could be an excellent opportunity for their victims to witness for the Lord.

This booklet explained "Flirty Fishing" -- sexual
seduction of potential COG members -- to preteens

 The sexual-missionary practice would be dubbed “flirty fishing,” or FF’ing, after Christ’s declaration in Matthew 4:19, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Berg would issue many Mo Letters on the theory and practice of this Christian sacred-whoredom, such as King Arthur’s Nights – a novella describing how his wife Karen and several other Children seduced Englishman Arthur Lindfield into the sect. Another memorable title on the subject was The Little Flirty Fishy, a children’s comic book that explained the practice to Berg’s preteen followers. The Mo Letters, as well as various public tracts, began to sound less like the Pauline Epistles, and more like The Penthouse Forum.

Berg’s entourage of Flirty Fishers followed him to Spain’s Canary Islands in 1974, where both female and male Children turned their evangelical and erotic attentions to the region’s many tourists. Working out of several communal houses in Tenerife, the Children not only FF’ed many new disciples into the sect, but quickly gained international media coverage, as both Time and Stern magazines did pieces on Berg, his followers, and their paradoxical melding of Christian witness with Swinging-Seventies sexuality.

One of many instruction manuals Berg provided for FF'ers

Once again, however, the exposure brought unwanted attention. This time it was from Spain’s conservative Catholic hierarchy, who complained to local officials about the cult’s presence in the Islands.  Called into Tenerife court in March 1977, Berg instead fled to mainland Europe, where his followers now numbered in the thousands. European Children had established colonies in England, Holland, Scandinavia, West Germany, and Switzerland, and had even converted an Italian nobleman, Count Victor Emmanuel Canevaro, Duke of Zogli, who let the cult use his palatial coastal estate near Genoa as a commune.

With the Children’s numbers and notoriety growing, Berg moved to reorganize the group. Since the name “Children of God” had become synonymous with both spiritual and sexual manipulation in much of the media, Berg renamed his movement “The Family of Love,” or more simply, “The Family.” He also centralized the cult, ousting his various regional lieutenants and organizing the Family as a system of cells with elected leaders that answered directly to him.

Berg got even more paranoid in late 1978, when the Jonestown mass-suicide brought negative attention on unusual religious groups with charismatic leaders and strange practices. Fearing that the Family would be hounded or legislated out of existence in the countries that hosted its cells, Berg organized the “National Reorganize Securitywise Revolution” (NRS). He urged members to either go underground and stay on the move from the System, or infiltrate mainstream Christian churches and slowly inject his teachings into their practices. He also refocused the group’s missionary efforts on the Third World; the Family’s real future, he said, lay in developing countries where the System’s media and churches held less sway, and the suffering masses yearned for delivery from oppression.

The transformation of the Family into a centralized global spiritual guerrilla movement, as well as the increasing emphasis on sexuality and separation from “the world,” cost Berg thousands of followers. Those who remained were even more committed to Berg’s vision of erotic evangelism and Christian world revolution, and although the group became less visible, its practices were more radical than ever.

"Davidito" with David Berg

No person more symbolized the ideals of Berg and the Family than Karen-Maria Zerby’s son, Davidito. Born on January 25, 1975 in Tenerife, he was the child of the cult’s “Queen” and a Canarian hotel worker whom she’d “flirty-fished.” Although the boy’s legal name was Richard Peter “Ricky” Rodriguez, Berg, who’d arranged the coupling, christened him Davidito (“little David”) and proclaimed that the boy and his mother were the “Two Witnesses” mentioned in Revelation 11 that would usher in the Apocalypse. The aging patriarch raised little Ricky/Davidito as both his own son and his ostensible heir to the throne – a Divine Prince who would be a living symbol of the Family’s commitment to create a new kind of human being.

As a cult leader living in a private cell of compliant young females, Berg indulged his sexual-liberation ideals fully in the raising of “Davidito.” From birth, Ricky grew up in an erotically-supercharged environment, and as the movement’s prince, was encouraged to embody Family-style sexual freedom. His early years were thoroughly documented in a 1982 Family-published book called The Story of Davidito – a compilation of Berg’s Mo’s Letters about parenting that was bound and distributed to Family enclaves around the world, and offered as a guide to raising the cult’s children, many of whom, like Ricky, had been conceived in flirty-fishing expeditions.

The Story of Davidito, and other COG publications that followed
the "Divine Princes" hyper-sexualized childhood

 Along with accounts of his more mundane activities, The Story of Davidito was filled with anecdotes about little Ricky’s precocious sexual escapades with both other children and his many female nannies. Page after page recounted how Ricky’s nannies would parade around naked, or have sex with male Family members, in front of the little boy. How Ricky would imitate them by attempting to mount little girls, including his younger half-sister “Davida,” another child conceived by Karen/Maria’s flirty-fishing. How Ricky would be present during adult orgies, wandering between the bodies and crying for attention. And how Ricky’s nannies would lie naked with the boy and let him fondle and suck their breasts, or would fellate him to sleep.  All of this was advocated and encouraged by Berg who, no doubt remembering his own dysfunctional childhood, wanted Ricky and all other Family children to be raised without the taint of sexual guilt or shame.

Amazingly, The Story of Davidito even contained photos of Ricky in sex play with both the nannies and other Family children, including one picture that depicted an adult female sucking the toddler’s penis. In that shocking photo, as in all the others in the book, the adults’ identities were disguised with cartoon-like faces that had been drawn over their real likenesses – a weird touch that made the book all the more unnerving. The facial obscuring was done largely because Berg and his associates were on the move across Europe and Asia, and didn’t want to be identified by authorities as they shuttled between Family safe houses, often hiding behind phony identities and faked passports to conceal their movements and locations.

Davida, Davidito, and Berg

 If Davidito was the Family’s Prince – the “little child [that] shall lead them” into the time of Prophecy – then his half-sister Davida was the Princess that symbolized childhood sexual liberation. Unfortunately for her, as she testified years later, this meant being the focus of spiritual father Berg’s lecherous attentions. Davida said that during her childhood years, Berg would fondle and perform oral sex on her (there was no penetration, since years of hard drinking had rendered him impotent). He also loved having her dance nude for him, and ordered his many female disciples across the globe to send him “nudie cuties”: videos of themselves swaying suggestively while topless or naked.

Berg's granddaughter, Merry "Mene" Berg. She testified
that her grandfather had sexually and physically abused her. 

 But Davida wasn’t Berg’s only young victim. In the early 1980s, when Berg and his followers were staying at a secret compound in the Philippines, the sexagenarian sect leader continually molested his granddaughter Merry, AKA Mene, the daughter of his son Aaron’s second wife Shula. Berg also forced her to have sex with Ricky, since he wanted her to get pregnant and continue his family line.  When she resisted Berg, he “exorcised” her by tying her to her bed, beating her with a rod, and spanking her bare bottom in front of her friends and Family leaders. Astonishingly, the Family transcribed the “exorcism”, published it in a Mo Letter called The Last State, and made it required reading for all sect members.

By this time, hundreds of Family children, born of marriages, trysts, and flirty-fishing, and raised inside the cult according to Berg’s principles, were now reaching puberty. Within Family colonies, Berg set up groups known as Teen Combos to indoctrinate, educate and socialize the adolescents, and crush any rebellion they might display towards him, the sect or their way of life. Troublemaking teens were sent to so-called “Victory Camps” in the Philippines, Japan, Brazil and Macao, where they were kept in isolation from the rest of the Family, and subject to the drunken, mercurial Berg’s arbitrary and ever-changing rules on behavior and discipline. Reports of beatings and sexual abuse, especially in the dreaded Macao compound, began to filter through the close-knit world of the Family.

Manuals like Heavenly Helpers helped COG parents
and elders control rebellious children.

In the late 1980s, Berg ran the camps, as well as the rest of the sect, from “The Heavenly City” – a secretive Family settlement in Japan that also housed Ricky and the rest of Berg’s extended entourage. Initiated into full sexual intercourse at age 12, Ricky spent his teens living out Berg’s ideal of sexual freedom, making love to both other adolescents and adults, including (according to Davida) his own mother.

A Children of God "topless feast" (note the cartoon-obscured faces).

Years later Ricky vehemently denied he had an Oedipal relationship with Karen/Maria. But he did testify in detail about the orgiastic conditions at the Family compounds. One especially lurid story concerned the time when Berg & Co. occupied a compound in the Philippines that featured a swimming pool with a glass-walled subterranean observation room, where voyeurs would watch Berg and others couple with their multiple partners in the water.

In 1993, the now 18-year old Ricky traveled to the United States just long enough to visit Washington State and legally change his name to “Richard Peter Smith.” He continued his globetrotting with Family hierarchs for another year, then returned to the USA and changed his name back to “Richard Peter Rodriguez.” (Identity-switching was a common practice among Family faithful, who used aliases and pseudonyms to confuse immigration authorities, and often chose common shared surnames like “Smith” to pass as married couples or legal-family members.)

By this time, the Family was once again generating media interest – most of it highly negative. Now an adult, Merry Berg went on NBC TV’s “Now” news show in September 1993, and discussed her sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Berg and other Family elders. Soon afterwards, Merry also testified in a high-profile British child-custody case involving the Family that exposed much of their hyper-sexualized culture to public view. Other Family children were also coming forward with their own horror stories about being raised in the cult, many of which corroborated Merry’s testimony. And on Halloween 1993, film star and former Family child River Phoenix, who once claimed he lost his virginity at the age of four, died in a Hollywood gutter of a drug overdose – hardly a fitting tribute to Berg’s idealization of childhood sexuality.

Along with the personal revelations, documented evidence of the Family’s sexual shenanigans surfaced as well. Part of The Story of Davidito was leaked to the press – hard proof that at least one child had been systematically molested at Berg’s orders, as an example to his followers. An even bigger bombshell hit the sect when one of its defectors turned over sixteen trunks’ worth of pilfered top-secret Family videos and literature to reporters. The treasure trove of damning materials documented the widespread advocacy and practice of child sex in the cult.

One of many COG publications that seemed
to endorse precocious sexuality

The Family went into high-gear damage-control mode. The sect commissioned an independent study of Ricky and other Family kids that seemed to conclude there was no hard evidence of maladjustment or molestation among them. They also pointed out that despite all the seeming evidence against them, nobody in the cult had ever been convicted of any crimes or misdemeanors against children. As for Merry, Family spokespeople claimed she was a delusional mental case who had been lying and “fucking the Devil” since she was a small child.

First page of official COG replay to allegations of abuse.

The sect also claimed that they’d renounced their more extreme doctrines about childhood sex, and that such practices hadn’t continued into the 1990s. Even flirty-fishing, according to Family literature, had been abandoned in 1987 when AIDS made the practice too dangerous. The Family also scored a public-relations victory when the British child-custody case was resolved in their favor in November 1995, although the presiding judge urged the sect to denounce Berg and his sexual teachings.

But the Family patriarch wasn’t around to suffer such an indignity. At an unknown date in 1994, the 75-year old Berg died at a Family commune in Costa de Caparica, Portugal of undisclosed causes.

Those who had hoped the Family would jettison its “weirdness” in his wake were disappointed.  Karen/Maria immediately took over the reins of leadership, and during 1995 issued a bizarre stream of “prophecies” from her late husband and Jesus, as well as beyond-the-grave messages from Genghis Khan, Jerry Garcia, River Phoenix, and even Art Linkletter (a miracle in itself, since the former TV host was very much alive at the time).

The channeled spirit of Berg insisted that his Queen marry Family executive leader Stephen Douglas Kelly, AKA Christopher Smith, AKA Peter Amsterdam, and make him King and second-in-command in the new cult dynasty. Kelly, who Merry Berg had identified as one of her childhood tormentors, became Karen/Maria’s common-law spouse – an arrangement that continues to this day.

"Queen" Karen Zerby, circa 2000.

 In these prophecies, Karen/Maria also clarified post-Berg Family doctrine. Although she emphasized that the days of flirty-fishing and kiddie-sex were long past, she stressed that the Law of Love – the pro-sexual freedom teaching that had made the Family unique among Christian sects – was still very much in effect.

Part of living the Law involved a new teaching called “Marriage of the Generations,” where young (adult) Family members were encouraged to sleep with members of their parents’ generation, in order to promote harmony and unity in the sect. Another one of Karen/Maria’s revelations, “Loving Jesus!” had Christ himself urging Family members to masturbate while praying to him, saying, “We shall have a great feast and we shall have great love, and we shall have a great, great, great big orgy together! This is My call to all the young virgins: Come unto me. I want to marry you. I want you in the bed of my love…” To critics of the Family, as well as disgruntled defectors, it seemed as if the sect hadn’t reformed at all, that it was deliberately recreating the same erotic-evangelistic environment that had caused all the trouble and heartache in the first place.

Three decades after the Family’s beginnings in Huntington Beach, the action was once again shifting to California – this time, to the little town of Dulzura in the mountains east of San Diego. Dulzura was the home of the Family Care Foundation, a nonprofit fund group whose top officers were all Family members, and which raised nearly $10 million in a six-year period from big donors and government grants. Along with its work with orphans and disaster victims, the Foundation funneled $70,000 to the youth charity “From the Heart”, run by Family member Philip Slown, who had been accused of continually molesting two girls born into the sect. Another Foundation employee and beneficiary was Paul Peloquin, who had allegedly abused Merry Berg and produced pornographic videos for the Family while running the sect’s “Music With Meaning” youth project.

For a few months in 2000, the Dulzura compound housed the Family’s most famous second-generation member: Ricky Rodriguez. But he wasn’t there for long; now married to a Hungarian Family member named Elixcia, the Divine Prince had become thoroughly sick of both Family life and his role in it, and finally denounced and quit the sect at the end of the year. He then relocated to Washington State with his wife, moved into a small apartment and found work on a fishing boat.

But Ricky had spent too many years in the Family, and been wounded too deeply by his elders, to ever forget the past and settle down to a “normal” life. By mid-2002, he had discovered the Internet, and had become a regular poster on ex- and anti-Family bulletin boards, describing his bizarre childhood and networking with other defectors and critics.

As he became more obsessed with his past, he drifted apart from Elixcia, and moved back to California in 2004, rooming with another Family escapee in San Diego and training for work as an electrician. His Internet postings started getting both more fatalistic, and more militant:

I was under the mistaken impression that having written [about my story] I could leave it all behind, start a new life that had nothing to do with the cult, and really ‘move on’ with my life. I know now that will never happen. I can’t run away from my past… Something has to be done to stop these child molesters…Every day these people [who] are alive and free [are] a slap in the face to the thousands of us who’ve been methodically molested, tortured, raped, and the many who they have as good as murdered by driving them to suicide.”

Ricky was obsessed with finding his mother, Karen/Maria. In September 2004 he moved to Tucson, Arizona, thinking that the peripatetic Family leader might land in her old hometown to visit her sister Rosemary. Ominously, he started speaking and writing about killing the Family Queen, and backed up his threats by purchasing a Glock pistol and training with it at a local shooting range.

Finally, on January 7, 2005, he made a rambling confessional video of himself in his kitchen, recounting his sufferings at the hands of the Family, and wavering between thoughts of suicide, threats of vengeance, and doubts that he could carry out either path of action. The next day he got in touch with Sue Kauten AKA Angela Smith, a close associate of his mother’s and one of the first flirty-fishers. An old nanny of Ricky’s, who appeared in Story of Davidito photos playing sex games with the little boy, the 51-year old Smith agreed to meet Ricky that evening in Tucson, ostensibly for a dinner date.

Sue Kauten AKA Angela Smith -- murdered
and possibly tortured by Ricky Rodriguez

She met Ricky at his apartment on the evening of January 8th, but never left it alive. Ricky might have tortured Smith for info on his mother’s whereabouts, but the coroner’s report on her death was inconclusive about secondary injuries. It did however determine that she had been killed with a single lethal neck wound, and had also been stabbed on her torso.

While Smith’s bloodied corpse was still warm, Ricky grabbed some belongings, jumped into his car, and headed west to California. On the road, he called his wife Elixcia in Washington State, confessed the murder and told her about his video, begging her to “come die with me” (she refused, and instead called the police). When night fell, Ricky crossed the state line into the desert town of Blythe, checked into a motel, changed out of his blood-spattered clothes, downed a few beers, and then got back in the car and drove south in the dark desert night, turning onto a dirt access road. There, at about 2:00 AM on January 9^th, he parked the car, put the Glock semiautomatic to his head, and squeezed the trigger. His bullet-shattered corpse was found in the morning by an irrigation worker.

The murder-suicide once again put the Family in the headlines, and brought home the reality and damage of the cult’s sexual excesses and abuses.  Many people both inside and outside the sect wondered if Alicia Smith had given up Ricky’s mom’s whereabouts, and if he had crossed into California to stage some sort of massacre at the Dulzura compound, only to lose his nerve, as he’d feared he would in the video he made just before the killings. Most, however, felt that Ricky had burned out on life completely – he had mentioned suicide repeatedly on both his swan-song video, and his Internet postings – and had killed Sue Kauten as a last symbolic bloody gesture to the Family before he sent a bullet through his own skull.

Current Web page for The Family (formerly the Children of God)

As with all the other scandals that beset it, the Family weathered the Ricky Rodriguez suicide-murder. Today, if one peruses its slickly-designed Web site, it seems to be just another evangelical Christian organization spreading the Good News and doing humanitarian work across the globe. But its critics and “survivors” maintain that it has never officially repudiated Berg’s doctrines, and that it continues to preach and practice in his spirit, often behind the cover of front groups. The Family remains controversial and the subject of regular investigations and exposes by both journalists and various national governments.

The seeds that were planted on the Huntington Beach boardwalk over forty years ago have long since brought forth creeping tendrils that have circled the world, sometimes entangling young and innocent victims in its vines. Whether the Family is an innocent (if strange) growth, or a noxious weed, will ultimately be determined by the Harvester that David Berg claimed to represent during his time as a modern-day Prophet and Patriarch of the world’s alienated youth.

Sources/Links

The Family International -- official Web site

xFamily.org (massive collection of COG/Family materials by former members. The source of most of the illustrations used here.)

Chancellor, James D. Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Lattin, Don. Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge. New York: HarperOne, 2007.

Melton, J. Gordon. The Children of God -- "The Family". Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1997.