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1 Birth and Beginnings Just as Coser (1971) imagined, the influence of Laud Humphreys’s family was of great importance in his life. Robert Allan (Laud) Humphreys was born on October 16, 1930, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, to Ira Denver Humphreys and Stella Bernice Humphreys. Laud had two brothers— William of Oklahoma City (who was ten years his senior) and Howard of Kent, Washington (twenty years older) (Claremont Courier 1988). According to Laud’s daughter, Clair, his brothers were distant even prior to his coming out as gay. Thereafter they were hostile. Clair said that she only saw one brother (Howard) once, for approximately an hour, when he was passing through Los Angeles. For his part, Laud had hardly anything positive to say about his father , who served as a Democrat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1951 to 1953 representing Grady County, except that he sponsored legislation making the show tune Oklahoma the official state song. He died on November 18, 1953, while serving a second term as House representative. His obituary in the Daily Oklahoman (1953, 1) notes that he was a “retired wire chief of Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. Survivors include three sons.” Laud also recalled that, “as a state legislator, my father was most diligent in promoting the passage of Sunday ‘blue laws.’ He also helped establish a law school in the attic of the State Capitol so that blacks would not have to be admitted to the University” (Humphreys 1975, 229). Referring to his own imprisonment for destruction of federal property during a demonstration against the Vietnam War, Laud noted, “I am one of those people who have been officially ‘rehabilitated’ by months in jail and years on probation, yet I still have utter contempt for a number of statutes on the law books” (Humphreys 1975, 229), emphasizing the repressive bills sponsored by his father. 13 At the time of his father’s death, Laud wrote a long, melancholy letter to him retained in his files at the time of his own death (Humphreys, n.d.). It reads in part: “I regret that you and I never shared the two great secrets that kept us from being really close to each other. You see I never told you that I was gay.” Laud went on to explain that he learned that his father was gay immediately after his funeral. “I remember that you went off alone to the Mardi Gras every year and now I understand why.” Laud also noted in the letter that he had written to his brothers three years earlier to tell them he was gay and had had no contact with them since. He closed by saying: “I love you and still miss you. Please send me your love too.” From his records, and from his family and friends, we are left with no accounts of his mother, who died on June 6, 1946, when Laud was fifteen years old. Education In 1948 Laud graduated from Chickasha High School in Oklahoma. His undergraduate education included a year at the University of Virginia , 1948–49. He then attended Colorado College, graduating in 1952. While at Colorado College he worked as a reporter for the Colorado Springs Free Press. Both these institutions, although not truly elite, are relatively expensive. This, together with Laud’s father’s membership in the state legislature, demonstrates that as a boy he was probably accustomed to a comfortable standard of living. Laud graduated from Seabury–Western Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1955. A fellow Episcopalian clergyman recalled Laud’s early years immediately after seminary: “I met him in 1955 at a clergy meeting in Oklahoma City. Laud had been reared as a Methodist but wanted to leave all that behind him. He wanted to be baptized again, and was baptized again in 1955, to make a new start in the faith. He took the name Laud after an Anglican Church leader, William Laud” (Jones 2001). William Laud became the Chancellor of Oxford University in 1629 and did a great deal to encourage scholars (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church 1974). In 1633 he became the Archbishop of Canterbury and, in spite of his lofty post, was “compassionate in his defense of the rights of the common people against landowners” (Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2001), but he was ultimately executed in 1645 for his demands for liturgical uniformity. So the role model important to Laud Humphreys was a man who valued scholarship and the Anglican liturgy, who...

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