Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Gene Robinson

227 Gene Robinson On the sunny, snow-melting January day that I meet him, Gene Robinson cannot contain himself, he’s so excited by a piece of mail he has just received. It’s a copy of the foreword to his soon-to-bepublished book of essays, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God. I have hardly sat down in his office at the Diocesan House in Concord, New Hampshire, when Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the American Episcopal Church, starts telling me the story of how Desmond Tutu came to provide the statement. “We met in September 2007. It was a thrilling, humbling experience . Often people are at a loss for words when they meet me. That’s how I felt meeting Tutu.” The two spent time together, after which Tutu offered to provide Robinson with some words to open his book. Weeks, then months, went by without the promised statement . “As late as a week ago, I was watching Tutu on TV. He was trying to quell the violence in Kenya. And, of course, I was thinking, Why isn’t he home writing my foreword!” But at last Tutu’s piece has come, and Robinson pronounces it “astounding.” “What he does—and I don’t think Tutu has ever done this in print before—is to apologize to all gay and lesbian people for the harm done them by the Anglican Church. He reiterates the idiocy of condemning people for something they can’t change.” Since his election as bishop, Robinson has fallen into the eye of a fierce ecclesiastical and theological storm. Conservative parishes and dioceses have threatened to leave the Anglican Communion, the worldwide body of churches with ties to the Church of England, of which the American Episcopal Church is one branch. He has been subjected to a smear campaign and been barred from the Lambeth Conference, the once-every-ten-years convocation of Anglican bishops. Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of the Anglican Church of Kenya, reflecting the sentiments of many conservative Christians, said of Robinson, “The devil has clearly entered the church.” Robinson, who has been called “the most controversial Christian in the world,” grew up in rural Kentucky in an area where “virtually everyone was a tobacco farmer.” His parents were sharecroppers. The most important aspect of his childhood, he tells me, was the “grounding in Scripture” he received from the Disciples of Christ, his parents’ denomination. “I proudly had thirteen years of perfect attendance : an hour of Sunday school followed by an hour of church.” During his adolescence, Robinson began having homosexual feelings, which he tried to suppress. By the time he left for college he had begun to feel how “unnecessarily and unflatteringly narrow and judgmental” his congregation was. He was ready for something new. And he found it at Sewanee: the University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Tennessee owned by the Episcopal Church. Although he chose Sewanee “for purely academic reasons,” the required chapel services led him to “fall in love with two things”: the Episcopal liturgy and the church’s two thousand year history with its emphasis on apostolic succession. He was confirmed in the Episcopal Church on Easter Day of his senior year, 1969. The following September , he enrolled at the General Theological Seminary in New York. When the homosexual feelings persisted, he sought help in therapy. After his second year at General, Robinson took a leave of absence to do an internship as chaplain at the University of Vermont. It was there that he met his future wife, Isabella Martin, known as Boo. By the next summer, despite continuing fears that his homosexuality was not under control, he and Boo married. The following year, he completed his degree at General. Six months later he was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood. After serving for two years in a parish in New Jersey, Robinson, with the help of his wife, started Sign of the Dove, a horse farm and conference center in rural New Hampshire, 228 Gene Robinson 229 Gene Robinson where they led retreats for religious groups, committees, and parishes . The couple’s daughters were born in 1977 and 1981. I ask Robinson about his coming to terms with his homosexuality . “We have come so far in this movement. It’s hard for young LGBT people to imagine a world without Will and Grace, without Ellen...