Death of a Cowboy

Peppy Jack McKinney died on March 18, 2011. He had an unusual name. He lived an unusual life. He was an unusual father.

Dad was an honest-to-goodness rodeo cowboy. He won his first prize money in a roping when he was just nine. He was one of the best high school and college ropers of his generation. Then he roped professionally until his body finally betrayed him in his early fifties. He was happiest on a horse or traveling across the country to a rodeo.

My father had a wardrobe that would make any gay man envious. He had closets full of beautiful shirts, expensive boots and belts with shiny buckles. Before he left for a rodeo, he would spend hours in his bedroom laying out his wardrobe. He took matching colors to the border of ludicrous. He believed it was important that his outfit match the color of the horse he rode.

He was a man of style and charisma. What he wasn’t, though, was a man who cared much for his wife and three sons. My parents divorced when I was eleven and Dad ceased to be a presence in my life.

In my teen years and young adulthood, I developed a strong resentment towards my father. I was bitter about the way he had treated my mother and his seeming lack of interest in me. More damning, Dad’s bigotry became more and more obvious as I got older. He would say terribly offensive things about people of color. Homophobia was not a word he would have understood, but it was a sin he committed regularly. It would be an understatement to say I had little respect for him.

In the course of time, I came to believe my father would never change and I needed to let go of my bitterness towards him. I did this for my sake, not his. I made little effort to stay connected to him, and when we did speak, I worked hard not to let his offensive remarks get to me. My soul declared an emotional ceasefire with Dad and I simply stopped expecting anything from him other than what I had always received.

Then, just a few years ago, something unexpected happened. My brother, Jim, did the most courageous thing anyone in our family has ever done. He came out of the closet in his mid-forties.

Jim’s initial inclination was not to tell Dad that he was gay. He feared, as did I, that our cowboy father would react out of his deep-seated homophobia and reject Jim. This prospect worried him greatly, because whereas I had long given up on a connection with Dad, Jim had worked hard to stay in relationship with him over the years.

In time, though, as Jim came out to the rest of our family and his large circle of friends, he decided it was inevitable that Dad would learn of his sexual orientation. He decided it was best that he be the one to tell Dad the truth. I cannot fathom the courage it took for Jim to have that conversation knowing all that was at risk.

What came next is the one great thing my father ever did for one of his sons. He accepted his gay son. I cannot say that he understood or liked the fact that Jim was gay. I simply know that he accepted him and because of that one surprising act he forged a much deeper bond with Jim. For the first time in my life, I was proud of my father.

At Dad’s funeral I offered a prayer at the end of the service. Here is what I said:

In death we are confronted with endings.
The end of breath.
The end of time.
The end of our best intentions of how to use our breath and time.

Words we wish we could have said or heard go unsaid and unheard.
Things we wish we could have done or experienced go undone and unexperienced.

So, we pray for your grace as we are confronted with Dad’s death.

Give us the grace to celebrate all that was good in him and about him,
and the grace to let go of the rest.
Remind us that your reconciling touch
can reach across the endings of breath, and time, and best intentions.
Bless us with your strength as we move between the celebrating of life,
the letting go of old hurts, and the contemplating of what reconciliation can be in your Kingdom.

And now, O God, as Dad approaches that last great round up, may he feel:
the warmth of a big West Texas sun above him,
the power of a strong horse beneath him,
the comfort of a gentle breeze behind him,
and the certainty of your healing love within him.

When my homophobic cowboy father accepted his gay son and told him that he loved him, a powerful reconciliation began. It gives me hope that such healing can happen in other families. Thanks, Dad, for showing me at the end of your life that there was more in you than I ever believed possible.

Looking at Gay Harassment as Part of a Larger Problem

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
The New York Times
Published: October 8, 2010

Weeks before she had any reason to know the name Tyler Clementi, the Rev. Audrey M. Connor was planning a celebratory day of worship at her church in Lynchburg, Va. It would take place this Sunday, the eve of a gay-rights event called National Coming Out Day. There would be prayers, songs and testimonies by three congregants who had successfully emerged from the closet.

Then, late last month, Ms. Connor watched the first news alert about Mr. Clementi’s suicide scroll across her computer screen. An 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers, Mr. Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge after, the police say, his dorm-room intimacies with another man were stealthily filmed and posted online by two classmates.

Those initial reports sprung loose shards of Ms. Connor’s own memories and experiences, she recalled in a telephone interview this week. She thought back to being teased as her sixth-grade boyfriend’s “boyfriend,” fully 15 years before she broke cover as a lesbian. She thought back to a gay college classmate who once told her that if his family had kept a gun at home, he would have shot himself in high school to escape the hatred and ridicule.

So this Sunday’s interfaith service at First Christian Church, Ms. Connor said, will inevitably take on a more somber tone, with a minister from the local Unitarian church speaking about Mr. Clementi in the Christian context of martyrdom.

“It may sound extreme,” Ms. Connor said, “but Tyler Clementi is someone who died in a battle that many clergy and religious people are fighting. For inclusion. For our understanding of what God wants the world to be.”

Well beyond Lynchburg and First Christian, the suicides of Mr. Clementi and three other gay teenagers over the course of three weeks have mobilized and galvanized liberal Christian and Jewish clergy members. While many already offered pastoral support to gay congregants and endorsed gay rights, the drumbeat of young deaths, all of them following on the harassment and humiliation of the victims, has driven up clergy activism.

As a result, it has also intensified the intrareligious strife over homosexuality. While there is no indication that Mr. Clementi or the other teenagers — Seth Walsh, 13, Billy Lucas, 15, and Asher Brown, 13 — had been personally assailed by religious leaders, liberal clergy members firmly believe that the traditional condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality in organized religion enables, indeed ratifies, the bigotry inflicted by peers.

“The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Oh, no, not again,’ ” said the Rev. Jack McKinney, a Baptist minister who does private pastoral counseling in Raleigh, N.C.

“And because there’s an epidemic of suicide among LGBT young people, my next reaction is anger,” he said using a common acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. “I’m convinced that the root of a lot of this is religion-based discrimination and defamation. Frankly, I think there’s a lot of spiritual malpractice going on.”

The conventional Judeo-Christian view of homosexuality as a sin, an abomination, largely derives from six sections of Biblical text, some in the Old Testament and some in the New, known colloquially as the “clobber passages.” Centuries ago, some religious leaders were able to similarly quote the Bible in defense of slavery. Yet somehow, while such passages as the curse of Ham proved mutable over time, the denouncing of homosexuality has remained a staple of conservative theology.

Ms. Connor’s church, for instance, is in the town made famous, or infamous, by a different minister, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who once described AIDS as “God’s punishment for homosexuals” and “the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a free-speech case involving Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., whose members used antigay rhetoric while picketing the 2006 funeral of an American soldier slain in Iraq.

And while Westboro is a small and extremist congregation, better at garnering headlines than filling pews, a major dispute about homosexuality has broken out in the country’s religious and geographical center, in Minnesota. There, the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Nienstedt, last month sent out 400,000 copies of a DVD opposing same-sex marriage as a “dangerous risk to society.” The archbishop subsequently refused to give communion to several dozen students at a Catholic college who attended a Mass wearing buttons with the rainbow insignia of the gay-rights movement.

None of these events, of course, played any direct role in the recent suicides. Official Catholic teaching on homosexuality, much like the rabbinic norm in Orthodox Judaism, tries to separate opposition to sexual behavior from acceptance of individual homosexuals. In various denominations, religious conservatives offer counseling to transform homosexuals to heterosexuals.

And yet, for liberal clergy members, the coincidental confluence of events has given them cause to mobilize. The Rev. Cody J. Sanders, a Baptist minister in Fort Worth, framed antigay bullying as a theological issue. “With dualistic conceptions of good and evil and hierarchical notions of values and worth,” Mr. Sanders wrote in an essay for the Web site Religion Dispatches, “it becomes easy to know who it is O.K. to hate or bully, or, seemingly more benignly, to ignore. And no institutions have done more to create and perpetuate the public disapproval of gay and lesbian people than churches.”

The Rev. Debra W. Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who is executive director of the Religious Institute, an interfaith organization active in issues of sexual health, last week sent 2,200 clergy members in a dozen denominations an open letter asking them to devote this weekend’s sermons to Tyler Clementi’s suicide. Her appeal reached an even wider audience when it was published on The Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog.

“Clergy have a key role,” said the Rev. Pat Bumgardner, pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in Manhattan. “We have a chance to shape public opinion, people’s willingness to wrestle with the diversity of God’s creation. Pastors need to step up to the plate and speak about the wrongness of bullying, the wrongness of cruelty.

“There’s no religion on the face of the earth that countenances the taunting to death of children.”

Email: sgf1@columbia.edu