Reactions to Robinson’s election came fast and furious. Messages flooded diocesan offices, split between those who passionately applauded the election of Bishop Robinson and those who just as passionately denounced it. “There were those who felt that it was the worst possible thing that could happen to the church and those who saw it as salvation, the most redeeming thing the church could have done,” said the election and transition chair some time later.2 Virtually overnight, Robinson went from being a priest little-known beyond his own circles to the most famous Episcopal leader in the country and possibly the world. As he later put it, “On June 6 I was just Gene Robinson, on June 7 I’m elected, and on June 8 I’m heading to New York to be on Anderson Cooper and The Today Show with Matt Lauer.”3
Bishop V. Gene Robinson speaks at a ceremonial event that was part of the inaugural celebration for President Barack Obama, 2009. KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE VIA GETTY IMAGES.
The next step toward the formalization of Robinson’s appointment was to take place two months later, at the denomination’s triennial General Convention, representing the leadership of the Episcopal Church across the nation. The country’s lay and clergy representatives to the General Convention would be voting on whether this bishop-elect were “of such sufficiency in learning, of such soundness in the Faith, and of such godly character as to be able to exercise the Office of a Bishop to the honor of God and the edifying of the Church, and to be a wholesome example to the flock of Christ.”4 Since the church leadership and laity were divided in their views about the moral status of same-sex relationships, the result was in no way a foregone conclusion. The convention, held in Minneapolis over the course of nearly a week, was filled with public discussion both for and against Robinson’s election. On August 5, the House of Bishops voted 62–43 (with two abstentions) in favor of his election, and he was consecrated to the office in early November.
Coming in the wake of widespread political, social, and religious conflict over homosexuality that had characterized recent decades, Robinson’s election was momentous. That the Protestant denomination most closely associated with the nation’s traditional small-c conservative elite would elect a gay man bishop was remarkable, most especially because it risked ecclesiastical rupture on a broad scale. Indeed, that rupture came swiftly: several ultra-conservative bishops, priests, and parishes renounced the US denomination to form a new ecclesiastical body—the Anglican Church in North America—and affiliate with the Global Anglican Future Conference, an international body that broke away from the worldwide Anglican Communion in 2008; a smaller number of departing Episcopalians joined the Roman Catholic Church, whose stance against same-sex relationships was unwavering. This entire falling-out reflected other acute rifts across American Christianity, as various Protestant organizations and denominations faced internal divisions and departures over homosexuality. Opposing sides coalesced their respective forces. And as the LGBT rights movement progressively won victory after victory, its staunchest foes—representatives of the Christian right—stoked fear about the future of America in a bid to stem the tide.
By the time the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage across the land, American Christianity seemed to have split into two oppositional, mutually hostile faiths. Christianity had never been a unified tradition within the United States, of course—one could make the case for ten or fifty or five hundred different versions of Christian affiliation, depending on different criteria of belief and belonging. But this split inside the nation’s largest religious tradition felt monumental precisely because the two sides fought against each other’s worldview so bitterly, reading wholly different values and commitments in the tradition itself. The Christian right was far larger than its progressive counterpart, but the progressives were in good company with a whole host of other groups, including many Jews and the majority of secularists. However one parsed it, sex had torn American Christianity asunder into enemy faiths.
VICKY GENE ROBINSON GREW UP in rural Kentucky, the child of tobacco sharecroppers. The family home had no running water or indoor plumbing. He was a faithful member of Bethany Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and his upbringing was “steeped in and nourished by a constant study of Scripture.” By his own telling, that nourishment went deep: “My greatest desire was to lead a Christ-centered life.”5
From an early age and continuing into adolescence, young Gene felt inwardly troubled, as he faced “a growing self-understanding that I was different—and not in a positive way.” As a teen, he realized that he was not aroused by things such as naked photos of women in Playboy magazine, and he also recognized that it would be very uncomfortable, possibly even dangerous, to admit what he was feeling instead. In the 1950s, he felt there was only one option, and he took it: “I pretended to be someone I was not.” Having learned from his religious upbringing that homosexuality was “repugnant to God” and the homosexual person an “abomination,” this deeply religious boy found the possibility that he fit such a category to be “an almost unbearable possibility.” He desperately prayed that he was not truly one of those homosexuals, as he thought anxiously of such people, and he prayed too that if he actually were that kind of man, God would change him.6
Robinson attended the University of the South, an Episcopal college in Sewanee, Tennessee, on a four-year full scholarship. While there, he was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and began to feel a call to ordination in the priesthood. By 1969, the year he graduated from college and headed to General Theological Seminary in New York, he knew beyond all doubt that he was attracted to men, and he despised himself for it. He attempted to get “cured” from this ostensible affliction and hoped that he would be able successfully to marry a woman and have a family. He did meet a woman for whom he developed loving feelings, and as their relationship deepened, he confessed to her his past relationships with men and his ardent hope that he had changed.7
They went through with the marriage in 1972, and after Robinson left his first parish ministerial position, they worked closely together for some years, running a Christian conference and retreat center in New Hampshire and having two daughters before finding the marriage untenable. While he loved his wife and the family they had created, Robinson’s longing for men and for a male partner intensified; through extensive therapy and open communication with his wife, he came to know that “‘gay’ was who I was, not just what I was drawn to do.”8 The book that “turned the key” for him and gave him the courage to come out was Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys for Gay Christians, a book that told of one man’s journey toward knowing that his sexual orientation made him no less worthy to God than any straight person. It felt to Robinson that the book was written directly for him: “For the first time, not only did I think that my sexuality and my faith could exist together but that they must, that I simply could not go on [living a lie].”9 He decided he needed to end his marriage but worried that his religious vocation might also be over, believing that while he would still be able to attend church worship services as a congregant, the church’s moral disapproval of homosexuality meant “I could certainly not function as a priest.” This anticipated loss was frightening, yet he felt he had no choice but to be truthful and live “a life of authenticity,” as his sermons regularly exhorted congregants to do. Keeping his sexuality secret had become indefensible.10
In 1986 Robinson and his wife divorced amicably. They brought a priest to the judge’s quarters for the divorce decree and then, still with the priest, held a religious service together to mourn the ending of their marriage, to pray for and forgive one another, and to commit their cooperative dedication to their daughters, whom they would jointly raise. “Somehow,” he later wrote, “we had managed to end our marriage in a loving way and not just slink away from God under cloak of night.”11 Robinson’s former wife remarried, and Robinson met and fell in love with a man, Mark Andrew, who would become his partner of more than twenty-five years. Raised by two sets of parents who cooperated well w
ith each other, the daughters remained close to both.
Contrary to his expectations, coming out as gay did not mean the end of Robinson’s ministry. Instead, he began to work half-time for the bishop and the rest of the time as a ministry coordinator for the seven Episcopal dioceses in New England. Within two years, he had a full-time job as canon to the ordinary, the chief assistant to the New Hampshire bishop. He “never, from that point on, never made a secret of my being gay,” he later recalled. Over the next few years, most everyone with whom he worked or who was connected to the Episcopal Church in that region came to know about his sexuality, and while some talked to him about the problem they had with it, his work as a priest never faltered.12 It was a mark of real openness in the church that Robinson was able to stay on working within it despite his open sexuality.
Major changes were sweeping the nation as he moved into this new life stage, and Robinson, who was keen to see same-sex relationships normalized in American society and the law as well as the church, traveled the path of ferocious conflict that characterized the nation’s struggle with homosexuality in these years. America’s clash over LGBT rights and legal same-sex marriage was the larger context for what was occurring in churches, where the divisions were deepest. The Episcopal Church was one of many religious bodies that struggled over homosexuality for years, as more conservative priests and congregations broke their ties with leaders who looked to be liberalizing Christian tradition. These splits exemplified the gulf that had come to separate two oppositional forces within American Christianity, and the politics that went with them.
SAME-SEX LOVE, SEX, AND INTIMATE relationships did not, of course, suddenly appear out of nowhere in the twentieth century, however much some detractors may have reckoned that the case. In America, laws against same-sex eroticism guided the norms of the English Puritan settlers, whatever breaches occurred, and same-sex unions were rendered unthinkable to many if not most Anglo-Protestants in that period. Well before that, however, early European settlers and missionaries traveling to America wrote of witnessing both male and female same-sex couples among indigenous people. Among Anglo-Americans there were examples of “female husbands,” cross-dressing women who lived in marriage-like relationships; numerous published accounts of such stories included repeated comments that neighbors, relatives, and others did not recoil at the relationship under scrutiny but rather accepted it as, one relative put it, a bond “no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage.”13 Up through World War I, passionate romantic friendships between women were common and mostly considered innocent and nonthreatening by others; these emotional bonds continued even after women married men, and though they often included some measure of physical affection, so long as they did not test the hierarchical order of marriage, they were within acceptable limits.
Views toward male same-sex partnerships were less positive, as these uncomfortably suggested practices of sodomy. The leader whom many later wished to claim as the nation’s first gay US president—James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor who served in that office from 1857 to 1861—was so close to his live-in male companion, Alabama senator William Rufus King, that political rivals openly mocked the pair, calling King “Mrs. Buchanan,” “Buchanan’s wife,” “Miss Nancy,” and more. Ridicule aside, police raids on spaces where men congregated with one another for companionship frequently uncovered male relationships described in marital terms.14
The language of marriage, and the staging of both male and female same-sex weddings, increased in the twentieth century, as queer subcultures flourished and spread across the United States. Partnerships between two women—nicknamed the Boston marriage—were not uncommon in affluent, educated circles, even if actual state-sanctioned marriages remained impossible. Sailors in the US Navy and commercial sailors alike were part of a maritime culture that gave limited accommodation to same-sex companions, including shipboard wedding ceremonies that mirrored those of heterosexual unions. As some sea personnel wryly quipped, “nothing’s queer once you’ve left the pier.” Army weddings during World War II—womanless weddings, that is—were part of a larger military domain that also celebrated drag shows, as did men’s colleges and other all-male spaces. White and African American lesbian couples also partook of weddings, which were popular in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. And while most religious leaders of that era may have balked at this specter suggestive of homosexuality, there were occasional exceptions. For instance, Mabel Hampton, a lesbian entertainer in New York, later described to an interviewer a black gay minister who would marry male and female same-sex couples in services “just like the regular,” down to the traditional vows.15
The relationship between efforts to improve the lot of LGBT people, on the one hand, and to advocate for something as radical-sounding as same-sex marriage, on the other, was contested within the community itself. When in 1953 the nation’s first openly published and widely circulated gay periodical—ONE Magazine, the young brainchild of an influential “homophile” organization called the Mattachine Society—displayed the title “Homosexual Marriage?,” it reaped consternation not only among the Los Angeles postal authorities, which seized the issue briefly before releasing it, but among readers critical of the feature essay arguing that the emergent movement should concern itself more intently with the legalization of “homosexual marriage.” The author’s chief rationale pertained to equality and respectability, as he noted that the push for marriage would enhance public relations for this scorned class, assuring critics that gays “are sincere in wanting respect and dignity!”16 Reader responses in the next issue were critical: one writer complained of the effort to constrain gay people with more rules and restrictions, while another resisted respectability another way, calling himself “an abnormal whose subnormality seems permanent” and who sought not acceptance for purported normalcy but rather “simple justice as what I am.”17 Another issue published ten years later with a lead essay titled “Let’s Push Homophile Marriage,” which also criticized promiscuous bar cruising, reaped similar reactions by readers who wrote that the piece “just stinks!” and excoriated ONE’s staff for printing a piece by a “humdrum” and narrow-minded writer who drearily aspired “to copy heterosexual life.”18
Despite marriage’s appeal to some gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, there was little large-scale effort to prioritize its legalization. To many, marriage felt conservative, unadventurous, and unappealing. Like many straight men and women who were living by much loosened sexual rules, men and women in the queer community wanted more freedom, not more constraint. Some would doubtless chuckle knowingly at the pointed question Howard Moody used in counseling premarital couples: “Why do you want to get married and spoil a beautiful friendship?”19
More importantly, the religious consensus regarding homosexuality’s sinfulness remained powerful in the wider culture and the nation’s social and legal institutions, so that openly gay people still faced abundant discrimination in the 1960s, even criminalization. Illinois in 1961 had been the first state in the union to repeal its anti-sodomy law, and such laws stayed on the books in most states for years. The American Psychiatric Association deemed homosexuality a mental disorder until 1973. At risk for consensual sex acts performed in the privacy of their own homes, and deemed by society to be mentally disturbed, those identifying as homosexual reasonably did not see marriage as an urgent matter. After a police raid set off the Stonewall riots in 1969, catalyzing and rapidly expanding the modern LGBT rights movement, the fight for equality and justice for sexual minorities emphasized pride and in-your-face revolutionary politics. A lot of people in these circles were not merely indifferent to marriage; they detested it. As activists in the Gay Liberation Front put it shortly after Stonewall, the institution was “one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system” and the family “the microcosm of oppression.” Same-sex marriage was still marriage, so it could only be “classed as reactionary.”20 Radical lesbians favored the elimination of marriage altogether, whi
le other sex radicals called for an expansion of marriage beyond monogamy, to include all manner of polyamorous relationships. In its 1972 list of reform demands, the National Coalition of Gay Organizations included the repeal of all marriage laws that constrained the sex or number of individuals who could enter into an official marriage. The group also called for the expansion of the legal benefits accorded to married persons to all persons who cohabit, apart from the sex or numbers of people involved.
But for those who did prioritize marriage rights for same-sex couples, this priority was often closely linked to religious faith. Some didn’t care if was called “marriage” or not. For example, New York’s Church of the Beloved Disciple was a predominantly gay congregation whose priest was openly performing religious ceremonies of “holy union” for same-sex couples. As Father Clement stated to one interviewer, “We don’t use the term marriage because that implies a legal concept and a marriage certificate through the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and we are interested in a church concept which is spiritual: people pledging their love together in the eyes of God and asking the blessing of God.”21 This was a religious rite that had nothing to do with the state; government officials, allies believed, had no right to interfere. The right to solemnize partnerships outside the reach of the state mattered, and in 1971 the Gay Activists Alliance staged a protest inside the New York Marriage License Bureau, along with an engagement party for same-sex couples; this was to protest the threat by the city clerk to take legal action against the Church of the Beloved Disciple for its ceremonies.
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