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There was a proposition on the California ballot that would have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in the state of California se nineteen seventy nine, and I went over to a rally in San Francisco at the Civic Center and I wore my Roman collars because I didn't want to even know I was gay. I just thought, well, I'll be a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
You show up to this protest looking like a priest, like a cat priest.
And Harvey Milk was giving a speech and he said, we're not here today for ourselves, because we're free. He said, we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the little boy in Bakersfield who field there all alone. And tears started to come down my face, and I pulled them. That white tab in a collar out and I put a piece of paper and I wrote, I'm a gay man. It was over.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Bill Glenn, a gay spiritual leader. We'll learn about how he was going to become a Catholic priest but ultimately ended up on another path, giving peace to gay men, Dying of aids From My Heart Podcast.
I'm Jordan and Solves and this is what we loved. I have a super complicated relationship with faith and religion. Growing up. I was raised super Catholic. I was in the church choir, and I never missed Sunday school and one Sunday in the seventh grade, the youth minister gave this presentation to all the teens at Sunday School on Heaven and Hell. I remember he projected this chart onto the wall and the chart had three columns. The first column was about how you could get to heaven. It
had things like obeying your parents and never lying. And then the middle column was about how you could be sent to purgatory. That was small stuff like overeating and wasting time. And the last column was about Hell and that had the most extreme stuff murder. But at the bottom of the hell column there was a line that said engaging in homosexual activity. I gulped when I read that, so loudly that I thought everyone immediately found out my secret.
I thought to myself, if I ever acted on being gay, if I ever kissed another boy, I was going to hell forever. I spent almost the next ten years in the closet, ashamed of myself, and after I came out, I was furious. I felt like I had been controlled. But every once in a while I would go back to church with my family for Christmas or Easter, just to make them happy. And I hated to admit it, but listening to the music would fill my eyes with
warm tears. The words would overwhelm me that despite my failure in the parts of myself I don't even love, there's some being out there that loves me simply because I have a soul. I still have really complicated feelings about religion, and I struggle with how to exactly separate it from faith and spirituality, something that so many of us long for. My next guest, Bill Glenn, is the author of the book I Came Here Seeking a Person, A vital story of grace one gay man spiritual journey.
He's out and proud now, but he was once closeted in the Catholic seminary. He's been a therapist to gay men for decades and he has this priestly quality to him. And even though he's almost fifty years older than me, we had a similar upbringing in the Catholic Church, but for him that was an Omaha, Nebraska in the fifties. What was your earliest memory of church that you can recall.
My memories go back to four and five. I was one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family. My father was very religious. I don't think he was very spiritual, but he was really committed to the church. My mother was a convert. I went to a Catholic grade school. We went to Mass every day. I loved church as a little boy, and the church was often dark, and the church was bathing candle light as well as some subtle lighting, and I felt enveloped by it. There was
no place I felt safer, and it's beyond safe. I just felt here, I am, this is where I belong.
And now, fast forwarding a little bit or maybe not, when was the moment that you knew that you were gay?
When I was in kindergarten, I went to Catholic elementary school. There was a boy in third grade. We used to line up by class. I was crazy about this boy. I wanted to hug him or something. I wanted to be with him. I didn't call that gay. Of course, I did not acknowledge any same sex attraction until my sophomore of high school and the boy sitting next to me in home room. I could barely sit next to him. He was a basketball player, so he was in very good shape, and of course I had seen parts of
his body at basketball games. But I just thought he was beautiful that I just thought he was so beautiful and he was sweet, and that combination was important for me. I was so excited by his presence and simultaneously horrified that I was drawn to a boy.
It seems like you sort of knew that it wasn't appropriate for you to have this kind of attraction to him.
I'd go beyond appropriate to say I felt there was a defect in me, and of course, like many many many gay Catholic boys at others, I prayed to have the defect removed, and I prayed for that from the age of fifteen to the age of thirty that God would remove this defect.
And simultaneously, what were the messages that you were receiving about being gay from the church from outside of the church.
Yeah, I was in ninth grade at school I went to was a big football power in this state. And I was at a football game at the big stadium downtown and I was sitting with a friend and these two guys that I now kind of call thug as they were my class. They were freshmen, they were bigger
than me. And these two guys came up to me very close to my face and one of them said he's the one, and the other one picked me up by my collar and I was I had no idea how to fight and slug me and I was knocked back into my bleacher chair and these two boys went on and I was totally humiliated. Knowing what I knew about myself. They're on to me. They see that I'm this pervert.
Going back to your family, Bill, what were the unspoken expectations of you from your Catholic Irish family.
There was an expectation that I was going to be a priest. Wow, And I think the way I expressed my piety people at the grade school, and in my family thought, Billy's going to be a priest.
So fast forwarding a little bit, you decide to join the seminary and you're going to be a priest. And for the listeners that aren't so familiar with that in the Catholic Church, is that you can't have any sexual communication with anyone. And I wonder, you know what sort of drove you to the priesthood, this life of abstinence.
I think the majority of gay priests, by far, the majority of priests are gay. I didn't join the seminary until after college, so I entered the Jesuits. I was twenty twenty one. The Jesuits are a very large, actually the largest religious order in the Catholic Church, priests and brothers, and they are committed mainly to higher education and kind of the intellectual life as well as social justice. So
they're esteemed and revered. And I had been taught by them in high school and college, so I was already with them for eight years before I entered. I entered to be ordained a priest, and it's a very long path for Jesuits. It takes over ten years to study, study, study, theology, philosophy, secular subject, and I believe now looking back, I thought, this is the only way I can expiate my sinfulness. Mind you, I had never had sex. I had never had sex with a man or a woman. I had
many girlfriends. As soon as you got close, I ended the relationships. I couldn't even kiss a girl. I wanted to kiss about half the men on in college campus. Yeah, I was obsessed. I going to the college church and I would cry because I would I was I was so filled with shame and guilt. But it was a way for me to say, to make my final transaction with God, I will do this if you will forgive me for being homosexual.
In your book, you write about your struggle with alcohol during this time, and it seems like it's somewhat connected to escaping these feelings of shame that you had because deep down you knew that you were gay. Is that true?
It's absolutely true and an insightful observation, Jordan. I saw drinking my first week of college. You know, most drug addiction, alcohol addiction is an attempt to sell me dedicate. I believe that, and I've I've worked at treatment centers for years and the people They're all self medicating about something in themselves that they can't stand. And I was medicating myself around my sexuality because the prayer wasn't doing it.
When did it sort of reach a point where you knew that you had to intervene.
The summer before I left the Jesuits, I got into it. I was blackout drunk, and I was driving my dad's car coming home from an ordination and I left the freeway and ran into a concrete abutment that holds another freeway up, and I totaled his car. And I still drank for three months. I have been dead. I wasn't dead. And then I was riding my bike on Lake Michigan where I was teaching a Jesuit high school Milwaukee, and I heard the words you never have to drink again.
Hmm.
That was forty seven years ago. I knew at that moment it was over. It was over. And then I came out a month later. Wow, once the alcohol was gone, I could see myself as a human being and as alive. I was so alive when I came out of the closet, I was like on fire. And I left the Jesuits on it eight months later.
It was no coincidence that once Bill stopped drinking, he decided he wanted to come out and that he no longer wanted to become a priest. And just when he left the seminary, his priestly gifts of empathy and love were needed more than ever. Gay people were on the verge of a political, physical, and social catastrophe AIDS, But by then Bill was already out. He was actually pushed
out of the closet by politics. In the late nineteen seventies, there was a gay activist turned politician in San Francisco that was taking America by storm. That activist was Harvey Milk. Bill was attending one of Milk's rallies when everything changed for him. And tell me about that, Bill, What was it like for you to come out? What was your coming out story?
There was a proposition on the California ballot that would have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in the state of California seventeen seventy nine. And I went over to a rally in San Francisco at the Civic Center, and I wore my Roman collars because I didn't want to imno I was gay. I just thought well, I'll be a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
You show up to this protest looking like a priest, like a Catholic priest.
And there was a huge crowd and standing sitting before we went a little plane, and sitting before me were two beautiful young boys who had their arms around each other. I almost couldn't bear it seeing it. It was so beautiful. And Harvey Milk be sainted, reallyef founding grandmother of the gay world, was giving a speech and he said, we're not here today for ourselves because we're free. He said, we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the
little boy in Bakersfield who feel there all alone. And tears started to come down my face, and I pulled that white tab in a collar out and I put a piece of paper and I wrote, I am a gay man. It was over, just like the drinking. It was over.
Was your family disappointed?
So that Christmas I went home a paper in a class on the theology of social justice, and it was my coming out of paper. I did it like a fifteen page explication of why gay was a gift. This was unheard of in the seminary. Gay is a gift. Girl, that's immortal, sin, I go, well, I've reinterpreted that for you, if you want to follow my logic. So I went home and gave this paper to my parents and I
watched them read it. And my mother stopped first and she put the paper in her lap, and then my father read more slowly because what my father was reading was intense. And as soon as my dad finished, my mother looked at me and she said, Billy, I've known this since you were four years old.
Wow.
So my father was very upset when I left the Jesuits five months later. My mother she hated all the judgment and sexual shit in the church. She just was like, of course, and this boy is going to be alive now. And if you can't hand then, She told me after I left that Christmas, if you don't accept Billy totally, you will not see him because that man is in his life now and he needs us less than we need him. I was very touched by that, and she was absolutely right.
That's a gift to have a parent stand up for you like that. It's not as common as we think.
As very blessed by her, very blessed.
A few years after you leave the seminary aids begins really destroying the gay community. And you write in your book that you were called to be a spiritual guide. I wonder if you have a story that encompasses what that was like for you.
I came to understand, Jordan, that I had had those ten years of preparation in order to do a deeper work that I was called to do. I didn't know what that was at all. I was just living my life. And I had met my now husband of forty three years, and we were a young couple. And shortly after we met, I saw an article in the national gay paper called The Advocate and described four men in Los Angeles and four in New York who had this rare skin cancer
CAPESI sarcoma, and I was like, WHOA, that's weird. About six months later, we had a friend who got sick on a Tuesday and he died on Sunday. Five days and we had a large circle of friends and people started getting sick. This is in nineteen eighty three. And my best friend at that time was a Catholic priest who was a Franciscan who was let's just say, very rascally and his vows managed less to him than perhaps to some people, and he got AIDS and he was fired by a Catholic high school.
He was a priest with aids.
Yeah, he was a priest with aides. I met him at Dignity in nineteen seventy nine because I went to see what gay Catholics are like. And I went to communion to him and he placed the host on my time and he goes by your christ Hansom. I go, oh, this is a good church. I like this shirt. And he and I became the dearest of friends. And the last time I saw him, which was six days before he died, my husband and I would go to his house on Monday nights for about a year and fix
dinner for him, and then we'd prayed. It got the three of us with our dog, the four of us, and this last night, which I didn't know, is our last night. We always got up on his bed. Scott would carry him from the dining room table to his bead because he was so frail. He weighed at that point about ninety pounds. And he said, see that Chester drawers over there, and I said yes. He goes open the bottom drawer, you'll see a stole would you bring
it over? And I said, of course. I got back on the bed and he put the stroll around me and he said, you're going to hear my last confession. And I said I can't do that. I'm not a priest. He said, you're going to hear my last confession. Bell you have to be the priest that you are, regardless of the church. I started to weep and I obeyed him. So I held his hand and I had this stole around me, and he blessed me. I put my hands
on his head and gave him absolution. I started to take the stole off and put on him and goes, no, no, no, no, no, you keep the stole on you. I can no longer be a priest. You have to now be a priest for all the people that you and I have taken care of. And I started to weep, and I knew he was telling the truth to me.
And for people that don't know. In the Catholic Church, it is sort of the ultimate blessing to con fess your sins and receive this final blessing from a priest before you die. It's sort of like you're guaranteed ticket to heaven and so were you now taking on that responsibility for several other men that were dying because of AIDS.
I was with several many gay men on the point of death. And regardless of whether it's the sacer and a confession or penance, or human beings profound need to be as clear with themselves as another human being at the end of their lives. There's a lot of commonality to people who are dying, especially thirty five year old men. One other dear friend, This man had been my boyfriend before I met my husband, and he was He looked like a porcelain man. He was so beautiful. His body
was covered with carson. His legs were one huge lesion. I think his boyfriend had left him by this point and he was living. He was alone in bed and he had caretakers. And I went over to his house as I did often to visit with him, and he said, would you get up, would you get into bed and hold me? And I held him and he sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, and I cried and he sobbed, and
then he said, would you do my funeral? So I called the local There was a gay gay Catholic parish and I went to the pastor and I said, Tony, I've been asked again to do a funeral, and these boys want to have it in a Catholic church. And he said to me, Bill, this church is yours for as long as you needed, for any for any boy who wants to be buried in a Catholic church. I buried many men from that church, and the Swedenborgian Church and the Unitarian Church, and it it disciplined me to
do what Larry had said. Others won't do this. You have to do this. You think you left the seminary. The seminary was just a training ground for you to be in this epidemic, and I came to know that there was deep truth in them. I called it my ministry without portfolio. I didn't say that publicly, but that's how I understood. I said, I really felt I was doing the work of a Jesuit, or many Jesus wouldn't do.
What was the Catholic Church's response to AIDS at the time, and how did you feel about it?
Meager? The church was busy judging gay people. The church is very subtle in the way it uses language. It wouldn't say you causes, but that they would talk about it as the food of our sinfulness? What death is that I should die with a horrible, emaciated death with capacies because I slept with a man.
In other words, what you're saying is this was sort of implied that it was God's punishment.
Yes, it was a little more than implied. It wasn't. But the church is subtle like that. And in the Catholic Church, I was very faithful every Sunday and more often than that, and I would be this gay person who was not really welcome at the altar, although church will say, of course, of course you were welcome at the altar as long as you had gone to confession for your many, many, many gay sins. Oh yeah, could
you hear those quickly? Because I'm going to be doing those gay sins and you know later today probably you know. It's a mindstraw, it's a mind fuck.
You know, Bill. I wonder if there was a point in all of this where you questioned your faith. Even the most faith filled person I think out there would have some sort of anger at God or whoever they prayed to for this just really horrendous disease. And I wonder if you had on through a period that really tested your faith at that point.
Well, this agency I ran, called Continuum, which was took care of these triple diagnosed, many many of them homeless people in the really rough neighborhood of posted downtown San Francisco.
And what does triple diagnose mean?
Substance abusers, drug addicts, menly ill and died of AIDS late stage AIDS. We had wrap around services. We were open from nine to five, and people stayed with us all day, and we had doctors and nurses and psychiatrists and physical therapists. And I thought, what these men, mainly men, but a lot of women too want most deeply is community and meaning what did my life mean? Why this? Why this end? That was a very very common question that I experienced from men during the AIDS epidemic. Why
is this happening to me? I love this group of people, I love this I love this place. Continuum we lost one a week, so in the seven years I was there that we lost about three hundred and fifty clients. We created a chapel and we took I eight by eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member, anyone who came into the group, and men and women who
IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling, and when I left, every inchant space in that chapel was covered with pictures of men and women who IT died. I loved being there. I had to stop. I was forty and exhausted, and I was at a retreat, a Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon, and I found myself on the floor of my little room in the fetal position, crying, and I knew I had to stop. I didn't want to.
I felt some way I was betraying, but I'd given fifteen years to and that was psychically exhausted by the death. Because the death came at our agency and my friends. So often, you can't fully grieve that.
One of the questions my reporting seeks to answer is how do we find happiness and joy in our lives. What I've been surprised to learn interviewing scores of people is that those who are happiest among us are ironically okay with being sad. For Bill, he understood that the sadness of surviving the AIDS crisis would never fully leave him. He surrendered to that sadness when it came up and became okay with sitting with it and honoring it and
having the faith that it would pass. Sometimes, when I interview many of the people on this show that lived through this period, I can still feel that anger in their hearts and in their energy, and I understand it. I really get it, because even though I'm not a part of their generation, for some reason, it kind of feels like it's been passed down to me in a way. And I wonder if you still grapple with that anger, just the unfairness of it all, and if you have forgiven I have.
Such sadness that Larry and I did not. Is Brea the exact same age he died, when its thirty nine, I can't imagine what our friendship would have been like. With forty more years, we probably just get side by side houses. But that happened to me a lot. The way I understand anger as a psychologist is that I think anger covers up fear, and fear covers up grief. We have to work through a lot of men do
not work through their anger. They stay angry. Alcohol helps, of course, but below that is fear, and men are of course trained to have no fear. They're weaned of their fear that they have as boys. But underneath that is grief, grief about what all of it, grief about life's impossibility, life's suffering pain.
In July of twenty twenty five, Bill will be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, over forty years after he left the Catholic Seminary and one gay plague in between. Bill is fulfilling a calling he had since he was a boy to be spiritual guide. This time he's doing it being one hundred percent himself. You're now in your seventies and you're going to become an ordained priest. I am in the Episcopal Church. It feels kind of
full circle from my perspective. Tell me about what that feels like for you.
It was greatly unexpected, and a friend of mine told me to a lesbian priest, told me I should go to this church. She said, I think you like what's going on. There was four years ago, and I went and met the rector of the pastor and we had a honestly a very immediate strong connection, and he took me out to lunch. About a year later, he said, you still think about becoming a priest, and I looked
at him. I said, Stephen, you know how old I am? Yeah, in his kind of droll forty one year old way, and I said, do you know I spent ten years of my life preparing to be a priest. He goes yeah. I said, why would you ask me this? I was, I wasn't. I was a little annoyed, and yet I knew he was a man of great integrity, but I had no idea what he was. And he said, Bill, because you are a priest, and I want the church to ordain you and allow your priestsood to flourish. I
was seventy two at the time. I'm in this cafe and I'm I start to cry. I like, it's one of those moments where the psyche gets broken open. I'm going to be ordained a deacon in a month, and I'm going to be ordained a priest in six months at the age of seventy six, I am four years older than the mandatory retirement age for priests in the church. And the bishop said, no, I want you or Daan. You have work to do. So I'm like, it feels like a grace, it feels like it's own time.
So my last questions for you are the really, really big questions. What is God?
When anyone opens their heart to love, that's the spirit of God inside of us. And the more we connect, life is still with love. That's the presence of God. All the good work being done on the planet today by billions of people, that's the presence of God. God is love. And that sounds tripe, but it is so not trite, it is so true.
Last one, what is faith?
Faith is not being in charge. Faith is giving up control to what bill it's giving up control? You don't even get to answer the question to what it's giving up control. We know intuitively there is something someone some We don't have a proNT on for it. We're not on our own. We're only being held up the image of God holding me up. That's faith.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail dot com, or you can send me a message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a production of the Outspoken podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts, But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norvil. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.