During his years of concealing his own same-sex
urges, the Reverend Mel White was a ghostwriter for
iconic antigay evangelical figures such as Pat
Robertson and Billy Graham. When the Reverend
Jerry Falwell got wind of White's prowess, White
was recruited to pen Falwell: An
Autobiography, published in 1987. Eventually White
came out and became a voice, as the cofounder of
Soulforce, for open and closeted LGBT people against the
religious right's condemnation. Here, White
remembers his relationship with Falwell, who died
May 15, and looks to the future of the antigay movement.
I was in the
dentist's chair when I heard that Jerry Falwell passed away.
I couldn't believe that I started crying. I had to
find an office and I just cried. I was trying to
think, Why the heck am I crying? I think I was
crying for his family. He was a great father and
husband, and he was a really good pastor--I've
been going to his church for years, so I
know--and he was a really good president of a
university. There are 20,000 students at Liberty University,
which Falwell founded, and they all like him.
I knew there
would be just a huge hole in Virginia and in Lynchburg, and
I felt for those people. But at the same time I was feeling
more strongly that now we'll never have a
chance for Jerry Falwell to say, "I was wrong.
I did wrong, and I said wrong, and I'm sorry. God
creates gay people and loves them just like she
created them. I'm not going to say anything
more against gay people because I was wrong." Imagine
the consequence that would have had for so many
people. Falwell was the face of homophobia.
Back when I was
still afraid that I was sick and sinful for being gay, I
got a job as a ghostwriter to get my kids through college.
First I ghostwrote for Billy Graham, and the next
thing you know, Jerry Falwell heard, and I ended up
ghostwriting his autobiography. When you have to write
450 pages about a guy, you get really intimate with him, and
I learned about this guy inside and out. I kind of
liked him. I didn't like what he said, but he
had a private persona that was really quite amiable.
After putting myself through exorcism, undergoing
electric-shock therapy, and then slitting my wrists
and going to the hospital, my wife finally said, "You
know, you really have a life of your own. I like gay
people, but I just didn't want you to be one."
Eventually I met
and fell in love with Gary Nixon, and as soon as I
realized that my sexuality was a gift from God and got over
my fear and guilt, I wrote Stranger at the
Gate, in which I told the leaders of the religious
right that they are doing terrible damage and they
must stop.
Then in 1999, I
told Falwell that I had 5,000 people trained to march on
his church to close him down.
"OK, what
else do you suggest?" he asked me.
I said,
"I'll take 200 of those gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender people and straight allies,
and we'll come visit with you for a weekend."
So he said we
would have an antiviolence summit, which 183 accredited
news crews attended. It was an amazing thing. And then the
minute he invited us, he started getting dumped on by
all his fundamentalist friends and donors--big
donors. Like Tim LaHaye and Gary Bauer and Jim Dobson
at Focus on the Family. So he started pulling back, and
after that event he refused to see me again. My
partner and I moved here, to Lynchburg, Va., hoping
that he would be tortured a bit by our presence and he
would see a healthy gay couple and realize that he was
wrong, because he's changed on other things. He
died first, which was a chicken way out.
He was a racist
in the 1950s and 1960s. He called the movement for black
equality the civil wrongs movement, and he bad-mouthed
Martin Luther King Jr. But in 1964, he began to
realize something was wrong and he reached out to
black people--he told me stories about a shoeshine man
who really won his heart. Two years ago he got
Lynchburg's NAACP award, which shows not only
did he change, but he acted it out.
I had a paradigm
for change that I thought Jerry would succumb to, but he
didn't. I told him that I would be here until he died or I
died, so he decided to win the race.
There's a
whole crowd of folks who are fundamentalists like Falwell
who are using the gay thing to raise money and
mobilize volunteers just like he did. And I think they
are all as sincere as he was. These people really
believe that America is doomed because God has created a
chain of command: from God to Jesus, from Jesus to
men, from men to women, and from women to children and
so forth. When a man gets out of the chain of command
and acts like a woman, he destroys God's plan for
humankind. When Jerry said 9/11 was caused in part
because we're accepting gays, he means that God
withdrew his hand of protection because of this crazy
acceptance of gays.
As far as the
future of the religious right, Liberty University will
graduate 3,750 little Falwells this month. Liberty will have
a school with more students than UC Berkeley or UCLA
within 20 years. That's the kind of foothold
Falwell has on education. He's got an accredited law
school, like Pat Robertson's Regent University.
They're both turning out lawyers who are
wiggling their way into politics and government. An
entire generation is coming up that really loves Falwell,
and I'm afraid they're all going to be antigay.
We gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are
really missing it when we think the older generation
will pass and the newer generation will save us. A whole new
generation of people is being prepared to condemn us.
