LGBT Pride Service

My Teaching Congregation experienced a much-loved member's collapse at its Pride Service in June 2010, and so rescheduled for a November date at which to complete a service in honor of LGBT Pride.


"Pride Sunday: A Personal Reflection"
by Paul Kent Oakley, Student Minister
Carbondale Unitarian Fellowship
November 28, 2010


I can’t think of Pride without thinking of Coming Out. I also think of some other important words. Welcoming. Open. Affirming. Inclusive. These words just feel good. Positive Honesty. Yet, whenever these terms come up, some good person will always wonder what all the fuss is about. Just like when we get to Black History Month and someone – no, some White person – feels put upon and asks, “When do we get to have White History Month?” – somehow honestly not realizing that White History Month is every month. So when a congregation starts the process to become an official Welcoming Congregation, frequently some people initially react with, “Shouldn’t we welcome everyone? So why are we singling out the gays to welcome?” – not realizing that religious institutions in this country have historically been actively involved in demonizing people whose sexual orientation or gender identity has not been accepted as “normal.”

Take me. In the mid-1980s when I came out as gay, my fundamentalist Christian grandmother went to the elders of her church to ask them what to do. She already knew the church’s teaching about homosexuality.” What she wanted from her elders was an action plan. And they had one for her. They told her to have nothing to do with me. And for several years she followed that advice. Many of the churches of America and elsewhere have actively damaged individuals and families and relationships around this issue. So any solution has to address that history.

Unitarian Universalism has a long history of liberalism. But did you know that a 1967 survey by the Unitarian Universalist Committee on Goals found that among our liberal people 7.7% believed that homosexuality should be discouraged by law? Okay, you say, that’s not perfect but it is a small percent. And it was still the 1960s. So how about this one: in the same survey, 80.2% of Unitarian Universalists believed homosexuality should be discouraged by education. Only 12% of us good liberal people believed that society should not actively discourage homosexuality. And only one-tenth of one percent indicated that homosexuals should be encouraged. The survey didn’t even ask people to consider bisexuals or transgender persons. And it is uncertain whether the people answering and interpreting the survey consciously included lesbians in the category “homosexual.”

So while we rightly should challenge conservative religion to move forward in greater inclusion, acceptance, and love, we cannot do so from a position of moral superiority. LGBT Pride and Welcoming are important to us because Unitarian Universalism too came through a wilderness of non-acceptance and devaluing of difference. Being a Welcoming Congregation committed to celebrating LGBT persons, our lives, our relationships, and our unique gifts is incumbent upon us not just because of religion’s bad track record but because we too came out of ignorance into the light of justice and inclusion.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride is not just a political concept. And it’s not just a lively party. It is about real lives. It is about the inherent worth and dignity of every person. It is a natural part of who we are as Unitarian Universalists, not just who we are as a formally recognized Welcoming Congregation.

Real lives. I remember the first time I realized that someone I had met was gay. It was the mid-1970s and I was working my first job as a stock-boy and bagger in a small grocery store. The brother of the owner was coming to town to visit for a week or so. But he wasn’t coming alone. Whenever the family talked about him, their love was apparent. But the curiosity was that they always paired his name with his – put this in quotations – “friend.” Herb & Jimmy, I’ll call them. Herb & Jimmy will be here next week! My boss’s daughter made a point of telling me that Herb and Jimmy weren’t gay. They were close friends who had lived together ever since college. They’d been together so long that Jimmy had just become one of the family. Well, Herb & Jimmy arrived and even an ignorant small-town boy like me could see that these two men were every bit as much a couple as any straight couple. They were loved and accepted by their family. But only under cover of a lie. I like to think that the family were just protecting themselves from society’s prejudice and were fully accepting themselves. But I’ll never know.

A decade later when I came out, I looked around the gay crowd that I knew in Charleston, Illinois, and I realized something important. There were two semi-closeted couples who had been together since before the McCarthy Era. But otherwise, there were only three gay couples among us who had made it to their tenth anniversary. Society didn’t value our relationships and presented roadblocks to our developing lasting ones. Among those roadblocks is the frequent refusal of hospitals to recognize same-sex partners of their patients as family. In August this year, a few weeks after his knee replacement surgery, I had to take my partner Walter to the ER for symptoms that resembled a heart problem. I’d been with him through various surgeries. But for them everything had been scheduled in advance. He had been able to indicate that he required my presence. That was all there was to it. But the ER is a different place. Every person who came into Walter’s room in the ER that day had one non-medical question that they had to ask me before they did anything medical: “What is your relationship to the patient?” Every time they asked, I panicked. Why did they need to know? I answered truthfully, each time fearing that I was going to be forced to leave the room. Thankfully that never happened. And in the end, all was well. But we live in a society where it is still reasonable for a same-sex partner to panic when asked the nature of the relationship.

So: Pride. LGBT Pride is a psychological statement: I am a human being; attention must be paid to such as me. LGBT Pride is a socio-political statement: I am a human being endowed by the creator or nature with certain inalienable rights that I hold society accountable for honoring. LGBT Pride is a religious and spiritual statement: I am a human being with inherent worth and dignity; accept me; respect me. And LGBT Pride is a commitment of this Unitarian Universalist congregation, accepting and celebrating the whole person of each one of us.