I’ve been thinking about Roger, whose devoted friendship changed my life.
I hired him in 1975 as Minister of Music in the church I served as pastor in San Marino, California. Two months after I hired him he asked to see me privately; in that thirty-minute conversation he told me he was gay and that I was the second person he’d come out to. For the next several years he led my wife and me on a journey into worlds we’d never explored: the world he lived in and unfamiliar worlds inside ourselves.
We grew up in Hollywood and were active in a large church with a fundamentalist bent. When we heard street talk about gay people (often identified as queers or faggots), it re-enforced the church’s message that they were perverts, God’s mistakes, and that we should avoid them at all cost. By the time we were at UCLA and dating one another, we’d moved intellectually far away from these fundamentalist convictions. We believed it was natural and completely acceptable to be gay, but we’d yet to make a gay friend. Then six years after gay men and lesbians challenged the police at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, three years before the murder of gay City Councilman Harvey Milk in San Francisco, and forty years before the Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, decided that gay people had the right to marry, along came Roger to disrupt and enrich our lives.
Harvey Milk campaigning with longshoremen in San Francisco during his 1976 race for the California State Assembly.
He was the son and grandson of Mennonites and Southern Baptists, and his family’s beliefs hedged him in to an identity that had no room for his gayness. He was a math teacher and a musician who, until he was in his twenties, disguised himself by participating uncomfortably in the heterosexual rituals of church and culture. But it could not hold; the pain was too great, the dishonesty too contrary to his characteristic integrity. In the early years of our culture’s growing awareness of the LGBTQ community, he began reading gay literature, snuck into gay movies, then went with trepidation to gay bars where he met men and women who welcomed him as another gay person in their common search for self-acceptance.
When he came out to me (and soon after to Becky), he invited us to come into his world, and for years we kept accepting his invitations. We were often the only straight people at gay parties; we stuffed envelopes at gay political gatherings and sang at gay bars with a boisterous chorus of mostly tipsy men led by the flamboyant Rudy de la Mor in his feather boa and silver tiara. Over time, these men and women, whom we originally thought strangers (and initially very strange, as you might guess from Rudy’s trappings), became our friends. With Roger’s encouragement, we soon invited our close straight friends to join us at these venues, to meet our new world; and we watched as our new friends become their friends as well.
Here’s what our friendship with Roger taught me. You can figure things out in your head, reject stupid fundamentalist or family beliefs you grow up with, learn that gays aren’t queers or faggots. But it’s only when you get close to someone, close enough to love them, that you experience the transformation from strangers to friends, from fear to intimacy, from us and them to all of us. It is only by getting up close and personal that you can widen not only your mind but your community of Beloveds.
Roger changed me, made me a more open-minded, open-hearted person. And he told me that I changed him as well, made it safe for him to leave his closeted world and trust that there were straight people who would learn to understand him, accept him, love him. When he knew he was dying, he asked if I would speak at his memorial service, which I did in the summer of 2017. I talked about how handsome he was and how gifted; he played piano and organ, had a voice like a perfectly tuned trumpet, wrote and arranged hundreds of pieces of music. I talked about him finding a community of like-minded men and forcing his uncoordinated body to master the skills of volleyball for their weekend trips to the Venice Beach courts. And I talked about our long, liberating relationship.
I often remind myself that forty-two years with this handsome, gifted, loving man taught me that the only way to love, accept and understand another person, to turn them from strangers into friends, is to get as close to them as you can, to let them rub up against you, rub off on you, to dare to let their experience, their character widen your own experience and character.
Thank you for this life-altering wisdom, Roger.
I will miss you and love you forever.
That's just what I've been thinking - I'd love to hear from you.
Blessings,
– Rick