Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Helene Loper. It was conducted on November 3, 2022 at God’s House church in Holt, Alabama. It concerns her life and pastoral work throughout the South and current work in God’s House. The interviewers are Carson Silas, Ella Brown, Brooklynn Coleman, and Sadie Talley.

CS: Alright, so could you first just start off by telling us your name and what you prefer to be called?

HL: I’m Reverend Dr. Helene H. Loper. That's Helene. It's Helen with an E on the end of it. It should be pronounced Helene, but I don't … it doesn't yell that way in my family. Any of y'all who musicians know that the long E does not carry. So Helene. So it's H-E-L-E-N-E, Loper L-O-P-E-R.  I am currently pastoring at God's House here in Tuscaloosa. I came into the university Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in 1990, transferring credentials. My first congregation that I served in was started in 1992 in Mobile, and I was in Mobile until the end of 1999 and in 2001, on January 1, I started in Tuscaloosa at what was Living Waters Metropolitan Community Church. There were some structural changes happening in the denomination. That congregation decided they didn't want to stay in MCC, so in 2002, they closed and God's House was formed. So that's the history of where I've been. It's been in Alabama except for my training time in Atlanta.

EB: So, kind of going back a little bit. When and where were you born?  

HL: I was born in 1952, in Orange County, California. My father was in the Marine Corps, at Camp Pendleton. My mother is from Tuscaloosa, was born and raised here. And when he exited the Marine Corps, sometime between my birth and my fifth month of life, he went back into the GI Bill to college, at what is now the University of Jacksonville. It was a junior college back then, and then after a couple of semesters there, they moved back here to Tuscaloosa. And so all of my younger siblings were born here. And I grew up here. We spent a lot of time at that beach house. In future years, but no, that was not where I was raised. I went to a private high school. I didn't go to the public schools here. I was planning on going to the University of Alabama, and the house I grew up in was only, literally two blocks as the crow flies from the campus.

CS: Mhm.

HL: I used to walk home through the campus, past any stadium and, you know, down the strip to get home from the elementary school. Bernard Elementary used to be where the dorms they just tore down over there on Bryant Drive, across sorority row.

Group: Yeah.

HL: That was where Bernard Elementary used to be. That was the elementary school I went to.

EB: Okay.

HL: So I had planned on going to university, so I was going to go away to high school so I would have an away from home educational experience. My senior year, my parents suggested I apply to some other schools just in case I changed my mind. So I did, and I got into Emory, and I was going to tell them no. I was going to come back with my dad, you better at least go look at the school. I went and looked and fell in love with it and literally, in March of my senior year, changed where I was going to college. Then I graduated from Emory and I was pre-vet, so I had to take ... Emory did not have an animal and dairy science department, so I had to take some courses at Auburn. So some sort of postgraduate student. It was some sort of special designation I had to take undergraduate courses at Auburn. In the process of that, between my senior year of college and doing those courses, I realized that the reason I wanted to be a vet was that I wanted to avoid having to do care of human beings and that vets have to care for the pets’ owners. And the thing that I didn't want to deal with was stuff like death and dying. When somebody that's very close to a pet loses a pet, it’s like losing a child. And so I wasn't going to avoid it. So I finally decided that I was really called to pastoral ministry and then had to sort of change my direction and my life and get things going towards seminary. I was married, had two children. When I started seminary, was not out. Somebody outed me to the Presbyterian committee. Somebody who was a closeted lesbian herself. You will find the stories of horizontal betrayal in many of the stories of the history. This is just how I experienced it. So I had a very rocky experience with the Committee on Preparation for Ministry. They would not approve me. But I still felt called, and it was like okay, there is another possibility because the religious tradition I grew up in believed that churches and councils make mistakes. And they kept telling me I was making a mistake. I said, no, there's another possibility. Well, 30 years after I graduated, the Presbyterian Church admitted it and changed their policy. But it was a little late for me. And so that was how I came into the community. I came in literally, with just a big, bold jump. My senior year of seminary was very difficult because I knew I was leaving that denomination and was going to be going, but I wasn't at a seminary yet, and it was a seminary and that denomination. So I really didn't get to know the gay lesbian community until after I graduated. And I started with a splash. I went to the Women's Festival in North Georgia. Now, have you all gotten that in your history stuff?

Group: No.

HL: Okay. There was this big festival weekend, where it was a women's festival, but it was mostly lesbians. They had a lot of lesbian entertainers, Meg Christensen. Just a lot of lesbian musicians that would be there. A lot of people who were involved in activism already. And it was just a weekend away. We went up to a camp up in Cleveland, Georgia, believe it or not. And I met a lot of people there, but as I told my story that I was looking for something in ministry, a lot of people … One of the things that happened in the gay and lesbian community is that there was so much alienation from religious traditions that had been closed was that they didn't tend to mix. The people who stayed in their faith traditions did not mix a lot with those who had left because there was so much anger about it between those who had been hurt enough to want to leave. But there were people there who knew people who were in the gay and lesbian welcoming congregations and the Metropolitan Community Churches. And so that was where I was given the name and phone number of someone at MCC. So I graduated and in two weeks, or a week later, I went to this conference and the next week I had called somebody and was An MCC. I mean, it was like [whooshing noise]. I started the transfer process and my supervising pastor in that, as we were going through it, said he had never seen anybody who learned the gay and lesbian community as fast as I did. And I credit that to my seminary training, because we were trained in learning how to read cross-cultural. When you went to a new congregation in a new place, you had to learn how to read that new context and that helped me to read the gay and lesbian context. And I recognized the split between those who stayed in the traditions of their faith and those who didn't. I read a lot of other stuff into it and began to understand a lot of pastoral dynamics because of that. So I picked it up pretty quick. And so by 1992, I was called to the church in Mobile, so I really came into it very quickly, at that point I got involved in participating in Gay Pride and in the community in Atlanta from 1990 to 92, and I went to Mobile. So I had those connections to places where in the Southeast there was a lot more organization than there was in Alabama. And so I learned a lot from that as I went back to Alabama. My father’s from a very large family also, his oldest sister was 20 years older than him and basically raised him like his mother, you know how that age bracket can do that, but she had been a missionary with her husband in the Methodist church for most of their adult life. And when they had retired, she was a few years younger than her husband. She was 60, and came back and her husband died within a year of retirement. She had started her doctorate in education administration and there were only two schools in the country that would accept her previous work and let her continue working on that doctorate, and one was the University of Alabama. So she came to live with us. And one day I was all over 14 years old. I was running through the house and … we were barefoot, just us kids. But she saw my high arches and she had terribly flat feet and she said, your feet are so beautiful, you're going to be a missionary. And I laughed in her face. Little did she or I know that I would be a missionary in Alabama. [laughter] So that's kind of the way that things turn around. You discover that, you know, they say, bloom when you're planted, but sometimes we need to come back and to go somewhere and then come back. And that's what many people do. My experience pastorally in Mobile, people who come out in more rural areas tend to go to larger metropolitan areas. But some people come from such rural places that moving to Atlanta is just a culture shock.

CS: Yeah.

HL: They just can't do it. They might move to Atlanta, to Birmingham or something like that. But the folks from southeast Alabama Dothan area in particular, across that southern swath, they all moved to Mobile. So that was the influx and that was the way that the gay/lesbian population found a safe space to go, to come out, to get some solid ground under their feet and self esteem and a sense of who am I, where am I, what am I doing. That kind of thing. And so that's historically a migration issue of trying to find kindred and community, creating an alternative to community where we can heal. And I very quickly picked that up in the Mobile context that there were a lot of folks from LA (lower Alabama), Dothan area and eastern southern part of Alabama over the Florida Panhandle who came to Mobile to live as out people or to live with their significant others in a way that was much safer than at home, where everybody knew everybody and, you know, it was just gossip. And harassment.  

CS: So, I want to kind of go back a little bit. So you said that you were on track to become a veterinarian. And then you …

HL: Got called to ministry.  

CS: Yes. So did you always have in the back of your mind that you would like to become a minister?

HL: I wanted to go into a caring profession. I love the sciences. And so my mind just figured I could become a vet, I wouldn't have to deal with people. [laughter] But I was aware of … that I really didn't want to do that kind of emotional work with people. And if you're a physician of people, you end up doing that. Dealing with human relationships, you know, as a pastor, you end up doing that. You get that counseling part that comes in. I never saw myself as a therapist, but being a pastor, you do relational counseling. And so I just … that was what I was avoiding in the back of my mind. I sort of knew that. But it wasn't really clear until I got up closer to going to vet school and realized, no, my spirituality had grown at that point enough. And I was like, okay, I need to deal with this. And so my deal with God was, I will give us a try until either you get me through this or I find that it's not me, it's not authentic. Integrity was really, really important to me. And while I was in the closet, I was walking with integrity in the fact that the church had told me that this was a choice and I could choose not to be. That it was a lie did not dawn on me until later. And when I realized the committee knew that it was real and that they were caught between the polity of the church and the theology of that polity and the reality they knew about human orientation, I was like, okay, you guys have a problem with integrity, not me. You are promoting the lie. I'm just the victim of it. And so I moved on. And that was the only real problem I had with being called, was resolving that. And once I realized that there were folks that knew that it was not the truth, and I knew it in my own experience, I mean, I looked back on my relationships with friends and it was like, I kept falling in love with them. Now this makes sense why those relationships got so crazy. [laughter] But for people who live in a context where they can't hear the truth, and this is one of the things for Alabama in particular, where you can't talk about it openly in schools, then it all becomes word of mouth, and it becomes very distorted and perverted and untrue. And it becomes about social coercion and peer pressure and bullying and it gets really, really hurtful. And so that's been the ministry context for me. But I had lived it before, so that was always the tomboy. The running joke is that it's really hard to tell who's gay or straight or lesbian or straight in Vermont because they all dress alike and act alike and they're all outdoors people. [laughter] Tomboy's not the criteria. That was where I was with it, was the call of ministry was around the pastoral care, not the gay issue. Yeah, but when I realized that the gay issue was a part of what I was having trouble with, then I realized that it was a church that had a problem, not me. And I was really clear about that. Broke my heart. A lot of my work since then has been involved in trying to find ways of doing a reconciliation process. That's a whole other story, but I'll stop there if there's any other questions.

EB: I would like to hear about Mobile a little bit more.

HL: Okay.  

EB: Just in the sense that you said it was safer for spaces or just environments.

HL: Y'all are looking at the southern story and Mobile is … You talk about Texas being a separate state for the rest of the world. Mobile is an old southern port city, so it has a lot more in common with places like Savannah and Charleston than it does with Alabama. Those old Southern port cities have a different kind of ethos and culture, and being native Mobilian is sort of a stamp of belonging and approval. And if you move to Mobile, and this is what a lot of people from the gay and lesbian community experience, if you move to Mobile, you're not really part of Mobile as long as you're because you weren't raised, you know, you're not native Mobilian. And so we created, the gay and lesbian community, created a different ethos around that. But it also meant that those who were native Mobilian and who were gay or lesbian had a much more difficult time being out because of the contradiction and realized that Mobile is fairly strong in Catholic influence. It was a Spanish settlement and the Catholic Spanish influence there and diocese and offices for their hierarchy are there and that kind of thing. So you have to think of Mobile as an old southern port city, not just as an Alabama city. And that very much influenced, I had one church member who was native of a Mobilian, had grown up, had gone to seminary in the Baptist tradition, as he puts it, before they stopped teaching, before they started teaching them to not think. [laughter] And he came out, he didn't really “come out” come out, but he got out of ministry. He was actually on staff at one of the very large Mobile churches, and he found the MCC and became a part of it. But after a number of years in MCC and really having that safe space to think about himself and what he was doing, he realized he needed to move somewhere else in order to really be his best self because as a native Mobilian still in Mobile, he still had to deal with how it affected his parents and in that native … for him to be out and to be active and prominent. And that was typical of people who came from old Mobile families, was the difficulty of being out because their family carried that stigma with them, and so it made it doubly. It was hard enough in other cities, but in Mobile it was especially difficult. That affected things like Pride events. The church in Mobile was very involved in helping with pride. The community down there was not really organized. We were fortunate to have a couple of people who were really good organizers in the community. And they would work with the church and with whatever it was mostly the bars and whatever. There was also, this is true of Alabama. There are three historic, long standing Mardi Gras crews in Alabama. And in Mobile, the Osiris. The Order of Osiris is one place where many of the old family, the fluid or whatever and the newcomers, they mix together, but it's one of the places where they could be out because it was a ball that was, you bought your ticket and only the members sold them, so we knew it was there. But there's also the Apollo Ball in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa has the Krewe of the Druids, the Mystic Krewe of the Druids. But what would happen is that when there was a public Pride event, is there would be a lot of people who were from either the old Mobilian or else had jobs that would be vulnerable, that wanted private Pride events. And so they would literally plan events during Pride Week that were by invitation only and they would invite their inner circle. And one year the church was facilitating, doing most of the work because the other community people had kind of fallen away. We had other communities still working with us, but they weren't organized enough to form a committee apart from us. So, we were trying to keep Pride going. We were at the park and somebody came up and, this is the way it happens in Mobile when something like that happens, they will come up and whisper in your ear. So did you know there's a party with over 100 people going on over in Daphne? At the same time we're having ours so they can celebrate Pride with us but not be out. And I said I'm really glad they've organized to have a party to celebrate Pride. That's a step for them. But other folks saw it as competition, and so that was always the tension between those who were out and those who were not out, and those who were somewhere in between, and it just depended on how safe they felt, whether they would go to the one that was out or the one that was not out. And that was how it worked. But that was particularly true for Mobile and the Mobile ethos as an old Southern port city where people had family and that culture was just like that. So Mobile. Is there anything else in particular? I just was trying to think of where to go.

BC: Can you clarify what MCC is, please?

HL: It's Metropolitan Community Churches. In 1968, and this is a connection to the South, Reverend Troy Perry had grown up in the South, he grew up in the Panhandle of Florida and he lived in Mobile for a while. But he was gay. And as many gays, we talk about migration. He had migrated to the West Coast to the Los Angeles area, but he was deeply spiritual and from a very religious tradition and he just missed his church. And he was sitting in a bar one day and was chatting with some other folks and said, why can't we just have our own church? So nine months before Stonewall, in October of 1968, he organized the first Metropolitan Community Church congregation in the Los Angeles area. It was actually down in … headquarters were in West Hollywood, Huntington, Huntington Beach area, where they first met as a church. It very quickly grew to all the major cities in the US and became international within a couple of years … that was ’68, by 1972, there were international congregations. London, all around the world. When the first Gay Pride after the 1969 Stonewall riots, 1970, it was the MCCs that really fostered that. I don't know when the first Pride was in Atlanta, but as it became okay to do it in Atlanta, then other cities around the South began to do it. So it was more when it was safe here that it became safer here. And so we had that growth outward from there, but the church was always a part of that, and it was very much a part of it in the South. And I was talking about Felicia Fontaine and the ’92 Pride March in Montgomery, which followed that pattern. Because what happened is they tried to organize a Pride March in Montgomery in 1992. And the person in the church who was trying to do that, it was a layperson, had gone to the police to get the permit. And the police said, you can't do it. So he went back and told the pastor, and Felicia on Monday morning, dressed up in her clergy collar and her best duds and went to the police office to get the permit and said, we want a parade permit, and they gave it to her. Having that clergy collar made a huge difference here in the South. That's very often how it had to happen, at first. It was really important for those who were people of faith to be involved in the movement, at the front, when it came to those kind of interfaces with public officials, having to have the faith base was really important. Reverend Elder Nancy Wilson tells of something happening in Los Angeles when she was at the church out there, and people called her up and said, we need a collar down here. [laughter] And that's the way it happened everywhere. Something would start to happen and start to look like it was going to get rough, and we need a collar down here so that things stay clean with the police. So that was how it worked for us as well here in the Southeast. If the churches were involved and if the ministers were involved, then we had a better time with getting our permits and things, going to the park and recreation to reserve the park for the day of Pride. Yeah, the church pastor went in collar, because they did it for other churches all the time, and they knew they couldn't make the distinction, and so that was how we did it here in the South especially. Does that answer your question?  

BC: Yes.

HL: But Metropolitan Community Church grew from there as a young denomination. I mentioned that the Living Waters church here in Tuscaloosa, MCC, decided not to stay. They were going through transitions, but like many young people, young organizations tend to do things before they have thought through them very well. The process of change may be painful, excruciating, and slow, and frustratingly difficult. But if you don't think it through, you wind up making mistakes.

CS: Yeah.

HL: And there were some things happening in that process where they were making mistakes because they were making changes without thinking them through. And the local church here just got tired of it. Yeah, we need to change, but we need to make changes that don't end up hurting somebody. So that was how that worked. Other questions.

BC: This is simple, but before we continue, what are your preferred pronouns?  

HL: I usually use she. She / her.

BC: Okay. Thank you.

HL: I get misgendered all the time.  I'm not offended. I was 30 years old, heterosexually, married, and in the grocery store. But I always liked short hair and always like [inaudible] boy shirts, they fit better. My parents used to do a big homecoming party here in Tuscaloosa, and I was helping them with getting that set up. And I had been sent to the grocery store to get the beer to boil the crab in, not the crab, the shrimp in. And so I had a basket cart. My dad had 400 pounds of shrimp to boil, a basket cart, a beer, rolling it out, and I got carded because they thought I was a guy. I had my ball cap on. And I got carded at another grocery store that week, and I got carded in a bar, and I decided it was time to get my ears pierced. [laughter] So, yeah, I get misgendered all the time. Been there.

CS: Just want to sort of talk … oh, there's an ant on this table. I just want to sort of talk about … So can you talk a little bit about the work that you did or the sort of experience you had, like working in Atlanta?

HL: Okay. In Atlanta, I was very new to the community, so I wasn't known or experienced in a lot of that. My work there was with the congregation learning to use my pastoral skills in that community. What I'm going to choose to talk about there is that I realized from my own journey, that faith development would be a very good way to work with people just coming out and struggling with their orientation and their religious upbringing. I'll give you the name. His name is James Fowler. Wrote a book called Stages of Faith. It's the best description of how we mature in our faith based on our psychosocial, emotional, mental, moral development. But what happens is that you'll go trucking along and the way you believed as a little kid, the little stories that you took literally, suddenly you start learning to understand metaphors, and you start realizing that they're symbolic. And so your faith takes a turn. But you're still operating in a very authoritarian model because you're still a kid and there's a lot of rules and behavior stuff, and the gay stuff comes in here because you're not behaving the way you're supposed to. And so the authorities come in and try to make you change or kick you out, in very black and white terms, but somewhere in between there for most of us. But that faith development model was a way to talk with the gay men and the lesbians who came, who were struggling with their faith journey. And that was during those two years that I really began to think about two things. I always had an interest in the story in Genesis chapter three about don't eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What about that’s so wrong? But it's dualism. It's a way of thinking dualistically, that's judgmental. It's actually a part of our human development. We learn sometimes as children best by comparing things and then learning what's right and wrong. That's really learning the rules. But the time comes when those don't fit. And that's in James Fowler's terms, it's a crisis of faith and it's an opportune moment to step up your understanding of faith and the God of your understanding in the language of Twelve Steps and that God is bigger than being just like this group of people. That God is the God of all people. And so in my work in Atlanta that was really where I worked mostly in my transition out of a mainline denomination into the Metropolitan Community Churches. The second thing with that is that the MCC’s ended up with people from many different religious backgrounds, ecumenically particularly. But we also had … in Mobile, I had somebody from the Latter Day Saints background in my church, and so we had to learn ecumenicism which also then broadened our understanding and openness to interfaith work because many of the pride events were interfaith, not just ecumenical. We would have the Jewish and other traditions worshiping with us in those services. At that time, the Islamic community really had not, the Islamic gay community really … they were terrified because it's a death sentence in Islam. They were not as out and were not as involved openly in pride events. But we learned that. So I was growing on those edges of the ecumenical interfaith and on the edges of the personal for the people coming to us. Because every time somebody new came into the church fresh from their coming out process, they were in that faith crisis of how do I resolve what I've always believed, but now no longer works because I have learned a new truth and I can't deny it. That's part of coming out. And so that was really what my work was around there and then the dualism that's behind the discriminations. And I came to the discriminations aware of the black issues and race stuff and all that kind of stuff. But from my personal experience I really understood and found ways to look at dualism from the perspective of my experience in the gay and lesbian world and religion. Of how it creates false truths, how saying either or creates a false truth when it could be both and. And that's another faith development stage, mentally stage when you learn to understand paradox, that can be both and. Do any of you all take physics?

Group: No.  

HL: Well, you'll probably understand this one anyway. In physics, there was a question of whether light was a particle or a wave. You’ve heard that conversation. Well, those who tested light for its wavelike properties found that it behaved like a wave. Those who tested light for its particle light found it behaved like … so either or was not a question. It's a both / and. And we don't understand how that is. Well, once you begin to understand paradox, then that whole dualistic system falls apart, because you realize that there's some things that both can be true that look like they're opposites and contradictory. And the gender issue, the gay / straight issues are examples of that. But it applies to racism, classism, ageism, ableism. Two things are different. It doesn't make somebody more or less human. They are just different. And that step beyond judging to seeing somebody as a human being is a huge mental-psychological step. And we were having to do that in MCC’s because there was only one in town, in most towns, and if we didn't, there would be people that would be left out. So that was where my work during those early years was transitioning to this new community. And I use that word guardedly, because we were really a community. I've always wondered where the young stallions at the herd of stallions runs off … went. And there were these bachelor groups. We were sort of the bachelor group, of mixed lineage out there, and that's kind of the way it was. But that was where my growing edges were. I did some work on the dualism issue around inclusive language, which is what we're struggling with. Inclusive language is trying to let everybody be who they are, without bias. And so I developed a workshop on that that I still have that's probably still useful, although it's 30 years old now. So I was working on that inclusiveness, and the faith journey that takes us beyond the traditions we knew that had been authoritarian or judgmental. So that was where I came in, was the tools I had gotten in seminary, I then used to adjust to and adapt to and to become effective in ministry in MCC.  

EB: So when you were kind of first realizing that you were lesbian and coming out on that whole journey, did your faith ever waiver? Did you go through those kind of same stages, the faith stages?

HL: Faith stages? When I went to meet with the committee of preparation for ministry, it was 1985, ’86. It was before I started seminary. And … You know, I was just cruising along, and it's an awareness issue. And, as I met with the committee and realized that there was a problem and then when I realized what the problem was, when somebody slipped up and told me why they were being as crazy as they were and I knew who it was that they were talking about. And they were telling me that there was something so wrong or bad about me that I could not be ordained. My church tradition had made that mistake of telling me that churches and councils can error. And so I was like, oh, that's probably what's happening here, and there's a truth that's not being truly spoken. And so I was able to take that little bit. Sometimes it's the one liner that grabs you that saves your life. And that was the one that saved mine in terms of my sanity and sense of calling and direction in life, because I don't know what I'd have done if I had had to give up my faith. Because that was my deal with God, was, if I can't do this, then you're out of here. I'm not listening anymore. But I knew what that would mean. It would mean that I would have to stop reading scriptures, I would have to stop hanging out at churches. It was going to be bad. But what I found was, that as I looked at scriptures and the way I dealt with it was I actually went to the scriptures and looked at them. One of my seminary classes was a New Testament theology class and we were given four topics to choose from, and one of them was homosexuality. And I said, If I can't write and talk about homosexuality from the scriptures, I don't belong here. And I went through and did it. And I came out of it going, oh, gee, it's not about orientation. They didn't know what the heck orientation was when they wrote all these texts. [laughter] And so I kept having those moments when I would get an affirmation that it was the church making a mistake, not me making a mistake. And so that's how I got through it was I started to get honest and to look honestly and to take those challenges or those hard texts, and really look at them. That then became my homosexuality in the Bible class for those folks coming in and talking about that, there's actually a really good video that a woman put together and I have it in my notes somewhere. I'll have to look it up later. It's on my computer, not on my phone, but she historically walks through homosexual … the word homosexual wasn’t coined until 1850 ad, so it was not in, those who claimed the King James Bible. It's not there. It didn't come into the scripture text until the New Revised Standard Version made a mistake, and put it into those texts. And then when the person doing the Living Bible did their transliteration, it's not a translation, they made it worse. And Billy Graham used the Living Bible for all of his crusades. So anybody who went to a Billy Graham crusade got that Bible. So that's how it infiltrated the conservative wing of the church. But my deal was, God, if I can't find affirmation of my calling and my being your child in here, I'm out of here. And it worked as I got on it, as I really worked with the text, it came through and that then became my Bible with homosexuality work, first because I could tell that story to others. I said, go look at the text, I know it won’t kill you. You might even actually find you like them. [laughter]

BC: Were there any moments that you almost lost the deal with God?

HL: Because of that experience, every time that it came to that, God came through. Some way, somehow there was something that came through. Leaving the, I'll say, I was in the Presbyterian Church USA. Leaving the Presbyterian Church was really, I didn't know where I was going to go. I had visited a number of other churches that were supposedly welcoming or that had welcoming congregations. And it's kind of like a divorce, the rebound relationship, I wasn't ready for it. But in terms of finding places where I felt like I was going to lose my faith, every time I got to that place, when I got really honest, I found it affirmed. What I found was that we've learned a lot of untruths, and it's the binary thinking that creates false truths for every … women, men, black, white, Asian, immigrants, we're all victims of it in different ways. And so that was what I was discovering is that I was being told things that weren't true and it wasn’t God. It wasn't God's fault. It's a way of thinking. It's a logic. I will say that I'm in recovery and I've been in long term recovery. I’ve been in it 17 years. I started doing spirituality recovery groups and as I've done the work and the research and the education for working in the therapeutic field, the [inaudible] brain theory makes a lot of sense. There's the reptilian part of our brain, that’s the oldest part, evolutionary wise, okay. That's our survival instinct and it's fear based and survival driven, and it's our impulsive behavior. It doesn't have a sense of past or present, it's get me out of this pain now or protect me, do something. And you have your defense mechanisms. The inner part of the brain above that is your limbic system. And they call that the paleomammalian brain. It's the part of the brain, it can have emotions, it can think and process things, but it thinks dualistically. And this is where I come back to genesis three. We're thinking with our animal brain when we think dualistically because it's always judging things and comparing things. And the symbolic story, if you want to see it as symbolic, or the literal story if you want to see it. The story in Genesis three is that the human beings chose to live by this part of their brain instead of by the part that's capable of love, compassion, mutuality. It gave up the possibility of a loving, caring relationship with God. That's how I have been able to describe this is that when we stay in that limbic brain our relationships suffer, not just with a higher power, but with each other. And so I have several things coming together here, but theologically that really does explain the struggle we have with opening up to the differences and I love it. Mental health field, addiction is a disease not a moral failure and those who want to say that addiction is a moral failure are not realizing they've got three fingers pointing back at themselves, because the moral failure is self-centeredness, which is the limbic brain. I want to win. If everything is in a dualistic mindset, I want to be right. I want to be good. And we end up failing to have relationships that are loving and caring. And one of the other sayings that comes out of mental health around morality is that morality happens in relationships. And when we treat each other as less than human, then we are behaving in an immoral way because we're doing harm. And it's like, okay, so what are you going to do about your greed? What are you going to do about the way that you do harm to the earth because of your self-interests? The extractive practices of mining and where do we put our pollution? Where does our waste go? That's a moral issue too. You're operating on the same way that an addict is, your self interest. You can't point fingers at addicts and not do it yourself. So let's call it a mental illness and say we need to grow up, which is really what's happening. We need to grow up into our limbic mind. So those are things that have come up since for me but that's also been something that's been part of the pastoral care is getting people to transition from being judgmental in community to being loving and caring. We're struggling with that right now politically. It’s partisan and we want control and power which is a limbic function. Where you are on the food chain really matters when you're thinking of the limbic system but the neocortex thinks in terms of how we are interdependent and so it's a very different kind of logic. We got three different logics going on in our brain. It's not that we lose one or the other. They're still there, it's just which one we're listening to and so that's what we work with. So I've diverged from the topics but that's kind of where it comes down to. It's not just us. All humankind is having this problem and right now we're just the ones that they're trying to blame. Well that's a limbic way of dealing with it. It doesn't create solutions.

CS: I apologize that I'm jumping…

HL: I know you're jumping around. I've got a list here of things I could go to. I’ve done the Mardi Gras group and some of the other stuff.  

CS: Okay. So if I have this right, you left a Metropolitan Community Churches and then joined God's House, is that correct?  

HL: People left the MCC to come and form God's house, yes. That was how the process went here. There are a lot of other MCCs in Alabama or the Southeast who were part of the MCC. They called them districts, the District of MCC. In the Southeast, there were two. There was Florida, that was one district. And then there was the Gulf Lower Atlantic District called the GLAD District. That was Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi. So it was the rest of the Southeast Corps besides Florida. Does that answer your question? And what will happen is the churches in Alabama, when MCC did its stuff, a lot of them left also. But we all left in different ways. And so you have a lot of UCC churches now in Alabama that are former MCCs, and that's true all over the country. A lot of the MCCs felt like they needed to become a part of a more stable denomination, and there were just a lot of issues there. And so Covenant in Birmingham. Spirit of the Cross in Huntsville. The MCC in Montgomery, I believe the one in Gadsden, Safe Harbor over in Jackson, Mississippi. I think the one in Nashville is because Greg Bullard is the pastor there and they're UCC now. A lot of the MCCs left and went to the United Church of Christ. That's not the Church of Christ, the United Church of Christ, which was actually from more of a northern background, except for there were a lot of black churches of Christ here in the southeast where the Mission Society had done home missions behind the Union army, bringing in schools and congregations for newly freed slaves to get an education and have a place to worship and build a faith base for rebuilding their lives as free people. So for a long time in the Southeast, it was just mostly black churches in UCC, but now a lot of the gay churches, former MCC churches, have come in. And we weren't all gay. We had people who were heterosexual or other varieties, a lot of trans and that kind of thing in the congregations. But we became a niche ministry, and so it's really hard to shed that. That's one reason why this church is so small is there are other welcoming churches where they're not a niche ministry, but most people choose a church that has people like themselves, which does not challenge them to deal with their diversity issues. They find a nice, safe place to not have to deal with the diversity issues. Unfortunately, that's problematic because then they don't function in public very well with diversity issues. Does that explain what you were asking about the MCCs?  

CS: Yes, ma'am. I was just asking about your personal experience, coming here.

HL: OK, so for me, I'm going back to Tuscaloosa, right? And every story has its own backstory. It's not normal for someone to go back to their hometown as a pastor in any denomination. But I mentioned my aunt. You're going to be a missionary? Yeah, it's like, okay, so that seed was already there. She didn't know she planted it that way, but that was how it happened. But my parents had been, I wouldn't say openly affirming. They’d not really been Pflaggers or parents or families and friends or anything like that. But my mother had a first cousin who was gay and I didn't know. They just wouldn't talk about it, this is normal. OK, down here. This didn't come up when I came out in 1990, about a year later, my daughter went with her on a trip for Christmas to New York City, FAO Schwarz, Radio City Music Hall and all that kind of stuff. And mom mentioned they had gone and stayed with her cousin Wag, my second cousin with Wag, and his friend and I went, code word. If she's in it two years earlier, I would not have gotten it. And his friend and I went, code word. It turns out she had a gay person in her family. He's her age, first cousins, son of her mother's sister, first cousins, not an issue. So I didn't have that issue of family. The second thing about my parents, and my mom in particular is she says that there's anything gossip-worthy in your family, you talk about it first and then it's no longer gossip. So I was not afraid of coming back. and her having to explain or admit that, yeah, I have a lesbian daughter, she's already talking about it. So it was okay. And it also was an opportunity to be back here with people that I knew needed it. When I was doing my student clergy in Atlanta, I realized that Alabama needed good clergy to come back to Alabama. They call it the brain drain from rural areas. They needed people to come back. And so I saw that as a part of my calling as well was to come back, that there were people here, not just in my old denomination, but for many denominations who were actually experiencing worse things than I had experienced. If you want to talk comparatively. English is a horrible language. It's always comparative. You just have to look at the adjectives. But there was a need. And so coming back to first, I went to Mobile, and then the pulpit and Tuscaloosa became available and it was like, okay, this makes sense. And I knew somewhat my way around and was known around town, and it changed the dynamic because now I was native Tuscaloosan. Not in the way that it is, an old port city, but my name was recognized and I had to be really careful. In fact, that's one reason I did not go back to my maiden name. Loper is my ex husband's name, and that's another cool story. He's very supportive. His second wife had a lesbian sister. She wouldn't let him have any agenda with me. So it gets to be a small world, if you start to realize what your relationships are in your family. And that's actually how the change started happening around the social openness to gay and lesbian rights, is people began to realize that they had gay people in their families and in their friendship circles, and they weren't these big, horrible, sex, whatever you want to call it. I call them somebody else's projection of their own ideas of a sex life. There are more to us than that. And so being here in Tuscaloosa has been a challenge and also an opportunity for sharing in ways that I might not have if I was just somebody from somewhere else coming in as the pastor. But my family dynamic is a part of that, and that's true of everybody's story. There's going to be something about why they do or don't or why it's better or not better, safer or not. You have a question?  

EB: Yes. So it sounds like your parents and your ex husband and the majority of your family were pretty receptive and pretty well…  

HL: Not all my brothers and sisters were. My next brother down, when he was a teenager, started dating someone from the Southern Baptist tradition. And it's very much not his theology, but he knows better than to do or say anything because you know your parents have a way on sibling issues. If you take the family dynamics where they talk about the foursome: there's the achiever, the lost child, the black sheep and the clown. Yeah, we had two sets of those. And not only that, but all of us had a second set. The first method wasn't working, so we'd be switching all the time. And so those personalities responded differently. I wasn't really the black sheep, but suddenly I was no longer the perfect achiever. Those dynamics shifted at times. I was no longer a child then. But the family dynamics have shifted that too.

CS: So how many brothers and sisters do you have?

HL: Seven.  

Group: Oh, wow.

HL: Yeah.

CS: I can’t imagine.

HL: Full set of eight.

BC: You said you're the oldest?

HL: Yeah, and I'm the oldest. Yeah. But you stop and think about when we're talking about creating social change, that means that I'm the aunt to 25 nephews and nieces and they're now having children. The image of the salt of the earth just really makes a lot of sense when you realize I'm one person with seven brothers and sisters and 25 nephews and nieces, and now they're having grandchildren.

CS: Yeah.

HL: It gets really big. They talk about having a nice small family birthday party. We're looking at a party of 50 at least. And that's just the ones that I could get here in town, because I have some that live further away. But that's how it happens, is, as we begin to work in our personal relationships, the social relationships in the culture begin to change because people know us. That's my aunt Helene that they're talking about. That's not the Aunt Helene I know. See the doubts there because they know me.

CS: Can you talk a little bit about your work in this congregation? Like what God’s House does?

HL: Okay. In the early years there was a lot more work around HIV/AIDS. And this is part of the whole southern context. And this happened nationally as well. When the AIDS crisis hit in the early ’80s, the first AIDS cases started showing up in the late ’70s, and then we realized it was a major health crisis by the early ’80s. There was the stigma and the fear around it and it was the lesbians … and the men and the women had been sort of separated in their communities, and the lesbians just got on board and created AIDS organizations here. It was WAYO in Birmingham, BAO, in Mobile it was Mobile AIDS Support Services, and began doing a lot of, even the primary care through home help for men with AIDS. And it drew the community together in a way as they support each other. We lost so many in that generation, of the men. That was really an important thing that happened was the compassion that the lesbians had for the gay men who were getting HIV. So this congregation here in Tuscaloosa, when I went to Mobile, this is one of the really cool things. Mobile is an old southern port city, but sometimes they do something really good, and this is something they did really, really well. I went to Mobile in 92 and they already had what was called the Mobile AIDS Support Services. But in Mobile, the network of social referral services that a support service would refer, legal services, the health department, all different kinds of other agencies or service providers that they would send them to, had gotten together and realized Mobile is on the quarter of I-10 and I-65.

CS: Okay, yeah.

HL: That quarter is a major drug quarter also. It’s a port city, and 65 runs to Chicago and 10 runs from the East coast to the West coast. Mobile was really hit hard by the AIDS crisis and there were people in the service agencies in Mobile who realized that they really needed to get their act together. And so they formed what was called the Mobile AIDS Coalition, preceded Ryan White by almost a decade, but because they got together and it was like 27, 31, I can't remember, when I was involved in it in Mobile there were still about 21 agencies involved, including Catholic Social Services. I mean, any place where you might refer somebody for assistance was involved in it. And what they did is, they came together monthly and talked about what the needs were, their communication networks, what transitions were happening on their staffs, what funding may be coming to one agency that others might not know about, resources, that kind of stuff. And they would also look at gaps in services. And if there was a gap in a service they would figure out what agency might develop that and write a grant, and then everybody else would sign on with that grant, so there's only one agency from Mobile applying for it. Or they would create, as a coalition, a new agency and help them get started. And because of that, mobile got a huge disproportionate funding of federal funds because everybody was signing on. There was not competition. And they saw that it would be more effective. The grants they wrote were really, really strong grant requests because they had the coalition behind them instead of competing agencies within one city. And that's why the Ryan White stuff was started, was because they realized that the competition was wasting funds. But that was what I went into, was involvement in that because the MCC was involved in that coalition and supported the fundraisers and the other agencies and all that kind of stuff. When I went to Mobile, the South being conservative and fundamentalist is not very ecumenical among its clergy. The Baptists may associate with the Baptists. The Presbyterians, the Presbyterians. The Methodists, the Methodists. But there wasn't a lot of ecumenical groups around. So most of those tended to be around the black community. If they did have them, they were usually personal support rather than outreach and community action oriented. So I couldn't find one in Mobile. And since I was the only MCC person for 60 miles, there was one in Biloxi and one in Pensacola. The next closest one was Montgomery. That was just not going to work for a local support system. So I joined what was called the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. It was actually an interfaith group, almost all black. There was one other woman who was black who occasionally attended. There was one other white person who was a Catholic priest in an African American community of Mobile. I was the only white person and the only woman at their meetings regularly. But I got involved in that. And because of that I got involved with some local action stuff around school board discrimination and things like that. And so we weren't just about the gay issue and we worked together. I actually got a death threat from that. I was at a AIDS symposium and the director of the Mobile County Public Health Department was walking down the hall. We were talking as we were walking to lunch and he said, you know, there's people in this community who don't like what you're doing. And the way he said it, he looked at me and I said, oh, you're talking about those paramilitia folks out there at Theodore. And he said, you got the idea. I said, you know, I do what I do in the daylight. I can't live and do ministry in fear. So if they're going to do something to me, it's going to be in the daylight. That was the end of it. But, I was the talk among those groups because of my being the white face on the TV, standing with these black clergy, confronting the school board. And there were things that would happen that you couldn't plan. The Mobile school system is countywide. They don't have a city system in a county system. It's a unified system, kind of like Jacksonville. It's all one system. And the five school board members are elected by the districts. So there's three white districts and two black districts. So you can see how school board decisions go.  

CS: Yeah.

HL: We were in there one day and we were talking about teaching students to be more tolerant and getting along with each other and not perpetuating the racial issues. And I mentioned the Southern Poverty Law Center teaching tolerance, teaching resources. The two black commissioners, one was a man, one was a woman, were both former teachers. Oh yeah, I use it all the time. And the other three white people went, who's Southern Poverty Law Center and what's teaching tolerance. And it was those moments when you knew there was such a disconnect in their experience and what they were bringing even to the school board, that these people were not educators, but they were white politicians controlling the education decisions. And the black community elected black educators to educate the kids. And that was the kind of thing that we would run into. And it was the same thing we had lesbians having the same experience of getting outed and then having discrimination in the school board. It was the same issue. So I became involved in those things as well. Martin Luther King Day, but more important was emancipation. The first of January is Emancipation Proclamation day. They have a big event around it and being a part of that was important. So as a pastor and in An MCC that is multicultural, diverse, we needed to be that.

CS: Yeah.

HL: We couldn't just be the typical stick to your nose, white congregation. We had people from everywhere because we were the one gay welcoming church, openly, in Mobile. And that has changed over time, thank goodness. But it's part of being a minister in a church that is diverse. This congregation here is really, really small. But we have about the same percentage of people who are on fixed income or retired as the population at large dealing with living without a living wage or living income. We had people who were professionals, people who had under income, we had black, white, we've had trans, we've had lesbians who have had children, we’ve had children in the congregation. So even as a small congregation, we become a microcosm of a larger community demographically, just not in our orientation. And we have one guy here who's heterosexually married and has been, but I think he's actually bi. He's never really come out and told me. It doesn't matter to me. He's committed to his wife, that's what matters. But he was in a Baptist church when the Baptist church started going so conservative, he said, I just can't stay there. He's our accompanist. We also have a heterosexual couple that attends here. So orientation wise, we're not representing the demographics, but in terms of backgrounds, we are pretty good smattering, everything from Pentecostal to Catholic to mobile had the LDS, we don't have one of those here. But Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, we have the Gamut represented in some way. And so learning to live with that diversity is a ministry here within the church that we can then take out. So does that get into your question about the congregation care?  

CS: I think it does, yeah.

HL: Okay. We're talking about the things we've been involved in. Up here in Tuscaloosa, we were involved with some of the AIDS stuff back in the 2000s. Then we just sort of lost touch with it. But we've also been involved in supporting what's called Soul Force. And I mentioned that when I was talking with Isabella. Soul Force is a nonviolent movement within the religious traditions to try to stop the spiritual violence. And it picked up on the King and Gandhi principles, but we took it to the churches. And so my being from a Presbyterian background, I would go back to the Presbyterian Church and somebody from another tradition would go back. Jimmy Creech went back to the Methodist church. Jimmy Creech was a national figure in Soul Force. Mel White was a ghost writer for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He went back to them. He’s the one who started it. And I gave Isabella … we have a lending library. We lent her a copy of Stranger at the Gate, which is Mel White's story of that. But we've been supportive of that and of being involved with speaking truth kindly with our former traditions, trying to help, understanding. But some are open and some aren't. It's that faith thing. Until they get uncomfortable with things not working, they're not going to change. That's a stage of faith. They're comfortable where they're at. And it's like outing somebody. The coercive outing somebody or exposing them does more harm than good. So we need them to work their process and they'll figure it out. One of their kids, one of their people, will bring up the issue for them because we're everywhere.

EB: I think, as we draw to a little bit of a close here, one thing that I'd like to know is, what kind of legacy do you hope to leave?

HL: You're speaking to someone who's working at Eric Erickson State of Integrity. So that's very much on my mind. Faithfulness as a pastor is creating a congregation that's loving and caring and diverse. And I mentioned the work I've been doing on spirituality that has really clarified the spiritual transformation of a spiritual awakening. In fact, I put this in my servant. You heard the term woke, and conservatives don't like woke. That's because they woke to something better. The living mind has suddenly had an awakening. Any of y'all. It's not Star Trek. It's Star Wars. Okay? Do you remember the episode where one of those cloned soldiers sees a buddy dying and he feels compassion?

CS: I don't know.

HL: He looks up with a Jedi and starts flying around with him. He's what becomes from a major character anyway, that's woke. He had been trained not to think about the other compassionately. He had been trained to think like a warrior. And a death is a death. It's a casualty. So you don't care. You just pick up your stuff and go on, leave them there. But he woke. We are people who have, because of our faith journey, become woke. And our thinking has changed so that we're able to embrace diversity and be more open minded, to listen to somebody's else's story with empathy and compassion, instead of judging them for who they are. We're a dangerous group. We're very small, but that's dangerous because people really, once they experience it, go like, oh, wow, I want more of that because it's part of becoming human. But for our people to be able to share that with others, and also to respect the journey, that when somebody new … we still have new people coming into the church, they still have that transition to make between their old way of thinking and another way that's possible and whether they're going to make that transition. And so making it a safe space for that and trying to help people to be aware of faith development as a lifelong journey, you don't arrive at 21. In fact, at 21, your neocortex isn’t even fully developed. Your neocortex typically takes till 25. So that's why they like to recruit 18 year olds for the military. Their moral compass is not developed, so they teach them what they're supposed to do and they can appeal to the limbic processes rather than to seeing another person as a human being. So my legacy would be that. Helping people to grow to a place where they become fully human, and able to use their full mind and be in relationships and then contribute their part. And that's also the contribution that I'm hoping to make to the recovery programs that are for therapists. The reason we waited till this week was because I was busy writing the book and I just turned it over to the proofreader yesterday.

BC: Congratulations.

HL: I do treatment groups on spirituality recovery, and I had been doing these groups since 2010. So the groups I was doing I wrote up in 2017. But since 2017, I've added several new groups. And one of them was on healing broken relationships. And that was probably the hardest to write up, because it's such a big topic. But that's a contribution that I would leave, is how we can heal. And it actually got into the same social issues that I was just sharing with you about how … I'm aunt Helene and I have seven brothers and sisters, their spouses, their children. This is how the social change really happens. In the North, what happened is the first Great Awakening happened in the 1700s and the second Great Awakening happened in the early 1800s, early 19th century. And the themes of those two were different. The first one was to personal piety, personal faith in relationships. The second one was around the worth and dignity of every human being. It fed the abolition movement in the North, which is why the North got so active on it. But you can't legislate that change. And so when they tried to legislate it or coerce it by war in the South, we ended up with Jim Crow.

CS: Yeah.

HL: And that's what happens, is if you don't let that change happen because of that awakening and you try to coerce it, you get the reaction and it gets worse. And so that's the kind of thing that I've put into this. But our personal relationships or how the LBGT thing changed, nationally, is that the division between those who were faith-based and those who were activist-based in the LGBT community had to be mended or healed, merged in order for that to become effective. Because what we needed to do was change the hearts and minds of people of faith, because it was religion that was driving the discrimination. And so finally, in the late 2000s, HRC, Human Rights Campaign, national legislative advocates in D.C., and they had state ones. We had Equality Alabama here in Alabama, which was part of that system. Hired Harry Knox, theologically trained, as the community coordinator with the faith community. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force hooked up with Patricia Volcker to have a community in faith connection. And between 2007, 2009 and the 2015 Supreme Court decision, a lot of people told their stories and came out and identified as being gay or lesbian. And we didn't fit the stereotype that was going around. And people we knew, people and family, friends, the ethos changed. Our personal relationships are how the larger change and we feel like a drop in the ... What do I hope to contribute? I hope to be a big drop in the bucket. Because when enough drops fall in the bucket, the bucket tips. That's how the change happens. That is true for other issues, too. The Great Awakening impact on the ending of slavery, officially, was a spiritual moment, but it happened one person at a time. Awakening to this is a human being, of worth and dignity, and what do they have to contribute and how do I relate to them instead of dominating them? That change is where it happens. So that's what I hope to contribute, an increasing awareness. And I never intended to be a writer. I hate writing. [laughter] When I took my Old Testament Hebrew and they said, are you going to want to be an author, you're going to need to use this for professional academic purposes. And I said, I'm not going to be a writer, but I don't write for the academy, so I don't have to worry about it. I write for practical application. Those of you who might be going for masters and doctorates. That was actually the question that was asked about Barack Obama when he was first elected as president was commentators, NPR commentators, they were wondering how Congress and other politicians were going to relate to him because he is practical, not ideological. And that was a lot of problems he had in dealing with Congress. He didn't play the politics, he played practical. Actually, that was how Johnson did too, but he did it much more subtly.

CS: I have a few more questions that I would like to sort of ask you. First of all, I would like to know, like you said, that you are currently married.  

HL: Yes.

CS: How did you meet your wife?  

HL: That's a funny story. [laughter] Back in 1994, there was a new program developing in the MCC's spirituality program, kind of like the Curcio movement in the Catholic Church other denominations now have. It's called an Emmaus walk in the Episcopal church. It's called Living Waters and the Presbyterians, same thing, it's just got a different name. It's a spirituality weekend for personal spirituality. And our district had a group that had formed, and I went to that event as a participant. It was after my first full year of pastoring in Mobile. I was coming up for a licensure review and I wanted to use that opportunity to reflect on my first year and a half, actually, of ministry. And they put you in table groups. You're there with the whole group. There were probably 30 participants and there were five of us in table groups. There were six tables, five at each table. And one of the other participants at my table was a woman from Birmingham who didn't do that artsy, fartsy stuff. You know, they have activities at these things. And so she disappeared and we started doing something with artsy, but I was doing my own stuff. When I came up to Tuscaloosa in the late ’90s, I started corresponding with the person who was the student clergy here at Living Waters. And she was asking me some pastoral questions that she was just not having support with from her supervisor. And I knew Tuscaloosa. She was asking me things about Tuscaloosa. And so we started talking and when I realized it was time for me to leave Mobile, she said, I know how to make a pulpit vacant. So she resigned as a student clergy pastor, and they called me and I came up here, and I was with someone else at the time, but it was not a healthy relationship, and I had not dealt with the verbal abuse in it, and it was affecting my ministry. And when that finally fell apart, Susie and I looked up at each other, because I came up here and I quickly realized she was the pastor. Her gifts are very much relational, empathy, pastoral care. Mine, I'm the activist. I write liturgy, I don’t know how to write but I write liturgy, activism, and then I understand the growth, but I'm more the theologian that I am, the relator. And so we worked together well, our gifts complimented each other, so we had become colleagues basically in working together here. She was still in the student clergy process when the relationship that I had been in fell apart. Finally, we looked up at each other and went, oh, and called the district coordinator, because that was an ethics issue of me being a senior pastor and her being student clergy here, and got that all sorted out. But we met in 1994. She was that one who didn't do the artsy-fartsy stuff, and we did not remember it. We both talked about having been to it the first excel, and I said, oh, yeah, I don't remember you. She said, I don't remember you either. We pulled out our table pictures and we were at the same table. It was really weird. It was one of those small world, crossing paths, but really weird. But when it was time, it was time. We had what we called a holy union because our marriages were recognized as legal. But we did a holy union in 2002. And when the 2015 decision came down with the Supreme Court, we went down to the courthouse and got a license. But our wedding date is 2002, because I'm not adamant with people that I've done holy union for if I've done your holy union any time in the past, I will come and sign your marriage license. Well, I can't now because they've changed the law. You have to be a … clergy can't sign marriage licenses. The probate judge can't unless they're also a notary. Only notaries can sign a marriage license in Alabama. Now, they did that so that the probate judges would not have to do it, because so many of them didn't want to sign the same gender ones. So they made it so only a notary could. And that got the probate justices off the hook because it conflicted with their job description if they didn't sign those that wanted to have the probate judge sign the licenses. But yeah, so we got ours done, and the person who did our one of the two people who did our holy union signed the papers. That was before the notary change. So we've been together for 20 years now for the holy union, but we've known each other for longer than that. Known and not known. It's kind of a strange story about how paths cross. I've known people who never went to the bars but one night they went for a private event or something and they met somebody else who never went to the bars. And they never went back to the bars, but that's where they met. The stories are varied, really varied with how people meet … HIV/AIDS. I talked about going back to my own denomination, closets and pride. For the Southern history, there's some significant ones here. Do you remember when Matthew Shepard was murdered?

CS: Yes. I’ve heard of it, I wasn’t alive.

HL: That was a real watershed. But within the next two years we had two of that kind of murders here in Alabama. Billy Jack Gaither was abducted from, I guess he was at a bar, and taken out, brutalized and burned on a pile of tires. He was from Sylacauga and no churches there would do his service. So the MCC in Birmingham did his service. They got picketed by Westboro Baptist. You’ve heard of them. Then Scotty Joe Weaver was a 17 year old, 18 year old gay man emancipated living and working a job as a waiter in Bay Minette, which is Baldwin County, east of Mobile County. He had two roommates living in this trailer with him who were a couple of sorts. They turned on him and murdered him. And when that happened, the community … I was already up here in Tuscaloosa, that was like 2000, 2001, up here in Tuscaloosa. The gay and lesbian community Mobile asked Soul Force Alabama to come down and help them to deal with Westboro Baptist coming into Mobile

CS: Yeah.

HL: His parents’ church decided, or a church they were associated with, I'm not sure if it was their actual church or not. But one of the conservative churches, fundamentalist churches in Bay Minette agreed to do the funeral service and Westboro picketed. The Westboro did a demonstration in one of the parks in central Mobile. And what we at Soul Force, after consulting with the Mobile folks, decided was that it was not wise to have a counter demonstration. We would not have people trained for that level of encounter and it would not be safe. And so what we decided, and in consultation with Mobile folks was that Soul Force would come and be a visible presence. We wore our Soul Force shirts and were easily identified. But what we did is we documented. And so Felicia Fontaine has pictures of Westboro Baptist from that event when we went down. And about the personal relationships, how that's one on one stuff? We stood across the street from the church where Westboro had their signs out and were filming. And the neighbor lady living in the house behind where we were standing had gone somewhere and was walking back to her house and saw the Westboro folks. And was just shaking her hands. And then she saw us and, sort of identifiable as butch and, you know, and we were filming what was going on and she stopped, and stood in and she said, you know, I don't agree with the gay thing, but that's terrible. And she talked to us for about five or ten minutes before she went back inside. That was a moment when somebody saw something different. They saw how the Westborough hate stuff was language and the offense that it was to a church. And she saw the respect that we were showing. And I truly believe that that was one person that moved to a good notch that day, in her opinion, and thinking about these issues was that kind of moment. So that's an example of what I was talking about, building a relationship where somebody gets to see us walking with integrity and truth and respect and dignity, versus some of the other stuff. And that happened in Bay Minette, but that's one of the ways that Soul Forces worked. Another thing that happened, though, is that 2002 you’ve all heard of  Judge Roy Moore?

Group: Yes.

HL: Okay. He had a case before him, and it was about a lesbian and a custody case. The issues of the case were not about her orientation, they were about other things. But when he wrote the opinion, he wrote in his opinion on orientation, which then made it a part of the decision. Big hoopla. That was why he had his big rock going on. So all that stuff was already going on. Equality Alabama wanted to start a petition and a movement to impeach him, to have him kicked out. That is not the first move in a nonviolent process. The first move is to try to talk to a person. And so we in Soul Force, Alabama, as small as we were, decided that what we would do is try to get an appointment with Roy Moore. And Felicia Fontaine was our facilitator, and she's really good with this kind of thing. She does excellent research. A man named Ken Baker, he died of cancer a number of years ago, was also very active. He was from Montgomery. And I went down to the state Supreme Court where Moore's offices were and asked. Felicia had called twice. We had written him, and we had called asking for her, and he had never responded. So we went to the door and knocked and discovered that he had been trying to decide what to do about that invitation and just hadn't responded yet. Well, two months later, it's too late to be … we’re doing something else. But it was during the time that he, as the chair of the Alabama Supreme Court, was working on the budget proposal for the court systems of Alabama. Really important work. He put all that aside and invited her in that day, and we decided that she would go in alone. So it would be a one-on-one conversation. We weren't going to team up. First you go one-on-one, then you go with two or three others as witnesses. She went in and they had a really good conversation. He had never had a conversation with a lesbian that was not in his court for something that the lesbian had done. So his image of lesbians was not the best. Felicia is brilliant, theologically. She came from the Church of Christ background. It's the Christian church background. So she knew the theology that he was operating under. And they had a long, like an hour and a half, conversation. They agreed that neither of them would out the other, for political reasons. It would do harm to Moore. But he agreed that when the Lawrence v. Texas case, which had to do with privacy in your own home … when that decision came down, if the Supreme Court favored Lawrence's case that the police had violated his rights, that he would abide by the Constitution, and that was in that verbal conversation. And so those kinds of things had happened but it also put us at odds with the ‘Get Him Impeached’ movement because they had not worked the process. And so we also have to be really aware when we're working at odds with each other's principles. Many times the political activists go for the jugular and never let the person live or change. Soul Force believes that change is possible and the goal is to win friends, not kill enemies. Yeah. So that's another history from Alabama that is not in most of the written stuff. There was finally a piece in the paper and Felicia can tell you she actually has a copy of that newspaper article where she wrote about it, finally. But those kinds of things happen, and the oral history you are collecting is very much … you just have to hit the right person. And I happen to know about Felicia, so I'm sending you there. But that would be a call well worth your time. She has history in the Women's Movement now and the Black civil rights movement and a lot of other things as well as the gay and lesbian. And that's the thing that's happened with the Gay and Lesbian thing. University Presbyterian that merged with Covenant Presbyterian to become Grace Presbyterian five years ago, became a welcoming congregation. And when they started becoming an openly welcoming congregation and they did the work around doing community with diversity and respect, they discovered they also had people from different classes and different races coming into the congregation. It crossed many different isms. And so that's how it happens. When you break the ice on one, you also break the ice on the others. That was a really neat thing to watch happening in that congregation as they realized that all the work they had done on becoming a welcoming congregation would also make them welcoming to people who were of different classes and of different races. It was cool. But that's how the movement has been understanding the intersections of the commonalities and that when you break this barrier, you're not breaking it just for yourself, there’s somebody else that it can also be broken for. So I mentioned Equality Alabama, student organizations. I'm sure you've followed up on some of that. University of South Alabama has had the same fluctuations of student organizations because people graduate and who are the new leaders, and it just depends on who steps up and who doesn't. The Anti-gay Education Law, the Southern Lesbian Gay Conference, you all probably heard about that?

CS: Yes.

HL: Okay. Any other ones that you wanted to ask about?

CS: So you have I think that we've sort of asked all of our questions, or you have answered all of them in some way.  

HL: Okay. Summary style is not really a very neat way of point, but yeah.

CS: I just want to sort of get a last sort of thought in. So you've sort of lived through and you've worked in HIV and AIDS outreach, and you've been a part of the Metropolitan Community Church, and you’ve-

HL: HIV, AIDS, the marriage issue.  

CS:Yeah. And so what advice would you give your younger self knowing that you've sort of done all of this?

HL: Let me tell you another story. My activism in the Presbyterian Church took me to the Presbyterian General Assembly, five consecutive assemblies back from 2010 to 2018. In 2016, I was at the assembly, and one of the seminary representatives, they call them seminary delegates, they don't have a vote on the floor. They vote as seminary delegates as an advisory, seminary advisory thing. A young fell in his twenties, gay, and they were talking about an apology to the lesbian and gay community as an overture to the General Assembly from the Presbyterian Church to its gay and lesbian members. In 2010, they had passed the marriage change. In 2010, they had passed the ordination. In 2014, they passed the marriage thing. And so ’16 was when they came back to the apology. And he was on the committee on social witness. When commissioners go to the General Assembly, they're divided up into committees that discuss all the overtures and motions that are going to come, and that committee then comes back with recommendations to the whole assembly. So there's a place where, as a group, members of the assembly sit and talk about it together in place. And he was on that committee, and they were talking about the apology, and he said, you know, we're over all of that now.

CS: Oh, wow.

HL: And completely did not acknowledge 40 years of pain of his predecessors who made it possible for him to be sitting in that chair that day. That would be my advice, is don't forget your history. Those who went before you, on whose shoulders you stand. That the things that you can't just pass a rule and it change. The Civil War didn't stop Jim Crow. There's still discrimination. You've got to keep working. You've got to be aware, because it takes time for everyone's heart and mind and ways of behaving, because we still got habits that change. We may change our thinking, but not change our habits yet. And what it is, is we're not thinking when we do the things we do. So that would be my advice is to not think you're over it, because you're still going to have to deal with it because as you go into new places, there are people who've not gotten over it and there are people who've been wounded and there are people who are still in that mode of thinking. You stand in a better place, but it's because you're standing on somebody else's shoulders. That would be my suggestion, is don't forget your history because it'll come back and slap you just like it did blacks in the South because there are a lot of people that haven't changed. That would be my advice to the younger people. But y’all got to find your own way because your issues are now different. Because of that, you also have different resources. Find out what they are. And have your own awakening. Because very often we get into us against them and we never move out of it. And then we're as much into the problem as they are because it stays adversarial. It never heals the broken relationships. So that would be my advice to the younger generation.  

CS: Yeah, it sort of seems I'm sorry, I have this last thing that I've sort of noticed, but it just seems to me like the relationship to, or at least in class, we've sort of talked about the relationship between being LGBTQ and the church and it always being negative, but it seems like that there is also this underlying thing of like everything that has been fought for by the LGBT community. There have been religious people who have gone away from the church or whatever and found their own church. It seems like they've always … what you were talking about the clergy. It's always easier to get things done because it just seems to me like there has always been this sort of underlying support from religious people.

HL: Yeah, actually 2000 and 2003, I think there was another one, I can't remember what year it was. It's called the WOW conference. Witness our Welcome was a national, actually had people from Canada, too, come in for it. Gathering of welcoming organizations within different religions. Most of them were Christian, but we did have some Jewish and other traditions represented at WOW. And what happened is those organizations networked in the movement as we began to try to get … the marriage issue was dovetailed into the religious issue because people get married in their churches or their religious organizations. But the struggle was always a political one at the national level because this is the danger of Robert's Rules of Order. I have a little bone to pick with it. Majority rule does not always heal. It's a win-lose. It doesn't build consensus and unity in decision making. It becomes a win-lose proposal. And so these changes there is a large contingent enough to vote. To make some changes, but there's also enough that really haven't changed. They just lost the war and dream of the noble cause of restoring it to the way it was. And that's the reaction. That's sort of how I see it. The transformation has not been complete, and part of it is a result of the way that polity decisions are made. They aren't made by consensus, by sharing and talking. They're made by Robert's Rules of Order decision making. And that's a win-lose debate. Debate is win-lose. It's not listening to the stories for the empathy and the consensus and the humanity in it. I really am on the edge on that one because so many rely on it. The folks that I'd mentioned, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliances, down in Mobile. They used Robert's Rules of Order, but they modified them at the end of every … they would have a long time of discussion. If you've ever watched Freedom Song, it's a story of the black movement in Mississippi at the lunch counters. Those decision makings of what to do and all that, they would have to come to unanimous consensus that everybody that was participating would agree on and then behave accordingly. And it took a long time to get there. But what happens is that's in dialogue and as everybody shares their fears and reservations, it's not about theological stuff. It's about more than that. It's more than just principle. It's about who am I, how am I feeling? Am I able to participate, why am I afraid, why do I want to participate? All of those things to get that clarity so that there was unity in the action. That's the beauty of the nonviolent thing is that training for unity in action. If you don't feel like you can stay with the principles and stay with the decisions, then you step back. It's not that you're not supportive, but you don't participate in the direct action. Anyway, that process changes how the action happens. And it's not a Robert's Rules of Order thing. And it's that dialogue. They would have these listening times. I'm using my experience of the General Assembly, but in these other churches too, they would have those listening times, but then they would then go from that committee where they had listened and pondered and wrestled with the issues into the plenary session where the people from the other twelve committees had not been in that conversation and then tried to do a vote. And it became the politics of belief still because the other people had not had the conversations and been a part of that decision making. And so, it's really hard to do that with the whole denomination. But that one-on-one grassroots is where that change has to happen so that those other twelve committees also know something about this committee's work. But just seeing how that can so quickly, a parliamentary political vote and that's what we're seeing in Congress right now. Who has control of Congress is a power issue because then they get to enforce their agenda, and it's not a consensus and it's not good for the country. That's what we're struggling with, is that whole concept of that kind of vote that's win-lose, where we're not listening to each other and considerate of each other. So that's a closing thought. How we make decisions can actually do harm to the unity and the spirit of the country and our relationships in communities.  

Group: All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you.