Mel White; Gay Author and Pastor

A man of his words
Gay author and pastor Mel White turns the tables on the religious right

By KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, September 29, 2006

For years, Mel White worked alongside fundamentalist Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, James Dobson and Pat Robertson. White even helped some of them write books.

Now White, who is gay, has written a book of his own warning against their anti-gay rhetoric and their plan to take over American government.

“I watched fundamentalists start in 1973 and I watched them plan to take over the denominations and to take over the country and in 35 years, they have done it,” White, 66, says in an interview.

White’s own background with fundamentalism is more than just professional. For 35 years, he tried to become “ex-gay,” a story that he documented in his first book, “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America.”

Finally, he accepted his sexual orientation and with his partner, Gary Nixon, founded Soulforce, a non-profit organization that works to combat religious-based bigotry and oppression.

“Gary and I decided to come out and try to confront [fundamentalist Christian rhetoric],” White says. “To confront it, we had to build a case against it, so we monitored all the heavies for a decade … I happen to be close to the primo people, coincidently. I think God has a sense of humor, doesn’t she?”

IN “RELIGION GONE BAD” White uses documents, tapes of old secret meetings and his own experiences to analyze how some fundamentalist Christians have developed a battle against gays to promote their larger war to take over American government.

In one chapter, he compares the characterization of gays by certain Christian leaders to the characterization of Polish Jews that Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels depicted in his propaganda film, “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”).

“Their goal for us is to disenfranchise us, deny us our rights and drive us back into our closets or worse,” White says. “The things [Goebbels] said about Jews are exactly the things Christians are saying about us. When you stigmatize and you demonize for so long, what’s going to happen?”

This war against American culture and gays, White argues in his book, has been well crafted and fully planned out by fundamentalist leaders for decades.

White, who still works as a pastor, says that religiously motivated killings of gay people and suicides of gay Christian youth persuaded him to do something.

“I’m constantly being asked to bury kids who killed themselves or who were killed,” White says. “So we have a collection of suicide notes from people who said ‘I accepted my homosexuality until I became a Christian a few months ago, then, learning that you can’t be both gay and Christian, I didn’t know how else to handle this,’ and they kill themselves.”

White and Nixon attend Jerry Falwell’s church every Sunday in Lynchburg, Va., in part so they can keep tabs on Falwell’s message and direction.

“I think people who live in Washington, D.C., for example, have no idea what it’s really like out there,” White says. “We moved to Lynchburg because we didn’t. We lived in Laguna Beach.”

White acknowledges that some people may see him as an alarmist, but he says he sees the problem as real, the threat as imminent.

“I’m trying to say to gay people, ‘You are oppressed. You are second-class citizens in your own country,’” White says. “Because you’re rich enough and because you’re white enough and because you’re male enough or female-enough, you can pass and therefore, you know nothing can happen to you, but I bury the kids who can’t pass.”