Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150036
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"We must learn to our love our enemies."
Silence from the hundreds of spectators in Wasena Park.
"It's difficult. It isn't popular."
The silence continued.
"But we will win if we have truth on our lips and love in our hearts."
Silence.
"Your applause is overwhelming," White said pointedly.
A smattering of applause began, then spread through much of the crowd at last Sunday's Pride in the Park VI, Western Virginia's annual gay and lesbian pride celebration.
White understands the reluctance to take up his banner of love.
After all, his audience was made up primarily of people who have been told over and over that nobody loves them, not even God. They've been cast as the worst kind of sinners. They've been given up - in spirit, if not in rhetoric - as unredeemable by many of the people White was calling on them to love.
"We've got to love Pat Robertson into loving us for who we are.
"I no longer hate Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition.
"They are victims of misinformation, as I once was," White said. "They are not evil. They are speaking evil, but they are not evil."
White may have as much reason as anybody to feel animosity toward Falwell and Robertson and numerous other conservative Christian ministers who were glad to use his ghostwriting talents before they knew he was gay. Among other things, White wrote Falwell's biography, "Strength for the Journey."
Once White publicly affirmed his homosexuality in 1993, he couldn't get the time of day from people who had bared their souls - more or less - to him.
Recently, he was jailed for trespassing at Pat Robertson's Virginia Beach headquarters. After White fasted for 22 days in jail, Robertson met with him for about 15 minutes to hear White's concerns about Robertson's attacks on gays on his nationally broadcast "700 Club" program.
Did his contact with his old boss make a difference? Maybe not. But the incident drew attention to the concerns White raises - that the vicious anti-homosexual rhetoric used by some TV preachers may contribute to violence against gays and lesbians.
In Roanoke last weekend, White was taking his message to the other side in that conflict.
"We can't get anything by screaming or by hating. Hate only consumes the person doing the hating," White said in an interview after his speech.
"I'm totally free of hate now."
For White, that includes studiously declining to question the motives of those who preach against him.
"Jerry and Pat and all these guys really believe" what they preach against homosexuality, White acknowledged. Not only do they believe the Bible speaks unequivocally against homosexual practice - a contention White rejects - but also, "They believe all gay men abuse, molest and recruit children. That all lesbians hate motherhood."
Those assertions are demonstrably false, White said, but their power continues in large part because they are repeated so often in pulpits across the country.
White wasn't trying to convert preachers last Sunday in Roanoke. He was talking to people with whom he shares a common experience of rejection, discrimination, hatred.
He urged his listeners to "be proud" and to come "at least partially out" of the closet as a prerequisite to showing their "spiritual muscle."
White encouraged the crowd to write the U.S. Supreme Court about a challenge to a Colorado law that would ban discrimination against homosexuals. He also urged them to write Hawaiian state legislators in support of proposals to legalize homosexual marriages in that state.
But those were side issues in White's larger message about love.
"Lots of gays and lesbians have given up their personal spiritual journeys because they've heard God doesn't love them," he said. "God loves us without reservation. Get back on your spiritual journeys. Re-examine everything you were taught, throw out what is an insult to your soul, and get on with the journey."
by CNB