by Charles
Parting Glances
Before I came out in my senior year at Cass Technical High School, I had devoted 13 years of my life to both liberal and evangelical Christian theologies.
My mother felt I could profit by a religious up bringing, so at age five I was enrolled in First Baptist Church primary. (Now People's Community Church of Detroit.) I still have my Sunday School promotion certificate.
As is the American Baptist Association tradition, I was baptized at 13, the age of accountability. (Among Jewish faiths, time signaled for a bar mitzvah.) I was baptized by dunking in the large baptismal tank underneath the pulpit.
I was also given a Bible inscribed by Rev. Ernest L. Honts. "To Charles Robert: May you always be a good monk." I wasn't then – nor now – quite sure what is meant by pastor's odd admonition, but if celibacy was intended I failed grandly, gloriously, egregiously over the years.
I spent a week at Baptist summer camp. I left with enthusiastic poems, collected rocks, and a heart-felt, weeks-long crush on my counselor.
For whatever reason (perhaps because our neighbors who took us to church moved away), my mother stopped attending First Baptist, and I stopped thinking about God until I turned 15.
I started dropping in on a church two blocks from home: The Missionary Worker's Tabernacle. The interdenominational ministry was founded in 1923 by Anna Curry Spellman, a cousin of New York City's politically powerful Cardinal Francis Spellman. (A friend of the Kennedys, "Franny" was also, shall we say, ecumenically fond of Broadway chorus boys.)
The Tabernacle was pastored by women, and given the time frame that fact was highly controversial among fundamentalists. ("Suffer not a woman to speak in church.") Even so, the Workers held evangelical meetings in Detroit's Campus Martius, as one of its elderly friends was sister of Wayne County sheriff Andrew C. Baird.
Looking back, the years I spent attending the Tabernacle, two, sometimes three times a week, probably saved me – pun intended – from getting into serious teenager trouble. (Although secretly, I became "lets fool around" active, which troubled me somewhat, but not enough to make me fully, sincerely repent for more than a week.)
I do recall that one of the Missionary Workers, a sweet, attractive blonde in mid-twenties, Miss Sanders, was very upset. She was despondent. Crying. Bereaved on two counts. Her brother had been accidentally killed, and had died "unsaved." Never having accepted Jesus as personal savior, he was lost for all eternity in Hell.
At Cass Technical High School I made friends with students affiliated with the Voice of Christian Youth, one of whom, an outgoing automotive repair senior named Jerry, invited me to attend Gilead Baptist. (Jerry, somewhat concerned, chided me for sampling a Jewish friend's gefilte fish sandwich during lunch, because doing so "compromised my born-again testimony.")
Gilead was Southern Baptist. (Belief in the Trinity. Deity of Jesus. His resurrection. Salvation by faith in His vicarious atonement. His second coming – after the Battle of Armageddon, initiated by Soviet Russia.) To be sure I was truly among the elect, I was baptized for a second time. I loved the fellowshiping, hoping my folks too would be saved.
I made friends at Gilead with the church pianist, Bryan. (I last saw him 30 years ago at a Ford Auditorium. He said his affiliation was now Unitarian/Universalist. I smiled, winked goodbye.)
Jerry, Bryan and I formed an evangelistic team during my CT junior year. Bryan provided Gospel music. Jerry led singspiration. I preached. I also became increasingly concerned that I was damnably different. A queer. I was 18. Thin. Youthfully handsome. Well . . .
A halo on my horizon. The hounds of heaven nipping at my high heels.
