GAY CHURCHES : IN THE AGE OF AIDS

Sunday mornings at Christ Chapel/MCC in Santa Ana appear straight out of small-town Middle America.

The men and women of the congregation are well dressed and well mannered. The bulletin board tells of the next potluck social and Bible study. The service itself is equally folksy: the gentle admonishments, the hymns to an all-loving Lord Almighty.

It is all very Main Street . . . until prayers are asked, and a startling number are for friends who are victims of AIDS . . . until services end and couples of the same sex stroll out holding hands.

Christ Chapel is not your typical church: Nearly all of its 120 members are homosexuals.

Furthermore, Christ Chapel belongs to the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), a 32,000-member movement that holds to a defiantly minority view in the world of organized religions: that the Scriptures do not condemn homosexuality or find it a sin.

Such a view horrifies the Moral Majority and others of the Christian right, who believe that MCC churches are unfit for membership in the Christian community. They contend that the MCC is an unholy claque of sexual deviants, its congregations a mockery of all that is decent, sacred--and normal--in U.S. society and a breeding ground for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

To the Rev. Dennis Chappell, Christ Chapel’s pastor, this kind of opposition is typical of the sweeping, unrelenting stigmas that still confront the MCC flock and others in the homosexual community.

“We’re all creations of God, and bask in God’s love,” he said, standing outside the 90-year-old restored dwelling that is Christ Chapel’s home in the heart of Santa Ana’s historic church row just a block east of Civic Center.

“This means everyone,” he added quietly, “including our church, especially now when it (the AIDS epidemic) has made others more fearful, more rejecting.”

The numerical strength of MCC churches in the county is hardly overwhelming. The two other congregations here are even smaller: the 55-member New Covenant, housed in a rented storefront in Anaheim, and the 30-member Ocean of Life, which meets in temporary quarters in Costa Mesa.

But the MCC is one of the few openly homosexual institutions in a county that, gay activists believe, has a homosexual population of roughly 200,000 men and women--the overwhelming majority of whom remain in the closet.

In a county famed for its ultraconservatism and its vociferous anti-homosexual forces, the very presence of MCC churches might seem galling and threatening.

Not surprisingly, the county’s MCC congregations have long kept a low profile, in contrast with the “gay ghettos” of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other big U.S. cities, in which MCC members have been far more militant and visible.

“Sure, we’re active in Orange County, but it’s done more quietly. We can’t help but keep this (county’s) conservatism in mind,” said the Rev. Jack Mossman, New Covenant’s pastor.

To MCC leaders, then, bringing their movement to the county is like walking into the lion’s den.

“We’re talking a real cross section here, the essence of middle-class American suburbia,” said MCC’s founder, the Rev. Troy Perry. “If we can meet the challenge of Orange County, we believe we can just about survive anywhere.”

Orange County’s first Metropolitan Community Church wasn’t in Laguna Beach, even though that city has the largest concentration of homosexual residents (an estimated 4,000) in the county.

The first church was set up in Garden Grove, and in a gay bar on that city’s commercial strip. The minister was Perry himself, who had just founded the first MCC church in Los Angeles and was already becoming one of the most acclaimed--and vilified--gay-rights leaders in the United States.

Garden Grove wasn’t Perry’s first mission in Orange County. Seven years earlier, he was pastor of a Church of God of Prophecy in Santa Ana. But when he openly declared his homosexuality, he was expelled by the church and separated from his wife and two sons.

Perry’s 1970 gay-bar ministry was a rather casual, surrealistic endeavor. “The owner wouldn’t let us in on Sundays--that was his biggest business day,” Perry recalled.

“But we were able to give services on weekdays. So there I was, holding Holy Communion near the bar, and competing with a blaring jukebox.”

The bar ministry was short-lived. It folded after a few months.

Subsequent attempts, starting in 1970 with Christ Chapel in Santa Ana, were just as tenuous. (Laguna Beach was not considered as a site because the mainline congregations in that community are especially receptive of gay churchgoers.)

But Christ Chapel, with 16 members--followed in 1974 by New Covenant, with an even smaller number--somehow took hold, even though services were in living rooms or borrowed quarters and members were fearful of hostile reactions.

Rodger Harrison, a former Baptist chaplain who founded Christ Chapel and remained its pastor for 12 years, recalled: “It wasn’t anywhere as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, you got the ‘fag’ and ‘queer’ taunts, a little vandalism. But we were blessed. It never got worse than that.”

The experience was the same for New Covenant, whose founders were lesbians who wanted to focus on feminist issues. “We got locked out once when the landlord found out who we were,” remembered Mae, 59, who like most of the county’s MCC parishioners did not want her last name used.

“It happened again once or twice, but subtler--like, ‘Oh, sorry, but your group is over our (room-capacity) limit.’ ”

Otherwise, the MCC groups, which are nondenominational, have seemed much like churches in the mainstream.

Membership is similarly diverse, made up of business executives, physicians, educators, office employees and blue-collar workers. A few heterosexuals join, particularly those active in the gay-rights movement.

And there are the usual internal squabbles. Fluctuations in membership rolls, members said, are more because of “personality clashes” and “plain old church-hopping” than to anti-homosexual incidents.

“Sometimes it’s the pastors because they bring their own worship styles,” said Alicia, 49, who admits to “church-hopping” for years, including to the larger MCC groups in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“It can be more formal or real evangelistic. You like it or you don’t. Sometimes it’s the nit-picking, like the music, the number of study sessions, even the color of the carpet.”

Laughing, she added: “This happens in any church, right?”

But there are no arguments over what has brought--and kept--them in the overall MCC fold. All were dropouts from established churches. All felt like religious outcasts.

“They told us that gays will all go to hell, that they were the scum of the earth,” said a 34-year MCC member and former Baptist who asked that his name not be used. “They were so intimidating. They made me feel that being gay was some cruel joke that God was playing on us.”

Mary, 55, said it was the “dogma, the boredom and the joylessness” that drove her from the Roman Catholic Church.

Also, there was the lay officer who “found out I was a lesbian and told me, ‘You’re not fit to even clean a kennel.’ ”

“You feel so terribly confused, so dead inside,” said Cari, 28, a one-time Baptist, “because you’re trying to live another life. You know, you’re supposed to be ‘normal’--get married and raise a family. I did that (she was married and has a 8-year-old daughter). But I kept feeling, hey, (trying to be a heterosexual) was a lie, at least for me.”

And all members remember vividly their first service at a Metropolitan Community Church.

“I was so scared; I drove around the block six times before I had the nerve to go in,” said Linda, 42, a one-time Reformed Church member, recalling a service 13 years ago in Los Angeles. “I was still shaking when I sat down inside. Because this was different--this was like saying out loud, and in the open, who I am.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself, to explain or apologize (at MCC),” said Steve, 31. “Just go through that door, be yourself and know that God does love us and that it’s all right to be me. We can hold each other; we can cry together. This is a family. This is a home.”

But reactions from their own families seem to be widely--and painfully--diverse.

“My mother says it doesn’t make sense,” Steve said. “But she’s come around. She says it’s my life. She hasn’t stopped loving me, although I know it’s been very hard for her to accept.”

Roger, 41, a divorced father of two girls, put it more succinctly: “Some of them (family) tell me it’s all right. The others? They haven’t spoken to me since.”

By 1981, when the Ocean of Life group was formed, the county’s Metropolitan Community Church movement seemed to be losing some of its outcast image.

MCC ministers were increasingly invited to debate gay-rights issues on the college circuit, usually pitted against spokesmen of anti-homosexual groups.

MCC members became part of an expanding, more visible county network of pro-homosexual groups, chiefly the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Election Committee of the County of Orange (ECCO), which supports gay-oriented candidates for political office.

And there was yet another trend, usually unspoken. The local MCC congregations continued to be spared the violence that has struck MCC churches in other areas.

MCC officials reported that 18 of their U.S. churches have been burned since 1972, the year the Los Angeles home church was gutted by fire. Dozens of MCC ministers and staff workers, they said, have been assaulted.

Christ Chapel’s first Santa Ana home--formerly a synagogue built in the 1890s--was burned down in 1979, but MCC officials said that fire was set by a mentally disordered member of the Christ Chapel congregation.

(The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, which has a far higher profile, was firebombed and vandalized in the late 1970s. The building itself was burned down in 1981. The center, which moved to another Garden Grove site, has reported no major violence since.)

But gay activists maintain homophobia is again on the increase. The reason, they said, is the AIDS epidemic. Because AIDS has afflicted mostly male homosexuals, anti-homosexual groups have labeled it “the gay plague.”

The Gay and Lesbian National Task Force has found a dramatic national rise in “gay bashing”--assaults on gay men and lesbians. Werner Kuhn, director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center here, reports a significant increase in such assaults in the county.

The increased homophobia, these activists said, has led to another alarming trend--a personal retreat within much of the homosexual community.

“Many gays and lesbians are being driven back into the closet, and just when the (gay-rights) movement was making such great strides,” said the Rev. Jane Carl, former MCC pastor in Ontario and now an administrator for Ocean of Life in Costa Mesa.

“They find it too difficult to go through the same hates, the old stigmas.”

Even longtime MCC members said open declarations of their homosexuality are now less likely.

“OK, my family knows, and my close friends,” said one 38-year-old man, an MCC member. “But not my bosses. It’s a conservative company. It’s not the place that can take that (knowledge). Especially now--not with the AIDS hysteria.”

MCC churches were no less affected.

“Like everywhere else (in the homosexual community), our members were paralyzed with fear. No one then (early 1980s) seemed to know anything about the causes and spread of AIDS,” Carl said.

“There were people, maybe quite a few, who left,” Chappell said. “But overall, throughout MCC and at our church, membership hasn’t declined.”

Now, pastors said, their members are closely involved with projects for AIDS victims, especially those offered by the Orange County AIDS Services Foundation and the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. On July 31, members of the three congregations are joining the Orange County AIDS Walk.

“If you are a true Christian, you don’t hide, you don’t turn away from (AIDS victims),” said Steve, a New Covenant member studying to be a MCC minister. “You learn to embrace them with love.”

Seven members of Christ Chapel have died of AIDS, one at New Covenant.

Contrasted with MCC’s big-city congregations, the county membership’s AIDS death toll is low. But the impact is hardly less devastating.

Consider the New Covenant victim--one of the deacons, Mik, who was 34 when he died.

Mik was diagnosed with AIDS in October, 1986. New Covenant members visited him constantly in the hospital. Four of them were planning to take him into their home. The target date: Ash Wednesday, the day that Mik picked to return to the church to give a sermon.

“But he went so quickly, and he was in the hospital the whole time,” Mossman recalled.

Mik died Feb. 22, 1987. The memorial at New Covenant was held 10 days later--Ash Wednesday.

“His family had already held a memorial at their (Roman Catholic) church. Some of us went, and even now, I’m not all that sure how they felt about us there,” Mossman said.

“Some of Mik’s family came to our service. Ours was casual, joyous, with a lot of humor--the way Mik was. I believe it was the first time any of them had been in one of our churches. They seemed deeply moved.”

A “referral” case that involved Chappell was even more ironic.

Although Chappell, since 1982, has conducted funeral or memorial services in Southern California for 80 AIDS victims, he did not conduct this service.

“He (victim) was from the Midwest, and his family wanted to bury him back home,” Chappell recalled. “But they were from one of the old-line churches back there, and the pastor flatly refused to have anything to do with him.

“So they turned to us. They were confronting so much pain in such a short time. They were hit not only by the terrible and early death of the son, but by the realization he was gay.”

The son was buried peacefully a week later. He was given a funeral at last.

In the hometown. In the local Metropolitan Community Church.