A Path Less Traveled

In the darkness of a West Hollywood movie theater, Troy Perry flinches as he watches Robert Duvall in “The Apostle,” the tragic tale of a clergyman who nearly loses his religion.

“That’s me,” he says, whispering to a friend during one poignant scene. “That’s me up there.”

In the movie, a defrocked Pentecostal minister is driven by his flock from the church he loves and is abandoned by his wife and children as punishment for past sexual dalliances.

Thirty years ago, Perry was also a Pentecostal minister banished from his church and deserted by his wife and children after a watershed sexual disclosure: He acknowledged that he was gay.

Like the film’s preacher, the Florida-born Perry left behind a painful past to open a new, highly controversial church--one that would soon flourish.

Today, his 52,000-member Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches is the world’s largest religious denomination for gays and lesbians, with 314 congregations in 16 countries.

Perry’s church, started as a fledgling service in his Huntington Park living room in 1968, welcomes people like himself, those gays, lesbians and transsexuals who have been shunned by more traditional religions. Each year, his churches preside over 5,000 “holy union” ceremonies for gay couples.

Perry’s churches are testimony to his audacity, his patience and--in an era when AIDS has killed or afflicted more than 10,000 of his congregants--his longevity.

“The smartest entrepreneurs are those who see a market where no one else can, and Troy Perry did that,” says R. Stephen Warner, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied Perry’s churches. “He was the first to see and act upon the fact that there are deep religious needs in the gay community.”

In an easy Southern drawl, the 58-year-old Perry says, “There’s still a lot of homophobic religion out there, pushing people right into our arms.”

Perry’s movement holds to a defiant minority view: that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality or find it a sin. It’s a stand that has won him critics and outright enemies.

“Troy Perry is a very confused and unhappy man concerning his sexual identity,” says the Rev. Lou Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition. “He’s chosen to be gay, but he doesn’t have to use the Bible to justify it. Somebody please tell him God didn’t intend for us to be homosexual. There’s no room for them in God’s church.”

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Perry is often accompanied by bodyguards while preaching nationwide. Church conventions are marked by body frisks and metal detectors. He says 24 of his churches have been desecrated or burned since 1972 and members of his clergy have been attacked.

Since 1984, he has seen more than 6,000 church members die from AIDS-related illnesses. Another 6,000 now have HIV--including his partner, Philip DeBlieck, whose condition was diagnosed 11 years ago.

Each week, it seems, Perry preaches at the funeral of a church member or friend. He tells those present they’ll all soon meet in heaven--and that the reunion will take place at the Eastern Gate, a reference to the Book of Revelation, which describes how God’s redeemed will be greeted by an angel at the gate of heaven where the sun rises.

“These funerals have become the story of my life,” Perry says. “It’s just rough when you don’t have the proper time to grieve for one friend before you have to move on to the funeral of the next one.”

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Born in Tallahassee, Fla., to a waitress and a father who could neither read nor write, Troy Perry always leaned toward the church, which had an air of sophistication he could not find at home.

He loved the exuberance radiated by Pentecostal ministers, recalls brother Jimmy Perry, and used to play at baptizing his four younger brothers in a 55-gallon drum behind their house--raising his voice to emulate his favorite fire-and-brimstone speeches.

“When Troy was 10, he’d have me kill a bug just so he could have a funeral,” Jimmy Perry recalls. “My 9-year-old cousin, she was the one designated to do all the crying.”

Perry was 12 when his father, a local moonshiner, died during a police chase. He ran away from a harsh stepfather to live with religious relatives.

Convinced he was called to the ministry, he started preaching in Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Illinois at congregations of the Tennessee-based Church of God.

He recalls testifying before crowds of 200 in his junior high school cafeteria. “At age 13 you think you have all the answers,” he says.

Still, Perry had questions about his sexuality. Once he consulted a church mentor, who suggested that all he needed was a good woman. Perry later married the man’s daughter.

“The church told me that getting married would cure me,” he recalls. “I had my doubts about my sexuality, but I still did exactly what the church asked me to do. I thought, ‘Praise God! If this will do it, maybe I’m not a homosexual after all.’ ”

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In 1963, at age 23, as the pastor of a Church of God in Prophecy in Santa Ana, he once again revealed to a superior that he was gay.

This time, judgment was swift: He was excommunicated. Perry’s wife left him and took their two boys, ages 3 and 1, to Alabama.

He plunged into a burgeoning gay lifestyle, taking on numerous sexual partners. “I was a homosexual--I was gonna die and go to hell,” he says. “So I figured I was gonna bust hell wide open.”

Years later, he says, after being deserted by a lover, he attempted suicide, slitting his wrists in his bathtub. He was discovered by his roommate, who rushed him to the hospital.

Perry spent the next few years working as a salesman and even did a short stint in the Army. All the while, he tried to come to terms with both his religion and his sexual orientation.

“Spiritually, I was never so sad as I was in those five years,” he said. “I couldn’t reconcile being gay and what the church said about homosexuals being evil.

“Every time I tried to go to church, I got slapped down. I couldn’t get any answers. Nobody would even talk to me about it.”

Eventually, Perry decided to return to the church.

Suggestions by his mother and a neighborhood psychic to start his own religious movement finally led him to announce in a Los Angeles gay-oriented newspaper that he was holding services.

Twelve people came to the first meeting Oct. 6, 1968, in his cramped Huntington Park home. He soon spread the word in gay bars and on the street. A year later, Perry was filling services at the 385-seat Encore Theater in Los Angeles.

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He attracted other gay clergy, and word spread about his church, thanks to coverage in major magazines, newspapers and on television. But he has been his own best apostle, traveling constantly to speak to potential converts and open new branches of his church.

He has toured Europe and Africa. In London he rented a Baptist church, placed ads in a local gay-oriented newspaper and began holding services.

Last year, he visited South Africa to encourage the spread of new churches there and met with Archbishop Desmond Tutu to discuss treatment of gays in that country.

As he spreads the word of his church, Perry has remained political--marching in the front lines of gay rallies, participating in sit-ins and hunger strikes, often going to jail.

Once, in 1969, after Perry led a gay march in Los Angeles, church board members--many of whom were still closeted and timid about publicity--voted to fire him as leader of his church for being too militant. Immediately, an enraged congregation met to voice its support for Perry, taking a vote to fire the board.

“Troy convinced them that this was all a learning process and that the board should be kept on,” recalls Nancy Wilson, pastor at the movement’s mother church in West Hollywood. “He didn’t take things personally. He knew the bigger picture was important.”

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Decades after coming out, Perry still feels the pain of his divorce and loss of contact with his two sons and former wife. He says he has not spoken to her in 35 years.

“It’s one of those things--I just have to leave it alone,” he says of his marriage. “My ex-wife and oldest son have made it clear they do not want me to contact them. It still bothers me, but I have to respect their wishes.”

In 1984, however, his youngest son suddenly contacted him and the two have become friends. Perry even served as preacher for his son’s wedding.

For James Michael Perry, a 33-year-old Midwestern construction worker, coming to terms with his gay father has been a hard lesson in unconditional acceptance.

“My perception of my father growing up, from what my mother had told me, was that he was an evil man, that homosexuality was the devil’s work,” he says.

“Now that I know him, I’m proud of what he’s done. I don’t understand homosexuals, but I don’t think gay jokes are funny anymore. I’m different now, thanks to my father.”

Perry recalls meeting with his adult son for the first time, at a Mexican restaurant near his home in Silver Lake, with his lover and mother in tow.

“I was gonna be big, bad and butch--I was not going to cry,” he says. “But as soon as we joined hands for prayer, everyone was blubbering.

“The waitress took one look at us and came over to ask if the tamales were too hot.”

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After three decades of steady growth, Perry’s movement has become a growing financial force. Last year, U.S. parishioners alone donated more than $15 million to his churches.

By all accounts, Perry lives modestly. He shares a two-bedroom condominium with DeBlieck and is paid an annual salary of $62,000. Still, he’s amazed by his success.

“A friend once said he thought we’d become a living room [operation] in West Hollywood and maybe one in San Francisco,” he says. “But we never dreamed of this.”

Last year, with the help of a $1-million down payment raised through church collections, his movement paid $3.8 million for a complex in West Hollywood--its present worldwide headquarters--with plans to transform the building into a church space, visitors center and gay and lesbian museum.

Perry continues to advocate for gay rights, both inside and outside the church. He has been invited to White House conferences on both AIDS and hate crimes.

In recent years, his churches have gained legitimacy among the religious community at large, accepted into a growing number of interfaith councils.

“When you think of where the religious community was in 1968 in respect to homosexuality, something had to give,” says the Rev. Albert Cohen, executive director of the Southern California Ecumenical Council, which last year voted to accept Perry’s churches for membership in its group.

The author of four books on homosexuality and religion, including “The Lord Is My Shepherd: and He Knows I’m Gay,” Perry remains an inspiring speaker, a man well-versed in Scripture, who mixes passion and storytelling with a touch of the absurd.

“So many times he’s made me laugh,” says L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a friend of Perry’s whose district includes West Hollywood’s sizable gay population. “The only difference between Troy Perry and me is that I’m a Jew and he’s a Christian. But if I was Christian, I’d want him as my minister. He’d keep me awake.”

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Ask Perry about his challenges and he talks about reaching out to self-loathing gays and lesbians who ask, “How can God possibly love me?” He also copes with what he calls the narcissism and sexual obsessions of the gay community and with the “oppression sickness” that he says leads to increased alcohol and drug use.

His biggest battle, though, is against death.

Especially difficult are services attended by parents who shunned their gay children while they were alive.

“They’re the ones I want to drop-kick, Jesus, right through the goal posts of life,” he says.

In his funeral services, he reminds such parents of precious moments with their sons that they missed. “I tell them what wonderful men they turned out to be, how proud of them we all were, even if they weren’t.”

Just the other day, Perry went through his address book and crossed out the names of those friends just in Los Angeles who had died from AIDS in the past few years.

There were 86.

And Perry prepares for others, such as a clergyman in his church whose AIDS-related illness has brought him near death.

On his office phone, he consoles the man’s lover with an explicit set of directions.

“Remember to tell him to meet at the Eastern Gate.”