Miami Herald - October 2, 2004
Alexandra Alter, aalter@herald.com

"I draw on my faith in my art, because that's who I am," said Cortada, 42. "A lot of my paintings are about religious issues. But I'm a little confused about if I still consider myself a Catholic."

A year ago, Cortada, a former altar boy, left the church over its stance on homosexuality. Though he and his partner felt at home at Gesu Catholic Church in downtown Miami, the Vatican's position on gay marriage convinced him he could no longer attend a church that discriminated against him, he said.

Cortada finds himself praying at sunset. He still considers the Catholic Church his home. And like many Christians who are gay, he no longer feels he has to choose between his faith and his sexual orientation. He only wishes his church would come to the same conclusion.

Despite many mainstream Christian denominations' condemnation of homosexuality, increasing numbers of gay Christians have been coming out spiritually, urging both their churches and the gay community to rethink the assumption that being a gay Christian is an oxymoron.

While some have turned to more liberal denominations and others have formed groups within their denomination to fight discrimination, many gay Christians are holding fast to their religious identities. They'll argue there's nothing inherently anti-gay in Christianity, and being anti-gay is decidedly not Christian.

DIFFERING VIEWS

Still, some Christians maintain the Bible clearly states that one cannot be both gay and a good Christian.

"It's just not linguistically credible to make the case that there's anything but a prohibition on homosexuality in Scripture," said John Aman, a spokesman for the Center for Reclaiming America, a conservative Christian organization in Fort Lauderdale that lobbies against gay marriage and abortion.

Aman and others point to the New Testament passage in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, which states that fornicators, sodomites and idolaters won't be admitted into the kingdom of heaven, as evidence that homosexuality is a sin. He says Christianity offers a way out of homosexuality "and any other sin as well."

Others call such views a distortion of Christianity's central message of love.

To Cortada, Christ is the ultimate comforter. In a painting called Modern Leper, Cortada shows Christ comforting an AIDS patient. Jesus and the infirm man are touched by flecks of golden light, but figures in the background cast ominous shadows in their direction.

"It's about Jesus reaching out to people in modern society who feel ostracized," Cortada said.

Cortada still donates paintings to Catholic day-care centers and Genesis House, a Catholic charity, out of a deep respect for the church's commitment to providing social services. But he'll wait until there's another pope, one who accepts homosexuals, before he attends Catholic Mass.

Others see the acceptance of homosexuality by churches as inevitable.

"I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Daniel Dower of Miami Shores, a former Catholic priest who attends St. Rosa of Lima Catholic Church with his partner of eight years. Sooner or later, Dower figures, the church will revise its position, just as its leaders have apologized for the church's tacit acceptance of slavery and the Holocaust.

"There are people in the church who disapprove of homosexuality, but I know they're wrong," said Dower, who was ordained as a priest in 1984 and was outed six years later by a fellow priest at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. "There are differences between what individuals believe and the core beliefs of a Roman Catholic."

Dower said he misses administering the Eucharist and giving sermons. He catches himself reciting Mass sometimes at his desk, and launches spontaneously into scriptural exegesis in mid-conversation. But he doesn't regret leaving the priesthood.

Patricia Huff, 60, who was raised as a Baptist in Tennessee, said anti-gay rhetoric and dogma forced her out of the church at age 16. After drifting to other faiths she found more accepting of her sexual orientation, Huff began to reconsider Christianity.

"I was agnostic for a long time," said Huff, a resident of Kendall. "Around 40-something, I started thinking about how to line up better spiritually."

But Huff said she found it hard to divorce her spirituality from her Christian upbringing. Despite the anti-gay rhetoric in her church, Huff couldn't shake the instinct that "God is love and Christ is love."

"My early upbringing was Christian and the culture here is Christian," Huff said. "I don't think you can ever get totally away from where you start."

Huff now attends Miami's Unity on the Bay, a Christian worship center where about 30 percent of the congregants are gay. Many, like Sophie Blanc and her partner Lourdes Triana, who volunteer at the church on Sundays to promote the church's "Adventures in Faith," chose Unity because of its inclusive atmosphere and diverse congregation, Blanc said.

Gay Christians who feel called to the ministry may facer greater challenges, particularly finding seminaries with progressive views on religion and homosexuality. Some, like Bishop SF Irons-Mahee of Fort Lauderdale, who was raised in an African-American Pentecostal household in the Bronx, have founded their own congregations and formulated their own theologies.

"People always expected me to go into the ministry, and I was groomed to do so," she said.

Mahee, who taught a seminar series entitled Holy Homos: Deconstructing Homosexuality and the Bible at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of South Florida in Fort Lauderdale, left the church for several years after coming out at age 14. After experimenting with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Wicca, Mahee was finally able to reconcile her spirituality with her sexuality, she said.

"I came back to Christianity with an understanding and experience that was so much bigger than anything that I'd ever been taught," she said. "It wasn't Christianity that didn't work, it was the dogma."

CHANGING CHURCHES

For many gay Christians, remaining in a church that rejects them is simply too painful.

Karen Weldin, 51, of Stigler, Okla., drives 200 miles with her partner every Sunday to attend a United Church of Christ service that is accepting of gays and lesbians. Raised a Southern Baptist, Weldin left that church in 2000 after hearing one too many homophobic sermons. Sometimes she questions her decision.

"I would still like to be a member of a Southern Baptist church to stay and work from the inside," said Weldin, who is now the director of Soul Force, an interfaith organization that works to end religious bias against gays. "But I encourage people to get out because it's an abusive situation."

Other gay Christians have found ways to embrace a conservative Christian theology without compromising their sexual identity.

Dr. Joseph Pearson, who heads the Christ Evangelical Bible Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., founded the institute 12 years ago to give gay Christians the opportunity to get a conservative Protestant biblical education.

"There are many wonderful training programs that are conservative and provide good solid biblical foundations but their doors are closed to us," said Pearson, who was raised a Baptist in Chicago and did not want to give up his theological heritage. "There are other denominations that have become affirming, but we would consider them to be theologically liberal."

Like Pearson, the Rev. Tommy Watkins has been told by Baptist preachers that he can't be gay and Christian, much less a gay Christian minister. As a gay African-American Baptist, Watkins, who now attends St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove, said that since he has accepted who he is spiritually and sexually, he feels at home pretty much anywhere.

A former Baptist preacher in Birmingham, Ala., Watkins said he used to preach against homosexuality to cover up that he was gay. Now, he publicly challenges the notion that there is no place for gay people in the church.

"I told this minister who told me that homosexuals have no place in the church and will never have a place in the church that I don't understand that, because I am the church," he said.

But getting African-American churches to embrace gays and lesbians has been slow going, he said. "I wouldn't sacrifice who I am for the church, which is not doing what it's supposed to do, to reach out to all God's children," he said.

Herndon Davis, author of Black, Gay & Christian (self-published, $16) still goes to Sunday services and Bible study at his Baptist church in Atlanta. "It was difficult to stay, but if I didn't, who would stay to challenge the church?" he said.

WORK FROM WITHIN

It's a question that still bothers Cortada.

"I know it's wrong for me to leave because the Christian thing to do is to fight for what's right," he said.

But he likens his view of the Catholic Church to his painting of Augustin Verot, the first bishop of St. Augustine, who worked to provide schools for African-American children but at the same time supported slavery. His prejudice was a product of his time, not his faith, Cortada says. In Cortada's colorful rendition of the bishop, his right arm is raised in triumph, his left foot shackled to a mangrove.

Some can live with both, but not Cortada.

"By my staying involved in what the world perceives to be a hierarchical institution, I was acquiescing to the views of that institution," he said. "I took that shackle off my foot and walked away."

041002
MH041002

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 2004. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. .