San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, October 11, 1992

But now Allen's bond with his church, and with his whole past life, has been sundered. Five times he and his family were discouraged from attending Baptist churches because his wife and two children were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Allen, 36, does not have HIV. His wife became infected from a blood transfusion during a pregnancy in 1982, before blood was screened for the virus. Since then, she and her infant son, Bryan, have died from AIDS. The older son, Matthew, now 10, has survived. Both sons were infected in their mother's womb.

What Allen learned about intolerance since 1985, when he first found that his wife and children had HIV, has wounded him and sent him outside the fold to look for solace. His anger has subsided only gradually, and flashes of it can still be seen in conversation.

"My case proves that you don't have to be gay to be kicked out," he said in a recent interview. "I used to see bumper stickers in Dallas that said, 'You're Welcome in Our Church.' Every time I saw one I got angry and felt like suing them for false advertising."

Eventually, he stopped trying to find a welcoming church, quit his ministry and began to work on projects for the Christian Life Commission, an educational body of the General Baptist Convention of Texas. In 1989 Congress appointed him to the National Commission on AIDS, which advises the federal government on AIDS policy.

Until now, Allen kept quiet the details of his family's odyssey through the realms of prejudice, their struggle with AIDS and their rejection by the churches. His wife, Lydia, asked him not to speak openly about their trouble while she was alive. She was 38 when she died of AIDS last February at her home in Dallas.

One of his jobs with the Christian Life Commission from 1985 to 1990 was to find churches that would accept people with AIDS into their congregations. He sometimes succeeded, especially with adults and especially when those who were infected were willing to go into the church quietly.

But he said, "I have never found day care for my son, not one center or church that that could accept him if other parents knew" of his infection. One minister suggested that Matthew could come to Sunday school if his infection was kept secret and if Allen sat in the room, too, to take care of his son should anything happen.

Another minister suggested that Sunday school sessions could be taped so his son could see them without actually having to be with the other children.

There is virtually no disagreement in principle among churches and synagogues in America. Most teach that church members should receive each other with unconditional love and caring -- even if they are ill, and even if they are unrepentant sinners.

A Washington clergyman, the Rev. Kenneth South of the Church of Christ, who is director of the AIDS National Interfaith Network, says it is important to recognize that outside government, the churches are society's greatest source of help to people with AIDS. He has a list of 1,800 separate AIDS relief and education programs run by churches around the country.

But the effort in the churches did get started slowly, he said, and it is still a person-by-person, day-by-day effort, coming almost entirely from individual ministers and their churches rather than from the moral guidance at the top of any religious denomination.

The Rev. Travis Berry, a former pastor who is now a professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, advises churches on how to handle situations in which someone infected with AIDS asks to join the church. At most, he said, 25 percent of the churches in the United States have begun to deal with the issue of AIDS.

The problem begins with the confusion over proper attitudes. The churches of most denominations condemn homosexual behavior. This sends a confusing message not only to gay people with AIDS, but also to church members confronting the issue, theologians from several denominations said in interviews.

Rejection is prompted by fear of the disease, fear of homosexuals and fear of drug users. Even when church members do begin to take care of those with AIDS, Allen said, often it is with the motive of "curing" them of their homosexuality. "In practice, the love and acceptance are not unconditional," he said. "There are strings attached."

In 1985, when Allen learned that his wife and children had HIV, he was a minister at the First Christian Church in Colorado Springs. Though he himself was not infected, he said, he was asked by the pastor, the Rev. Warren Hile, to leave his ministry.

Hile did not return telephone calls asking for comment about the incident. A few days after Hile and other church members asked him to step down, Allen said, he took his family and drove out of Colorado Springs in the middle of the night, heading home to Texas. He was fearful and angry, he said, at both God and man.

"At first I blamed the gays in San Francisco, where the transfusion took place," Allen recalled. "That is completely illogical because transfusions take place everywhere, and there is nothing to say that the infected blood came from a gay man. But I felt that angry at first. I kept saying to myself: 'I'm innocent! I didn't do anything!' "

For a year, he said, he could not bring himself to talk to his brother, who is a homosexual.

Allen said that on the day his wife became infected he had taught Sunday school class, went to the home of a sick child, preached a sermon, and taught class again in the evening.

"My wife had a seizure in the evening on the way home," he said. "They say that God will bless your life if you live in Him. But I lost everything. What is this blessing stuff? What is the meaning of innocence and guilt?"

The shocks continued as friends stopped calling him.

His second son, Bryan, died not long after the family returned to Texas. He was seven months old. Allen said he held Bryan as he died and placed the boy's body in a small coffin beside the hospital bed. He remembers vividly the next moment:

"Bryan's head was over to the side, and the funeral director reached out to straighten it in the casket. But he stopped and drew back. He said, 'Would you mind moving your son's head for me?' That stung."

But at the same time he had a small epiphany, one that began to make his anger dissolve.

"When Bryan died in my arms," he said, "I realized that it was the virus that died, not Brian." His anger at gay people began to fade, he said, adding, "I realized then that I was dealing with a virus, not with people."

Allen has left the organized church, at least for now, and is searching for a spiritual path that is more open and accepting at its base.

Allen said he now sometimes feels closer to people whom he formerly condemned than to people he linked arms with at church.

"I once was at an interfaith conference and sat down with a man whose lover had just died of AIDS," he said. "I saw the pain and sadness in his eyes; they were my eyes and I was looking in a mirror. He told me there was one thing I should always do -- take a lot of pictures. And I have."

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