January 15, 2025 • 33 mins
Bill Glenn is the author of I Came Here Seeking a Person. A Vital Story of Grace; One Gay Man's Spiritual Journey. In the 70s, he trained to be a Catholic priest, but left the seminary at 29. But just as he left, his priestly gifts of love and compassion would be needed to get him — and the thousands of queer people he touched — through the AIDS Crisis.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
There was a proposition on the California ballot that would
have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in
the state of California se nineteen seventy nine, and I
went over to a rally in San Francisco at the
Civic Center and I wore my Roman collars because I
didn't want to even know I was gay. I just thought, well,
(00:27):
I'll be a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You show up to this protest looking like a priest,
like a cat priest.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
And Harvey Milk was giving a speech and he said,
we're not here today for ourselves, because we're free. He said,
we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the
little boy in Bakersfield who field there all alone. And
tears started to come down my face, and I pulled them.
That white tab in a collar out and I put
(00:58):
a piece of paper and I wrote, I'm a gay man.
It was over.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Bill Glenn, a gay spiritual leader.
(01:31):
We'll learn about how he was going to become a
Catholic priest but ultimately ended up on another path, giving
peace to gay men, Dying of aids From My Heart Podcast.
I'm Jordan and Solves and this is what we loved.
(02:12):
I have a super complicated relationship with faith and religion.
Growing up. I was raised super Catholic. I was in
the church choir, and I never missed Sunday school and
one Sunday in the seventh grade, the youth minister gave
this presentation to all the teens at Sunday School on
Heaven and Hell. I remember he projected this chart onto
(02:35):
the wall and the chart had three columns. The first
column was about how you could get to heaven. It
had things like obeying your parents and never lying. And
then the middle column was about how you could be
sent to purgatory. That was small stuff like overeating and
wasting time. And the last column was about Hell and
(02:57):
that had the most extreme stuff murder. But at the
bottom of the hell column there was a line that
said engaging in homosexual activity. I gulped when I read that,
so loudly that I thought everyone immediately found out my secret.
I thought to myself, if I ever acted on being gay,
(03:20):
if I ever kissed another boy, I was going to
hell forever. I spent almost the next ten years in
the closet, ashamed of myself, and after I came out,
I was furious. I felt like I had been controlled.
But every once in a while I would go back
(03:41):
to church with my family for Christmas or Easter, just
to make them happy. And I hated to admit it,
but listening to the music would fill my eyes with
warm tears. The words would overwhelm me that despite my
failure in the parts of myself I don't even love,
(04:03):
there's some being out there that loves me simply because
I have a soul. I still have really complicated feelings
about religion, and I struggle with how to exactly separate
it from faith and spirituality, something that so many of
us long for. My next guest, Bill Glenn, is the
(04:24):
author of the book I Came Here Seeking a Person,
A vital story of grace one gay man spiritual journey.
He's out and proud now, but he was once closeted
in the Catholic seminary. He's been a therapist to gay
men for decades and he has this priestly quality to him.
(04:44):
And even though he's almost fifty years older than me,
we had a similar upbringing in the Catholic Church, but
for him that was an Omaha, Nebraska in the fifties.
What was your earliest memory of church that you can recall.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
My memories go back to four and five. I was
one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family. My
father was very religious. I don't think he was very spiritual,
but he was really committed to the church. My mother
was a convert. I went to a Catholic grade school.
We went to Mass every day. I loved church as
a little boy, and the church was often dark, and
(05:28):
the church was bathing candle light as well as some
subtle lighting, and I felt enveloped by it. There was
no place I felt safer, and it's beyond safe. I
just felt here, I am, this is where I belong.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And now, fast forwarding a little bit or maybe not,
when was the moment that you knew that you were gay?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
When I was in kindergarten, I went to Catholic elementary school.
There was a boy in third grade. We used to
line up by class. I was crazy about this boy.
I wanted to hug him or something. I wanted to
be with him. I didn't call that gay. Of course,
I did not acknowledge any same sex attraction until my
(06:12):
sophomore of high school and the boy sitting next to
me in home room. I could barely sit next to him.
He was a basketball player, so he was in very
good shape, and of course I had seen parts of
his body at basketball games. But I just thought he
was beautiful that I just thought he was so beautiful
(06:35):
and he was sweet, and that combination was important for me.
I was so excited by his presence and simultaneously horrified
that I was drawn to a boy.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
It seems like you sort of knew that it wasn't
appropriate for you to have this kind of attraction to him.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I'd go beyond appropriate to say I felt there was
a defect in me, and of course, like many many
many gay Catholic boys at others, I prayed to have
the defect removed, and I prayed for that from the
age of fifteen to the age of thirty that God
would remove this defect.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And simultaneously, what were the messages that you were receiving
about being gay from the church from outside of the church.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah, I was in ninth grade at school I went
to was a big football power in this state. And
I was at a football game at the big stadium
downtown and I was sitting with a friend and these
two guys that I now kind of call thug as
they were my class. They were freshmen, they were bigger
than me. And these two guys came up to me
very close to my face and one of them said
(07:47):
he's the one, and the other one picked me up
by my collar and I was I had no idea
how to fight and slug me and I was knocked
back into my bleacher chair and these two boys went
on and I was totally humiliated. Knowing what I knew
(08:07):
about myself. They're on to me. They see that I'm
this pervert.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Going back to your family, Bill, what were the unspoken
expectations of you from your Catholic Irish family.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
There was an expectation that I was going to be
a priest. Wow, And I think the way I expressed
my piety people at the grade school, and in my
family thought, Billy's going to be a priest.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So fast forwarding a little bit, you decide to join
the seminary and you're going to be a priest. And
for the listeners that aren't so familiar with that in
the Catholic Church, is that you can't have any sexual
communication with anyone. And I wonder, you know what sort
of drove you to the priesthood, this life of abstinence.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I think the majority of gay priests, by far, the
majority of priests are gay. I didn't join the seminary
until after college, so I entered the Jesuits. I was
twenty twenty one. The Jesuits are a very large, actually
the largest religious order in the Catholic Church, priests and brothers,
and they are committed mainly to higher education and kind
(09:21):
of the intellectual life as well as social justice. So
they're esteemed and revered. And I had been taught by
them in high school and college, so I was already
with them for eight years before I entered. I entered
to be ordained a priest, and it's a very long
path for Jesuits. It takes over ten years to study, study, study, theology, philosophy,
(09:42):
secular subject, and I believe now looking back, I thought,
this is the only way I can expiate my sinfulness.
Mind you, I had never had sex. I had never
had sex with a man or a woman. I had
many girlfriends. As soon as you got close, I ended
the relationships. I couldn't even kiss a girl. I wanted
(10:04):
to kiss about half the men on in college campus. Yeah,
I was obsessed. I going to the college church and
I would cry because I would I was I was
so filled with shame and guilt. But it was a
way for me to say, to make my final transaction
with God, I will do this if you will forgive
(10:26):
me for being homosexual.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
In your book, you write about your struggle with alcohol
during this time, and it seems like it's somewhat connected
to escaping these feelings of shame that you had because
deep down you knew that you were gay. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It's absolutely true and an insightful observation, Jordan. I saw
drinking my first week of college. You know, most drug addiction,
alcohol addiction is an attempt to sell me dedicate. I
believe that, and I've I've worked at treatment centers for
years and the people They're all self medicating about something
in themselves that they can't stand. And I was medicating
(11:11):
myself around my sexuality because the prayer wasn't doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
When did it sort of reach a point where you
knew that you had to intervene.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
The summer before I left the Jesuits, I got into it.
I was blackout drunk, and I was driving my dad's
car coming home from an ordination and I left the
freeway and ran into a concrete abutment that holds another
freeway up, and I totaled his car. And I still
(11:44):
drank for three months. I have been dead. I wasn't dead.
And then I was riding my bike on Lake Michigan
where I was teaching a Jesuit high school Milwaukee, and
I heard the words you never have to drink again.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That was forty seven years ago. I knew at that
moment it was over. It was over. And then I
came out a month later. Wow, once the alcohol was gone,
I could see myself as a human being and as alive.
I was so alive when I came out of the closet,
(12:23):
I was like on fire. And I left the Jesuits
on it eight months later.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It was no coincidence that once Bill stopped drinking, he
decided he wanted to come out and that he no
longer wanted to become a priest. And just when he
left the seminary, his priestly gifts of empathy and love
were needed more than ever. Gay people were on the
verge of a political, physical, and social catastrophe AIDS, But
(13:02):
by then Bill was already out. He was actually pushed
out of the closet by politics. In the late nineteen seventies,
there was a gay activist turned politician in San Francisco
that was taking America by storm. That activist was Harvey Milk.
Bill was attending one of Milk's rallies when everything changed
(13:23):
for him. And tell me about that, Bill, What was
it like for you to come out? What was your
coming out story?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
There was a proposition on the California ballot that would
have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in
the state of California seventeen seventy nine. And I went
over to a rally in San Francisco at the Civic Center,
and I wore my Roman collars because I didn't want
to imno I was gay. I just thought well, I'll be
(13:51):
a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
You show up to this protest looking like a priest,
like a Catholic priest.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And there was a huge crowd and standing sitting before
we went a little plane, and sitting before me were
two beautiful young boys who had their arms around each other.
I almost couldn't bear it seeing it. It was so beautiful.
And Harvey Milk be sainted, reallyef founding grandmother of the
(14:23):
gay world, was giving a speech and he said, we're
not here today for ourselves because we're free. He said,
we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the
little boy in Bakersfield who feel there all alone. And
tears started to come down my face, and I pulled
that white tab in a collar out and I put
(14:45):
a piece of paper and I wrote, I am a
gay man. It was over, just like the drinking. It
was over.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Was your family disappointed?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
So that Christmas I went home a paper in a
class on the theology of social justice, and it was
my coming out of paper. I did it like a
fifteen page explication of why gay was a gift. This
was unheard of in the seminary. Gay is a gift. Girl,
that's immortal, sin, I go, well, I've reinterpreted that for you,
(15:18):
if you want to follow my logic. So I went
home and gave this paper to my parents and I
watched them read it. And my mother stopped first and
she put the paper in her lap, and then my
father read more slowly because what my father was reading
was intense. And as soon as my dad finished, my
mother looked at me and she said, Billy, I've known
(15:40):
this since you were four years old.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So my father was very upset when I left the
Jesuits five months later. My mother she hated all the
judgment and sexual shit in the church. She just was like,
of course, and this boy is going to be alive now.
And if you can't hand then, She told me after
I left that Christmas, if you don't accept Billy totally,
(16:06):
you will not see him because that man is in
his life now and he needs us less than we
need him. I was very touched by that, and she
was absolutely right.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
That's a gift to have a parent stand up for
you like that. It's not as common as we think.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
As very blessed by her, very blessed.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
A few years after you leave the seminary aids begins
really destroying the gay community. And you write in your
book that you were called to be a spiritual guide.
I wonder if you have a story that encompasses what
that was like for you.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I came to understand, Jordan, that I had had those
ten years of preparation in order to do a deeper
work that I was called to do. I didn't know
what that was at all. I was just living my life.
And I had met my now husband of forty three years,
and we were a young couple. And shortly after we met,
I saw an article in the national gay paper called
(17:13):
The Advocate and described four men in Los Angeles and
four in New York who had this rare skin cancer
CAPESI sarcoma, and I was like, WHOA, that's weird. About
six months later, we had a friend who got sick
on a Tuesday and he died on Sunday. Five days
and we had a large circle of friends and people
(17:37):
started getting sick. This is in nineteen eighty three. And
my best friend at that time was a Catholic priest
who was a Franciscan who was let's just say, very
rascally and his vows managed less to him than perhaps
to some people, and he got AIDS and he was
fired by a Catholic high school.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
He was a priest with aids.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yeah, he was a priest with aides. I met him
at Dignity in nineteen seventy nine because I went to
see what gay Catholics are like. And I went to
communion to him and he placed the host on my
time and he goes by your christ Hansom. I go, oh,
this is a good church. I like this shirt. And
(18:21):
he and I became the dearest of friends. And the
last time I saw him, which was six days before
he died, my husband and I would go to his
house on Monday nights for about a year and fix
dinner for him, and then we'd prayed. It got the
three of us with our dog, the four of us,
and this last night, which I didn't know, is our
last night. We always got up on his bed. Scott
(18:43):
would carry him from the dining room table to his
bead because he was so frail. He weighed at that
point about ninety pounds. And he said, see that Chester
drawers over there, and I said yes. He goes open
the bottom drawer, you'll see a stole would you bring
it over? And I said, of course. I got back
on the bed and he put the stroll around me
(19:05):
and he said, you're going to hear my last confession.
And I said I can't do that. I'm not a priest.
He said, you're going to hear my last confession. Bell
you have to be the priest that you are, regardless
of the church. I started to weep and I obeyed him.
So I held his hand and I had this stole
(19:27):
around me, and he blessed me. I put my hands
on his head and gave him absolution. I started to
take the stole off and put on him and goes, no, no, no, no, no,
you keep the stole on you. I can no longer
be a priest. You have to now be a priest
for all the people that you and I have taken
care of. And I started to weep, and I knew
(19:50):
he was telling the truth to me.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And for people that don't know. In the Catholic Church,
it is sort of the ultimate blessing to con fess
your sins and receive this final blessing from a priest
before you die. It's sort of like you're guaranteed ticket
to heaven and so were you now taking on that
(20:12):
responsibility for several other men that were dying because of AIDS.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I was with several many gay men on the point
of death. And regardless of whether it's the sacer and
a confession or penance, or human beings profound need to
be as clear with themselves as another human being at
the end of their lives. There's a lot of commonality
to people who are dying, especially thirty five year old men.
(20:43):
One other dear friend, This man had been my boyfriend
before I met my husband, and he was He looked
like a porcelain man. He was so beautiful. His body
was covered with carson. His legs were one huge lesion.
I think his boyfriend had left him by this point
and he was living. He was alone in bed and
(21:03):
he had caretakers. And I went over to his house
as I did often to visit with him, and he said,
would you get up, would you get into bed and
hold me? And I held him and he sobbed and
sobbed and sobbed, and I cried and he sobbed, and
then he said, would you do my funeral? So I
(21:24):
called the local There was a gay gay Catholic parish
and I went to the pastor and I said, Tony,
I've been asked again to do a funeral, and these
boys want to have it in a Catholic church. And
he said to me, Bill, this church is yours for
as long as you needed, for any for any boy
who wants to be buried in a Catholic church. I
buried many men from that church, and the Swedenborgian Church
(21:47):
and the Unitarian Church, and it it disciplined me to
do what Larry had said. Others won't do this. You
have to do this. You think you left the seminary.
The seminary was just a training ground for you to
be in this epidemic, and I came to know that
there was deep truth in them. I called it my
(22:09):
ministry without portfolio. I didn't say that publicly, but that's
how I understood. I said, I really felt I was
doing the work of a Jesuit, or many Jesus wouldn't do.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
What was the Catholic Church's response to AIDS at the time,
and how did you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Meager? The church was busy judging gay people. The church
is very subtle in the way it uses language. It
wouldn't say you causes, but that they would talk about
it as the food of our sinfulness? What death is
that I should die with a horrible, emaciated death with
(22:49):
capacies because I slept with a man.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
In other words, what you're saying is this was sort
of implied that it was God's punishment.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Yes, it was a little more than implied. It wasn't.
But the church is subtle like that. And in the
Catholic Church, I was very faithful every Sunday and more
often than that, and I would be this gay person
who was not really welcome at the altar, although church
will say, of course, of course you were welcome at
the altar as long as you had gone to confession
for your many, many, many gay sins. Oh yeah, could
(23:22):
you hear those quickly? Because I'm going to be doing
those gay sins and you know later today probably you know.
It's a mindstraw, it's a mind fuck.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
You know, Bill. I wonder if there was a point
in all of this where you questioned your faith. Even
the most faith filled person I think out there would
have some sort of anger at God or whoever they
prayed to for this just really horrendous disease. And I
(23:57):
wonder if you had on through a period that really
tested your faith at that point.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, this agency I ran, called Continuum, which was took
care of these triple diagnosed, many many of them homeless
people in the really rough neighborhood of posted downtown San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
And what does triple diagnose mean?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Substance abusers, drug addicts, menly ill and died of AIDS
late stage AIDS. We had wrap around services. We were
open from nine to five, and people stayed with us
all day, and we had doctors and nurses and psychiatrists
and physical therapists. And I thought, what these men, mainly men,
but a lot of women too want most deeply is
(24:41):
community and meaning what did my life mean? Why this?
Why this end? That was a very very common question
that I experienced from men during the AIDS epidemic. Why
is this happening to me? I love this group of people,
I love this I love this place. Continuum we lost
(25:03):
one a week, so in the seven years I was
there that we lost about three hundred and fifty clients.
We created a chapel and we took I eight by
eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member, anyone
who came into the group, and men and women who
IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling,
(25:26):
and when I left, every inchant space in that chapel
was covered with pictures of men and women who IT died.
I loved being there. I had to stop. I was
forty and exhausted, and I was at a retreat, a
(25:48):
Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon, and I found myself
on the floor of my little room in the fetal position, crying,
and I knew I had to stop. I didn't want to.
I felt some way I was betraying, but I'd given
fifteen years to and that was psychically exhausted by the death.
(26:13):
Because the death came at our agency and my friends.
So often, you can't fully grieve that.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
One of the questions my reporting seeks to answer is
how do we find happiness and joy in our lives.
What I've been surprised to learn interviewing scores of people
is that those who are happiest among us are ironically
okay with being sad. For Bill, he understood that the
(26:53):
sadness of surviving the AIDS crisis would never fully leave him.
He surrendered to that sadness when it came up and
became okay with sitting with it and honoring it and
having the faith that it would pass. Sometimes, when I
interview many of the people on this show that lived
(27:17):
through this period, I can still feel that anger in
their hearts and in their energy, and I understand it.
I really get it, because even though I'm not a
part of their generation, for some reason, it kind of
feels like it's been passed down to me in a way.
(27:38):
And I wonder if you still grapple with that anger,
just the unfairness of it all, and if you have
forgiven I have.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Such sadness that Larry and I did not. Is Brea
the exact same age he died, when its thirty nine,
I can't imagine what our friendship would have been like.
With forty more years, we probably just get side by
side houses. But that happened to me a lot. The
way I understand anger as a psychologist is that I
(28:10):
think anger covers up fear, and fear covers up grief.
We have to work through a lot of men do
not work through their anger. They stay angry. Alcohol helps,
of course, but below that is fear, and men are
of course trained to have no fear. They're weaned of
their fear that they have as boys. But underneath that
(28:32):
is grief, grief about what all of it, grief about
life's impossibility, life's suffering pain.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
In July of twenty twenty five, Bill will be ordained
as a priest in the Episcopal Church, over forty years
after he left the Catholic Seminary and one gay plague
in between. Bill is fulfilling a calling he had since
he was a boy to be spiritual guide. This time
he's doing it being one hundred percent himself. You're now
(29:07):
in your seventies and you're going to become an ordained priest.
I am in the Episcopal Church. It feels kind of
full circle from my perspective. Tell me about what that
feels like for you.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It was greatly unexpected, and a friend of mine told
me to a lesbian priest, told me I should go
to this church. She said, I think you like what's
going on. There was four years ago, and I went
and met the rector of the pastor and we had
a honestly a very immediate strong connection, and he took
(29:52):
me out to lunch. About a year later, he said,
you still think about becoming a priest, and I looked
at him. I said, Stephen, you know how old I am? Yeah,
in his kind of droll forty one year old way,
and I said, do you know I spent ten years
of my life preparing to be a priest. He goes yeah.
I said, why would you ask me this? I was,
(30:13):
I wasn't. I was a little annoyed, and yet I
knew he was a man of great integrity, but I
had no idea what he was. And he said, Bill,
because you are a priest, and I want the church
to ordain you and allow your priestsood to flourish. I
was seventy two at the time. I'm in this cafe
and I'm I start to cry. I like, it's one
(30:33):
of those moments where the psyche gets broken open. I'm
going to be ordained a deacon in a month, and
I'm going to be ordained a priest in six months
at the age of seventy six, I am four years
older than the mandatory retirement age for priests in the church.
And the bishop said, no, I want you or Daan.
You have work to do. So I'm like, it feels
(30:54):
like a grace, it feels like it's own time.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
So my last questions for you are the really, really
big questions. What is God?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
When anyone opens their heart to love, that's the spirit
of God inside of us. And the more we connect,
life is still with love. That's the presence of God.
All the good work being done on the planet today
by billions of people, that's the presence of God. God
(31:25):
is love. And that sounds tripe, but it is so
not trite, it is so true.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Last one, what is faith?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Faith is not being in charge. Faith is giving up
control to what bill it's giving up control? You don't
even get to answer the question to what it's giving
up control. We know intuitively there is something someone some
We don't have a proNT on for it. We're not
(31:56):
on our own. We're only being held up the image
of God holding me up. That's faith.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a
production of the Outspoken podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts, But
(32:32):
We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers
are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norvil. Original music
by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis.
If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and
(32:54):
follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you next week.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
There was a proposition on the California ballot that would
have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in
the state of California se nineteen seventy nine, and I
went over to a rally in San Francisco at the
Civic Center and I wore my Roman collars because I
didn't want to even know I was gay. I just thought, well,
(00:27):
I'll be a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You show up to this protest looking like a priest,
like a cat priest.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
And Harvey Milk was giving a speech and he said,
we're not here today for ourselves, because we're free. He said,
we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the
little boy in Bakersfield who field there all alone. And
tears started to come down my face, and I pulled them.
That white tab in a collar out and I put
(00:58):
a piece of paper and I wrote, I'm a gay man.
It was over.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Bill Glenn, a gay spiritual leader.
(01:31):
We'll learn about how he was going to become a
Catholic priest but ultimately ended up on another path, giving
peace to gay men, Dying of aids From My Heart Podcast.
I'm Jordan and Solves and this is what we loved.
(02:12):
I have a super complicated relationship with faith and religion.
Growing up. I was raised super Catholic. I was in
the church choir, and I never missed Sunday school and
one Sunday in the seventh grade, the youth minister gave
this presentation to all the teens at Sunday School on
Heaven and Hell. I remember he projected this chart onto
(02:35):
the wall and the chart had three columns. The first
column was about how you could get to heaven. It
had things like obeying your parents and never lying. And
then the middle column was about how you could be
sent to purgatory. That was small stuff like overeating and
wasting time. And the last column was about Hell and
(02:57):
that had the most extreme stuff murder. But at the
bottom of the hell column there was a line that
said engaging in homosexual activity. I gulped when I read that,
so loudly that I thought everyone immediately found out my secret.
I thought to myself, if I ever acted on being gay,
(03:20):
if I ever kissed another boy, I was going to
hell forever. I spent almost the next ten years in
the closet, ashamed of myself, and after I came out,
I was furious. I felt like I had been controlled.
But every once in a while I would go back
(03:41):
to church with my family for Christmas or Easter, just
to make them happy. And I hated to admit it,
but listening to the music would fill my eyes with
warm tears. The words would overwhelm me that despite my
failure in the parts of myself I don't even love,
(04:03):
there's some being out there that loves me simply because
I have a soul. I still have really complicated feelings
about religion, and I struggle with how to exactly separate
it from faith and spirituality, something that so many of
us long for. My next guest, Bill Glenn, is the
(04:24):
author of the book I Came Here Seeking a Person,
A vital story of grace one gay man spiritual journey.
He's out and proud now, but he was once closeted
in the Catholic seminary. He's been a therapist to gay
men for decades and he has this priestly quality to him.
(04:44):
And even though he's almost fifty years older than me,
we had a similar upbringing in the Catholic Church, but
for him that was an Omaha, Nebraska in the fifties.
What was your earliest memory of church that you can recall.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
My memories go back to four and five. I was
one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family. My
father was very religious. I don't think he was very spiritual,
but he was really committed to the church. My mother
was a convert. I went to a Catholic grade school.
We went to Mass every day. I loved church as
a little boy, and the church was often dark, and
(05:28):
the church was bathing candle light as well as some
subtle lighting, and I felt enveloped by it. There was
no place I felt safer, and it's beyond safe. I
just felt here, I am, this is where I belong.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
And now, fast forwarding a little bit or maybe not,
when was the moment that you knew that you were gay?
Speaker 2 (05:50):
When I was in kindergarten, I went to Catholic elementary school.
There was a boy in third grade. We used to
line up by class. I was crazy about this boy.
I wanted to hug him or something. I wanted to
be with him. I didn't call that gay. Of course,
I did not acknowledge any same sex attraction until my
(06:12):
sophomore of high school and the boy sitting next to
me in home room. I could barely sit next to him.
He was a basketball player, so he was in very
good shape, and of course I had seen parts of
his body at basketball games. But I just thought he
was beautiful that I just thought he was so beautiful
(06:35):
and he was sweet, and that combination was important for me.
I was so excited by his presence and simultaneously horrified
that I was drawn to a boy.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
It seems like you sort of knew that it wasn't
appropriate for you to have this kind of attraction to him.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
I'd go beyond appropriate to say I felt there was
a defect in me, and of course, like many many
many gay Catholic boys at others, I prayed to have
the defect removed, and I prayed for that from the
age of fifteen to the age of thirty that God
would remove this defect.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And simultaneously, what were the messages that you were receiving
about being gay from the church from outside of the church.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah, I was in ninth grade at school I went
to was a big football power in this state. And
I was at a football game at the big stadium
downtown and I was sitting with a friend and these
two guys that I now kind of call thug as
they were my class. They were freshmen, they were bigger
than me. And these two guys came up to me
very close to my face and one of them said
(07:47):
he's the one, and the other one picked me up
by my collar and I was I had no idea
how to fight and slug me and I was knocked
back into my bleacher chair and these two boys went
on and I was totally humiliated. Knowing what I knew
(08:07):
about myself. They're on to me. They see that I'm
this pervert.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Going back to your family, Bill, what were the unspoken
expectations of you from your Catholic Irish family.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
There was an expectation that I was going to be
a priest. Wow, And I think the way I expressed
my piety people at the grade school, and in my
family thought, Billy's going to be a priest.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So fast forwarding a little bit, you decide to join
the seminary and you're going to be a priest. And
for the listeners that aren't so familiar with that in
the Catholic Church, is that you can't have any sexual
communication with anyone. And I wonder, you know what sort
of drove you to the priesthood, this life of abstinence.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I think the majority of gay priests, by far, the
majority of priests are gay. I didn't join the seminary
until after college, so I entered the Jesuits. I was
twenty twenty one. The Jesuits are a very large, actually
the largest religious order in the Catholic Church, priests and brothers,
and they are committed mainly to higher education and kind
(09:21):
of the intellectual life as well as social justice. So
they're esteemed and revered. And I had been taught by
them in high school and college, so I was already
with them for eight years before I entered. I entered
to be ordained a priest, and it's a very long
path for Jesuits. It takes over ten years to study, study, study, theology, philosophy,
(09:42):
secular subject, and I believe now looking back, I thought,
this is the only way I can expiate my sinfulness.
Mind you, I had never had sex. I had never
had sex with a man or a woman. I had
many girlfriends. As soon as you got close, I ended
the relationships. I couldn't even kiss a girl. I wanted
(10:04):
to kiss about half the men on in college campus. Yeah,
I was obsessed. I going to the college church and
I would cry because I would I was I was
so filled with shame and guilt. But it was a
way for me to say, to make my final transaction
with God, I will do this if you will forgive
(10:26):
me for being homosexual.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
In your book, you write about your struggle with alcohol
during this time, and it seems like it's somewhat connected
to escaping these feelings of shame that you had because
deep down you knew that you were gay. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
It's absolutely true and an insightful observation, Jordan. I saw
drinking my first week of college. You know, most drug addiction,
alcohol addiction is an attempt to sell me dedicate. I
believe that, and I've I've worked at treatment centers for
years and the people They're all self medicating about something
in themselves that they can't stand. And I was medicating
(11:11):
myself around my sexuality because the prayer wasn't doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
When did it sort of reach a point where you
knew that you had to intervene.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
The summer before I left the Jesuits, I got into it.
I was blackout drunk, and I was driving my dad's
car coming home from an ordination and I left the
freeway and ran into a concrete abutment that holds another
freeway up, and I totaled his car. And I still
(11:44):
drank for three months. I have been dead. I wasn't dead.
And then I was riding my bike on Lake Michigan
where I was teaching a Jesuit high school Milwaukee, and
I heard the words you never have to drink again.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
That was forty seven years ago. I knew at that
moment it was over. It was over. And then I
came out a month later. Wow, once the alcohol was gone,
I could see myself as a human being and as alive.
I was so alive when I came out of the closet,
(12:23):
I was like on fire. And I left the Jesuits
on it eight months later.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
It was no coincidence that once Bill stopped drinking, he
decided he wanted to come out and that he no
longer wanted to become a priest. And just when he
left the seminary, his priestly gifts of empathy and love
were needed more than ever. Gay people were on the
verge of a political, physical, and social catastrophe AIDS, But
(13:02):
by then Bill was already out. He was actually pushed
out of the closet by politics. In the late nineteen seventies,
there was a gay activist turned politician in San Francisco
that was taking America by storm. That activist was Harvey Milk.
Bill was attending one of Milk's rallies when everything changed
(13:23):
for him. And tell me about that, Bill, What was
it like for you to come out? What was your
coming out story?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
There was a proposition on the California ballot that would
have required all gay identified teachers to be fired in
the state of California seventeen seventy nine. And I went
over to a rally in San Francisco at the Civic Center,
and I wore my Roman collars because I didn't want
to imno I was gay. I just thought well, I'll be
(13:51):
a priestly liberal friend of the gay community.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
You show up to this protest looking like a priest,
like a Catholic priest.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
And there was a huge crowd and standing sitting before
we went a little plane, and sitting before me were
two beautiful young boys who had their arms around each other.
I almost couldn't bear it seeing it. It was so beautiful.
And Harvey Milk be sainted, reallyef founding grandmother of the
(14:23):
gay world, was giving a speech and he said, we're
not here today for ourselves because we're free. He said,
we're here for the little girl in Fresno or the
little boy in Bakersfield who feel there all alone. And
tears started to come down my face, and I pulled
that white tab in a collar out and I put
(14:45):
a piece of paper and I wrote, I am a
gay man. It was over, just like the drinking. It
was over.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Was your family disappointed?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
So that Christmas I went home a paper in a
class on the theology of social justice, and it was
my coming out of paper. I did it like a
fifteen page explication of why gay was a gift. This
was unheard of in the seminary. Gay is a gift. Girl,
that's immortal, sin, I go, well, I've reinterpreted that for you,
(15:18):
if you want to follow my logic. So I went
home and gave this paper to my parents and I
watched them read it. And my mother stopped first and
she put the paper in her lap, and then my
father read more slowly because what my father was reading
was intense. And as soon as my dad finished, my
mother looked at me and she said, Billy, I've known
(15:40):
this since you were four years old.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
So my father was very upset when I left the
Jesuits five months later. My mother she hated all the
judgment and sexual shit in the church. She just was like,
of course, and this boy is going to be alive now.
And if you can't hand then, She told me after
I left that Christmas, if you don't accept Billy totally,
(16:06):
you will not see him because that man is in
his life now and he needs us less than we
need him. I was very touched by that, and she
was absolutely right.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
That's a gift to have a parent stand up for
you like that. It's not as common as we think.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
As very blessed by her, very blessed.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
A few years after you leave the seminary aids begins
really destroying the gay community. And you write in your
book that you were called to be a spiritual guide.
I wonder if you have a story that encompasses what
that was like for you.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I came to understand, Jordan, that I had had those
ten years of preparation in order to do a deeper
work that I was called to do. I didn't know
what that was at all. I was just living my life.
And I had met my now husband of forty three years,
and we were a young couple. And shortly after we met,
I saw an article in the national gay paper called
(17:13):
The Advocate and described four men in Los Angeles and
four in New York who had this rare skin cancer
CAPESI sarcoma, and I was like, WHOA, that's weird. About
six months later, we had a friend who got sick
on a Tuesday and he died on Sunday. Five days
and we had a large circle of friends and people
(17:37):
started getting sick. This is in nineteen eighty three. And
my best friend at that time was a Catholic priest
who was a Franciscan who was let's just say, very
rascally and his vows managed less to him than perhaps
to some people, and he got AIDS and he was
fired by a Catholic high school.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
He was a priest with aids.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yeah, he was a priest with aides. I met him
at Dignity in nineteen seventy nine because I went to
see what gay Catholics are like. And I went to
communion to him and he placed the host on my
time and he goes by your christ Hansom. I go, oh,
this is a good church. I like this shirt. And
(18:21):
he and I became the dearest of friends. And the
last time I saw him, which was six days before
he died, my husband and I would go to his
house on Monday nights for about a year and fix
dinner for him, and then we'd prayed. It got the
three of us with our dog, the four of us,
and this last night, which I didn't know, is our
last night. We always got up on his bed. Scott
(18:43):
would carry him from the dining room table to his
bead because he was so frail. He weighed at that
point about ninety pounds. And he said, see that Chester
drawers over there, and I said yes. He goes open
the bottom drawer, you'll see a stole would you bring
it over? And I said, of course. I got back
on the bed and he put the stroll around me
(19:05):
and he said, you're going to hear my last confession.
And I said I can't do that. I'm not a priest.
He said, you're going to hear my last confession. Bell
you have to be the priest that you are, regardless
of the church. I started to weep and I obeyed him.
So I held his hand and I had this stole
(19:27):
around me, and he blessed me. I put my hands
on his head and gave him absolution. I started to
take the stole off and put on him and goes, no, no, no, no, no,
you keep the stole on you. I can no longer
be a priest. You have to now be a priest
for all the people that you and I have taken
care of. And I started to weep, and I knew
(19:50):
he was telling the truth to me.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
And for people that don't know. In the Catholic Church,
it is sort of the ultimate blessing to con fess
your sins and receive this final blessing from a priest
before you die. It's sort of like you're guaranteed ticket
to heaven and so were you now taking on that
(20:12):
responsibility for several other men that were dying because of AIDS.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I was with several many gay men on the point
of death. And regardless of whether it's the sacer and
a confession or penance, or human beings profound need to
be as clear with themselves as another human being at
the end of their lives. There's a lot of commonality
to people who are dying, especially thirty five year old men.
(20:43):
One other dear friend, This man had been my boyfriend
before I met my husband, and he was He looked
like a porcelain man. He was so beautiful. His body
was covered with carson. His legs were one huge lesion.
I think his boyfriend had left him by this point
and he was living. He was alone in bed and
(21:03):
he had caretakers. And I went over to his house
as I did often to visit with him, and he said,
would you get up, would you get into bed and
hold me? And I held him and he sobbed and
sobbed and sobbed, and I cried and he sobbed, and
then he said, would you do my funeral? So I
(21:24):
called the local There was a gay gay Catholic parish
and I went to the pastor and I said, Tony,
I've been asked again to do a funeral, and these
boys want to have it in a Catholic church. And
he said to me, Bill, this church is yours for
as long as you needed, for any for any boy
who wants to be buried in a Catholic church. I
buried many men from that church, and the Swedenborgian Church
(21:47):
and the Unitarian Church, and it it disciplined me to
do what Larry had said. Others won't do this. You
have to do this. You think you left the seminary.
The seminary was just a training ground for you to
be in this epidemic, and I came to know that
there was deep truth in them. I called it my
(22:09):
ministry without portfolio. I didn't say that publicly, but that's
how I understood. I said, I really felt I was
doing the work of a Jesuit, or many Jesus wouldn't do.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
What was the Catholic Church's response to AIDS at the time,
and how did you feel about it?
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Meager? The church was busy judging gay people. The church
is very subtle in the way it uses language. It
wouldn't say you causes, but that they would talk about
it as the food of our sinfulness? What death is
that I should die with a horrible, emaciated death with
(22:49):
capacies because I slept with a man.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
In other words, what you're saying is this was sort
of implied that it was God's punishment.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Yes, it was a little more than implied. It wasn't.
But the church is subtle like that. And in the
Catholic Church, I was very faithful every Sunday and more
often than that, and I would be this gay person
who was not really welcome at the altar, although church
will say, of course, of course you were welcome at
the altar as long as you had gone to confession
for your many, many, many gay sins. Oh yeah, could
(23:22):
you hear those quickly? Because I'm going to be doing
those gay sins and you know later today probably you know.
It's a mindstraw, it's a mind fuck.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
You know, Bill. I wonder if there was a point
in all of this where you questioned your faith. Even
the most faith filled person I think out there would
have some sort of anger at God or whoever they
prayed to for this just really horrendous disease. And I
(23:57):
wonder if you had on through a period that really
tested your faith at that point.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Well, this agency I ran, called Continuum, which was took
care of these triple diagnosed, many many of them homeless
people in the really rough neighborhood of posted downtown San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
And what does triple diagnose mean?
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Substance abusers, drug addicts, menly ill and died of AIDS
late stage AIDS. We had wrap around services. We were
open from nine to five, and people stayed with us
all day, and we had doctors and nurses and psychiatrists
and physical therapists. And I thought, what these men, mainly men,
but a lot of women too want most deeply is
(24:41):
community and meaning what did my life mean? Why this?
Why this end? That was a very very common question
that I experienced from men during the AIDS epidemic. Why
is this happening to me? I love this group of people,
I love this I love this place. Continuum we lost
(25:03):
one a week, so in the seven years I was
there that we lost about three hundred and fifty clients.
We created a chapel and we took I eight by
eleven photographs of everybody who we called a member, anyone
who came into the group, and men and women who
IT died. We put their pictures up, began the ceiling,
(25:26):
and when I left, every inchant space in that chapel
was covered with pictures of men and women who IT died.
I loved being there. I had to stop. I was
forty and exhausted, and I was at a retreat, a
(25:48):
Trappist religious retreat center in Oregon, and I found myself
on the floor of my little room in the fetal position, crying,
and I knew I had to stop. I didn't want to.
I felt some way I was betraying, but I'd given
fifteen years to and that was psychically exhausted by the death.
(26:13):
Because the death came at our agency and my friends.
So often, you can't fully grieve that.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
One of the questions my reporting seeks to answer is
how do we find happiness and joy in our lives.
What I've been surprised to learn interviewing scores of people
is that those who are happiest among us are ironically
okay with being sad. For Bill, he understood that the
(26:53):
sadness of surviving the AIDS crisis would never fully leave him.
He surrendered to that sadness when it came up and
became okay with sitting with it and honoring it and
having the faith that it would pass. Sometimes, when I
interview many of the people on this show that lived
(27:17):
through this period, I can still feel that anger in
their hearts and in their energy, and I understand it.
I really get it, because even though I'm not a
part of their generation, for some reason, it kind of
feels like it's been passed down to me in a way.
(27:38):
And I wonder if you still grapple with that anger,
just the unfairness of it all, and if you have
forgiven I have.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Such sadness that Larry and I did not. Is Brea
the exact same age he died, when its thirty nine,
I can't imagine what our friendship would have been like.
With forty more years, we probably just get side by
side houses. But that happened to me a lot. The
way I understand anger as a psychologist is that I
(28:10):
think anger covers up fear, and fear covers up grief.
We have to work through a lot of men do
not work through their anger. They stay angry. Alcohol helps,
of course, but below that is fear, and men are
of course trained to have no fear. They're weaned of
their fear that they have as boys. But underneath that
(28:32):
is grief, grief about what all of it, grief about
life's impossibility, life's suffering pain.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
In July of twenty twenty five, Bill will be ordained
as a priest in the Episcopal Church, over forty years
after he left the Catholic Seminary and one gay plague
in between. Bill is fulfilling a calling he had since
he was a boy to be spiritual guide. This time
he's doing it being one hundred percent himself. You're now
(29:07):
in your seventies and you're going to become an ordained priest.
I am in the Episcopal Church. It feels kind of
full circle from my perspective. Tell me about what that
feels like for you.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It was greatly unexpected, and a friend of mine told
me to a lesbian priest, told me I should go
to this church. She said, I think you like what's
going on. There was four years ago, and I went
and met the rector of the pastor and we had
a honestly a very immediate strong connection, and he took
(29:52):
me out to lunch. About a year later, he said,
you still think about becoming a priest, and I looked
at him. I said, Stephen, you know how old I am? Yeah,
in his kind of droll forty one year old way,
and I said, do you know I spent ten years
of my life preparing to be a priest. He goes yeah.
I said, why would you ask me this? I was,
(30:13):
I wasn't. I was a little annoyed, and yet I
knew he was a man of great integrity, but I
had no idea what he was. And he said, Bill,
because you are a priest, and I want the church
to ordain you and allow your priestsood to flourish. I
was seventy two at the time. I'm in this cafe
and I'm I start to cry. I like, it's one
(30:33):
of those moments where the psyche gets broken open. I'm
going to be ordained a deacon in a month, and
I'm going to be ordained a priest in six months
at the age of seventy six, I am four years
older than the mandatory retirement age for priests in the church.
And the bishop said, no, I want you or Daan.
You have work to do. So I'm like, it feels
(30:54):
like a grace, it feels like it's own time.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
So my last questions for you are the really, really
big questions. What is God?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
When anyone opens their heart to love, that's the spirit
of God inside of us. And the more we connect,
life is still with love. That's the presence of God.
All the good work being done on the planet today
by billions of people, that's the presence of God. God
(31:25):
is love. And that sounds tripe, but it is so
not trite, it is so true.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Last one, what is faith?
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Faith is not being in charge. Faith is giving up
control to what bill it's giving up control? You don't
even get to answer the question to what it's giving
up control. We know intuitively there is something someone some
We don't have a proNT on for it. We're not
(31:56):
on our own. We're only being held up the image
of God holding me up. That's faith.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore goosolves. We are a
production of the Outspoken podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts, But
(32:32):
We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers
are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our executive
producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norvil. Original music
by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis.
If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and
(32:54):
follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you
for listening. I'll see you next week.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com