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JG: As you entered into seminary, did you, I want to ask this the right way, I mean, did you consider yourself a very religious person?

MN: No, not at all. No. And in fact, I've said that, not just with respect to my decision to enter seminary, but in my entire Christian life, I am not someone who had a Paul on the Damascus Road experience, what's been commonly called a conversion experience. That's not my experience at all. I am someone who was born and raised in the church and just took it for granted that church was a part of my life, but other than that, no, there was no big event that happened to me. It's just a gradual transformation that I experienced.

JG: So what was your, you've talked about this time you've had in PSR and I just want to get a sense, what was your most, maybe it's a collection of things, but what is your most memorable experience of your time in seminary?

MN: Gosh. There are a couple that come to my mind. One actually has to do with the issue of gender equality of homosexuality, and it was probably one of the experiences that changed my way of thinking. Not that I was, I had any one way of thinking about homosexuality and gender issues in the first place, but one experience in particular really challenged my thinking in that area and also challenged my thinking, or my ways of thinking in a lot of other areas. What had happened was I was taking a class, and this was in my second year of seminary studies. It was a class called "Religion and Society," and one day the professor said, African American professor who also was my counselor at the, during my whole seminary experience, and I'll come back to that in a few moments, but one day he said to the class, "For our next class session, we're gonna have a guest lecturer to come in and talk about what it is like to live a homosexual lifestyle in America." So I thought to myself, okay, that'd be kind of interesting. Well, the next class session came and the professor introduced the guest speaker actually, and lo and behold it was a classmate who I had been sitting next to throughout the semester. And needless to say, when I saw him come and take the podium my jaw just dropped. And he went on to talk about his experiences growing up as a gay person, but he told one very, very powerful story in his life that probably really shook me out of my comfort zone, and the story he told was this: he had been living in some town in Montana, and this was after college, I believe. And on a Valentine's Day weekend the local gay community there in that city, and that kinda shocked me to think that there was a gay community in a town in Montana, but anyway, this gay community was gonna have a Valentine's Day party. And so he decided to go, and that evening as he was walking to the location of the party he was mugged by a group of guys who beat him and in the course of beating him damaged one eye, and eventually that eye had to be removed and a false eye had to be put in. And when he told that story, it just stopped me emotionally in my tracks, because regardless of whatever my preconceived notions had been of, of gays and homosexuals, I just thought to myself, you know, man, he didn't do anything to deserve that And to think that he had been sitting next to me throughout that entire class semester up until that point and had never said anything about it. I mean, why would he, but he had never shared anything about it. But I could just only imagine how someone like him could sit through not just a class but go through an entire life and carry that burden and, and not let anyone know about it. And I have to say, that singular experience there that day in that class really challenged me, again, not just in my attitudes about gays and homosexuals, but about a lot of things in life, and then it continued to shape me, well, in that area. And then what comes after that, so a few years after that is when the first major outbreak of AIDS happened and how that was linked to the gay community and... but because of that prior experience of hearing that story and then having been sensitized to the plight of gay people, when the AIDS epidemic came along and certain forces in this society tried to link it directly to the gay and lesbian community, I really was ready to take that issue head on.

The other thing about that time was, and I mentioned the fact that the professor of that class who was African American was also my advisor, he had once made the comment in class, and this was during a class session in which he was talking about the African American church, he had once commented, or actually once questioned why, the black church is what we called it back then, why the black church was, in his opinion, slow to defend or advocate on behalf of gays and homosexuals. And it had nothing to do with whether one agreed or disagreed with the gay and homosexual lifestyle, but in his mind it had to do around issues of marginalization and being a minority status, of minority status. In other words, his argument was black churches, African Americans, more so than anybody, know what it feels like to be marginalized and oppressed and because of that we, African Americans that is, should be the first ones to come to the defense of gays and lesbians, because of their marginalization and oppression, regardless of whether or not we, regardless of whatever it is we think about the gay and lesbian lifestyle. And I had never even thought of, of those issues in that light, and to hear that coming from an African American who happened to be my professor as well as my counselor really, again, challenged me in a lot of areas of life, a lot of attitudes that I had held.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.