Video Interview, Jim Mulcahy, August 16, 2012

(unintelligible)

JAMES MULCAHY: It really was the last one,

that's a really good question.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah.

We ask that of everybody.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yeah, that's a really good question.

KEVIN INDOVINO: First of all, I need

you to give me the correct spelling

of your first and last name.

JAMES MULCAHY: J-A-M-E-S M-U-L-C-A-H-Y.

KEVIN INDOVINO: And when we title you on screen,

do you want Father--

JAMES MULCAHY: No, Rev, R-E-V. Yeah.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So let's talk about your choice

of going into the ministry.

But then kind of work it into some of the,

I don't want to say conflicts, but some

of the thought that I'm sure you had to go through, being

a gay man into the ministry.

JAMES MULCAHY: Thinking about going into ministry for me

was kind of a no-brainer.

I was born in the early '40s.

So World War II was still going on.

I lived in an immigrant neighborhood.

My family were devout Roman Catholic.

All my early education was Roman Catholic.

And I felt called.

When I was 16 I had what felt like an experience of God

saying, I want you to do this.

I didn't know how to say I was gay.

I didn't.

Nobody talked about it in the '40s and early '50s.

I didn't know anyone who was openly gay.

And the way I was thinking about it,

even though I knew I was attracted to men,

I was going to have vows.

And so I thought it was a non-issue.

At sixteen, seventeen you can think like that.

And then I went off to novitiate up

into the hills of Western Massachusetts.

And there were 200 young men between the ages

of eighteen and twenty-three or twenty-four.

And it was like pheromones were in the air.

So it became more of a struggle, not so much in early years,

but when I finished my studies and was out working,

I realized that it was going to be more difficult.

It was the '60s.

Everyone was talking about the Kinsey Report.

To read theological articles on the death of God which

was the big theology in those days in Boston anyway,

we had to read Playboy magazine.

I had no trouble with obedience and I

had no trouble with poverty.

I had trouble with chastity, because I not only

was surrounded by men, I was surrounded

by men who were facing the same struggles I was.

There was no way to talk about it because we didn't

know how to talk about it.

And yet there were encounters clearly in seminary.

People were involved with each other.

I went to the missions and it was a non-issue

because I worked so hard.

I was in Baghdad before Saddam Hussein came to power.

And I left the Jesuits because I was gay.

And I wrote to my superior and said, I can't keep this vow.

And I'm not sure I want to.

Apparently, if I had not written it,

they would have found a way to persuade

me to stay because they felt it could be managed.

But I was happy that I was out.

I thought I left the Church.

But the Church was all I ever had known.

And the jobs I got were church-related jobs.

But in terms of being a gay man within a religious order,

nobody talked about it.

There were other people experiencing

the same phenomenon.

Because it was the '60s, it was a time

when priests were leaving the Catholic church in droves

and I was one of the ones who left.

I finally was dispensed from my vows in the early '70s.

I have to say that neither before entering religious life

nor in the process of leaving did I experience

any discrimination whatsoever.

Superiors were understanding and kind and if there was judgment,

I didn't feel it.

So it was really an organic experience for me, coming

to be aware of who I was.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to just back up just a little bit

because I want to get a little bit more deeper into that, that

thinking of yours that my homosexuality wasn't going

to be a problem because of the chastity vow.

JAMES MULCAHY: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Just to expand on that a little bit.

What was really going on with you personally with

regards to trying to find that balance.

JAMES MULCAHY: What was going on with me personally,

was that as a young man in my late teens and early 20s,

I not only was dealing with hormonal stuff,

I was also dealing with the affective side of my life.

And training in a religious order

is really all about not having intimate friendships.

And that doesn't necessarily mean sexual at all,

just not having the kind of attachment

to people that would lead to a sexual expression

or an emotional involvement.

And I found personally that it was impossible

for me not to have an emotional side and an attachment side.

So I had a lot of experiences of having

I suppose it would be called a crush on people

that never went anywhere.

But I felt this intense attraction

and need to be with people in a different way than I able

because of my because of my commitments.

And it wasn't really any different for heterosexual

than homosexual men.

Because we were all at that age where

that's what was happening in our personal development.

So, it was an intense time.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So then let's jump ahead a little bit.

You made a decision to leave the Church.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yes.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Talk to me a little bit more about that.

Again, what was going on with you

personally that made you make that choice?

JAMES MULCAHY: After I left the Jesuits,

I went back to Egypt where I had been teaching.

I had a one way ticket and $100, and my assumption

was that the French Jesuits in Cairo

would take me in to teach for room and board.

That's all I wanted.

But I was a traitor because I had left the order

and they didn't take me in.

So I was in Cairo, Egypt with nowhere to go.

And no way to get home at that point.

So I called an acquaintance who was

a headmaster at a school in Alexandria, Egypt

who had been--

the school had been the school for the children

of Presbyterian missionaries in Africa but by the early '70s,

was an international school.

And all he said to me was how soon can you get here?

So for the next three years, I was vice principal and biology

teacher and at the school in Egypt.

And actually I formed a close emotional romantic relationship

with a woman, an Egyptian woman.

And I didn't know what to do with that.

I didn't know anything about sex, I mean really.

I knew urges.

I didn't know anything about bisexuality.

I didn't know how to put labels on myself.

And again, it still was a time when people weren't,

in my circles, weren't talking openly about what was going on.

Fortunately for me and for this young woman,

nothing came of our relationship because I

know it would have been a disaster as I continued

recognizing that I was really attracted to men.

I always liked women, but I couldn't

be in a close, intimate relationship with a woman.

So I came back to this country in 1974.

No job.

I had bought some land in Western New York.

I'm originally from Boston and I lived in a barn for a year,

picking up some substitute teaching where I could

and ultimately getting a job as director of religious education

at a Catholic church, which kind of set me on a career path

in religious ministry continuing.

I worked at the Catholic Diocese.

And when I reached a place where--

this would be now in the '80s, I reached a place

where I was high enough in administration

so that I began to see some of the abuses that

were becoming known.

And it ate me up.

I couldn't do it.

And it culminated with my basically

having an encounter with my boss, saying,

get rid of this guy or I'm going to the press.

Well needless to say, that ended that career.

But I was able to get a job as non-denominational chaplain

at a local hospital.

And realized that everybody I was taking care of

were outside the church, whatever church that would be.

And it was shocking to me.

I'm still capable of being shocked.

It was shocking to me that when called,

pastors wouldn't necessarily come

to see somebody unless they were active, contributing members.

And this was cross-denominational.

So I was burying people.

And then I would get a call a year later,

the grandson of somebody I buried saying,

well, my girlfriend and I are getting married

and we don't have a church.

So then I was in the marriage business.

And pretty soon I was just taking

care of people who were outside whatever church

they started in even though I didn't

have a formal congregation, that I was ministering to accept

as health care chaplain.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Back up a little bit.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yeah.

KEVIN INDOVINO: You're leading me right to my next question,

Listening to you, a question came to mind.

I don't know if you've had thoughts on this.

If you don't, we just won't talk about it.

I've read things in the past and there's

been a lot of speculation in the past that a lot of men

go into the church to hide from their gayness,

thinking that that might be a safe place.

Again, the issue is with chastity

vows in the Catholic Church.

JAMES MULCAHY: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: What are your thoughts on that?

JAMES MULCAHY: I don't know anyone personally

who went into the priesthood to hide from homosexuality.

Having said that, I know an awful lot of gay priests.

But I think that there is a part of the gay gene, quite

honestly, that is nurturing and really wants to care for people

and take care of people.

But in the days where I entered religious life, for me,

I felt that God had called me to do this.

And quite honestly, with the rigorous training

at the beginning of our careers as it were,

there's no way you could stay in a religious order

to hide from your homosexuality.

It just, the self-examination and intensive conferences

with the master of novices or spiritual director,

I just don't see how it would be possible for somebody

to enter that system without feeling a sincere call to what

they would have been uncovered or have decided for

themselves early that they needed to get out of there.

I suspect that that kind of speculation comes from the fact

that it seems like there are so many gay priests.

But I don't think the motivation was to hide.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to get to your hospital ministry then.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yes.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Because you were entering hospital ministry

during the rise of AIDS.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yes, I was.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So talk to me about in those very early days,

what you were seeing as a hospital minister, who

hospitals were treating AIDS patients and such.

JAMES MULCAHY: My hospital was suburban.

And for my first three or four or five years,

I never saw or heard of an AIDS patient in our system.

In my family, my youngest niece's husband

died of AIDS in that period.

And she recounts horror stories of people refusing

to take care of him, of having to be there during meal times

because they were putting his tray on the floor

outside the room and not even entering the room

to take care of him.

After I had that experience with my own family,

we had our first AIDS patient in my hospital.

It was a horror show.

All rooms were private rooms.

This was a twenty-one-year-old kid who was terminal

at diagnosis.

He was shocked.

He was angry.

He was acting out.

And it was intensified by the fact

that right outside his room, he could hear nurses

refusing to take care of him.

He could see them coming in with a plastic shield, facemask,

triple gloves, and so many garments

that it was like they were robots.

They didn't even look human by the time they came in.

They didn't talk to him.

So they called me and said, he's impossible for the nurses

to take care of.

You go try.

And I did.

I realized that I did not need all of that protective stuff,

that he was in more danger than I was.

And I went in, and for the first fifteen minutes

he ranted at me.

And I remember asking him, are you angry with me?

And he said, no, why would I be angry with you?

I said, I don't know but you're talking

to me like you're really angry.

And then he started crying and telling me

how he felt when people treated him like

he was a leper, which he was.

And I went to the infection control nurse for the hospital.

And I asked her what was really needed for people

to wear to take care of him.

And when she told me, I requested the nurse manager

to have an in-service for the staff.

But still, there were nurses whose husbands were saying,

I don't want you going in there.

I don't want you taking care of him.

His story wasn't a happy one.

He didn't get treatment.

We didn't have anti-retrovirals.

He had no remissions from anything.

But he did have a reconciliation with his father.

And when this kid went on to hospice,

the dad was his caregiver, and as much as it could be,

it was a peaceful ending for all of them concerned.

My hospital never saw a lot of AIDS patients.

But from this one extreme case, a kind of sensitivity

began to grow.

I teamed up with Community Health Network at the time

to provide support groups for survivors

of AIDS relationships.

And we had really a great group for a number of years.

And then the anti-retrovirals came

and people stopped dying for a while,

and so we didn't have the need for that anymore.

But even today, there are still, it's

still a frightful disease for people who maintain

their ignorance about it.

Other larger hospital systems in the city at the same time

were doing a better job teaching staff

how to care for AIDS patients.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to back up

to when you had to address the staff yourself.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yes.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Talk to me a little bit

about that experience.

What were telling them?

What were you trying to awaken them to?

JAMES MULCAHY: What I was trying to awaken them to

is that the question that was being asked

in those days, the first question anyone asked

about when they heard someone had AIDS was,

how did he get it?

As though there were an honorable way

and a dishonorable way to get AIDS.

And so my work with the staff was to kind of demystify

and take the judgment out of our patients

so that they understood this is somebody who is suffering.

Our job is to alleviate suffering.

And our job is to do that compassionately.

And when you make someone feel less than human,

you're not doing your job.

Nurses are very prideful about being

caring, compassionate caregivers.

And I think it was an argument that spoke to them.

And then all the questions about fear and how do you get it.

And you expect medical personnel to know that stuff,

but they didn't in those days.

So.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So, let's jump to then 2000.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK

KEVIN INDOVINO: You decided to come--

well, you're a hospital pastor, still at the time, are you?

I want to move into--

JAMES MULCAHY: MCC.

KEVIN INDOVINO: MCC.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK.

Kind of lead me up to that.

KEVIN INDOVINO: When did the thinking start changing again

that you might want to align yourself with the church.

JAMES MULCAHY: I really didn't need

a church for many, many years.

I mean, I was twenty-five years old a hospital or health care

chaplain, the last seventeen of which were in hospice.

In the year 2000, I was diagnosed with cancer.

And I recognized at that time that I

needed a community around me.

Because hospital chaplains don't have a built in spiritual

community around them.

I had evolved in terms of activism by that time

that I could not join any church.

No matter how open and affirming the local congregation

was if the larger denomination had prejudice against anybody,

whether it be women or gay men or whatever.

That really narrowed my choices.

The two churches in Rochester at that time that I felt

were possibilities were the Unitarians,

and MCC, MCC for a number of reasons.

One, they were Christian.

And two, they had communion every week,

which was very important to me.

The Unitarians, I was in sympathy with their standards

and principles, but they weren't Christian,

and I just couldn't do that.

So MCC was it.

My first encounter actually was a few years before I joined it.

I went to a good Friday service with a friend and hated it.

I thought this is my one and only try into this church.

And I didn't even know it was MCC.

I just know it was the church my friend invited me to.

In 2000, I went to the picnic for Pride and MCC

was holding a service there.

And I not only had communion, the woman who prayed over me

after communion was incredible.

And I went the next Sunday and I'm still going.

So.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Talk to me a little bit,

what is Open Arms MCC.

Talk to me as though I don't, never even heard of it.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK.

KEVIN INDOVINO: And its place within the gay community.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK.

It's kind of an interesting question.

Because this year, Open Arms MCC is thirty-one years old.

In 2000, we were just approaching

our 20th anniversary.

It's a liberal Christian church that has primary ministry

to LGBT people.

And I liked that idea.

I was at a place in my life where

family was important to me.

And blood family was way too small.

And it was a place where I could go be welcomed, be cared for,

and in fact I had cancer surgery shortly after I joined.

And the church was there solidly for me.

The pastor would spent twelve hours, fifteen hours a day

with me while I was in the hospital after the surgery.

And I never heard of a church doing anything like that.

So it just cemented my desire to belong.

It's a church that for almost twenty-five years

of its existence, almost, was a very well-kept secret

in Rochester.

It was also at a time in gay history

when a lot of the gay community felt that you could not

be religious and gay.

Because the church had such a part

in marginalizing and excommunicating LGBT people.

And here was a church that, given the size of the Rochester

community, should have hundreds of people,

because there weren't a lot of open and affirming churches

at that time.

And yet nobody knew about us.

And we didn't have a church building.

So we were kind of a storefront church.

And that doesn't have a lot of reputation for people looking

for stained glass and incense.

So we were very small.

And I never intended to be pastor of that church.

I joined it for me.

But when the pastor left suddenly in 2003,

I was asked to be interim pastor for a year

because I had the skills to do it

and I was already a member of the community.

And I unwillingly accepted, fighting and screaming

and kicking all the way.

And then just realized I loved it.

I had spent my entire church career

not wanting to be a pastor.

And we started growing.

And I started preaching according to MCC values

that it's not OK to be in the closet, especially as a church,

you can't be in the closet.

You can't be a secret.

It was at a time when we had begun

fighting for equal marriage.

But most of us never really thought

we were going to have anything like that.

And yet one of the things that MCC had across the country,

was that on Valentine's Day, couples

would apply for marriage licenses at their local clerk,

knowing they'd be refused but doing it

as a political statement.

So we started doing that.

And everybody in the Rochester community

knows about Anne and Bess.

KEVIN INDOVINO: We'll get to that in a little bit.

I want to talk just a little bit more about your congregation.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Who are these people and more so,

what are you hoping that you're providing for them?

JAMES MULCAHY: Me personally?

KEVIN INDOVINO: You personally as a pastor.

Or the church as a whole.

JAMES MULCAHY: OK, and it's not so different.

It was really important to provide

a safe place for people.

Most, gay venues, at some point are a meat market.

So they're not necessarily safe.

I needed my congregation of MCC to be a place where someone

would come without being afraid of being

hit on the first time they were there.

Or being asked by someone what they like to do in bed.

I wanted a community where the men and women liked each other,

because that's not always been true in our community either.

When I became pastor, we had high twenties attending church

on Sunday.

It quickly started balancing out so that we had mostly

women at first.

More men came.

And then younger people came.

We initially thought of ourselves

as an aging white, conservative group,

conservative in the sense that mostly not folks at bars

or out in drag or doing the things that

are the more extreme expressions of ourselves.

We got less conservative.

We got a little more extreme.

We started attracting a balanced congregation.

And we really had good success in men and women

doing social things together and enjoying it.

And once we started growing, we started

attracting people of color.

In the last few years, we have even

been baptized a fair number of infants.

So I mean, it's really been an organic development.

And my goal for the congregation and apart

from having a safe place, teaching them

a wider vision of who and what God is, what responsibilities

Christians have in terms of the community,

even those who hate us.

And having our congregation be a reflection of what

the wider community looks like.

I wanted to look like the community we were living in.

So that was my goals.

KEVIN INDOVINO: So then 2004 comes along.

JAMES MULCAHY: 2004 comes along.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Talk to me about the marriage of Anne

and what was here name?

JAMES MULCAHY: Bess.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Tell me that story,

and I like when I listened to your interview

with Evelyn, how you really kind of set it up

as the coming out of a church.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yeah, yeah.

In 2004, I had been pastor less than a year.

In 2004, the congregation decided

they didn't want me to be interim pastor,

but they wanted to call me as the senior pastor, which

I reluctantly accepted.

I was still reluctant.

But I became aware that we can't just

say that we are a gay church.

We have to put our money where our mouth is.

It was a time in Rochester religious history

where we had a coalition called the Rochester Religious

Community for Equal Marriage.

It thrived for less than a year.

But it was made up of--

it was made up of a wide variety of religious groups.

So Anne and Bess had been interviewed by,

I can't remember the name of the reporter

from the Democrat and Chronicle.

And he basically wrote a ho hum article.

Because when he got to their house,

Bess was mowing the lawn and Anne

was baking chocolate chip cookies.

And there was no zing in the article

because they weren't different from anybody else.

So the article just sat.

It never got published.

When we decided that we would make a public statement,

we decided that and in Bess would go to city clerk

to try to get a marriage license.

And they were told at that time that they

were the first ones, the first same sex couple to apply.

And they were refused, of course.

But the clerk encouraged them to sue the city.

So as a follow up to that, we decided

to do a marriage for them in Washington Square Park.

We alerted the reporter who had done the article.

And he ran it front page above the fold on the morning

that the wedding was going to take place.

So we had all of the media there with the TV cameras

and the rest of it.

About a dozen other clergy from the religious coalition

showed up to stand in solidarity.

And they stood in a line behind me

as I was doing the ceremony for Anne and Bess.

And in the meantime, somebody alerted the district attorney

that we were going to do this.

This was right around the time when the mayor of Poughkeepsie

did it and was arrested, and basically word

went out from the state attorney general

that any minister who attempted this would be arrested.

And I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to be arrested.

But putting your money where your mouth is

came into it again.

We had to do this.

The irony is that the assistant district

attorney, who was in regular communication with me,

was lesbian.

And even the morning of the event,

she called and said, he said if you say marry or married

he's going to arrest you.

I said fine.

Let it be.

You can't be telling a church what it can do

and what it can't do.

So the wedding went off without a hitch.

It was really a nice ceremony.

And we had one protester.

Two things I want to comment on about that.

The only line that the TV folks picked up for the evening news

was, you may seal your vows with a kiss.

That was the big titillation for the group.

The one protester who was there got his moment on camera

and he said, what used to be done in the dark of night

is now being done in the light of day.

That was his big quote.

And while he said that, one of our women

walked by yelling, "Praise Jesus!"

And it was like that came across on the clip.

And it was like it just showed the ridiculousness

of the whole protesting what everyone else has.

So it was really a great event for us, not only--

and we were very attentive to make sure that for

and best this was not just a political statement.

This was their marriage.

And as a result of it, it's like all of a sudden,

we weren't a secret anymore.

And our congregations started growing so that by 2005, we

had outgrown our rental space.

And we ended up being able to buy a church.

So like in two and a half, three years

we went from being a tiny congregation

with $31,000 in debt to a congregation

that was growing and could dare to have

a capital campaign to buy a church building, which we did.

And I really attribute all of that to Anne and Bess's wedding

publicly.

Because we said, this is who we are.

We're proud of who we are.

We're not ashamed in any sense.

We are as religious as the next person.

And here is the religious community standing behind us.

So it was great.

It was really a great time for

KEVIN INDOVINO: I'm embarrassed to ask you this.

This is my own information.

Where is the church located?

JAMES MULCAHY: Right now, the church

is located on Marshall Road in Chili.

We really always saw ourselves as a local congregation, a city

congregation.

But we just didn't have that kind of money.

And most of the churches that would be available to us

would have needed a half a million dollars i renovations.

And we didn't own anything.

We had no equity in anything.

So so we really lucked out, getting in the church we had.

KEVIN INDOVINO: I think this question comes a little further

down, but it's getting down in regards

again, to your congregation and your ministry, more so

on an individual basis with your parishioners,

helping them with their gayness, helping

them come to terms with who they are, their identity.

Have do you, with your ministry help them as individuals?

Give me an example, I know you mentioned AIDS--

JAMES MULCAHY: I have a very specific individual in mind.

After we moved into our new church, for some reason

we started attracting younger people.

So at one point, we had this whole crew of young men

in their late twenties who came to the church.

One of them came alone.

But he said he didn't come for himself.

He came for his boyfriend.

He was checking it out.

When the boyfriend arrived, he had spent ten years

and thousands of dollars.

He was what he called a Bible believing

Christian, which meant that he was an abomination.

And he spent ten years of his life,

untold thousands of dollars trying to ungay himself.

And he realized he couldn't.

All of a sudden he realized, this is who I am.

But he came to us with all of the baggage

from the ex-gay movement about how

he was unclean in the sight of God

and how he knew those passages from Scripture by heart

that condemned him.

At the beginning, honest to God, I

spent probably four to five hours a day

with him on the phone.

He had such incredible pain and agony.

I never felt I convinced him of anything.

But I was there for him.

He had someone he could listen to that

wasn't going to condemn him, wasn't going to tell him

he needed to be at a different place of coming out.

Because that's something I learned.

When I started this activism stuff,

I thought you go from in the closet to out,

and there was nothing in between.

And I came to realize from my own people that in my own life,

it's a process.

I wasn't a good example in my personal life

because I didn't struggle with it.

My family just, I was who I was and they

were who they were and I was still going to be who I was.

And it wasn't an issue for them.

But all my people had come through various degrees

of struggle.

This young man had a family who rejected him

because of his gaiety.

And over a year, he gradually began to understand himself.

He went to his pastor and was very clear

that he disagreed with him about homosexuality

and what the Bible said about it and that he was gay.

Of course, the pastor told him he couldn't

come to church anymore.

But he continued to go to what was called a youth group,

but it was a peer group.

And ultimately he was told he couldn't go to that anymore

either.

So he had various heartbreaks in the course of his journey.

But today, this is four years later,

he's out and proud and involved in pride events.

And he's a really good example of what

we hope to be able to provide, not only in terms

of a safe place, but in terms of education.

Because what MCC has done as a denomination,

is crack open scripture, give rise to queer theology,

begin to see reflections of ourselves in the Bible,

and just change the way churches are looking at it.

And just a final note on this issue, in 2005 somewhere there,

we had our church world conference

in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

And Bishop Gene Robinson had been elected the year before.

And he was one of our keynote speakers.

And what he said to us, there were probably 1,200 of us

gathered there.

What he said to us was, "if MCC didn't exist,

I would never have reached a point

where I could become bishop."

So, I'm not sure that the mission of MCC

is to be a permanent church in the greater scheme of things,

but I think it has served as a bridge

between the gay community and the mainline denominations.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Just talk briefly

about the faith community in Rochester as a whole--

such a diversity of churches and spiritual beliefs

here in the Rochester area.

More recently, aren't more of those churches coming to terms?

Are they being open and affirming--

JAMES MULCAHY: Not only more of the church, we've always had,

not always, but as consciousness about equal marriage

and other things, as consciousness

that gay rights are human rights, as this kind of idea

comes along, it wasn't just the Unitarians

who have been open and affirming for a very long time,

it wasn't just the Unitarians and MCC,

more and more and more local congregations

of mainline denominations have grown

and consciously chosen to be open and affirming churches.

And we've had the occasion over the last ten years,

to see their parent denominations also

open the ministry to gay and lesbian people, transgender

people.

And not only doing that, but then not imposing celibacy

on them.

Because in the baby steps that some

of the mainline denominations took,

it was, OK, you can be gay and be a priest or a minister.

But you can't be partnered.

And fortunately that stupidity, we've seen fall,

certainly what the Presbyterians and

to a degree with the Methodists.

The Episcopalians have really blazed a path for many.

And watching-- the United Church of Christ of course.

But watching them expand and grow and have

more and more congregations, we still

have to realize that churches like the Unitarians and MCC

are open by definition.

Mainline denominations might be getting to, by definition, open

and affirming, but many of their local congregations are not.

And people still can't be openly gay in some Episcopal churches

and in some, all of the churches.

But we are rich in the Rochester area

with having, I mean a wealth of congregations where

gay and lesbian people can be open and affirming,

bring their families and be welcomed

and be an integral part of the church.

As opposed to, you can come here.

And that's been a wonderful evolution to see in this area

also.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Yeah, define that for me

more clearly about yeah, we have churches, oh yeah,

I can come here. but we still think gayness is a sin.

JAMES MULCAHY: Right.

KEVIN INDOVINO: There are those churches out there.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yes, there are.

Well, you know if we have within the LGBT community,

if we have patience with people's coming out process,

and we still at least mostly agree that outing someone is

not the thing to do, let them come to terms themselves,

we have to grant the same thing to religious bodies.

One of the things we surely have seen in this country

is people are more likely to be accepting of gays and lesbians

if they know gays and lesbians.

There are still a lot of churches

with closeted gay people who don't feel safe coming out

in their own congregation.

So people don't know that they know gay people.

Where some of the struggle is playing out

is when they have to replace a pastor,

and the new pastor is gay or lesbian.

And usually they go through a big upheaval,

but then everything turns out usually

more advanced than it was.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Again, I have one question here

about threats of picketing from other churches.

I don't remember what that was about.

JAMES MULCAHY: Yeah.

While we were still on Norris Drive,

we had a very uptight-looking man

in a suit come to church one Sunday morning

with a really big Bible in a zip cover,

who never made eye contact with anyone

and took notes through the whole service.

We have this really out of control part of our service

called community greeting.

I used to introduce the community greeting with,

please don't scare visitors, because it's really exuberant.

Well, this man just didn't participate in the community

greeting at all.

And after church, during fellowship showed up

at my office, to put me on notice

as he unzipped his Bible, to tell me

that I was a wolf in sheep's clothing,

leading God's people astray.

And I refused to discuss Scripture

with him because there's no winning

that kind of discussion.

But I did need to show him that he was welcome,

that I refused to become angry with him,

that he is free to bring as many of his followers

as he wanted to pick at our church,

but he must not interfere with people getting into church.

And he must not try to disrupt service

or the police would be there.

So he threatened to be back.

I let the religious community, larger religious community

know that he had been there.

And the Unitarians down the street

said they'd send 300 people to form a human barrier

between them and us.

Well, we have 30 people at the time.

So I didn't think we wanted 300.

But we had a really good plan on where to park

and how to get people into church unmolested.

And there was a police officer outside the church

for several weeks.

But they never came back and we never heard of them again.

And I'm suspecting that it's because we weren't afraid.

We didn't react the way he was reacting.

We didn't condemn him.

And that's another hard lesson is when we marched in the pride

parade as a congregation, I always told my people,

don't engage in those hateful protesters.

Don't engage with them.

Don't shout anything.

Don't say anything nasty to them.

Endure it.

KEVIN INDOVINO: Just a couple of quick question at the end then.

We've kind of got into the end, talk to me a little bit,

try to put it in a concise little sound bite for me,

but within your religious faith and your gay activism,

what drives you?

What, how do you balance those two together?

What really drives you to really make

a difference in this community?

JAMES MULCAHY: It probably can be summed up

in the vision statement we had for our local church, MCC

Church.

We said that we had to empower people.

We said that we had to embrace the journey.

And we said that we had to touch the world.

Embracing the journey means you can't finish up

where you started.

You have to be moving and growing.

Touching the world means we have to make a difference

in the community that we're in.

In spite of a segment of our community anywhere saying that

you can't be religious and gay.

We have to be there saying, yes, you can.

Not only, yes, you can, but we have

to realize we're in this together.

We're all in this together.