<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\neven before he could speak, he knew it and felt it: knew he would never be separated from it; felt it in the form of light and heat. actually, light and heat belittled what he felt. They were just words, and words were small, man's way of knowing; words could point and suggest, but never apprehend. When he was old enough to search for better ways to convey what he felt when the love of God came upon him, he would tell his mother and father and minister and anyone else in Nicholasville, Kentucky, that it was like butter, liquid-warm, luminous, drizzled atop his head and descending over and through him in a seamless golden coat to his feet.\n\nAs a child, he prayed the way he breathed, and for the same reason. His Sunday-school attendance record was unblemished, from toddlerhood to the time he left for college. One Sunday morning, he woke feeling that his insides were being dry-baked. \"Nothing's wrong,\" he told his mother when she saw the color of his face. \"Let's go to church!\" So off they went, where he passed his measles on to every student in his Sunday-school class. Weighed against the prospect of not getting his Sunday fill of Jesus, the reprobation that came from being a Patient Zero was a small price to pay.\n\nThe Love of God! If you paid the right kind of attention\u2014and there wasn't anyone around him during his childhood who didn't\u2014you could see it everywhere you looked, in every person, in every little thing. The women who cooed over him the first time he was brought to church as a newborn\u2014there it was!The distinct reddish inking, a grain of beauty, on his infant nape, marking him as Christ's own forever, even before he'd been baptized\u2014there!The tender and ravishing attention\u2014the way, a generation later, on the day that boy brought his own progeny to that church, those women were able to recall that birthmark to his children. There!\n\nActually, at the very beginning, the boy hadn't been so much marked as maimed. After Imogene and Charles Victor Robinson were told their newborn, mangled by forceps during delivery, was partially paralyzed, probably brain damaged, and likely to die, they were asked to put a name on the birth certificate. What did a name matter now the Robinsons asked themselves, providing one that combined her first and his middle names.\n\nVicky Gene Robinson spent his childhood wondering what his parents were thinking when they saddled him with a name like Vicky. Only in high school, after a case of strep brought him face-to-face with one of the doctors who'd treated him as a newborn, did he get an explanation. Odd, how the explanation for his unmanly name came just as a larger question about his manhood, thick with terror, was rising within him. Truth was, in the years Vicky Gene Robinson had been on the earth, the Love of God had not been the only certainty of his life. There was another.  Fear. As with the Love, he had been marked with it from the beginning. But\u2026how How could the fear dwell in him along with the Love of God, which banishes all fear This was the conundrum of Gene Robinson's youth.  He's 61 years old now, and there hasn't been a day in his life as a considering person that Gene Robinson hasn't thought about fear, what it creates and what it takes away, how it feeds on itself while devouring everything it touches. As he sees it, God is love, and the only thing that can displace that love is not doubt, or faithlessness, or even evil, but fear. And the thing that occurs when God is absent Call it the Devil if you must. But if you want to call it by its name\u2014and as far as Gene Robinson is concerned, you should, because limited as human language is, words are powerful, words are actions\u2014you must call it fear.\n\nDuring his childhood, there was another word for it, thanks to an uncle. The uncle, he was a smirker. He knew. At get-togethers, he would sidle up to the nephew named Vicky\u2014always clean, nicely dressed, getting straight A's; always good\u2014and wait for his moment. Then the words would ooze out.\n\nNot much of a boy, are you\n\nVicky Gene would sit ramrod straight with his hands in his lap, eyes forward, listening to the questions and waiting for the word they always worked their way to.\n\nSissy.\n\n But what did that mean Gene didn't know. He knew only that when he was 12 and a buddy produced a Playboy, the half-dozen boys who gathered to gaze were awakened, electrified, and he wasn't, and that it could be dangerous, perhaps physically, to point out this contrast. The Playboy brought a half clarity: He realized he was afraid, and that\u2014even if he couldn't name the thing he feared\u2014he had always been afraid.\n\n So he stayed quiet, compartmentalized the love and the fear. Until he couldn't. Until, when he was 16, the matter and antimatter of his love of God and his fear were forcibly merged under the ice-cold shower water of a high school locker room. For whatever reason, God had seen fit to place Vicky Gene Robinson, the neat little boy who would become not only his class's valedictorian but also the top graduate of all high schools in larger Lexington, Kentucky, and whose birdlike frame contained not a single athletic bone, in phys ed  with the juvenile-offender brigade. The thugs were so hopeless with the academic Health Class that went with PE, though, that V. Gene Robinson was assigned to tutor them, and the word went out: Gene's gonna keep us out of summer school, so anyone who messes with Gene answers to us. \n\nAll well and good, except when it came time for the showers. Because these hoodlums.\u2026 How to put it They were bigger. And older\u2014many of them grade repeaters. And muscular. And fearless.\n\nHot.\n\nNo matter what he did to keep these sulking, sultry hoodlums out of summer school, an erection, an erection, would not be overlooked. So it was that one day, shortly after Gene Robinson had been teaching his charges about the endocrine system\u2014about hormones, for Christ's sake!\u2014he found himself in the locker-room shower, rotating the metal handle clockwise, colder, colder, until the water shocked his skin. And praying.\n\nGod, please. Don't let me get an erection.\n\nColder. Colder.\n\nPlease, God.\n\nSuch a sad and feeble vision. And in hindsight, such a funny one. And so hard to reconcile with what Gene Robinson has become: a man of the cloth who doesn't seem to communicate so much as embody his love of God; the first openly gay bishop in the history of Christianity; a man subject to constant death threats and scorned by the chief Anglican archbishop of Nigeria\u2014perhaps the second-most influential figure in Christendom after the pope\u2014as \"a Satanic attack on God's Church\" whose behavior is beneath that \"of animals, dogs, cows, lions\"; a disciple whose elevation has brought on the Church the greatest crisis since the Protestant Reformation some 500 years ago, and may well lead to a worldwide Christian schism; a man whose life and works are going to determine, for better or worse, how the world's 77 million Anglican Christians comprehend their god over the next hundred years; a marked man.\n\nHe didn't think anything of the same-sex experiences he had in his later teen years. Literally\u2014he didn't think of them. They occurred, and after, he would pray\u2026\n\nGod, please don't make it true. Show me I am not one of them. Make this a phase I'm going through\u2026\n\n\u2026and they would recede from consciousness, perhaps because there wasn't yet a real word to anchor them there. Just it and this. The contradictions! The compartmentalizations! Even as he stowed the wordless it in the cellar of his soul, Vicky Gene's mind blazed with questions about words, and the Word. According to the Disciples of Christ church in which he was being raised, the Bible's every word was literally true and therefore final\u2014to be received rather than engaged. When the boy read the Book, though, it wasn't the words that brought the stories alive; it was the wrestling.\n\nIf God didn't want His heart broken, why did He place the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden\n\nIf every word of the Word is factually true, what to make of the different versions of the same stories about Jesus' ministry in the Gospels\n\nWhy was his critical eye, his willingness to wrestle with a text, welcome when it came to reading a book like Huck Finn but a problem when it came to the Book Moreover, what was that business whereby a preacher, a parent, a teacher, even another child, would assert three words\u2014The Bible says\u2014and then read or quote this or that passage from memory Was this what God wanted his children to do with the Bible This way of reading didn't seem to do anything with the Book.\n\nBy the time he entered high school, he'd begun to wonder if there wasn't an arrogance to The Bible says, a presumed mastery of the Book's manifold mysteries\u2014and of the Mind behind them. The three words even seemed to discard the Book, seal it in a tomb. Dead. Done. Nothing to discuss.\n\nBut Gene couldn't ever get done with the Book. Nor it with him. It left him blissfully undone, because what he dared not to think about his own soul and what it longed for, he dared to think about the Book: that it was unstill, uncontainable, wildly alive with the Holy Spirit, which, in its infinite and terrifying way, wanted what it wanted and went where it wished.\n\nHow to read. The questioning and doubt Gene Robinson brought to the Word didn't alienate him from it. Just the opposite: They kept him connected to the Love as the realization dawned throughout his high school years that his church abominated him.\n\n\"From time to time, we would get the sermon about the passage from Leviticus or Corinthians,\" he says, referring to the texts most often cited as proof that GOD HATES FAGS, as the chanting protesters at Robinson's consecration put it. \"But when I heard God's voice, it was not from the pulpit but through the Scripture I read. And the voice I heard was God saying to me what God said to Jesus at his baptism: 'You are my beloved, in you I am well pleased.' Now, that is a total miracle. That as a kid I could discern that God's real voice was not what my church was telling me it was, even though I didn't yet know how that distinction applied to me. And I can't explain that other than to say that I already had a relationship with the living God, and that that relationship came from my reading, and that my reading convinced me that the ministry of Jesus was about inclusion\u2014that God makes holy what people shove away.\"\n\nSix generations of sharecropping Robinsons had worked the tobacco fields around Lexington. Gene, whose mother laundered clothes in a cast-iron pot over an open fire in the front yard, and who didn't experience running water until he was 10 years old, was the first to attend college. For purely financial reasons, he chose the -University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, which gave him a full ride; it was only a coincidence that Sewanee was an Episcopal school, and all-male. In Tennessee, terrible and wonderful forces began to work on Gene Robinson's mind.\n\n\"One of the great sadnesses of my life is that I can hardly remember college,\" he says. \"I know I was there. I can remember having crushes on guys and never acting on them, and being hard hit by that. But I literally can't remember who any of them were or what they were like. It's just a big blank. I think that's because when you repress, you can't do it selectively.\" He went through the motions of dating women. \"None of it went anywhere. People often ask me if any of the women I dated in college ever said, 'You know, Gene, you might be gay,' and why I didn't ever ask myself if I might be gay. Well, where I came from, gay wasn't anything you were. 'Gay' didn't really become the word as we now know it until the '70s.\"\n\nWhile Robinson put one part of his brain into a deep freeze, another was awakening. From an intellectual and theological point of view, Anglicanism (known as Episcopalianism in the States) off ers an exceptionally supple approach to worship. Born of the need to keep England's mid&amp;amp;#x2013;sixteenth-century Catholics and Protestants from escalating their religious spats into civil war, Anglicanism has always tolerated and even encouraged divergent notions of what it means to be a Christian. For centuries Anglicans have used the term \"three-legged stool\" to describe their theology, which places equal value on Scripture, tradition, and reason. It's a theology that presaged, and therefore survived, the rupture of the Enlightenment.\n\nThe third leg of that stool, the reason, both rocked and affirmed Gene Robinson's world\u2014the notion that God's revealed truth worked in tandem with humankind's own advancements, that it was ongoing, in play; that what The Bible says could change as new information became available; that it was God one was meant to worship, not a book. It was so simple, but until his immersion in Anglican theology, Gene Robinson had never given himself license to consider it: God's revelation hadn't stopped after He'd gotten the Book published; God could do new things in the world.\n\nAnd so could he. In his final year at Sewanee, he knew he'd been called to create a life as an Episcopal priest. \"I had been trying to reconcile the loving God I knew from my reading of Scripture with the God I'd heard about in church who would send everyone who didn't believe in Jesus to hell. There were an awful lot of Jews and Buddhists and Muslims and Sikhs and other non-Christians in the world, and I just didn't see how a loving God could condemn them. At Sewanee, I began to see a much more diffuse God\u2014diffuse in the Creation, and able to reveal God's self in all kinds of ways. And while I still believed Jesus Christ was the most perfect revelation of God, I also began to think: What a small God it would be if God were unable to reveal God's self in some other way, through other people and other sacred texts. I began to think I'd been on the right track about God not condemning most of the world.\"\n\nThe third leg of that stool\u2014it was a beautiful thing.\n\nIn the fall of 1969, Robinson entered the General Theological Seminary in New York City\u2014eighteen blocks north of where the Stonewall Riots had gone down two months earlier. He registered that event as a story in the newspaper, nothing more. \"Chelsea wasn't Boys Town, like it is today,\" he says. \"I might have figured all this out a little sooner if it had been.\"\n\nIn New York, Robinson became unrecognizable to himself, descending to a place he'd never known, for reasons he couldn't fathom. He holed himself up in his dorm, sleeping through his days and staring at the wall of his room at night. His mind\u2014built to seek the what and why of all things, barred from seeking the what and why of Gene Robinson\u2014became roaringly inert, like a car with the accelerator and brake simultaneously floored. Then it happened.\n\n\"I couldn't afford to go home for spring break, so I went to the home of a fellow student. And I fell madly in love with him.\" The feeling was mutual. \"It immediately brought me out of my depression. We had a wonderful three months together.\" Problem was, Robinson's boyfriend had a fianc\u00E9e. \"During the summer, he told her about us. She said, 'This will stop now.' And he never spoke to me again. It broke my heart. That's when I started the therapy.\" Robinson believed what the church had been teaching for centuries about what causes a man to \"lay\" with another man\u2014an extrinsic thing, a kind of infection that distorts the soul's natural workings. So he entered psychotherapy to get the gay out.\n\n\"Lord, I tried,\" he says. \"Nobody could have prayed harder than I did. Nobody could have wanted it more. I desperately wanted to be married and have kids.\"\n\nAfter a year of twice-a-week sessions aimed at unearthing his \"primary\" condition (of which it was presumed the same-sex yearnings were a mere \"symptom\"), Robinson believed himself ready to date straight. While chaplaining in Vermont, he met a woman named Isabella Martin, whom everybody knew as Boo.\n\n\"Ten minutes after meeting him, I thought, That's the man I'm going to marry,\" Boo recalls. \"So smart and clear and faithful. He was so articulate and fun, and he just preached from the heart.\"\n\nShortly after they began dating, Gene told Boo that his only serious relationships had been with men. \"I've been working for more than a year to cure myself,\" he said. \"I think it's under control, but I'm scared to death that it could rear its head.\"\n\nShe told him that if he loved her enough, it wouldn't matter. They married a year later.\n\nThere is a turn of phrase, as reflexive in its way as The Bible says, applied to stories of gay men who marry and have children. He was living a lie. Is there any other way to size up, say, the Colorado preacher Ted Haggard, who, when not busy excoriating gays, was scoring meth and sex from them in no-tell motels\n\nThe uncanny thing about Gene Robinson is that he never lived a lie, before or even during his marriage. He lived a delusion. But lying requires intent, and intent requires consciousness. And there was never a time when Robinson was not sharing, with himself and his wife, all he knew of his interior goings-on.\n\n\"I think that's why there's no bitterness now,\" Boo says. \"What was happening was certainly traumatic, but in the long run it wasn't damaging. There was never a feeling of betrayal. If anything, Gene felt betrayed by this thing going on within him that we were both trying to understand.\"\n\nAfter two years during which Gene worked as a curate in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the Robinsons bought part of her parents' New Hampshire farm, where Boo opened a horse-riding camp at which Gene ran Episcopal youth retreats. It was in New England as it had been in New Jersey: Everyone who met the man saw that he was touched. Parishioners came away from his sermons and pastoral visits feeling loved, which was something. But there was also an unmistakable sense of love\u2014no d\u2014as diffuse as it was palpable, which was\u2026unfamiliar. At least to adults. Children knew\u2014teenagers in particular. \"They clung to him,\" says Boo, observing none of the personal space they accorded other adults they regarded as authority figures. They'd take hold of his forearm, because they knew they could, and tell him about their lives. \"He was so candid and down-to-earth with them,\" Boo adds. \"His own time as a teen had been so stormy, he could relate to their angst.\" Once parents saw their kids doing it, they started doing it, too. Father Gene, he was a man of hugs, not handshakes, and of laughter. Always, always, laughing. The grace was in the laughter.\n\nIn 1978, Robinson became the head of youth ministries throughout all seven of New England's Episcopal dioceses. \"That's when I started to see that it was secrets that make families crazy, not the subjects of their secrets.\" Which was why he wound up formulating not only New Hampshire's but also the national church's policies of transparency and investigation for accusations of sexual abuse, whether they involved churchgoing families, clergy, or both.\n\nThe Robinsons had a daughter, Jamee, then another, Ella, whose arrival, early in the morning of Christmas Day, 1981, transformed Robinson's understanding of the Virgin Birth. Seven hours earlier, as Gene prepared for a Christmas Eve service, a parishioner ran into the sacristy to announce that Boo had gone into labor in the parking lot. A ride to the hospital was arranged; Gene stayed to celebrate the Eucharist.\n\n\"I got to the hospital by ten o' clock, and by midnight Boo was in hard labor, and then at 1:07 a.m. Ella was born,\" he says. \"And the whole time, I was having this mystical connection across time to Joseph. The experience of birth for women has changed, but for fathers it has remained the same. You're excited. You're scared. You're wondering if this baby's gonna have ten toes. You want to do something, but you're helpless. And that's how it is, whether you're in the back of a stable or in a modern birthing suite. I kept thinking that I was feeling just what Joseph was feeling, to the very moment, almost 2,000 years before. Ever since then, I've been a man of the cloth who spends his Christmas days, and a lot of his other days as well, thinking not just about Jesus, not just about the miraculous presence on earth that is God, but about Joseph, that earthly man.\"\n\nJoseph\u2014the father regarded by many of his peers as something other than, or less than, a father, and even less than a man.\n\n\"I think Joseph must have been amazing,\" says Gene. \"Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have been able to so lovingly connect God to father.\"\n\nThe wife, the daughters, the church, the farm, the horses\u2026all was well. Nothing was well. \"He could be so intimate with a whole congregation, and he could preach with his whole heart and soul,\" Boo says. \"But we didn't feel very intimate. I kept thinking if I was smarter or thinner or prettier or if I cooked better, Gene would love me more and it would feel better.\" After several years of marriage, Gene told Boo he realized something about the deprogramming therapy. It had blocked the gay\u2014Boo and the girls proved that, right\u2014but not eradicated it. The gay, it seemed, behaved a bit like hepatitis A\u2014giving you a single bout of sickness, then staying in your system, dormant and harmless, for the rest of your life.\n\n\"I just need to admit that it's there, so I can make my peace with it,\" he told his wife, acting on his own belief about secrets in families. \"So there it is: There's a part of me that will always be gay. But it's a small part. No threat to the main part. I don't have to ever act on it.\"\n\nOnce this awareness was incorporated into their marriage, there was peace. Until there wasn't. Gene prayed on it daily.\n\nMake this not be true, Lord. Show me how I can change it. \n\nIt.\n\nWhen Gene realized it was a bigger slice of the pie than he'd initially thought, he told Boo. When he realized he couldn't have peace with it\u2014even as he was convinced he would never act on it\u2014he told Boo. When he realized it was not only present but no longer dormant, that it was awake, pushing, he told Boo.\n\nThen, one night in 1983, he shot up in bed and, at long, long last, uttered the word.\n\nGay. My God. I'm gay.\n\nIn the mid-'80s it wasn't a given, as it more or less is now, that a heterosexual marriage with a gay man in it couldn't be sustained. Two more years passed before the Robinsons decided they had to let each other go. Jamee was 8 years old; Ella, 4.\n\nA friend, another priest, attended their final divorce hearing at a county courthouse. After signing, they retired to their friend's church to celebrate the Eucharist and perform a homespun liturgy that traced in reverse the vows they'd taken before another altar fourteen years earlier. Both of them felt that the only way they could honor their wedding vows\u2014I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow; with all that I have and all that I am, I honor you in the name of God\u2014was to release, not renounce, them.\n\n\"I know it may seem counterintuitive,\" says Gene, \"but we took our vows very seriously. We had sworn an oath in front of God, and we just didn't want to slink away in the night. We both felt that if the church was going to bless marriages, it ought to be around in some liturgical way to bless divorces, too. It's easy to be there when it's all happy and there's a big party. But it's more important for the church to be there when it's painful. There's a lack of integrity about this. I can't help but imagine that someone who is getting married the second time who has not put an end to the first marriage before God must feel creepy about saying those same words the next time. You make these promises in front of God, you ask God's blessing on them, then you never mention to God or to the community that you're no longer holding yourself to these promises Then you show up in church making identical promises to somebody else You'd think God might interrupt and say, 'Um\u2026could we finish the last one before we do this one'&amp;amp;#x2009;\"\n\nThe day they divorced, Gene and Boo knelt before the altar, asked for each other's forgiveness, and pledged themselves to the joint raising of their children. Then they re-exchanged their rings, as symbols of the vows to which they no longer held each other. He still has hers, and she his.\n\n\"One thing I say to couples in premarital counseling is that the church isn't kidding when they say this is forever,\" he says. \"Even if you're divorced in less than a year and you don't see them for the rest of your life, you'll always be emotionally connected to this person. I say this because I know. Boo and I divorced in 1986, and I still love her.\" By the time Gene Robinson ended his marriage and came out of the closet, New Hampshire's Episcopalians had known him for eleven years. They were shocked but, with a few exceptions, not up in arms. The man had brought love, transparency, and the truth as he knew it to their children and their families for more than a decade. Why would he stop now\n\nOne of those exceptions was a fellow priest named Ron Prinn, whom Robinson had known and worked with for years.\n\n\"I understand you've done this because you're a\u2026what\" Prinn demanded.\n\n\"A homosexual, Ron. I'm a homosexual.\"\n\n\"I just don't understand it,\" Prinn said. \"Boo. The girls. I don't understand.\"\n\nRobinson said he wasn't demanding or even asking Prinn to understand. \"Just be in communion with me. That's all I ask.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can,\" Prinn said. \"I just don't know if it's permissible.\"\n\nTerrible words. To the unchurched, \"in communion\" is the kind of term that can pass through the senses without finding purchase. But to those who have grown up in the church, not to mention those who devote their lives to it, to be told by a man of the cloth that you are not worthy of sharing Communion is to be cast out by one's own flesh and blood; it is to be told that you are unworthy of salvation.\n\nAnd then there was that word. Permissible. It was a word that implied the primacy of doctrine\u2014canons, rules, rote adherence to the letter of the law\u2014over the kind of questing, empathetic faith Robinson had practiced all his life. Not only was Gene Robinson being told he was unworthy of communion but also that he fundamentally misunderstood what it represented.\n\nBoo remarried in September 1987. Two months later, Gene met a Peace Corps worker named Mark Andrew while vacationing in St. Croix. Andrew was a distance runner, a marathoner, intelligent in a practical and unassuming way, and terribly shy. Robinson was a charismatic, a radiant who'd rarely known the ertion of his own spirit to be met with a like force, yet something about Andrew's presence, an attention\u2014nonverbal, evident in the handshake\u2014instantly and fully measured him, held him.\n\n \"I don't know where this is going,\" Robinson told Andrew just days later. \"But you need to know I'm not leaving my kids. If it goes anywhere, it's going to come to New Hampshire. If that's not an option for you, we should stop this right now.\"\n\nIt was an option. After a year and a half of long-distance dating, Andrew moved from Washington, D.C., to New Hampshire, where he and Robinson built a house.\n\n\"My dad never said or implied, 'This is an important person in my life, so he's going to be an important person in yours,'&amp;amp;#x2009;\" says Gene's younger daughter, Ella, now a movie-industry publicist in New York. \"He just introduced him into our lives and let us come to our own conclusions. From the beginning, Mark was this quiet, powerful presence. His love was all in the details. Mark was the one who always remembered to have cottage cheese on hand if SpaghettiOs were being served, because I had this disgusting taste for the two mid together. He paid attention. Not loud attention, but the kind that makes a big difference at the end of the day. With Mark and Gene, and with my mother and her second husband, I grew up with this loving feeling of having all four of my parents there at every parent-teacher conference and every horse show and every play.\"\n\nNot long after moving into his new home with Mark Andrew, Robinson sent Ron Prinn a letter. The two had worked for several months on a committee, after which Gene and Mark hosted a dinner for committee members and their spouses. Prinn had answered the invitation with silence, so Robinson sat down and wrote everything he'd learned about fear.\n\n\"I told him what I'd learned from my own life, and from those of everyone to whom I'd ever been a pastor\u2014that the fear is always worse than the reality. You know how when you're a kid lying in bed and you just know there's something in the room with you, and how frightening that is\u2014but how the thought of turning on the light is somehow even more frightening So I wrote, 'Ron, I don't think you're afraid of what you think you'll see if you come to my home. You might think you are\u2014that you're afraid of all the pictures of naked men we must have on every wall. But I think you're afraid of what you won't see. I think you're afraid that you won't see those pictures, that what you'll see is actually quite boring. Which it is. And I think you're afraid of what that might mean. So let me tell you now: What you will see when you come here is a Christian home. You have a standing invitation.'&amp;amp;#x2009;\"\n\nPrinn never acknowledged the letter, but a year later the two men met at a clergy conference. Robinson was now Canon to the Ordinary\u2014the New Hampshire diocese's second in command. Prinn took Robinson's extended hand but said nothing in response to his hello. Something was very wrong\u2014he wouldn't let go of Robinson's hand. Just kept it gripped while gazing into Robinson's face. His voice trembled when he spoke.\n\n\"I have done everything the church has asked me to, I have believed everything I have been told to believe, and I am unhappy.\" He seemed to be talking at himself as much as at Robinson. \"And here you are living your life the way the church says you shouldn't. And\u2026look at you.\" Before Robinson could muster a response, Prinn withdrew his hand, turned, and left the room.\n\n\"Later in the conference, the bishop got called away, so it fell to me to celebrate the Eucharist,\" Robinson recalls. \"I was halfway through the prayer of consecration when I realized he was going to have to present himself to me for Communion. Sure enough, I looked down and there he was in line. When he knelt, I thought he might cross his hands over his chest, so as not to receive the host from me. But then he put out his hands. Not for the host but for me. So I knelt with him, and right there at the altar rail he took me into his arms.\"\n\nSeveral years later, Prinn worked on a committee tasked with deciding whether the diocese's annual clergy and spouse retreat should be renamed, with \"partner\" replacing \"spouse.\" Prinn was torn. Though he had come back into communion with Robinson, he still didn't approve of what he saw as the man's poor decisions\u2014and he still hadn't brought himself to cross his doorstep. As Prinn saw it, a gay clergyman, an individual, was one thing; the institutionalization of \"gayness\" in the church, even semantically, was another. Grudgingly, he placed a call to Mark Andrew.\n\n\"Would it even mean anything to you\" he asked. \"I mean, you already attend the conference. It's just a word, right\"\n\n\"A word is never just a word,\" Andrew said. \"It would mean everything.\"\n\nPrinn made the change.\n\nBy the time Prinn finally accepted one of Gene's group-lunch invitations, three years ago, Parkinson's disease had ravaged his body. He could no longer eat\u2014liquid nutrients had to be pumped directly into his stomach through a stent\u2014and had neared the point where he could no longer walk or talk. Another of the guests ushered Prinn and his wife, Barbara, through the garage, where Gene and Mark had installed a handicap lift years before. When he rolled his walker into the kitchen, Prinn beheld Gene with a bewildered look. A gurgling sound emerged from his throat. Barbara put an ear to her husband's mouth, then translated.\n\n\"Ron wants to know who in your family is handicapped.\" No one, Gene said.\n\nIt clearly pained Prinn to muster the words, but he managed.\n\n\"Who did you build that lift for\"\n\nThe lift had been used only once before. Gene hadn't thought twice about installing it. His theology of inclusion had structured not only his ministry but his idea of what a living space should be; the lift hadn't been built with anyone particular in mind.\n\n\"We built it for you,\" Gene said.\n\nPrinn began to cry quietly, then motioned for Gene to come close. When he did, Prinn whispered that he wanted Robinson to kiss him.\n\nBarbara Prinn says that in her husband's final months, when he could no longer speak, Robinson would sit with him in silence for hours at a time, holding his hand and, before taking his leave, kissing the dying, smiling man on the crown of his head.\n\nIn 1998, at the once-a-decade gathering of the world's Anglicans known as the Lambeth Conference, it was resolved that homosexuality is \"incompatible with Scripture.\" By 2001, Robinson was a nationally known figure within the church, in part because of the open way he lived\u2014a matter-of-fact defiance of the Episcopal Church's widespread practice of ordaining gay clergy only if they committed to a life of celibacy. Mostly, though, he was known for his reputation in New Hampshire as an inspired preacher and pastor who happened to be a homosexual rather than vice versa, and for the nationwide adoption of the conflict-resolution policies he'd authored. By 2002, when he became a candidate to replace his retiring boss, he'd already been considered for seven other bishop openings. Robinson says that in one of the dioceses, the man he'd fallen in love with back in his seminary days was on the search committee\u2014and still married to the woman he'd been engaged to at the time.\n\n\"I don't think anyone other than his wife knows that I was a part of his life. The thought of my being his bishop must have scared him to death. Since [that search process], he and I have actually spoken quite often. He's a terrific priest. But he's never been able to discuss it.\"\n\nOn June 7, 2003, New Hampshire's Episcopal laypeople and clergy elected Robinson the ninth bishop of their 201-year-old diocese. His candidacy had generated no organized opposition. When the results were announced in St. Paul's Church in Concord, the jubilation was deafening, even primal. \"Ten years ago, I would not have been happy about this, because I would have felt it's clearly contrary to the Bible, contrary to the traditions of the church,\" the search committee's co-chair said at the time. \"It's all because I've experienced the ministry of this man and a couple of others that I think I was mistaken.\"\n\nShortly after Gene and Boo had told their children that their father was a homosexual and that they would be separating, Gene drove to Kentucky to tell his parents face-to-face. Imogene and Charles told their son they didn't understand what he was telling them, but that they loved him all the same.\n\n\"But they kept it a secret all those years because they figured that no one would talk to them again, that their lives would be over,\" Gene says. The election was national news, however. \"They were totally blown away when their friends kept saying, 'We just saw another talk show! You must be so proud!' You know that thing you fear so much that you can't even turn the light on to look at it They were amazed to learn there was nothing there.\"\n\nRobinson's election didn't make him a bishop; confirmation was required. Two months later in Minneapolis, 900 lay and clergy leaders considered the question. Meanwhile, the postcards began to pour in.\n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__You fornicating, lecherous PIG. How dare you split the Anglican Church You dumped your wife &amp;amp; daughters to live with a homosexual pig. \n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__I hope that someone stones this faggot to death. If they did, I would be the first person to congratulate the assailant and pat them on the back for a job well done. \n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__Hi Gene hows the corn holing Bishop doing, you son of a bitch\u2026still spreading aids is the only thing you are good for. \n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__If you had any courage, you would kill yourself, like all queers. \n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__You vain, arrogant, self-aggrandized OLD COCKSUCKING FOOL! God will curse you and your HERESY! \n\n&amp;amp;#x2022;__God said: DEATH TO THE FAGGITS. \n\nIn Minneapolis, Robinson, who had then been with Mark Andrew for sixteen years, testified to the delegates that sexuality, in all its forms, manifested God's having made humankind in God's own image. Fundamentalists who claimed to \"love the sinner, hate the sin\" when it came to homosexuality made the same false distinction inherent in the Episcopal Church's practice of ordaining homosexuals only if they were celibate; both presumed homosexuality to be something one did, not something one was. A God who formed a human being with a same-sex attraction and then forbade him or her to act on it would be a cruel God, he told them, and he did not believe in a cruel God.  \"What I can tell you is that in my relationship with my partner, I am able to express the deep love that's in my heart, and in his unfailing and unquestioning love of me I experience just a little bit of the kind of never-ending, never-failing love that God has for me. So it's sacramental for me.\"\n\nThe allegations of sexual misconduct hit on the eve of the final confirmation vote, when each of the attending bishops received an e-mail from a Vermont man claiming Robinson had made a pass at him a couple of years earlier at a church conference. Within hours, another allegation\u2014that Robinson had \"links\" to a pornographic Web site\u2014emerged.\n\nThe bishops immediately postponed their vote and began investigating Robinson\u2014per the very policy Robinson himself had created. Gene, who was forbidden to comment publicly during the investigation, holed up in his hotel room with Mark and Ella, who was handling media requests for the event. Mark \"just held Dad's hand and quietly said, 'We are doing this the right way, and this is going to be okay,'&amp;amp;#x2009;\" says Ella.\n\nWithin thirty-six hours, the \"porn link\" was debunked, and the Vermont man conceded that the \"sexual harassment\" consisted of Robinson patting him on the back during a public assembly in a way that might have appeared \"normal and natural\" to anyone present.\n\nAfter a slim majority confirmed Robinson's election, twenty bishops rose in protest. As their spokesman, they had selected the Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, Robert Duncan, who, oddly enough, had been an old seminary classmate of Robinson's in New York. \"With grief too deep for words, the bishops who stand before you must reject this action,\" he said. \"This body has denied the plain teaching of Scripture and the moral consensus of the church throughout the ages.\u2026 I will stand against the actions of this Convention with everything I have and everything I am. I have not left, and will not leave, the Episcopal Church or my apostolic role as Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. It is this Seventy-fourth General Convention that has left us, betrayed us, undone us. May our merciful Lord Jesus have pity on us, His broken bride.\"\n\nThe breaking of the worldwide Anglican Communion had officially begun.\n\nGene Robinson does not fear God. Nor does he fear for his soul. He never has. During his childhood, words preached from the pulpit of his church sometimes struck fear into his heart, but never a fear of God. Because almost as soon as he could read, he noticed a recurring melody in the Gospels\u2014it was constant, like a tic\u2014and began to follow it.\n\nDo not be afraid. \n\nThere hardly seemed a passage in the New and even the Old Testament that didn't carry the injunction, either explicitly or between the lines. It wasn't just the injunction, though. It was the way the Book invariably linked fear and love\u2014the way people quailed in terror whenever the Love of God on earth was imminent. After informing Mary she had \"found favor\" with God, the angel took one look at her face (\"troubled\") and added Fear not before laying on her the fact that she'd be mothering the Love of God. So it was when the angel broke the news to Joseph. Fear not. And to the \"sore afraid\" shepherds abiding in the field. Fear not.\n\n\"Jesus' whole life was bookended by that phrase,\" Robinson says. \"Every single one of the Resurrection experiences began with Jesus saying, 'Don't be afraid.' Perfect love, in the form of Jesus Christ, literally casts out fear wherever it goes. So do I fear God Not at all. I do have a sense of judgment. I do believe that after death there will be some piece, some moment, when we will see our lives for what they really were. And I believe that's going to be pretty hard on all of us. But I also believe nothing can separate us from God's love, that our worth in God's eyes is a done deal. So fear does not enter into it.\"\n\nGene Robinson has hid nothing and feared nothing for his own sake in more than twenty years. The man carries no secrets. When, for instance, he became uncomfortable with his reliance on wine to decompress at the end of his workdays, the last thing he did before checking in to rehab in early 2006 was to write an open letter to New Hampshire's Episcopalians, explaining where he was going and why. The effects of this fearlessness now seem less psychological than musical: He will describe a terrible memory such as the collapse of his first marriage with a grief that is clearly genuine and still present, yet something in the telling\u2014his speaking voice is reedy and crisp; his grammar is unerringly precise\u2014feels shot through with hope, feels upcast, and brings to mind nothing so much as a contented, chirping robin. It seems peculiar to describe the absence of something as palpable, but this small, bespectacled, unremarkable-looking man has about him an absence of fear so entire that it is palpable. Or, rather, the thing that's rushed in to fill the vacuum where fear once dwelled\u2014fear's opposite: love\u2014is so complete that it's palpable. Unnerving, even. He's a \"loving person,\" of course, who says and does loving things\u2014unassumingly spending every Christmas Eve in prison with New Hampshire's worst women offenders, to cite one of hundreds of examples. But the love one feels in his presence is too diffuse, too invisibly luminous, too strange, to originate in anything he says or does. It's simply something that he is\u2014or for which he serves as a vessel.\n\nLove casts out fear: Between the confirmation in August and the consecration ceremony in November 2003, the calls for Robinson to stand down turned to howls. It wasn't just Bob Duncan's group in the States, and the primates, as Africa's chief archbishops are known. It was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams\u2014Anglicanism's spiritual figurehead\u2014who publicly opined that Robinson shouldn't be made a bishop. The death threats picked up, too. Scores of them, the creepiest featuring a photo of Gene and Mark\u2014a joyful image, both men bent back with the force of their own laughter\u2014beneath a message comprising block letters cut from magazines. i have a bullet for each of your heads when you least expect it.\n\nTo which Robinson's response was, simply, What will be will be.\n\nHe \"slept like a baby\" the night before his consecration, and woke with a deep calm that \"might better be described as an absolute stillness.\" Which was saying something, given that security before and during the ceremony, held at the University of New Hampshire hockey rink in Durham, cost the Diocese of New Hampshire $100,000. In the preceding month, armed bodyguards accompanied Robinson on his pastoral visits. In the preceding week, bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the Durham facility. On the day of, snipers took positions atop the roofs of adjacent buildings. The clergyman in the red stole who processed behind Robinson was no clergyman but an armed bodyguard; Robinson wore a Kevlar vest, as did Andrew, as did the then presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold. Medics typed Gene's and Mark's blood ahead of time; both men were assigned three-person triage teams. An escape plan was established, replete with an idling car and a secret location where, if Robinson were still alive after an attack, three bishops would complete the consecration rite. A cameraman perched on a catwalk directly over the spot where Robinson was to kneel before the consecrating bishops, to ensure visual proof of the instant they laid their hands upon his head and officially made him a bishop. And through it all, the absolute stillness.\n\nThere was no bomb, no shots. Just polite objection: After Frank Griswold duly asked if anyone present knew of \"any reason why we should not proceed,\" an Episcopal priest from Pittsburgh named Earle Fox took the microphone. As he later revealed on his Web site, God had told him the day before to drive to New Hampshire with a Message.\n\n\"For males, around 99 percent engage in oral sex,\" Reverend Fox informed the assembly, citing a twenty-four-year-old tome called The Gay Report. \"Approximately 91 percent engage in anal sex. Eighty-two percent engage in 'rimming'\u2014touching the anus of one's partner with one's tongue and inserting the tongue into the anus.\u2026\"\n\n\"We know where you are headed,\" said the presiding bishop.\n\n\"You know where I am headed\"\n\n\"You can spare us the details.\"\n\nFox later wrote a rueful blog entry completing the Message\u2014\"golden showers,\" \"fisting,\" \"scat eating,\" \"mud rolling\"\u2014that Bishop Griswold had cut off.\n\nIn time, Robinson's family\u2014Imogene, Charles, Boo, Mark, Jamee, Ella\u2014presented him with his new vestments. He then knelt as forty-four bishops encircled him and laid their hands upon his head, adding him to the apostolic succession, the unbroken line of Anglican bishops going back to the original twelve apostles. An unbroken line straight back into the hands of Jesus.\n\n\"Brothers and sisters in Christ,\" Griswold said, \"greet your new bishop!\"\n\nAfter three minutes of the kind of high-pitched pandemonium normally afforded only to pop idols, 4,000 Episcopalians and Anglicans, some of whom had come from around the world, and all of whom had passed through protesters bearing god hates fags and fag church placards, as well as metal detectors and handbag searches, launched into the Ralph Vaughan Williams hymn \"Sine Nomine,\" whose lyrics compare the Christian saints to soldiers.\n\n\"I only gauged the full impact all this had on Mark about two and a half years later,\" Gene says. \"I did a service at a church in Portsmouth, which had a three-sided balcony. Afterwards, Mark said, 'Halfway through the service, I realized that for the first time since the consecration, I wasn't constantly watching the balcony for someone with a gun.'&amp;amp;#x2009;\"\n\nThe Anglican primate of Uganda announced the day after the ceremony that his primacy was breaking communion with \"that man.\" Within a year, twenty-two of the thirty-seven overseas branches of the worldwide Anglican Church had severed relations with the U.S. branch. Bob Duncan, with financial support from the same conservative foundations associated with Richard Mellon Scaife that financed the movement to impeach Bill Clinton, had actually begun the plan for global \"realignment\" months before Gene Robinson was made a bishop. Within two months of Robinson's consecration, Duncan's Anglican Communion Network was up and running. Its premise was radical: that it was not Duncan and his conservative supporters who were schismatic but those who had elevated Gene Robinson; the ACN was aiming not to reform but to replace the Episcopal Church outright. What The Bible says about a man laying with another man was plain, according to Duncan and his backers, and by electing an openly gay bishop the Episcopalians had willfully forgotten how to read.\n\nSince then, thirty-two Episcopal congregations, some of them the largest and wealthiest in the country, as well as one entire diocese, have \"seceded\" from the American church. Declaring themselves under the \"jurisdiction\" of ultraconservative overseas bishops, they've begun sending the money they once tithed to the national church to Africa and South America. And although Episcopal dioceses hold the deeds to their congregations\u2014the idea being that parishioners are not owners but caretakers for succeeding generations\u2014many breakaway churches have sued for ownership of their buildings, some of which are worth eight figures. (Bob Duncan has been trying to subsume the Diocese of Pittsburgh under the church of Kenya, whose archbishop routinely refers to Gene Robinson as \"the Devil.\") Some of the dissident churches have won in court; others have been forced to move. The question is no longer whether the property issue will wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, but when.\n\nAt this point, Bob Duncan is an inconsequential figure next to the African primates, whose followers\u201418 million in Nigeria alone\u2014are growing exponentially and numerically dwarf the 2.4 million Episcopalians in the United States. The Africans are only a few generations removed from the English missionaries who converted their ancestors; the fundamentalist zeal they bring to the Word still has the feeling of first things, and their reading of Scripture is almost uniformly literalist. To them, \"interpreting\" or \"rethinking\" Scripture is, well, unthinkable, and Gene Robinson and his sympathizers blaspheme when they claim that a proper reading of the Bible requires asking if \"a man lay[ing] with another man\" meant the same thing to Saint Paul and his audience that it means in the twenty-first century, and if the \"abomination\" mentioned in Leviticus meant then what it means now. (The scholarly consensus is that Paul was referring not to amorous \"laying\" but to the punitive raping of enemy soldiers by conquering armies, and that the \"abomination\" in Leviticus simply means \"nontraditional.\")\n\n\"I sincerely don't want this to sound condescending, but I do feel sympathy for these conservatives,\" Robinson says. \"They are only believing what we've taught them to believe for centuries. Why wouldn't they be angry about what I represent But I can't not talk about discrimination in the church. Because this is about far more than the church. This is a secular issue as well. Ninety percent of government-sponsored oppression of homosexuals and suppression of gay civil rights is church-related. It's the church that has taught the larger culture to feel comfortable making homosexuals second-class citizens. This makes it distinct from racism and sexism. The church is the source when it comes to the secular culture's attitudes about homosexuality\u2014and it's going to take church people to change it.\"\n\nRobinson won't likely live to see the change. His diocese is healthy, but nationwide membership in the Episcopal Church is in drastic decline. Meanwhile, the power and prestige of African-style Anglicanism shows no signs of slowing\u2014in no small part because animosity toward Gene Robinson has proved remarkably profitable for a number of primacies. Which may explain why Nigeria's archbishop, Peter Akinola, who claims to love homosexuals while hating homosexual acts, supports a proposed law in his country that would make it a crime to provide food or lodging to any gay or lesbian person, or even to discuss homosexuality in a public venue.\n\n\"For six years now, I've listened to African leaders say that I am lower than a dog and that Satan has entered the church,\" says Robinson, who, incidentally, believes in sexual abstinence before or outside of marriage or a committed relationship. \"Now, I want to be in communion with these people. I want it to work out. Still\u2014and I never thought I would come to feel this way\u2014I've come to believe that it is time for the American church to be who it is. And if the fact that God is doing a new thing in our church gets us kicked out of the Anglican Communion, so be it. I would never advocate for our leaving, because I think leaving the table is the ultimate sin. It should be as it was with Ron Prinn and me\u2014the way we held on to one another for dear life while we tried to figure it out. I would never walk away.\"\n\nNor will he stand down. A few weeks ago, thanks to a new New Hampshire law, Robinson and Mark Andrew entered into a civil union. And this month, he will attempt to step into Canterbury Cathedral to attend this decade's Lambeth Conference, along with the more than 800 bishops and primates who represent the 164 countries of the Anglican Communion. He may or may not be barred entry. Gene Robinson is the only Episcopal bishop from whom Rowan Williams has withheld an invitation. (This distinguishes him even from Philadelphia's Episcopal bishop, Charles Bennison, who was recently revealed to have concealed the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl\u2014by his brother\u2014in one of his former parishes.) The snub is a sop to the primates of the global south led by Akinola, who had called on the archbishop to blackball the entire American church from the conference \"unless they truly repent\" for having elevated Robinson. (After overseas primacies declared themselves in \"impaired communion\" with the Episcopalians due to Robinson's consecration, Williams commissioned an inquiry. The resulting report called on the Episcopalians to refrain from consecrating any more gay bishops and to express regret for their actions; the American church apologized for any grief it had caused, but not for making Robinson a bishop.)\n\n\"I think the only way you can be a disciple is to not be fearful,\" Robinson says of his plans to crash Lambeth. \"I have no idea what goes on in the Archbishop of Canterbury's mind\u2014I can't get him to return my calls or e-mails or letters\u2014but doesn't it strike you that he's a fearful person So often, the thing we fear is what we create when we're fearful. There's no question in my mind that he wants to save the communion, but by his being fearful, he may be bringing about the very thing he most doesn't want to happen.\"\n\n\"You know, Jesus was always in trouble. And I think it's an indictment of us as Christians that I wear this around my neck\"\u2014his cross\u2014\"and police don't follow me wherever I go. I tell my clergy that if they're not in trouble, they're not preaching the Gospel.\"\n\nRobinson has been in touch with the London office of the security contractor that handled his consecration in New Hampshire, to make the proper arrangements.\n\nIt ought to go without saying that as the Lambeth Conference looms, and the pressure and scorn and death threats mount\u2014yes, the death threats have picked up again\u2014Robinson's prayer life is filled with pleas for his physical well-being and for the power of persuasion in the face of all the questions he's bound to be asked. A funny thing, though, about Gene Robinson, a man whose name has become inextricably linked to the Word, and what the Word does or doesn't say, in the minds of millions of Christians: His prayer life has become almost entirely void of words. Every morning, as early as four and no later than dawn, he wakes, descends to his living room, sits on the couch facing the hearth with his hands on his knees, his back straight and his eyes closed, begins his prayers, and, more often than not, says nothing.\n\n\"I find myself saying a lot less to God than I used to. I've come to realize that God doesn't need me to remind God of what God already knows. God doesn't need to be briefed.\" Instead, Robinson's prayers now return him, in a way, to the feeling he used to try, try, but fail to describe to anyone who would listen to him when he was a child\u2014to the Love of God. \"Except for the intercessory prayers I offer up on behalf of those who are sick and troubled, I try to use my prayer as a space and a time in which I let God love me. I close my eyes, and I think of light, and I think of warmth, and I think of God's Love, and I feel it, starting at the top of my head and dripping over me like melting butter. You see\" Robinson closes his eyes, turns the plane of his face up, and lifts his cupped palms nearly to the level of his chin. \"It's when I let God love me that I remember who I am.\"\n\nAndrew Corsello is a GQ correspondent.\n\nClick here to listen to Gene Robinson talk about his faith, his sexuality, and the church that is dividing around him on GQ Radio."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/gene-robinson-gay-bishop-protestant?currentPage=10>