I have a t-shirt that says: “Greenville, MS: Where My Story Begins.” This is not literally true, as I lived in four other places in the first twelve years of my life, but it’s true in all the ways that count. Greenville is certainly where I came to understand myself as a person in society, not just as a person in a family. Developmentally, that may well just be the stage all twelve year olds are.

The reality of life in Greenville, Mississippi in 1971 was that there were White people and Black people. Greenville Public Schools, like all Mississippi Public Schools, had integrated in January 1970. That had certainly had an impact on my life in Jackson, MS, but the break-up of my parents’ marriage had had a FAR bigger impact. We had moved from middle class to “struggling.” We searched the Fondren neighborhood where we lived for soft drink bottles to return to the grocery store to buy food. We moved to Greenville so my mother could take a job as Director of Medical Records at King’s Daughters Hospital. She was a Department Manager, but she was a Woman Department Manager who managed other women. We weren’t searching for soft drink bottles to buy food, but we were just barely holding on to the lower middle class.

After school integration, Greenville had seen the establishment of two private schools, Washington School and Greenville “Christian.” Those who set them up, those who taught there, those who attended and everyone else in town knew they were there to keep White children from going to school with Black children. Allusion to “Quality Education” and “Christian Values” were smokescreens to mask the deeply racist reasons for their existence. There were no concerns about “quality” or “Christian values” in the public schools before January 1970.

We were, as I said, barely holding on to the lower middle class, and there certainly wasn’t money for private school tuition for three children. Fortunately, not ALL the White families had abandoned the Greenville Public Schools. The racial breakdown in 1971 was about 65% Black and 35% White. Most of the White families were also lower middle class, but there were some professional class persons who stayed with the public schools out of conviction, not economic necessity.

The constant in my life during those years, and before, was the Southern Baptist faith. Both of my grandfathers had been Southern Baptist pastors, and my parents met at a Southern Baptist university. My father had been a Southern Baptist Minister of Music before his marriage fell apart. The change in marital status had also necessitated a change in career for him, but he and my stepmother continued working part time in music ministry at Southern Baptist churches in Florida.

First order of business in Greenville, after securing a place to live, was finding a church. We looked only at Southern Baptist churches. We settled on First Baptist Church. The racial and social hierarchy of the city of Greenville was replicated at First Baptist Church. Black people were excluded from worship by church policy, with the police to be called if anyone challenged the policy. At the top of the pyramid were the planter class, below that were business owners and professionals. Below that were “intact” families and we, a family headed by a single mother with no family ties to the area, were at the bottom.

In February of 1972, my mother married a man who was an assistant football coach and study hall supervisor at the junior high school my brother and I attended. This made things MUCH worse, as now we lived in a family of domestic violence. It is absolutely false that “Words Can Never Hurt Me.” Verbal abuse of everyone, backed up with the threat of physical violence became the daily environment at my house. This man also became the first from whom I heard homophobic words. My brother and I weren’t “masculine” enough for him and he let us know about it, incessantly. The fact that my brother and I were attracted to girls was irrelevant to whether we’d be subjected to homophobic verbal abuse. He also reveled in homophobic incidents at other schools where he’d taught. Neither of us ever actually played football for him (another mark against us), but I’m sure that homophobic abuse was a big part of his “motivational” arsenal.

The choir programs at First Baptist Church Greenville was a refuge for us. Kenneth Forbus, the Minister Of Music, had established a way to accommodate the racism and classism of Greenville and get significant financial support for ministry with us Baby Boomers. He accepted my brother and me for who we were and found our contributions to the choir valuable.

My second experience with homophobia came at First Baptist, though. During my tenth grade year, First Baptist hired Sheila Hyde as Minister of Youth and Recreation. I have no idea what Sheila’s sexual orientation (or certainly, her behavior) was but she dressed and presented as “Butch.” She took the full amount of spiritual authority available to a Southern Baptist woman in the 1970s, which wasn’t that much. The criticisms and even the “jokes” by her friends were tinged with both misogyny and homophobia. She was forced out of her position after just two years by her boss, the Minister of Education, who was hired after she was.

I found myself at Millsaps College, an unlikely spot for a Southern Baptist “Mama’s Boy,” but every good thing that has happened in my life since is a result of the serendipity of going to Millsaps. I heard a call to ministry in a Heritage lecture by United Methodist clergy Dr. T.W. Lewis. My connection with Dr. Lewis and Lee Reiff led me out of fundamentalism. They helped me understand that the God of the Bible is the God of the oppressed and the poor. Political Science courses from Howard Bavender showed me how to analyze government in terms of how the poorest and “least of these” are treated. History courses from Charles Sallis and Bob McElvaine helped me to see US history in terms of how “the least of these” have been treated.

As I was becoming less fundamentalist, the Southern Baptist Convention was becoming MORE fundamentalist. A “switch” went off in my mind, telling me I could not pursue ministry as a Southern Baptist. I became a United Methodist in January 1980, midway through my junior year.

I became a member of the “Methodists Students Association” at Millsaps. One of our early decisions was whether we would sponsor a talk on campus from the leader of Affirmation, the LGBTQ advocacy organization for the United Methodists. We decided to do so. One thing the speaker said flipped another “switch” in my brain. He said (paraphrase) “We don’t know whether people are born attracted to the same sex or not, but why don’t we give them benefit of the doubt.” I saw the connection between homophobia and racism instantly. I already knew that racism was wrong. The person who coined the term “Intersectionality” may not have even been born in 1980, but it was the first moment of “intersectional” thinking for me. I was sure that the United Methodist General Conference would strike the phrase “The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” That phrase was incompatible with the United Methodist Church I had just joined. I could never have imagined it would take forty-four years to get rid of that accursed phrase.

A month or two after this event, Lynette and I began our journey together as a couple. That journey ended much too soon thirty-seven years later. From that point on, our journeys with the not-as-perfect as I thought United Methodist Church would be joined.