Southern Baptist gay minister

[suzer1013]

News
Retired Baptist minister preaches honesty at LGBTQ event


By Jeremiah Horrigan
October 01, 2006
Times Herald-Record
Kingston — You could call Ted Hayes an ex-prisoner of war. A POW who set himself free years ago in a war of religious and personal values that continues to rage to this day.

Hayes, who is 76, is a retired Southern Baptist minister who still speaks in the soft, gentlemanly tones of his native Memphis. He is also a gay man who, until 1977, kept his sexual orientation a secret from his flock and his family. He spoke yesterday of his release from prison as the keynote speaker at a day-long conference entitled "Come Out & Find Out," sponsored by the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center.

Hayes came out as a gay man at what seemed then to be a peak of anti-homosexual bias among what Hayes calls "the fundies," religious fundamentalists who built careers, established churches and secured national notoriety denouncing homosexuals as sinners, deviates and destroyers of all that was good about the American family.

These are the people, he said, who made it impossible for him to continue his ministry. And these are the people he continues to battle as an advocate of gay rights.

For years, Hayes struggled with the question "Why?"

"Why did I always have to hide the real me from the rest of the world, particularly those who were dearest to me?"

His address explored the answer he found, an answer he said other closeted gays need to hear.

In finally deciding to come out to his family, he said he decided that he would rather be hated for who he was than loved for who he was not.

His first bit of coming-out advice: Don't do it when he did it, back home with his parents and over dessert at Christmastime.

Though his story had its amusing moments, his coming out was painful.

"Have you ever stood outside at night during a winter snowfall and noticed how absolutely quiet it is?" Imagine that kind of quietness intensified tenfold. I had finally unlocked the cell of that prison in which I had confined myself for nearly 47 years and had walked into a world where it seemed suddenly that no one knew me and I was completely and utterly alone."

"But I was out!"

His parents and a beloved aunt and uncle became his allies and defenders. And his escape opened unsuspected doors he hasn't stopped exploring since then.

His anger at religious fundamentalists hasn't abated since the '70s. They are, he says, "hate-filled, psuedo-pious, pompous and hypocritical." He characterized the abuse gay people suffer from fundamentalists as "spiritual terrorism," using "spiritual violence" to intimidate and coerce governments and religious groups alike. The religious right's "misuse of religion "¦ gives credibility to the scientific theory that proposes that the two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

He urged his audience to "come out totally" and to stop accepting second-class citizenship.

"As long as any of us is still closeted, either completely or partially, none of us is truly free."

[Steven E. Webster]

Originally Posted by suzer1013

The religious right's "misuse of religion gives credibility to the scientific theory that proposes that the two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

I'd never heard this expression before! Fabulous!

Steven Webster