Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a Spiritual Director, oral historian, counselor, musician, teacher, speaker, and workshop facilitator who has been participating in and working with the LGBT community since coming out publicly in 1965 at the age of 18. The first student to declare his homosexuality at Oberlin College, I was then present at the Stonewall Riots and participated in the Gay Liberation Front, living for 2 1/2 years in radical gay collectives. I hold degrees from Northwestern University, Chicago Theological Seminary, and Seabury- Western Theological Seminary, and I helped found Bonaventure House, a living facility for people with AIDS. For the past 16 years, I’ve been in private practice as a Spiritual Director with a large Queer client base, focusing my work on the complete integration of sexuality and spirituality, the ontological goodness of being created Queer in the world, and how our sexuality cannot be separated from our basic being. I’m a member of the faculty of School of Music at DePaul University, and I speak about and conduct workshops around Queer sexuality, spirituality, and politics for Queer students on college and university campuses and for social service agencies. I’ve lived with HIV since 1982, and I was diagnosed with AIDS in 1995.

What were the major challenges for you and the other LGBT students at Oberlin College in the 1960’s?
I am not sure that LGBT students as a general population had many challenges in the mid- to late-1960’s We knew who each other was, and we had our social connections as well as our
sexual connections, and there really was no sense of politics among Queer students. We were out to each other, and that was community enough. I was an aberration, actually. I had no choice but to come out and be public. My survival depended on it. With all the “radical” politics on the Oberlin campus because of the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, I had no choice but to make a radical decision to come out publicly on campus. For me, coming out was an act of not just pure survival, but of great exultation. I claimed my identity both in and out of the classroom, challenging professors to discuss the sexuality of great artists, writers, composers, and thinkers, asking quite forcefully why we were not talking about how their sexual orientation informed their great work and contributions to the world.

How has Oberlin College changed since the 1960s?
To say that Oberlin has changed for the good is such an inadequate understatement that I really don’t know quite what to say. To see all the Queer students on campus, living fully in their identities as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgender people, living with celebration and joy, in community with one another, thrills my heart. To see them, and work with them as a Queer alumnus, in their challenges and in their struggles, both political, social, and spiritual, is a great honor for me. There was nothing like this when I lived in Oberlin. I have to say that I am proud to be the one to have begun the process that has led to this extraordinary living environment by coming out as the first Gay man in the history of the campus 1965. Certainly,
Oberlin, because of it’s history as a college of “firsts”, Queer life would be open and affirming now, but it may not have the color and vitality it has, had what I and those who came immediately after me did in the 1960’s and 70’s.

What advice would you give to LGBT students at Oberlin College today?
For me, I would have to say that the largest issue is keeping the culture alive. We live in an arch-conservative Theocratic society, specifically conservatively Christian in the darkest and most oppressive ways. Queer people are either being demonized beyond anything that existed in the 1960’s, or are being swallowed up by the materialistic, greed-centered, corporate straight culture in which the larger majority of society lives. When I say keeping the culture alive, I don’t just mean politically, but anthropologically, artistically, aesthetically, and most important of all, I believe, spiritually. I think this is the greatest challenge facing Queer Oberlin
students. Keeping the legacy and the history alive in the face of not just opposition, but assimilation, is absolutely necessary if we are to survive as a people. Only we can, in
our self-love, our self-fulfillment specifically as Queer people, see to it that Queer culture stays alive and present in ongoing history.