Oberlin was very quiet except for the Throne Room…”

Robert Wood was born into a Christian family in Youngstown, Ohio. Robert Wood served as an infantryman in the Army, was wounded during the invasion of Italy—for which he was decorated with the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star—and spent twenty-two months recovering in military hospitals. It was also in the Army that Wood had his first sexual experience with another man, though he wasn’t “brought out” into a gay social world until his undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania. He was already twenty-five years old when he enrolled at Oberlin’s Graduate School of Theology.

Wood began speaking and writing for gay causes shortly after his ordination. In 1960, his path-breaking book, Christ and the Homosexual was published. Wood retired in 1986 after thirty-five continuous years as a parish pastor, Hailed in the gay press as a “pioneer for gay rights in America,” he is the subject of a forthcoming biography.

Oral history conducted by phone, Mar. 30, 2000, by Joey Plaster. An ellipsis (…) indicates that material has been omitted.

When I was at [the University of Pennsylvania], I crossed paths with a group of undergraduates; today we call them fundamentalist rightists evangelical Christians. [I] happened to be in a meeting one time when they started quoting all the negative verses in the scripture about homosexuals, and that sort of frightened me, because I’d grown up in a Christian home and Sunday School and all, and had never confronted those texts. But I realized they were using these texts to bash me and other homosexuals, so I decided that when I went to Seminary, I would learn my Bible as well or more than they did so I could use the scripture to confront them…So that was one motive I had in going to Oberlin Seminary, was to really get grounded in scripture, so I could hold my own in a discussion about what the Bible says about homosexuals…

First I explored the Seminary library. I used the card index, but there was no single book on [homosexuality] and a few that even dared to mention it. It was primarily biological, but there was nothing about a Christian ministry with homosexuals or any historic information of the church’s relationship to homosexuality…I went to the college library and you might find a paragraph under the letter “H” that was very academic and certainly not very enlightened at that time. [The books] considered [homosexuality to be] a disease or an illness, an infliction, a perversion or a sin… I didn’t find anything in print so I decided that I would have to write my own book…

The Seminary was always known as a liberal Seminary…One semester one of my term papers was to write on the story of David and Jonathon and whether or not that was a homosexual experience. The professor Herbert May, who was known as an Old Testament scholar said, “Don’t forget that they were teenagers and who knows what teenagers do!” So he wasn’t surprised or alarmed that the students brought up that issue…Herbert May and Thomas Kepler were both scholars on a liberal standpoint, and I was pleased as a gay man with their interpretations. They certainly weren’t using the text to bash homosexuals. They were looking at it from a historical and theological basis. I felt much more relieved when I found there was another way to interpret the texts as opposed to how I read them at Penn…I [now] feel I’m well grounded on scripture, and I still write now and then on gay marriage particularly…

These years that I was at Oberlin, ’48, ’49, ’50, first part of ’51, Harry Truman was still president and Senator Joe McCarthy was just coming to power…He was outing what he called “pinkos and homos” and it was really a very frightening time in America for people in the Federal Government and Hollywood…If a gay man got arrested and was convicted, depending on what state, he could [be forced to] have a lobotomy, which was a horrible procedure and certainly not a cure, and left most of them as vegetables…

It was very closeted then. There was one other [gay] Seminary student…[who arrived] a year after I was there, but again it was in some ways frustrating because I kept saying, “Once I’m ordained and I graduate, I’ll try to find a church somewhere where I can be a little more open.” And that’s one reason I went to Manhattan since I knew there were a lot of gay places in Manhattan. I found a church and I found my lover there. But at Oberlin it was very quiet and many of my Seminary friends were talking about their girlfriends and some of them were married…

Non-gay people [at Oberlin] didn’t know I was gay so they didn’t know they were talking about me [when they made anti-gay statements]…Same way as when I was in the military listening to all those awful queer jokes which were very negative and derogatory, but the G.I.’s, my buddies, didn’t know they were talking about me…The term faggot was a popular put-down, the word “pansy” was another popular word at that time, particularly applied to Conservatory students…

Sometime in my second year I met an undergraduate who was in the Conservatory. His name was John Challener…[He] was a piano major and later became a rather well known concert pianist and went to Julliard after Oberlin, and we later met in Manhattan…I would go read magazines [at the undergraduate library] and one day I spotted Jack. He was doing the same thing, and so we traded looks with each other and recognized the signs…

I don’t know whether he spoke the first words or I spoke the first words, but it wasn’t really difficult to tell, to recognize each other, that we were both gay men without being terribly obvious, and I was happy to meet him because I heard that there were some gay undergraduates on campus…When I was in Philadelphia during my last year, I told some friends that I had been accepted into Oberlin and the gay fellows I knew at Penn said, “Oh, isn’t that where they have a Conservatory of Music?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s one of the undergraduate schools.” And he said, “Oh, I hear it’s full of queers!” So that was my introduction and I kept my eyes open when I got there to see if it was true…

In those days Jack was what we used to call a very “obvious fairy.” Later, when we met in Manhattan, he had calmed down a bit and was in a permanent relationship with another man, but in those days Jack was quite obvious and so were his roommates. He didn’t care who knew and I figure the Administration must had been aware of it but there was never any reprise or anything…I think I only went to bed with him one time but we remained friends after that…

Jack was a resident [of the Throne Room] and his roommates were also Conservatory students…Everyone was very quiet and under-cover [on campus] except for the Throne Room, [where] Conservatory students would let their hair down from time to time…We called it the Throne Room because it was always occupied by the queens on campus, so that’s how it got the title! It was on [the top floor of] a men’s dormitory [Burton]—at that time all the men and women had separate dorms…At that time it was the biggest men’s [room] on campus…They decorated the room with lovely drapes and flowers on the center table and always had a bowl of candy or something in the room and were quite swishy about it…In the Seminary our rooms were pretty austere and there wasn’t much chance to really decorate it…The Throne Room was always very appealing.

It was all for the men. If there were any lesbians, I didn’t know about it…And [it] always seemed to be occupied by some fellows in the Conservatory…[They got that room] by careful planning. If you were coming back in September you had to sign up for a room in May…Or if they were graduating, some of their gay friends made sure that they would get that room…That went on all three years that I was there…[They used] any excuse for a party. I remember one night before graduation and there must have been about thirty guys in the room and there was a lot of camping and kissing and saying goodbye. That’s where I spent my last night on campus before graduation…I met people through parties at the Throne Room, but I was the only graduate student, so if they met me they knew I was in the Seminary and there was an anti-Seminary feeling on-campus because we had cars, we had more privileges, we were also several years older than the undergraduates…

Some of the Conservatory students didn’t try to tone that down or to hide it, but there was no “outing” of someone or a sense of spreading rumors…We were very protective of one another. [We used] first names basically, not saying anything to the administration or the professors…It was nice to know there were other like-minded fellows there and weren’t trying to get ourselves kicked out. The Throne Room had a sense of community, of family there…I always have the sense that it’s easier for one fellow to come out if others come out…but there was no sense of activism or letter-writing or picketing or anything. That came a couple of years later…

The administration didn’t say anything negative or anything positive…They didn’t do anything about it one way or another…They [either] wanted to keep it under wraps or pretend it didn’t exist [and] I never felt any sense of understanding or any interest in trying to relate to their gay students…

[The University of Pennsylvania] is right in the middle of Philadelphia, which is very cosmopolitan [and] had several gay bars at that time…Leaving Philadelphia for Oberlin was quite a change, but I didn’t really mind that because I was intent on doing a good job in the Seminary there…In those days only the graduate students had cars because we were out working in churches on weekends. We had a little more freedom coming and going, so I could go to Cleveland from time to time. Occasionally I took a few undergraduates into Cleveland too…

There was one gay bar [in Cleveland] called the Cadillac Lounge. It was a great place and I did meet a few friends there, but it was very quiet with coat and tie and all that sort of thing…The Cadillac Lounge was on the ground floor and very small. It wouldn’t have held more thirty or thirty-five patrons plus the bar, which was run by a woman named Gloria who, I don’t think was a lesbian, but she was very knowledgeable. She also ran a strict bar…There was no walking from table to table, there were no frequent trips to the men’s room, there was no overt approaching, but we knew all the fellows there were gay and it was a young crowd…

It was really a place where you could be yourself and not have to wear the mask…You could talk and chat with some of the other gay fellows [or] sing some songs that were popular then, and people talked about parties they had been to or they were going to, comments on the political scene at the time…It was much more social than it ever was sexual…After you went a time or two you would begin to recognize other fellows who were sort of regular customers…I went out with one or two fellows that I got to know and they would invite me to go to some party the following week where they were going…

We would refer to each other as “dearie” and “honey”, and used some exaggerated gestures. I was not at all effeminate but some of the other fellows were and that didn’t bother me when we were there…We used to call it “dropping the hairpins” in those days…It helped us to relax, to be ourselves for a couple of hours, not to have to pretend [or] wear the mask… I was not really frightened…The owner, Gloria, had a good relationship with the police and everything was very “up” and “clean,” and if the police did come in, Gloria was at the door to beat them…I never saw her [pay them off] but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did…

One time some of the gay fellows at Oberlin heard about a gay bar out by Lorain…so we drove up down the one main street [and] went out to look around…We came to a storefront place which was a gypsy fortune-teller, but was really a whorehouse…The madame was sitting out front with a couple of the young ladies pretending to tell fortunes…And so I went up to her and I said, “can you tell us where the gay bar is?” And she said, “I should tell you my competition?!” In fact we never did find the gay bar, and there may not have even been a gay bar!

In those days, they used to show movies [at the Allen Art Museum]—art type movies…Of course the lights were out, so that was a favorite cruising place for gay fellows to go to whatever movie was going to be on because it was free and with the lights out there was a lot of embracing and holding hands that type of thing…I remember one time, it was dark and the movie was on and a rather effeminate male voice said, “I’ll give you three minutes to get your hand off my knee!” And of course the whole room burst into laughter, but the lights were off so nobody was quite sure who had said it…

It was just a place to contact people and leave together…Likewise at the Main Library. It was a rendezvous place to meet and maybe go back to their rooms…I don’t recall any rumors about cruising places…and I sure didn’t want to ruin my career at the Seminary so I spent a great deal of time in classes and then usually we were assigned to some rural church to do on the weekends, so that time was kept busy…

The Mattachine [Society] was the first organized gay group, actually I think ’50 was its birth in California, and it was sort of a reaction to McCarthy and it was all a group of gay men, no lesbians…In ’52, the second national gay organization called ONE was born, and then in ’54 the first lesbian group, The Daughters of Bilitis, was born, so all this was happening the first year I was in Seminary and then when I was in New York…So I just happened to come on the scene the first years these [homophile organizations] were born…

And then in ’51 when I graduated and was ordained, a book called The Homosexual in America by Donald Webster Cory was published…That was the first book in America to be open on the subject…and the only thing that book didn’t cover was religion…[Cory] was a non-religious Jew and he knew I was ordained [and encouraged me to write on the subject], so that got me thinking…I was the first to write a book that took on the religious subject…