Essay written May 2006

I grew up as an only child in suburbs of Chicago and Detroit. By the time I was in kindergarten I “knew” in some non-verbal way that I was different and that I was profoundly attracted to men. I also knew that somehow I wasn’t allowed to bring this into full consciousness and put it into words, that to speak of it would lose me the love and respect of others. And so I related to heroes in the movies and later on television, especially cowboys and their world of mostly other men in Levi’s and leather.

I fell in love with a classmate in high school. We studied together and even vacationed and fooled around a bit together, upon my initiative. Then he wrote me a letter saying that what we were doing was wrong. We met to talk. I told him I loved him. He said that he knew that. But it was still wrong. We remained friends at a distance. Years later I discovered that he was gay, too. Such a loss.

In the spring of my junior year in high school I visited some colleges and universities. The choice came down to Oberlin and Harvard. I visited Oberlin the weekend the College Choir gave their homecoming spring concert, just back from a national tour. Way high up in the back center of the balcony of Finney Chapel I heard them sing Bach’s Cantata BVW 150, “My soul yearns for you, O Lord.” All the longing and loneliness inside of me surfaced and I wept openly (but wait: does it show that I’m a homo if I cry in public?). Oberlin was to become my college and I was going to sing in that choir. And so it all worked out that way.

Just after graduation from high school, I went to the young and handsome assistant priest at the Episcopal Church of which I was a hyperactive member. I came out to him. He didn’t try to tell me I would grow out of it. He explained the Church’s position (at that time) and seemed to feel sorry that he couldn’t help me.

Oberlin met all of my intellectual and artistic needs, and most of my social needs, too. I majored in German and minored in music history, with a heavy dose of French and art history. I was not merely taught but also mentored by some of the greatest teachers I was ever to encounter. But inside I was still frightened and lonely. No one must even guess that I was different, a “homo” or a “queer.” I had crushes on any number of fellow Obies. Of course I fell in love with two who were perfectly straight. I finally told them in my senior year what they meant to me. For the first time in my life I experienced acceptance as a whole person. Our friendships continued for some years. I recall that each of them said that he felt some sadness that he could not respond to my love in kind.

In addition to singing in the College Choir I got involved with the Oberlin Gilbert and Sullivan Players, beginning in my sophomore year. Perfect set-up for getting to know other gay guys, right? Sure, if I hadn’t been so blinded by fear even as I was torn apart by attraction. But I recall some wonderful moments when I was “out” to hundreds of people at a time, over and over again.

I sang the role of Private Willis in Iolanthe. Willis is a guardsman at the House of Parliament. From his closet-like guard’s booth he observes everything going on yet is not free to get involved. But at the end of the opera he is chosen to be the spouse of the Fairy Queen. She taps him with her wand and he sprouts pink wings and becomes a Fairy Guardsman. Night after night, I knew what it meant for me to come out of that booth and be transformed. For those few moments each night I was at home in my skin. But then off came the costume and it was back to the isolation booth.

But there were some who observed my pain and wanted to help me. Indeed, I had been living in the midst of an active and supportive underground community of gay men and lesbians and for the most part I hadn’t noticed, hadn’t dared to notice. Late in my senior year a classmate came to see me one evening in my room off campus. He told me he was gay, although he had a fiancée and they planned to be married. I listened to his story and lay there on my bed, emotionally frozen. Finally I asked him, “Why are you telling this to me?” And he explained that he had come, indeed been sent, to help me. And he advised me to go and talk with a leading member of the G&S Players who was known for his understanding and compassion and who was also gay. I had long been intimidated by that fellow’s artistic brilliance and developed social skills, so I delayed and delayed and then it was too late to go and see him. We had all graduated.

Something else happened in my senior year that was to change my life forever. One evening, at dinner in French House, I met a very precocious and cute freshman named Mike Lynch. It didn’t take me long to move from an exhilarated crush to a deep sense of love for him. He was handsome, yes, but he was also somehow beautiful inside, a man of soul.

Mike Lynch, later to become Michael just as I was later to become Robert, not Bob, had been raised in Dunn, a small North Carolina town. His father died of alcoholism when Mike was fifteen. His mother discouraged him from expressing his feelings, but Mike found solace in music and mastering the piano. As I had been, he was very active in his high school and community. He was a youth leader at his church, a page at the North Carolina legislature at Raleigh, and spent two summers teaching poor black kids to read and write. All of these – his music, his leadership skills, his teaching ability, his care for others, and his political experience – were to emerge as public virtues in his later life. Before he left Dunn, he spoke to his church pastor about his sexual feelings. He, too, was already trying to sort things out. And he was getting nowhere.

Dunn sent Mike off to Oberlin as somewhat of a town hero. His imposed role as the fair-haired hero was to haunt him throughout his life. Oberlin offered, perhaps, new freedom to find himself. And among others, at Oberlin he met early on a senior with similar interests, another lonely “best little boy in the world.” We began a friendship revolving around art, literature, and music. It was a relationship like I suspect many others were. We were probably falling in love with each other, but neither of us could name it.

One of the ways that Mike and I would “make love” was to go together to the Allen Art Museum and stand and look at things, side by side. This was a safe way of being intimate. We would stand there and we would talk about and enjoy Terbruggen’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,” or we would go and look at Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional shadow box constructions and talk about them. Mike introduced me to “The Little Prince,” which we read together in French. I still have the copy from which we read, sitting side by side.

The next year I began doctoral studies in German and music history at Harvard. Michael and a woman I’ll call Sophie (a very close friend from College Choir) came by bus to visit me in Cambridge that fall. Sophie was in love with me, I was in love with Michael. Michael kept his feelings to himself. Then I visited Oberlin early in 1964 as the Choir was rehearsing for their Russian Tour. One evening the three of us sat talking together in one of the parlors of Talcott. I explained to Sophie that I loved her but not in the way she loved me. I was homosexual (we hadn’t grown into the use of “gay” yet). I wanted to turn to Michael and say to him, “But I love you, love you in every way.” I could not bring myself to do it; I was so afraid he’d reject me. That night Michael did not come out to Sophie and me. Did he have feelings for me or not? What kind of feelings? I didn’t know.

At the end of his sophomore year Michael transferred to Goddard College in Vermont, following his Oberlin mentor, Professor Thomas Whitaker. I visited him there at least once. We stayed in touch and wrote really loving notes to one another, funny notes, really silly things. We gradually lost touch over the years.

During my years as a Resident Tutor in Lowell House at Harvard I earned a Ph.D. in Germanic studies while working as a tutor and as what other colleges might call an assistant academic dean. From 1966 through the summer of 1969 I engaged in an experimental program of “reparative therapy” at Harvard Medical School. I took tests, I had one on one sessions with the psychiatrist and his female assistant, I went to group sessions, and I underwent several months of nearly daily electric shock aversion therapy. The therapy, of course, didn’t have the intended results.

Meanwhile Michael had finished his B.A. at Goddard and moved on to Ph.D. studies in English at the University of Iowa, where he enrolled in a government-sponsored counseling program that aimed to change homosexuals’ orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

Let’s talk about marriage. While at Harvard I met Jennifer (Harvard ’66) and knew that if I was going to marry any woman, she was the one. I eventually told her I loved her; I told her I was gay but in a treatment program and couldn’t make any predictions about its “success,” and I asked her to marry me. Knowing all of this, she said yes. I finished my degree work and we moved to Philadelphia, where I had been offered a teaching position at suburban Haverford College. We were married in 1969.

Michael Lynch also met his future wife while in graduate school at the University of Iowa. She was aware of his attractions to men and was sexually involved with both men and women herself. They also married in 1969. They moved to Toronto in 1971, where Michael taught English at the University of Toronto and their son would be born the next year.

By then our correspondence had dwindled to next to nothing, and I think that my last note to Michael was in 1975 to tell him that Jennifer and I were both going on to an Episcopal seminary to earn the MDiv degree. In 1978 we moved to Colorado, where I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1979 and Jennifer served as a deacon to the bishop. Seminary had been more of the same: strong feelings for fellow students, couple therapy to “straighten me” out (I wanted so much to do this out of my love for Jennifer), and deep retreat into the closet. Colorado offered an even deeper closet.

In late 1980 or thereafter, I received a packet in the mail from Michael. At that time I was rector of my first parish. The mailing contained an article Michael had written about being a gay father, “Forgotten Fathers” [Body Politic, 1978], and other gay related articles by and about Michael’s life and work in Toronto. Sitting in my office in my very straight parish in a diocese with a wonderful yet essentially homophobic bishop, I read through all that Michael had sent me. There was no cover letter. I panicked and stuffed the envelope in the bottom of a drawer, and to my everlasting shame I never wrote a reply. And now, decades later, I think he was saying, “Here am I, where are you?” And I wish I had been able to answer, but I wasn’t ready to.

By 1991 I had finally landed a secure position in New Hampshire in what turned out to be a “safe” diocese for GLTB people, whether lay or ordained. In the summer of 1992 I read Michael’s obituary in the Oberlin Alumni Magazine. He had died of complications from AIDS in the summer of 1991. News of Michael’s death stirred me to become active on behalf of GLTB rights in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and in time to become a member of the Board of Directors of AIDS Response – Seacoast and later on Seacoast Outright. Jennifer and I came to a deeper understanding of the strengths of our relationship yet also how much each of us had been missing over the years.

In June of 1996, at the first of several conferences for gay men I took part in at the Kirkridge Center in Pennsylvania, I finally came to grips with the fact that I had never mourned the loss of Michael. And I told my “Michael story” several times over. One night I had a “real” dream in which we finally made love together. I felt a healing beginning inside of me.

The next year, while Jennifer was finishing up a PhD in New Testament studies, I took a three-month sabbatical at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. We wrote back and forth and, in consultation with our bishop, prepared a coming out statement to my parish and the surrounding community. During the sabbatical I lived as an out gay man in the Bay Area. As the time of the leave drew to a close, I went to spend Holy Week and Easter with Chris, a beloved friend who is an instructor at the University of Toronto.

On Easter Day 1997 Chris and I visited the AIDS Memorial in Toronto. I had been there several times before, but I had never looked closely at the introductory writings on the first of the great standing stones upon which the names of the dead are fixed chronologically on bronze plaques. The first great stone had upon it two poems, one by a lesbian and one by a gay man. I read the first poem, “These Waves of Dying Friends,” and was deeply moved. Then I looked at the attribution beneath the poem: “Michael M. Lynch, 1945-1991.” I stared at it. I burst into sobbing tears. I went and grabbed Chris by the coat sleeve, unable to speak. I pointed out the poem and the name and croaked, “This is my Michael.” By then a lot of my friends knew about Michael, but none knew his last name or where he had lived. My friend looked at me and said, “You mean, your Michael is Toronto’s Michael?” And I said yes and began to cry again.

That day I discovered that Michael Lynch is considered one of the founding fathers of the Canadian gay rights movement. He co-founded the AIDS Committee of Toronto, AIDS Action Now!, and the AIDS Memorial, and founded the group Gay Fathers of Toronto. In 1974 he founded the Toronto Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, where he taught the first gay studies course in Canada. As a contributor of The Body Politic editorial collective, starting in 1973, he wrote the first major article in Canada on living with AIDS in 1982. Michael was also possibly the only gay academic to be a nude centerfold for both Honcho and Mandate magazines. He published his book of poetry, These Waves of Dying Friends, in 1989. His intended book about Walt Whitman was in draft form and unfinished at the time he was no longer able to do research and write.

My friend knew the head of the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives, housed in Toronto, where all of Michael Lynch’s personal correspondence, diaries, and journals, along with his public writings and many materials about him are kept. Chris arranged for me to have access to the archives and to spend every evening of the coming week working my way through the then unsorted 57 shelf feet of witness to the life of Michael Malcolm Lynch. I sorted, read, wept, wrote in my own journal, and made copies of selected materials within the limits allowed by the Archives. In a folder marked “Oberlin” was every letter or scrap of paper that I had ever sent Michael, even things written on napkins.

Michael’s diaries and journals contain no mention of the package he sent to me in the early 80s, just about the time he spent a sabbatical in New York City. But they do contain evidence of his lifetime struggle to integrate “Mike” from Dunn, NC, with “Michael” of later years. In the spring of 1990 he accompanied his son on a tour of prospective colleges. When they visited Oberlin, Michael worked very hard to contain his own thoughts about the college, with which he had had something of a love/hate relationship, so as not to influence his son. Sitting alone in a room at the Oberlin Inn, he wrote in his journal. Earlier he had visited the Allen Art Museum and reacquainted himself with his favorite pieces there – the same pieces he and I had looked at together nearly thirty year ago.

Then, being an intellectual and a man of letters he pours his feelings into a historical matrix. He writes that never have the Tappan Brothers, the founders of Oberlin, been more real to him than they are now. He says the same of C. G. Finney and even reaches back to J. F. Oberlin himself. Suddenly he is in his own past. In a clear hand he lists first Madame Ragnier, the vivacious and beloved Directrice of French House, with whom he had carried on a correspondence long after he left Oberlin. Then he names several faculty mentors and about five of his fellow students. There, in the last volume of the 70 some volumes of his journals, “never so present as … now,” I found my name. I loved you, too, Michael.

Michael’s story and my story go on, much longer than this essay can tell. His wife in California read about my coming out in New Hampshire. His son spent two September days with me, as I was the only man he could talk with who had known his father during Michael’s undergraduate days. His son had just bicycled across the United States raising money for COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere), an organization he had founded (and which still thrives). Finally the evening came when my straight spouse and I sat down to supper in his son’s apartment in San Francisco with his mom and her partner. We talked of many things, and the wonderful blessing was that we really didn’t need to talk about Michael.

I have loved three people unconditionally in my life: Michael Lynch, my spouse Jennifer, and George, whom I had known at Harvard and who came back into my life in response to the national publicity about my coming out. Jennifer and George instill my life with joy and purpose. It’s a good thing they are fond of one another, because it is clear that the three of us are going to grow old together. In fact, we are already old together. I regret only that Michael didn’t get the opportunity to grow old along with us and with his wife and son and with the scores of colleagues and students and friends who cherished him so greatly.

Oh yes, I know the reader is wondering about those centerfolds. Even before I came along, someone had gotten into the boxes and stolen the archival issues of Honcho and Mandate. But there remains a Christmas card Michael sent out that year. It is one of the full-length nude shots not used in the magazines. And there are some other full-color proofs from the photo shoot. Even without a stitch on, Michael was charming, poised, intellectual, and witty. I don’t know that he ever really comprehended what a handsome and beautiful man he was, inside and out.

(The Reverend) Robert E. Stiefel, Ph.D.