This Should Not Go Unnoticed

Robert Carter, right, with Dan McCarthy, left, Bernard Lynch and John McNeill at a gay pride march in the early 1980s.
In the early 1970s, the Reverend Robert Carter became one of the first Roman Catholic priests to come out of the closet. As a result of his public declaration that he was both gay and Catholic, he helped found the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force [NGLTF]. Father Carter died February 22 at the age of eighty-two.
In October 1973, Dr. Howard J. Brown, a former New York City health services administrator, announced that he was gay and that he was forming a civil rights organization called the National Gay Task Force, which later became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. With the group receiving national attention, an article about them appeared in the New York Times which said: “A number of homosexual and lesbian organizations were represented on the board. One member was the Rev. Robert Carter, a Jesuit priest and professor of historical theology.”

Father Carter’s coming out was very public one.

Soon afterward he was visited by a subprovincial of the Jesuit order, who wondered if Carter had had some sort of "psychotic break;" Carter denied this claim, and suddenly there were numerous calls for his expulsion from the church by irate “Jesuits, parents and alumni of our schools.”

Funny, that at the same time they were calling for Carter's expulsion for being openly gay, the church was shuttling pedophiles around from parish to parish in silence. Had they chosen another path, to openly embrace Carter and other gay priests, and parishioners, and punish the pedophiles, we might have a very different Catholic church today.
But I digress.

While Father Carter was not disciplined, it was the belief of the church that homosexual attraction is “disordered,” and that gay people who are celibate are not inherently sinful. The church continued its practice of denying admission to the seminary, or refusing to ordain "those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’”

But Father Carter did not give up, or hide, or feel shame. Instead, he helped found the New York chapter of DignityUSA, a support group for gay Catholics. He hosted the first meeting of the group in 1972, with the Reverend John McNeill, who recalls Carter as "the heart of Dignity. I was doing all the writing, but he was on the front line, meeting with people, counseling people.” Of course, in typical fashion, Catholic authorities decided DignityUSA could not meet on church property, so Father Carter began celebrating Mass in apartments all around Manhattan.

He led blessing ceremonies for gay couples.
He testified in support of the gay rights law proposed by Mayor Edward I. Koch before it was passed by the City Council in 1986.
He urged Dignity to march in gay pride parades and marched himself, in his clerical collar.
He counseled gay priests and hundreds of lay Catholics.
He counseled AIDS patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.
He became a supervisor of the outpatient AIDS program at the Bellevue Hospital.

Brendan Fay: “As I sought to reconcile being gay and Catholic, Bob Carter helped me move from self-hate to self-acceptance and then to a place of gay activism. He was like a Catholic Harvey Milk.”

For him, there was no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity, and, in his unpublished memoir, Father Carter wrote:
“Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.”

Rest in Peace, Father Carter. You've earned it.