Dedication

So, I'm coming down the home stretch. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel called this doctoral project and it's not another train coming in the opposite direction.

I've got about 5 more pages to write - a summary statement, really - and then the bibliography, title page and appendix. Then this succa is tout finis! Woo hoo! Someone cue James Brown: I feel good!

I want to thank so many of you who have held me in prayer. Don't stop now. I've got one more 8 hour day, a final revision in March (no doubt), and a defense in April before the fat lady sings at graduation in May and I do my 'happy-happy-joy-joy dance' down the aisle of The Academy.

The following is from my title page. It will give you some sense of the intensity of this project and this work.

COMING OUT CHRISTIAN: A MODEL OF FOUR FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS FROM THE SPIRITUAL LIVES OF LGBT PEOPLE TO CLARIFY CHRISTIAN IDENTITY AND DEEPEN SPIRITUAL MATURITY

Who do men say that I am? Jesus of Nazareth 

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde

Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer that we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell. Frederick Buechner

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

This work is dedicated to all of my teachers and professors of pastoral care and counseling who helped me formulate these questions and develop this model of Christian identity and spirituality – all of the brave gay men, lesbian women, bisexual and transgender people (and their children) who died in the early years of the pandemic of AIDS and its parallel epidemic ‘AFRAIDS’ which led to the real cause of their death:
Bureaucratic Red Tape.

If ‘all we need is love’ they would be alive today. 

Their names are legion, but I wish to remember especially (because I can never forget):

D.J. Jimmy Mac (the first but far from the only)

Mark Clarke - The Rev’d Dennis Dellamalva

Gary Lambert – Bill Urban

Joe Horan – Bob Meili

Lisa Tisti – Anasthasia Tisti

Jay Schaeffer – Dennis O’Keefe

The Rev’d Bill Lowry – The Rev’d Bernie Healy

Avon Johnson – Bertha “Birdie” Thompson

‘Just call me Madam’ James Ramp – Paul Risi

‘Tall Paul’ Wallace – Bob Applegate, 

and the amazing, the unforgettable, 

‘The Large and Lovely Ms. Beula Lamont’, who said, 

“We’re all born naked, honey, everything after that is all drag.”

May they rest in peace and rise in glory.