December 6, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

The AIDS quilts are coming down today, after being displayed for over a week. Hundreds of people came and viewed them, read their messages, and thought about their significance. On these particular panels, some 24 people who died of AIDS are commemorated.

Our friend Paulette procured them from the Names Project Foundation in Atlanta to display over the period of World AIDS Day and our World AIDS Hollywood Vespers Concert.

The last visitors, last night, were teenagers from the Silverlake Children’s Theatre Group, who were on site for their regular rehearsals. They were very interested, and respectful of what they saw. None of them had been born when most of the individuals whose names appear on the quilts were dying of AIDS.

Alas, AIDS has become a “generational thing” in America. Too many young people have little to no experience of anyone having HIV or AIDS. It is natural for them to think it’s an old people’s disease, or a former disease, or one that will never affect them. Tragically, too many young gay people are having unprotected sex in the mistaken belief that AIDS is not their problem. Their gullibility to this falsehood is increased under the influence of crystal meth, which lowers inhibitions to sexual expression. Looking for “hookups” online is deceptively easy. And people still lie about their status. Yesterday a 365Gay.Com story reports allegations that a Roman Catholic priest and Navy chaplain has been having unprotected sex with other men without disclosing that he is HIV+.

AIDS is still killing people by the thousands, although we do not see it as much in America. America can (just barely) afford the miracle drugs that have kept tens of thousands of people alive during the last 15 years. We know individuals who have been living with AIDS for more than twenty years, so AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence.

I remember our friend Andy, who came to Lutherans Concerned events in the 1980s. Young, cute, blond, buff, pleasant, Andy was a UCLA student. He was, however, not out to his parents. And he was not aware of how easily he could contract HIV. In those days there were no miracle drugs. Andy got sick, very sick, and was diagnosed with the virus. In a matter of days, his parents learned the awful truth: that he was gay, that he was infected, and that he was dying. Andy was dead before most of his friends even knew he had been sick.

But because his death occurred twenty years ago, today’s youth just have no connection with it nor with the hundreds of thousands of people who died in their youth.

After years and years of activism, from “Play Safely” ads in gay magazines to total abstinence programs which Republigelicals have been pushing so hard, too many people have little understanding of AIDS or why it must be stopped globally. “Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise.”

One would think that visualizing AIDS as an enemy to be defeated would inspire a new generation of activists. But I’m not seeing that yet. And I don’t think it’s because people are that complacent about the disease, but they seem to be complacent about life itself.

Americans are the worst of human beings when it comes to denial. We are certainly the epicenter of death-denial and death defiance.. Evel Knievel just died November 30, incidentally, after a 40 year career of doing imaginative, stupid things to get attention. A man in Omaha Wednesday killed eight other people in an Omaha shopping mall before killing himself. He apparently left several suicide notes, including one that said, “Now I will be famous.”

And we are in a state of pathological denial about the causes of death, and will eat, drink, race, have sex, and blow off every form of danger, commit murder and suicide, as if our lives do not matter.

Perhaps our lives do not. There is the thinnest of lines between carelessness and callousness about life. But life is what you make of it. Reverence for life is not inherited, it must be learned, adopted, believed. To honor those whom we have lost —such as we did Sunday with the lighting of candles and reading of the names of 250 people— is to love life itself as a gift of God, and to respect ourselves and our finite existence even more. What is “the meaning of life”? The meaning you give to it, beginning with self-respect.

Remember the dead. Thank God for life. Stop AIDS. Keep the promise.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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November 30, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I think we are all suffering from “compassion fatigue.” People don’t care as intensely, or consistently, as we did a few years go, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in this country.

But our “suffering” is slight compared to those living with, and fighting against HIV/AIDS. The suffering of this country is slight, now, compared to the struggle being endured in developing countries. Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS, says that the epidemic has globalized and feminized. (Read his statement here.) The face of AIDS today is that of a heterosexual African woman of color. UNAIDS estimates that 95% of those living with HIV/AIDS are in developing nations, where all resources are scarce and costly.

There are countless world-wide and national organizations trying to help, but they too are often short on financial resources. The miracle drugs and “cocktails” which have made the continuation of life possible for thousands of Americans living with HIV/AIDS, are prohibitive elsewhere in the world, where even basic sanitation is spotty and difficult to maintain. Your compassionate response makes a difference.

Originally launched by the World Health Organization, tomorrow is the twentieth annual World AIDS Day, December 1.

This Sunday the Hollywood community will respond with an ecumenical Vespers/Concert in observance of World AIDS Day at Hollywood Lutheran Church, 1733 N. New Hampshire Avenue 90039. “World AIDS Hollywood” is an event to remember, pray and bring light. [Full details can be found at www.worldAIDSHollywood.org. Or call (323) 667-1212].

The event will feature the premier of “The Celestial Veil”, a new musical composition by Christopher A. Flores and Adrian Ravarour; music from Vox Femina and the Hollywood Wind Ensemble and other guest artists. Three 12×12 blocks of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt are on display. A bell will be rung and a votive candle lit for hundreds of names of those whom we have lost in our community. Please join us!

It is my prayer that our compassion fatigue has ended, and that the Hollywood community especially will be awakened again to the urgency of our compassionate response.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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November 18, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

All human beings are unique. Every body is different. Each of us has a unique life experience which results from what we have been given from birth onward (both our genes and our birth-family environment, etc.). Some are born to privilege, others in dire circumstances, some with physical challenges, others with extraordinary physical “good luck” — no genetic time bombs, etc.

The variety of human beings is endless. The stuff of literature, however, is fairly finite, and one of the recurring themes used by writers (whether novelists, essayists, or those who craft screen plays) is the story of someone who overcomes great difficulties or obstacles. For example, the heroic figure who rose out of poverty, or broke free of slavery, or overcame ignorance, racism, disease, handicaps, physical hardships — you name it.

In films, this “overcoming obstacles” is one of that limited number of story ideas. I had some fun with this in my earlier blog, “Everybody knows there are only five basic plots.”

It set me thinking whether we are so conditioned by popular literature and especially the movies that we have trouble with people who accept the circumstances they are in, rather than struggling against them and overcoming them. And I think of St. Paul’s advice, in 1 Corinthians 7, that “each of you lead the life that the Lord assigned, to which God called you.” He begins by talking about marriage, singleness and virginity, but when he comes to these verses (17–24) he also includes circumcision and slavery. Slaves, he counseled, should be willing to accept their enslaved condition, knowing that they are “free in the Lord.”

This is of course one of those passages that gets St. Paul in trouble with modernists, feminists, liberations, etc. But I have thought of this passage as it might be understood by lesbian and gay people — or for that matter, but transgender persons. Are we asked to accept the condition or circumstance in which we find ourselves, make the best of it, and just try to be spiritually free in the Lord even if we feel trapped in what life has dealt to us?

The story of transgender individuals tests this interpretation. Individuals who are born with a male body but perceive themselves to rightfully be female, or the other way around, suffer from gender dysphoria. There is a lot of debate right now about whether this or another label even belongs in the diagnostic manuals of mental health. But if we try to apply St. Paul’s advice — on a parallel track with being single or being married or being a slave, we would have to counsel a transgender person not to seek to change genders, through hormonal treatment or gender reassignment surgery. “Let each of you lead the life the Lord has assigned.”

But then what of the situation for those who discern themselves to be lesbian or gay? Shouldn’t we just accept the fact that we are homosexual, accept our sexual orientation as a given, as part of what life has dealt us?

The rub comes not within ourselves but from others, who weigh in with strong opinions about what it means to “accept.” Conservatives and fundamentalists quickly counsel a transgender person not to change genders but to accept their birth gender and to live (present themselves) as that gender, but take the opposite point of view on homosexuality. They do not believe that we should accept ourselves as gay or lesbian, and live the life “assigned” to us. The conservative would argue that being gay or lesbian was not “assigned” by the accidents or vagaries of human diversity, but chosen as a willful act of human disobedience and sin.

It makes for a fine, coherent systematic view for conservatives. The only problem is, it’s not particularly truthful. Most of us cannot remember choosing to be heterosexual or homosexual, and we don’t discern our sexual responsiveness (arousal, emotional attraction, and even love) as willful acts. We can suppress and stifle our true humanity and human experience—with enough social pressure and internalized shame brought about by the disapproval of others—but that is far from accepting our “condition” and claiming our “freedom in the Lord.” In fact, it’s quite telling that in the very same discussion in 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul also advises those who are single “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”

Taken as a whole, Paul’s advice is quite mixed. He strongly counsels those who are unmarried to remain unmarried and to accept their circumstances. He counsels the slave to remain content in his “condition” of enslavement. Yet he suggests that it is not a sin for the single person to marry after all, rather than to be aflame with passion. And he stops short of advising the slave that it’s not a sin to seek freedom rather than to be aflame with anger and resentment.

What rule would Paul give to a person who is lesbian or gay? Are we to be content with being lesbian or gay, and so go ahead and “lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you”? Or to attempt to remain celibate and abstinent, even if constantly aflame with passion? Or aflame with bitterness, loneliness and resentment?

Or as the conservative Christians insist, can a lesbian or gay man overcome the sexual orientation she or he has discerned, through great heroics and with great triumph. Conservatives want to believe the latter, because they have a whole “ex-gay”industry riding on it which they seek to protect from the ridicule of both the LGBT community and of health professionals.

I don’t think I’m through with this one, at all. I’ll get back to this.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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November 13, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

This past Sunday, we attended the 10^th annual Hollywood Interfaith Choral Festival. I was proud of our choir and its musical tornado director, Eldon Turner, for their hard work. It was also a chance to hear the Harmonies Girls Choir under the direction of the very gifted Jose Antonio Espinal, both alone and singing with Hollywood Lutheran Church’s choir in a new work by Eldon M. Turner III.  This year’s concert benefited the Harmony Project.

The Harmonies Girls Choir is comprised of girls ages 8 to 18. Although started only five years ago, the choir has already made a third concert tour to Europe.  These young girls may be seen as coming from “underprivileged” settings, and are seeing a better world open for them through music. Of course, these girls, with disciplined and coordinated voices, and matching outfits, regularly perform for “the privileged.”

Many “privileged” people like to see “the underprivileged” being showcased.  Somehow it makes us feel better about our position – we who can afford concert tickets, nice clothes to go out in public, and a roof over our heads (where there is a comfortable bed and a computer to write blogs on.)  If young people are somehow making progress from “underprivileged” places in society, it seems to ease our own consciences about the positions we have and the places we live in.

But contrast these underprivileged children with the “unprivileged” – those who are homeless children in Los Angeles, in California (over 100,000) and across the nation: Estimates are that one million youth are homeless in America.

This November has been designated the first-ever “National Homeless Youth Awareness Month” by resolutions of Congress. Virgin Mobile has launched “The RE*Generation” project to help, and to seek other corporate sponsors.  Other organizations are connecting the dots of their efforts, including Fannie Mae Foundation’s Help the Homeless Program. It is impressive that Virgin Mobile’s efforts have already raised $3 million, but that’s only 3 bucks per kid – not even enough to eat one meal.

According to the National Runaway Switchboard, somewhere between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away from home each year. http://www.1800runaway.org/.  The reasons are complex, painful and tragic.  Kids on the street are more subject to sexual abuse and prostitution, drugs and substance abuse, despair and other forces which contribute to suicidality.

Our parish has been involved with youth homelessness by directly supporting the work of the Jeff Griffith Youth Center residential program, which keeps 24 youth off the streets of Hollywood, teaches them skills, helps them finish their GED and helps them find employment to build a future. I’m proud of what we’ve done these past three years, and hope our small community will keep its prior commitment to help LGBT youth.

Youth homelessness is an issue we must own in the LGBT community.  Many young people who do flee their childhood homes, or are ruthlessly expelled from them, are sexual minorities and misfits.  I wrote about Jeremy in Denver in the Lutherans Concerned/Los Angeles Light of Christ newsletter five years ago, and will try to re-post that article soon.

Your homework assignment starts here:

• Virgin Mobile’s introduction to the issue: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/regeneration/. It also has a column of relevant web sites here.
• Good Magazine’s presentation of the Virgin Mobile project
• The Trevor Project, which operates the nation’s only 24-hour youth suicide prevention hotline.
• Also see: Home Walk L.A. - this coming Saturday November 17.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 25, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

This morning’s Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times reviews Rufus Wainwright’s Sunday concert at the Hollywood Bowl.  He re-created the 1961 Judy Garland concert at Carnegie Hall (for the last time, after doing it in New York, Paris and London).  It sounded like great fun—even as the reviewer acknowledged that Wainwright admitted a certain nervousness about it.

I don’t follow showbiz very closely, so paying attention to out gay singer/actor/composer Wainwright wasn’t high on my list.  But Gay.com has an undated interview with Wainwright that set me thinking:

[Interviewer Jack Shamama:] In a recent New York Times article entitled “Rufus Wainwright Journeys to ‘Gay Hell’ and Back,” you chronicle your struggle with drugs, your subsequent mental collapse and a recent trip to rehab.  Has that gotten you into any trouble — with your label, maybe?

Wainwright: No, not trouble with the label. I’m in dangerous territory in terms of the Right using the term “gay hell” as a brand of shampoo for gay people.  I understand that concern.  But I do believe that every gay man knows exactly what I’m talking about.  Anyone who thinks there isn’t a side to gay life that’s not dangerous with a drug culture that sort of forgets about the last 20 years is fooling himself.

Well, no, I’m not fooling myself.  I may have been in a sub-cultural fog not to realize fully that drug abuse has tripped and brought down so many others.  As a guy without an addiction problem, I naively wonder about why everyone who “makes it” in entertainment seems to follow the same downward path, to say nothing of the huge majority of gay men who are so easily seduced into drugs.  Do we need to have one tragedy after another—first HIV, then crystal meth—like a bad two-act play?

Wainwright’s affinity for Judy Garland is unfortunate.  She died in 1969 of a drug overdose after nearly 20 years of drug-induced health problems.   The outline of Wikipedia’s article on Wainwright is literally a 1-2-3 progression:
“1.1 The early years
1.2 Rise to fame
1.3 Addiction.” Uh oh.  From the article:

Wainwright became addicted to crystal meth in the early 2000s and temporarily lost his vision to overuse. [emphasis added.]  His addiction reached its peak in 2002, during what he described as “the most surreal week of his life.”  During that week, he played a drug addict in a cameo role in “Absolutely Fabulous”; spent several nights partying with the president’s daughter, Barbara Bush; enjoyed a “debauched evening” with his mother and Marianne Faithfull; sang with Antony of Antony and the Johnsons for Zaldy’s spring 2003 collection; and, throughout, experienced recurring hallucinations of his father . He decided shortly after that he “was either going to rehab or I was going to live with my father.  I knew I needed an asshole to yell at me, and I felt he fitted the bill”.

Seeking guidance, he telephoned his friend Elton John, who persuaded him to check in to rehab at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota.  He detoxed and underwent therapy at the facility; he has neither confirmed nor denied his current sobriety.

Two years ago, I told our interfaith gay/lesbian clergy association I didn’t know of anyone in my church with a crystal meth problem.  They didn’t believe me. That has now changed, sadly.  As a pastor, I face an overwhelming challenge:  to communicate unconditional love, but at the same time to communicate rejection of crystal meth.  But to admit, or even tout, that I never did have a drinking problem or a drug problem doesn’t win any admirers.  They may even revoke my gay card.

But “temporarily losing his vision to overuse”?  Are people nuts?  If we don’t communicate to our own that crystal meth is evil, it is like watching a war unfold in which all our comrades drop like flies.  It doesn’t take a crystal ball.  What is the point of LGBT rights in a culture where so many people won’t need any civil rights, or culture, because they are killing themselves?

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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September 22, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Recently I’ve been to see Confessions of a Mormon Boy by Steven Fales. We’re trying to get a group together to go see it while it’s at the Elephant Lab Theatre in Hollywood (through September 30).

Mr. Fales’ true story is funny, sad, moving and in some ways overwhelming. It is fair to say that Fales is also a strong and capable actor, since in a solo performance he must keep his audience’s attention for 90 minutes. “Mormon Boy” never bores—or even slows down, for that matter. It will leave you laughing, gasping, crying, stunned.

Why the story is most compelling is that Fales was caught in the same web in which many other fundamentalists of other religious stripes have been caught. It might as easily be entitled “The Best Little Boy in the World.” It is a life that many of us might have lived, or actually lived.

But the darker side is what happens to Fales after he is expelled from his church, and his marriage crashes and burns. This too raises the usual existential questions for someone of faith who, discerning one’s sexuality, becomes unhinged from all the connections and supports of life-before-coming-out. “If anything and everything I do as a gay man is horrible and offensive to God, and I’m going to burn in hell for it anyway, then I might as well have the biggest fling I can.”

That absurdity has wrenched spirituality out of the hearts of so many LGBT people. Lives become pointless and aimless in an unchecked progression of promiscuity, alcohol and substance abuse, disease, cynicism and spiritual death. It might sound as if I am joining sides with Pat Robertson or James Dobson here, but the truth is, what causes the downward spiral for so many people is not being who they are: being lesbian or gay or whatever, it is society’s knee-jerk rejection, fear and phobia. Because of prejudice and bigotry, whole classes of people are thrust out, kept on society’s margins, until they find other ways to survive without respect or restraint.

I don’t believe, of course, that virtually any intimate sexual expression earns God’s wrath, just because of the gender of one’s partner, any more than I would say “anything goes” is just fine. It falls to each of us to work out our own ethics in regards to sexuality, so that our sexuality is integrated in our whole lives in healthy ways. Fales’ story can be described as a tale of “fall and redemption.” What makes it most compelling is that it is a true story, and his own redemption is not a dramatic device. He teaches us a lesson for life from his own life education.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Fundamentalism, Hollywood, Ecumenical Issues, LGBT Christian, Faith, Coming Out, Spirituality, Ex-Gay | Print | No Comments »

September 20, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes

“It’s been done.” – Hollywood

This being Hollywood, I often find myself in conversations with people who work in The Industry or are “wannabees.” One subject that comes up periodically in talking with my writer friends is the old line that “there are only five basic plots.”

Probably the first time I heard this was after semi-seriously developing a story line for a screen play more than 10 years ago, and then taking a friend to lunch to discuss how a rookie goes about writing a screen play. She was very kind, and interested in my story line, but while munching on the lunch I was buying her, said, like a mathematician who has memorized all prime numbers, “I hate to tell you this, but there are only five basic plots,” etc.

Slowly I learned not to pay for other people’s lunches to present my ideas. (It’s cheaper to start a web site or a blog and make a gift to the universe of these wonderful and worthless ideas!) Anyway, now it’s just occasional phone calls or, more likely, e-mails in which people tell reply: “Don’t make me use upper case, Dan.  EVERYBODY KNOWS THERE ARE ONLY FIVE BASIC PLOTS.”

And if I nag hard enough for them to actually name the five basic plots which they are sure all films, books, etc. contain, they will deflect the question and with weary disdain for newcomers summarize the eight word mantra in three words: “It’s been done.”

So I decided to research this with Google, and on-and-off spent a couple of hours tracking down many of the 260 hits (an extremely minuscule number for Google) on the phrase “five basic plots.” When I changed my search to just “basic plots” the Google hits jumps to 47,700. Hmmm. And the first one of the larger pool of results is called “The 36 basic plots. View them here. 

My digest or capture file is now 31 pages long.  (If you want to see it, post a comment and I will put it on this blog site.)  Anyway, I’ve made some interesting discoveries:

1. The view that there are only five basic plots is repeated over and over.  This view is a stock item in writing classes, writers workshops, blogs, etc., repeated by many people simply because “everybody knows.” 
2. Those who attempt to actually name the five basic plots come up with lists which completely differ from one another.
3. Thoughtful commentators say it doesn’t make any difference, since the art and craft of story-telling is what makes a story interesting, not the novelty of a plot line.  There’s a lesson for life, because:
4. There is basically only one basic plot: you are born, you do interesting stuff, you die.   Make your stuff as interesting as you can.
5. Reductionism (like saying “there are only five basic plots”) is often rooted in the commentator’s ego or cynicism, so that s/he can appear to be astute, on top of her/his craft, sophisticated, or tired of it all.

One more observation based on my research:  If you are an aspiring writer for Hollywood, do not be deterred when someone tells you “It’s been done.” Keep going!  But beware:  When you finally triumph, and get your novel/script/story/idea into final/polished/published/paid-for form, a reviewer will likely come along and cut you down anyway: “It’s been done badly.”

Don’t give up!

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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