A Gay Teacher’s Notes of Sorrow

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. --Leviticus 18:22

It wasn’t uncommon for Ray Halm, the president of Christ College Irvine, to get to his office by 6:30 a.m., but it was unusual to have a student waiting for him when he got there. So when Perry Miller greeted Halm outside the administration building in the early morning chill of Jan. 27, 1989, Halm knew it wasn’t for idle chatter.

Once inside, Miller told Halm he had been grappling with a moral dilemma for a month: Over the holidays, he and his family had been watching a daylong TV broadcast of Christmas music from the Los Angeles Music Center, featuring a succession of choral groups. As the camera panned an all-male group, Miller’s sister recognized Bud Bisbee, CCI’s highly regarded choir director and an associate professor of music. She called in other family members, but their enthusiasm for Bisbee’s role soon turned to shock when the group was identified as the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.

Miller believed that the Scriptures were emphatic in the condemnation of homosexuality. To the conservative Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, the arm that supported Christ College, homosexuality is a sin, an aberration of God’s perfect plan. And so Miller pondered: as a student at Christ College , as a Christian, where did his duty lie? If a faculty member were homosexual, didn’t he have a responsibility to tell someone?

On that January morning in Halm’s office, Miller unburdened himself. Halm thanked him and said he would handle it. They prayed together. The meeting lasted 15 minutes.

Not even seven in the morning and already Halm knew it was going to be one of those days. In seminary, he had been told that the toughest balancing act he would ever perform was that between biblical law and Gospel; in other words, balancing God’s condemnation of sin and his forgiveness of it. And unless Perry Miller and his entire family had been hallucinating on Christmas Eve, Halm had a major headache on the way.

Bud Bisbee wasn’t just another faculty member. Since starting full time in 1980, three years after CCI opened, he had virtually built its music program. Music has always been an integral part of the Lutheran Church--dating to Martin Luther himself and with a lineage that includes Johann Sebastian Bach. In that tradition, Bisbee’s choral groups had become a centerpiece of the small school’s out-of-state recruiting and public relations effort. Outside of Halm and perhaps one or two others, Bisbee might well be CCI’s most visible faculty member.

Yes, everyone at CCI knew Bisbee, the mile-a-minute perfectionist who never seemed to have time for anything but his music. And if no one at the school knew much about Bisbee’s personal life, the prevailing opinion was that the slight, bespectacled, middle-aged man couldn’t possibly have one, so consumed was he by his music.

But, of course, Bisbee did have a private life--a life that seemed to the people at CCI to be energized by music, but which was in reality a dull, lonely existence where solace was found at the piano.

On that January morning in his office, Halm was about to learn about the private side of Bud Bisbee for the first time. Three hours after Perry Miller handed off his bombshell, Halm summoned Bisbee to his office and asked if he were gay. Bisbee said he was and always had been. It was the way God made him, Bisbee said, and although only a fool would have proclaimed it to anyone at the college, he wasn’t ashamed of it, either. In fact, Bisbee said, joining the Gay Men’s Chorus was the best thing he had ever done.

That wasn’t what Halm wanted to hear from the mild-mannered Music Man.

From that moment, the clock began ticking for the end of Bisbee’s career at CCI. His disclosure about being gay and his eventual dismissal for refusing to quit the chorus would affect a host of personal and professional friendships and leave him today, at 55, without a full-time job in a field already glutted with applicants.

Bisbee learned a swift lesson that morning--a lesson that gay rights activists say gays have long experienced: that disclosure about homosexuality can be tantamount to exile. If there is no voluminous record of case histories, those activists say, it is because many gays won’t risk the ridicule or harassment that comes with publicizing their plight.

One might logically have assumed that Bisbee would also quietly slip away. He had developed confrontation-avoidance and artful dodging about unpleasant topics to a high level of art. Characteristically, at first he didn’t even seem angered by his dismissal. Once, while a teary-eyed friend explained to Bisbee that he was trying to enlist support for him, Bisbee said, “Why are you taking this so hard?”

Slipping into denial was as easy as dressing in the morning. Once in the gay chorus, however, Bisbee found he wasn’t alone. “It’s amazing how many of these guys in this gay men’s chorus have been married and have a family. There’s denial every place you look,” he says. “The fag jokes all over the place, you’re a piece of dirt--and that’s all you heard in the church, every place you look, that’s all you hear--you can’t help but internalize that. I knew I was gay, but it never occurred to me that anyone could like me. I recognized that I could like people, but it never occurred to me that someone would be interested in me. Just me as an individual.”

Today, with encouragement from friends and his own sense of justice, Bisbee is taking on the church. It is as though by coming out of the closet, Bisbee is wearing a whole new suit of clothes. “If this kind of thing had come up several years ago, I would have been destroyed,” he says. “I still don’t know quite where I am in life, but I have no doubt that I’m gay, and I have no guilt about that. But it has not made life any easier, that’s for sure.”

Bisbee was fired with a year left on his contract. He has enlisted the aid of a gay-rights attorney to challenge the termination and to be paid for the third year of his contract. In addition, he is pursuing appeals through the college and the Missouri Synod, forcing the church to publicly defend its actions and review its policies.

That is the stuff for lawyers. The human drama goes beyond a year’s salary and contract language.

In a larger sense, by publicizing his homosexuality, Bisbee is asking who rightfully decides who will sit at God’s table? After his 30 years of service to the church, during which his musical ministry has reached thousands, who is entitled to cast the first stone at him?

What if, just what if , Bisbee asks, the Bible isn’t as clear as it seems on homosexuality?

To see Bud Bisbee scurrying around the pastoral CCI campus was to think that he was always behind schedule. So much music, so little time. It was a longstanding Bisbee trademark: Students of his from Lutheran High School in Los Angeles in the early 1960s talk of him walking “90 m.p.h.” and getting everything done at the last minute; an associate from the late 1970s says Bisbee “put in unduly long hours to get everything prepared. He expected excellence; in order to get it absolutely perfect, he ran a pretty tough choir.” In the 1980s, Halm saw in Bisbee a “perfectionist to the nth degree. . . . Even though I might want or need him to perform earlier (than scheduled), he would not have that choir perform until he was ready.”

His meticulousness wasn’t just reserved for students--Bisbee would do the same with adult volunteers in the community choir he also conducted at CCI. Stopping in front of some poor soul at rehearsal, Bisbee might well ask, “What are you singing the wrong notes for?”

But on balance, Bisbee had the golden touch. “I’ve been at this (church work) since 1963,” Halm says, “and I never met a choir director for whom I had greater respect. One thing Bud could do better than anyone in our church was create programs. He has a very creative side to him. He might have a piece done by hand bells, which would be highly sophisticated, extremely complex music which would almost spellbind the audience with how rapidly the performers had to move. He might follow that by having a student reach under a table and pull out a Mickey Mouse hat and do something like ‘It’s a Small World.’ No one was ever bored by a Bud Bisbee program.”

Bud Bisbee’s main critic was Bud Bisbee. His intellectual side told him he was good at what he did, but his psychological side resisted. “I had been extremely successful at both high schools before I came to Christ College,” he says. “It’s difficult for me to say that because I had such, well--and I still haven’t gotten over it--such low self-confidence and low self-image that it’s very difficult for me to say I was good at something.”

Without intimate friends to bolster his confidence, Bisbee lived a life on emotional automatic pilot. “After all this stuff happened, I went to a therapist and he asked me who I talked to when I was growing up. It sort of hit me that I didn’t have anybody. I just assumed that was the way it was. It didn’t really bother me one way or the other. I just grew up alone. . . . We would have discussions in the chorus on how when you’re growing up, coming to terms with yourself, you have no role models. Growing up is always hell except for a lucky few. Everything you hear is negative, negative.”

We are talking in the comfort of Bisbee’s Irvine townhouse. His living room is dominated by a Steinway grand piano. There is no television downstairs--the fulfillment of a pledge Bisbee made years ago not to foul the air where a piano stood. We are talking three months after a CCI appeals committee turned down an appeal of his dismissal.

He recounted a story about how he heard a junior high classmate play a Paderewski minuet at a recital and thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. He goes over to the piano and plays a couple bars of the piece. “I knew then I had to play the piano; it was one of the strongest things that ever happened to me.”

Abandoned by his father and raised by his mother and stepfather, neither of whom he is close to, Bisbee left his small Wisconsin hometown for college and essentially left his home life behind. He set out on what has become a lifetime course of traversing two worlds that couldn’t be further apart: being gay in a strict church school environment.

“I didn’t have gay friends as I entered middle age. I had a small circle of straight friends, mostly from those I taught in high school. I always had trouble with relationships, even friend relationships. I was really quite unhappy, and I guess on some level it got to be where the job wasn’t enough anymore,” he says.

If you were that unhappy for so many years, I ask, how could you put so much verve and enthusiasm into such a joyous art as choral music? “Well,” he says, with a half-hearted laugh, “I’m a pretty good actor. I can put on a good show and no one would ever know anything was wrong.”

For your entire adult life? “I did,” he says.

Thirty years as a bachelor teacher in a conservative church setting and your sexuality was never brought up? “I got very skillful at turning the conversation the other way,” Bisbee says. “If people said, ‘When are you going to get married?’--I got those all the time--I learned how to deflect it. My answer was that no one had asked me yet, and then I’d move on to something else.”

Over the winter of 1987-88, he took a friend’s suggestion that he join a self-help group. “At that time, I didn’t think I would ever feel anything again. I thought I was absolutely dead inside. I just didn’t think I had any feelings at all in any way. I’d been squelched for so long. . . .”

But the workshops helped. “When you finish the workshops, you’re supposed to invite your friends to the ceremonies. That was one of the first times that I could even express to my very closest friends that they were important to me. It always sort of puzzled me. I liked them, but it always sort of puzzled me why they liked me.”

In the spring of 1988, he went to a concert of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. He had never belonged to a gay group, marched in a gay demonstration or had a sexual relationship. Aside from the company of his own thoughts, his only real contact with the gay world came from reading gay novels.

That summer, fighting himself all the way, Bisbee went alone to one of the group’s rehearsals at the Hollywood Methodist Church in Los Angeles. “He was super-shy that night,” remembers Jon Bailey, the chorus director and a music professor at Pomona College in Claremont. Bailey also realized what Bisbee was risking. “I was really excited to find someone who was also a college professor. We didn’t talk a lot that night, but I have some acquaintance with the Missouri Synod, and I think I said something like, ‘Oh, my word.’ ”

“I almost didn’t go back the second time,” Bisbee says. “I always felt uneasy in social situations, and of course I didn’t know a soul. I didn’t feel comfortable at all.”

But he did go back. The initial unease was soothed by the bonding with other gays. “I didn’t have any clear-cut agenda. I just knew this was a place where I could go and be among other gay people in an environment where it was OK.”

The more time he spent, the more the duality of his life weighed on him. One gay friend in the chorus couldn’t believe that Bisbee didn’t openly discuss his gayness with others. Bisbee tried to explain that he lived in two different worlds and that they were “absolutely separate.”

As if to underscore the duality, he got a variation on the same theme from Christ College after he disclosed his homosexuality. “They had such a terrible time understanding why I had to join a gay chorus,” Bisbee says. “Why couldn’t I just go join a choir. They couldn’t understand that. It wasn’t just the chorus; it was more. It was that belonging. Being in the chorus means a great deal to me, and I know that feeling is widespread in the chorus. It’s incredible how much pain there is in that group.”

Chorus members are bonded by their common plight of being gay in a society colored with homophobia, but also, of course, by the AIDS specter. “There is an incredible warmth of caring between members,” Bailey says. “We’ve lost almost 35 members. There are people singing who are sick and every week report on who’s in the hospital and who died. And we sing for lots of funerals.”

Those feelings tapped long-dead nerves in Bisbee. That semester, he believes, he was a better teacher than he had ever been.

With Christmas, 1988, approaching, the chorus was invited to sing at the televised Christmas pageant at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Suddenly, faced with the risk of being discovered, Bisbee had a fundamental decision to make: Should he sing in front of the cameras?

“First, I had decided not to do it. Then the closer it got, I just decided, no, I was part of the group, I should do it. It was the first year the group had been invited; it was a huge victory, because they’d been trying for years to get invited.”

There was a pivotal moment, he believes, when his course became clear. During rehearsals, he was on an airplane and passing the time by studying the music the chorus planned to sing at Christmas. One song, “Family,” was from the musical “Dreamgirls.”

We are a family, like a giant tree branchin’ out toward the sky/

We are a family, we are so much more than just you and I.

We are a family, like a giant tree/

Growin’ stronger, growin’ wiser, and we are growin’ free.

As Bisbee studied the lyrics, he says, he realized tears were rolling down his face.

Meanwhile, his best friends, Larry and Sue Gerling of Whittier--high school students of Bisbee’s 25 years ago--were apprehensive. Larry Gerling’s parents had “adopted” Bisbee years ago when he first came out to California from the Midwest, inasmuch as he lived alone and was a strong influence in tapping their son’s musical interests. If there was a big Gerling family affair, chances are Bisbee would be there. By the end of his high school career, Larry, now 42, knew Bisbee was gay, but never told his parents, knowing what their reactions would be.

Larry and Sue knew Bisbee had joined the chorus. As lifelong Lutherans, both of whom still work in a Lutheran church in Whittier, they knew the stakes. “I wanted real bad to call him up right before and say, ‘Bud, don’t do it,’ Sue Gerling said, “just don’t do it, OK?’ But my thinking was that he was a big boy and if this is what he needs to do. . . .”

“It was what he needed to do,” Larry interjected.

At the Chandler Pavilion, Bisbee was a jumble of emotions. “I must say when we walked out on the stage, with all those lights, and I saw another member of the chorus in the audience, an elementary school teacher, I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ ”

Bud Bisbee was anxious as he left Ray Halm’s office on that January morning. “I think I was slipping into my denial mode. I just sort of denied that the incident was as serious as they saw it, and I probably refused to look at the possibility I would lose my job immediately.”

Halm was in no such mode. He knew full well the magnitude of the problem, replaying it in his mind. Bud said he’d been celibate all his life. The church position was that the propensity for homosexuality wasn’t a sin, but that homosexual behavior was. Maybe the situation was salvageable. But then there was the problem of his joining the gay chorus. How could Bud be so cavalier as to do that without considering the consequences? No, staying with the gay chorus was out of the question.

Over the next few days, Halm met or spoke by telephone with a number of CCI faculty members and administrators and synodical officials. Halm’s own notes from those first conversations show that, from the start, Bisbee and the college were walking parallel lines that probably could never intersect.

Halm wanted Bisbee to resign, but things were put on hold until after a CCI Board of Regents meeting scheduled for Feb. 9. The board, however, decided not to fire Bisbee outright and instead offered terms that could save Bisbee’s job. The terms stipulated that he:

* Drop out of the gay chorus.

* Remain celibate.

* Acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin and encourage others with a similar propensity to practice abstinence.

* Seek pastoral counseling.

If Bisbee agreed, the board suggested, the synod would review its entire position on homosexuality.

Bisbee agreed to the terms.

“I hated myself when I was writing up the letter (agreeing to the conditions), and I hated myself the next day,” Bisbee says. “In some ways, I sold out. I wasn’t true to what I felt was right.” He was motivated largely, he says, by Halm’s promise that the church would re-examine the homosexual issue.

Bisbee remained on the faculty for the duration of the 1988-89 term. A long-planned sabbatical for the 1989-90 term took him out of the classroom.

But in the fall of 1989, Bisbee rejoined the chorus, thus violating the terms of his agreement. “While I was out of the chorus, I began to realize I’d made the wrong decision. I felt myself drying up again. I had been deprived of my support group. I could call them up on the phone, but it wasn’t the same.”

The college found out he had rejoined the chorus, and on Oct. 13, 1989--a Friday the 13th--the regents began dismissal proceedings. On Dec. 12, Halm sent Bisbee his termination letter, saying the dismissal stemmed from his reneging on his agreement with the board, for conduct “unbecoming a Christian” and for failing to uphold the doctrinal position of the synod. It also said, in part: “Bud, the work of the church moves forward but slowly. Yet it is my hope that in the years to come we will see the people of God be more articulate in our expression regarding homosexuality.”

On April 18 of this year, Bisbee lost his appeal through a committee named by the college. In upholding the firing, the appeals committee added: “We regret that Christ College has lost a talented, dedicated musician and teacher and that there was and is no place within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod where individuals who struggle with their homosexuality can go for counsel and support.”

While Bisbee took his medicine, his best friends, the Gerlings, were becoming increasingly upset. Larry, raised in a strongly Lutheran household, had first grappled with various biblical interpretations as a collegian. Sue, while a little more philosophical about the workings of the church, was equally disturbed by the firing.

“You know what it is,” Sue Gerling said in their living room one evening, “when you really care about somebody and you see them being crucified for no good reason--there’s nothing to describe how terrible that feels, and then when you feel totally helpless to do anything about it. . . . The other thing is partly shame, because here we have been a part of this church, we work in the church, we’ve been raised this way. Now our church is treating someone we love very much with such disdain.”

“I feel betrayed,” Larry says. “The church that I grew up with and loved and espoused all this wonderful doctrine of God’s love and then the church does this. What’s incredible is that if Bud were to quit the chorus, he could have kept his job, which means that the church is saying it’s OK to call yourself gay, just don’t act on it and don’t associate with sinners. That’s what Jesus did all the time. If Jesus criticized anybody, it was church leaders for saying you guys are playing the hypocrite.”

Although some biblical scholars question the interpretation that the Bible condemns homosexuality, Gerling concedes the point.

So you just don’t believe those verses, I ask him.

“I never thought much about homosexuality until Bud’s situation came up,” Larry says. “When I had to discuss it with him or Sue or other friends, I hadn’t thought much about it, so I couldn’t even make my own decision about whether it’s right or wrong or a sin or not a sin. And, of course, to call homosexuality not a sin when the Bible clearly says it is, to contradict the Bible, I’m trained not to do that. But it was interesting and very freeing for me to come out and say, ‘I don’t think it’s a sin.’ Even if he were to develop a relationship with another person and have a sexual relationship, as horrible as society says that it is, I don’t see it as horrible. I think it’s a wonderful thing because I know my relationship with Sue is a wonderful thing and if he can have anything like we have, everybody deserves something like that, whether they’re the same sex or not. I just don’t believe that passage. That’s what it comes down to.”

Although the church sees a distinction between homosexual propensity and behavior, Bisbee thinks it’s a distinction without a difference. “It’s a phony separation, totally illogical. It’s incredibly offensive that they think they have the right to deny to any human being the possibility of relating and having a loving relationship with another human being, regardless of what sex they are. What does that have to do with love between two people? It has nothing to do with it. And besides, of your whole life, how much time do you spend in bed?”

Ray Halm didn’t want to fire Bud Bisbee, but neither does he have any misgivings about the correctness of the decision.

“I am not uncomfortable with the teaching of the church that homophile behavior is sinful in God’s sight,” he says, speaking in measured tones. “That’s not at issue for me. What is at issue is the place of the individual who has homophile propensity but who copes by the grace of God with that condition. . . .”

After the Bisbee case surfaced, Halm says, he began reading on the subject of whether homosexuality was “reversible.” He says he wasn’t able to reach any conclusions, but he didn’t consider that the issue, anyway.

“I wanted to find a counselor who said the condition of homosexuality is an effect of the fall into sin,” Halm says. “It is a woefully unfortunate situation, and the individual must be helped to cope with that propensity to sin, even as other people must be helped to cope with other propensities to sin.”

In other words, I asked Halm, you’re asking any gay member of the church to remain celibate for life. “Or,” Halm says, “even if the individual did not remain celibate, even if there were moments of falling, that the individual would have those moments of relapse not from absolute defiance of the law of God, but from his own weakness--and having done that, would return to God asking for forgiveness. The fact that one has committed adultery doesn’t mean one is forever castigated from heaven.”

Given that view, Halm and Bisbee grew ever further apart. “Bud began to express his belief that a homosexual relationship entered into with sincerity and conducted with fidelity would be as pleasing in the eyes of God as a heterosexual relationship entered into with such sincerity and fidelity,” Halm says. “Both of those views are diametrically opposed to the Bible and our church.”

And, I asked, there’s no middle ground? “There is no middle ground.”

The Bud Bisbee matter hasn’t existed in a vacuum in the Lutheran Church. In July, two San Francisco congregations were disciplined by another Lutheran Synod (considered less conservative than the Missouri Synod) for ordaining three gay ministers who refused to take celibacy vows. On July 20, members of Lutherans Concerned--a national group that addresses the gay issue within the church--marched on the Chicago headquarters of that branch of the church.

Dan Hooper, pastoral counsel to Lutherans Concerned in Los Angeles, said that although many biblical scholars don’t accept the literal interpretation of the Bible’s apparent condemnation of homosexuality, Bud Bisbee’s ouster from the church isn’t atypical.

“We hear stories constantly, but most are covered up because most people are not willing to let them become public. They’re ashamed of the loss of a job, they may not be real confident in the fact they’re gay, and so they’re completely deflated when they’re suddenly attacked for who they are. They don’t have the will to stand up and say they haven’t done anything wrong.”

Hooper thinks the church eventually will modify its stance. “We’re moving in the direction of acceptance, not just tolerance. More and more individuals are telling stories, coming out to parents, spouses, coming out to their children, coming out to family and friends, and they’re finding that on a one-to-one basis, people’s minds change.”

In the meantime, Bisbee is looking for full-time work, having accepted a part-time job for the coming year at Pomona College in Claremont.

And the players in the 20-month-old issue hold fast to their positions.

Ray Halm: “It is not uncommon for us to want to find a way to soften God’s language, to want to find a way to soften his attitude toward things, to want to make him more tolerant. But when He speaks, He generally speaks so as to be understood.”

Sue Gerling: “I’m mad at my family, my friends. I’m just very angry about it, and I’m afraid I’ll flare if someone says the wrong thing. I’m mad at my mother, who’s mad at Larry for always being mad at the church. . . . But I strip it down to its bare meaning, which makes it real simple for me. What am I here for? I’m here to love and care about people, no matter who they are or where they are. Of course, I fail at that all the time, but that was Jesus’ goal. He associated with all the sinners . . . and to bring the message that they were loved. Gay people need to hear that they are loved. Boy, do they. And if the church isn’t telling them that, there’s something wrong. But I’m going to stay in the stupid church, because I’m going to be one in the church who tells them they’re loved.”

Bud Bisbee: “I remember one of the meetings we had, with President Halm, and academic dean (Shang Ik) Moon was there, and he was trying to say, ‘Nothing’s really changed, and we don’t feel any different about you.’ I usually don’t say anything, but I said, ‘How can you say that? Everything is changed. I’m being fired, I’m being told I’m not good enough to be in a synodical classroom over something over which I have no control, as if I had a certain hair color. And you sit there and say everything is the same, nothing’s changed, it’s all OK. Well, no, it isn’t OK, and nothing is the same.’ ”