METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY CHURCH
On January 17, 2019, I interviewed Reverend Troy Perry for the first time. Reverend Troy Perry is a renowned figure in both religious and LGBTQ+ advocacy, best known as the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). Born on July 27, 1940, in Tallahassee, Florida, he established MCC in 1968 as the first church to specifically serve the spiritual needs of LGBTQ+ individuals, creating a space of inclusion during a time of widespread discrimination.
Reverend Perry’s story is one of courage and determination. As an ordained Pentecostal minister, he faced profound challenges, including being rejected by his church after coming out as gay. Undeterred, he turned his personal struggles into a mission for change. The first MCC worship service was held in his Los Angeles home with just 12 attendees, but the movement quickly grew into a global denomination, now operating in dozens of countries and advocating for equality and human rights.
Throughout his career, Reverend Perry has been at the forefront of LGBTQ+ activism, organizing protests and championing causes like marriage equality long before they entered mainstream conversation. His contributions have left an indelible mark on the fight for justice and have earned him widespread recognition. In addition to his advocacy, his memoir, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I’m Gay, offers a profound look at his life and the intersection of faith and identity.
Our conversation explored his journey, his reflections on faith, and his vision for the future of inclusivity, offering a deeper understanding of the extraordinary impact of his work.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August: I don't think the word homosexual is in the Catholic Bible, but I know some Bibles have the word homosexual. Can you maybe talk about that?
Reverend Troy Perry: Absolutely. It's very interesting. The word homosexual did not appear in English scripture until 1946, and that is when the National Council of Churches released its English version of scripture. For the first time, they put in the word homosexual. It wasn't in the old King James scriptures, but with that, of course, that was the era, too. You have to remember that we were having problems in Congress where there was a communist under every bed. They were homosexuals.
Harry Hay, who we view as certainly the founder of the modern GLBT rights movement in America, Harry—I can't remember the name of the congressman from Wisconsin right now who called him in front of Congress and questioned him and called him a fairy if you can believe that, in front of Congress. He saw, because Harry had been a member of the American Communist Party and later was thrown out of the early homophile groups because of that, that his politics were to the left. It was an amazing time in history.
In the state of Florida, where I'm from, in the 1950s, we also had a state legislature that all at once wanted to find homosexuals. The legislature published a bulletin that was sent out to everybody.
Of course, the Johns Report, as it was called, the Johns Report had a photograph, of all things, a glory hole scene. The state of Florida went absolutely nuts when it was published on taxpayers' money. A clergyman said, "This is official pornography from the state of Florida." They tried to withdraw the pamphlet and secure all copies but couldn't. In that, he, of course, discussed scripture, too. It was only in the '50s. Before that, the word homosexual was not in Christian scripture.
August: What do you think that connotation meant compared to the Catholic Bible, which says man lying with a man?
Reverend Troy Perry: It was awful. It laid a whole foundation for the religious fundamentalists in America, the evangelical community especially, to start their fight against the GLBTQ rights organizations. It was just terrible all at once. I remember I had never heard the word homosexual. They always quoted the old King James—that if a man lies with a man as he would with a woman, they're to be stoned to death, their blood to be upon their own hands. It was a death sentence, but there were a lot of ways you could interpret that. Once they put it in the English scripture, it went around the world. It was the basis of everything when it came to scriptures and homosexuality. Here I go, getting ahead of myself. After I founded MCC, we also published a pamphlet that said, "What did Jesus say about homosexuality?"
When you opened it, there was nothing inside the pamphlet. Then, on the back cover was, "That's exactly right. Jesus never said anything bad about homosexuals." It was true.
For me, it was very interesting. I felt a call to ministry at a very young age. I started preaching in 1953 when I was 13 years old. I went to Southern Baptist churches and Pentecostal churches—two of the most conservative groups on Earth.
At least in the Catholic church, as I always say, you never had to park your brain, usually, at the door. The priests preached about many things, mainly about the Saints or the Holy Father's words, as they talked about Catholicism. With the Evangelicals, it was a completely different thing. I was licensed to preach in 1955 by the Southern Baptist Church when I was 15. I'd felt a call to ministry at a very young age. I thought there were all kinds of young people like me. I didn't realize until later that I was very unusual, even for that period.
August: I don't know if this is true, but I read that your aunt prophesied that you'd be called into a ministry life. What does that mean?
Reverend Troy Perry: That's true. My Aunt Lizzie Smithy was a good Southern woman who helped found the snake-handling churches in America, just as an aside to all of this. When I had had my call to ministry, I had run away from home. My name was Troy Jr. My father was Troy. My father had been killed in a car wreck, and my mother remarried. The man that she married just did not like me. He moved the family from Tallahassee, where we had lived all my life until then, to another part of Florida.
He took all the money my mother had inherited through my father's death and purchased a business. It turned out he had alcoholism. Like I said, because my father was Troy, and my mother, of course, I'm reminding her every day because my name is Troy Jr. and here I am, Troy, in the family. Her new husband did some bizarre things. Finally, I ran away from home.
While I was away from home, my Aunt Lizzie Smithy went to her little church the very first Sunday. During what we call the altar call in the Pentecostal churches, I went forward, like all of us did, to pray. She came over and laid hands on me. She told the whole crowd, she said, "Junior." She called me Junior. All my relatives did. She said, "Junior." She said, "I just received a revelation from the Lord."
She said, "God is going to use you mightily, but not in the church you think." I thought she was trying to get me into her church because after she had done that, she then said to me, "The book of Mark says, 'You shall take up serpents,' not maybe." I thought, "Well, if I've got to pick up a snake to go to heaven, I'm going to bust hell wide open because I am not going to handle snakes." It was very true.
I later joined the Pentecostal church that my other relatives belonged to, The Church of God. I really love that church. They gave me a deep love of scripture and of doing what was right. It was in the South, and we were Southerners. I thought the world of my new church.
At age 18, I went to my Pentecostal pastor, and I said to him, "I think I have a problem." I didn't use the word homosexual. That was the word. I knew what it meant, but I kept saying to myself, "You're not a homosexual no matter what you feel." For about an hour, I talked around the mulberry bush, as I call it, and tried to make sure he understood I was attracted to men. Finally, his eyes lit up, and he said, "Oh my God." He said, "I know what you're trying to tell me. All you need to do is marry a good woman, and that'll take care of that problem."
I married his daughter at age 18, and it wasn't funny or flippant five years later when we went through the divorce procedure. It was an amazing time because, in one breath, I had no role models. I thought I was the only person in the world that had the feelings that I did. I kept thinking, and I kept saying because people kept saying, "A homosexual is somebody who wants to wear his mother's dresses or who wants to go to bed with kids." I thought, "I'm not interested in my mother's clothes, and I want to go to bed with men."
I just kept telling myself, "You're not a homosexual. Whatever this is about, you're not." Then he said to me, too, "God can deliver you from that. Don't you worry. God will deliver you. You'll see." After we married, my wife and I moved from Florida to Illinois so I could attend Bible College, as we called it, in the Pentecostal faith. I went to this college in Chicago and just kept wrestling with what I felt.
Finally, about a year and a half later, I told my wife that I was a homosexual, and some things that had happened, that just finally I said, "This is enough." Her parents found out about it. They called her and wanted to talk to her at their home. I took her and dropped her off, leaving her there. Without belaboring this, when she came out, she said, "My mom and dad told me what you are."
Of course, I had told her about my feelings, but now I had acted out, and they had excommunicated me. They said, "You're just going to die and go to hell if God doesn't deliver you." We moved back to Florida. My first son had been born in Illinois, second son in Florida. We moved back to Illinois, but I very quickly knew that was not going to work. I was working for a company in Chicago, a plastics firm.
They opened a plant in Torrance, California, and said, "Would you be willing to go out and help us open the plant?" I said, "Yes, but you know I have a call to the ministry." I said, "I'm still going to do that," and they said, "That's perfectly alright. Just help us get it open. If that's what you need to do, quit then." I said, "Fine." She and I, and our two boys, moved to Santa Ana, California, and I started pastoring at a little church there, The Church of God of Prophecy. While I was there, I really came to terms with who I was.
I walked into a bookstore in Santa Ana. My wife was on an extended vacation back East, and I walked in midway through this. As I looked around, I was going to quote from an article in Life or Look magazine. I can't remember which. I remember looking around, and all at once, I saw a physique magazine for the first time in my life. I always cut up and say today; those were the good old days when they still wore bathing suits.
It was men, and my God, I knew I looked, and I was just embarrassed almost. I thought, "My God, Troy. There is something different about you. Why are you so attracted to these photographs in this magazine?" It was all men. I got some nerve up, and I went to the woman behind the counter, who I know today was probably a lesbian. Then I was so nervous, and I said, "Do you have any books on homosexuality?" She looked me up and down and said, "Well, I have a few." I said, "Give me a copy of everything you've got." I wrote out a check for $18 and something cents. That was a lot of money back then.
I returned them to the parsonage, and two things in that bag helped me. While they were novels and things like that, the magazine was called One. Not the One with the physique photographs. I had her put that in there, too. There was One from a homophile group, and it let me know that I wasn't the only homosexual in the world. I was shocked when I saw "communities of people like me."
The other thing was the book called The Homosexual in America by Donald Webster Cory. When I read that book, it just described me to a T. I knew without another thing that I was a homosexual. I went back home and hid the books under my mattress. Then I said, number one, "I've got to talk to the church, my church leader for Southern California." I said, "I need to talk to my district overseer." I went, and I talked to him.
Finally, I used the word. I said, "I have a problem and need to talk to you about it." He said, "What is it?" I said, "I think I'm a homosexual." He, oh my God, and just turned blue. He said, "Oh my God, have you molested some little boy in Sunday school?" I said, "No, sir." He said, "What makes you think you're a homosexual?" and I said, "I've read these books and they say I am." He said, "This is a trick of the devil." He said, "You go back and throw those books away."
He said, "I had a problem, too. During World War II, I went to bed—" and he told me this prostitute story that had no bearing on what I was talking to him about. That he'd gone to bed in France. I returned to the parsonage where we lived, my wife and I, next to the church. I didn't throw the books away. I reread them. I told him, "Would you tell the Bishop what I've told you?" I knew he was coming down for a visit in about four weeks. Sure enough, I found out later that he told the Bishop.
The Bishop had a heart attack and said, "Oh, my God, if he thinks he's a homosexual, I'm sure he is, and I want him out of there now." I can't even remember I was out somewhere, but I came home. When I did, my wife said, "The Bishop was here with two ministers and wanted to talk to you. He asked that you stay here. If you came in, he would be back."
She said, "What is wrong?" About that time, the Bishop showed up with two clergy, and I knew this would be it. I would be excommunicated, and this would be the end of my ministry. The Bishop came and said, "Do you mind coming out to the car and letting us talk with you?" I knew what he was going to say. With the three clergy there, that meant excommunication. I walked out to the car, and he said, "The district overseer told me what you said." He said, "I'm removing you tonight as pastor. Can you and your wife get out of the parsonage tonight?"
I said, "No, sir." For the first time in my life with church officials, I stood up and said, "No, sir, I'm not going anywhere." He asked, "How long will it take you to move out?" I said, "Until I can sell the furniture." I said, "I've got to have the money. My wife and I haven't had—" "Do you want me to talk to her?" I said, "No, sir, I'm an adult. I'll talk to my wife."
Friends who were at the meeting, he had called a congregational meeting, and the membership of my church showed up; they told me later, they said, "He said he had removed you as a pastor, and the congregation just absolutely went nuts." They said, "What do you mean you're removing Reverend Perry? We love him and his family. Since he's become our pastor, we've tripled in membership here at this church. We're getting ready to build a new building."
He used the word homosexual when he told me he wasn't going to do that. Not another question was asked. It was met with complete silence. Everybody was just freaked out.
I walked back to the parsonage. Before he started talking, he had asked me, "Would you just come in, stand up, and tell people like we do, that you feel like you failed the Lord? That'll be the end of it." Of course, I just told you about the rest of it.
Anyway, it was very interesting. I said, "Let's go have coffee. Bring the kids." I said, "We'll go to a coffee shop." When we got there, she said, "What is wrong?" I said, "You know what your mother and daddy told you?" I said, "I've told you before, I've had attraction to men. I could not accept myself, but I have now." I said, "Good, bad, or indifferent, I'm a homosexual."
She said, "Does this have anything to do with the books you hid between the mattresses?" She had found them. She said, "I read the book, and it said that some homosexuals are married heterosexually. Maybe we could stay together." I said, "No. All I have is a label. I don't know what I am yet." I said, "Until I find that out, that's how it will be." I said, "I want to know what you want to do," and she said, "If we're not going to stay together," she said, "I want to go back to my mom and dad." I said, "All right."
It was very interesting. A week later, the Bishop had somebody come and buy all of our furniture so that I had the money to pay for her and the two kids to fly back to Illinois to her parents. I went to the airport and put them on the plane. Before I did, I told my oldest little boy, like my mother had told me when my dad died, "You got to help me." She said, "Raise your brothers," my mother had told me. "You got to be a father to them, a daddy to them."
I told my oldest son, Troy III. He was just a little boy. He was five years old. I said, "You got to help your mom." I had no idea I would not see my children, one of them at least, for another 17 years. There's a price to be paid sometimes for coming out of the closet, but I wouldn't have done anything any differently than I did.
August: How old were you when this happened?
Reverend Troy Perry: I was 24 years old and had just moved to Los Angeles. My mother and her—not the man she'd lived with who had mistreated me. My mother had married again and her husband, they lived in Huntington Park. My wife and I went up to see her, and very typical of mothers, she said, "Listen, you two just stay with me. We can work this out." I just told my mother, "No. There's no working this out until I know more about who I am and what this is about."
When I was in Los Angeles, I met someone named Madeline Nelson. I said, "There must be some places that gay people must go to." She said, "You should ask my 15-year-old son." I couldn't believe this. Sure enough, her son said, "I know a restaurant in Hollywood where homosexuals go to." I did not ask this kid anything about how he knew that, but his mother said, "He can go with you up there." She and I were good friends. She knew I was not interested in her kids.
Madeline Nelson’s son went with me up to Pergolas Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. It was very interesting. While I was there, there were other gay men. I could tell it in there. All at once, someone was there who was—I was so dumb. He was actually looking at Madeline's son but sent over another gay man to say, "Hi, my name's Billy." I just brightened right up. I thought, "This is wonderful. I'm meeting somebody."
We started talking, and then Willlie Smith came over. Willie became my roommate. We were not sexual partners ever, but we were the best friends in the world. Willie and I rented our house together. Then, in 1965, I received a notice from my draft board in Mobile, Alabama. They said, "Uncle Sam needs you. Is it true that you're no longer pastoring, and you and your wife are separated?" I wrote them back and said, "Yes, but I pay child support."
They wrote me right back and said, "No, Uncle Sam needs you." It was the middle of the Vietnam era. The war in Vietnam was going on. I'd met lots of gay people by then. Willie knew all kinds of gay people. My gay friends said, "Are you going to let them draft you into the military? Are you going to check the magic box?" I said, "What magic box?" and they said, "Right under tuberculosis and cancer is homosexual tendencies." I said, "I don't have homosexual tendencies. I am a homosexual." I said, "Yes, I will go into the military. I'm from the South."
I know now, as I look back on it, it was a cultural thing. Sure enough, I was in the Army for two years, and that was finishing school for me, just like you were supposed to. I had a top-secret NATO crypto clearance. I was so honest in the military, but I did not fit their stereotype. Their stereotype was a gay person would never marry a woman. Number two, they returned to wearing the dress again—nothing wrong with that, but not for me. My whole unit, I was just really liked by the GIs who were in my unit.
When they had a crackdown just before I left to come home, it was very bizarre. Here again, they were stereotyping gay people. They could almost never find one unless they called you. I went to gay bars. There were gay bars in Germany. I was stationed in Germany, and it was just incredible. I discovered Amsterdam. When I went to Amsterdam, I was there talking to a gay guy in the COC at one of the gay clubs. I look up, and two Dutch police officers walked in. I was just shocked. I said, "Aren't you afraid?" and he said, "Of what?" I said, "Two police officers have just walked in. They were in uniform." He said, "No, they're just here to have a beer." This was the polar opposite of LA. We had the worst police department in the world. Every gay person said that.
In other words, the difference between what I saw there subconsciously just really put it in perspective for me. After two years in the military, they gave me confidence in myself. Again, I was the butch guy.
When I came home, here I was as a person who had been in the military. Then, several things started happening very rapidly. I fell in love for the first time in my life with a man. I sometimes say it was six of the worst and best months of my life. It's not really true. It was then. I thought it was just awful after we broke up.
In the middle of that, I ended up—when he walked out of my life, I tried to go back to church. I couldn't find any church where I could go. Every time I would go in, I usually lasted three Sundays.
On the first Sunday, they would notice that I knew scripture and could read. I was in the young adults Sunday school class. That's the marriage mill in the Protestant groups.
On the second Sunday, they would ask me to pray or read scripture, and I did. Then, a third Sunday, it would be, "Are you married?" I said, "We're in the process of getting a divorce." "Why?" and I said, "Because I'm a homosexual." My mother used to say to me, "Troy, why do you have to tell everybody you're a homosexual?" I said, "Mother, I don't want to tell them, but they asked. I'm never, ever going to lie about that again."
Now, I have met gay people, but my partner walked out on me. I took a razor blade, climbed into a bathtub, and cut both of my wrists. I'd said, "Oh, God, this just isn't fair. You can't love me, the church says. They say that I'm an abomination. The person that I was in love with has walked out of my life." I said, "I just don't want to live anymore."
Willie Smith came home and knocked on the bathroom door. When I didn't answer, he knew I'd been very depressed over the breakup. He broke down the door and called neighbors to help him get me out of the bathtub, put tourniquets on my arms, got me dressed, and rushed me to County General Hospital here in Los Angeles. When I was there, I was just crying uncontrollably and waiting for the doctors to come in. It was probably the closest I'd ever come to a nervous breakdown in my life. In the middle of that, an African American woman in a nurse's uniform came in and said, "You know something? I don't know why you've done this, but can't you talk to somebody? Can't you just look up?" She pushed every religious button on me again. My spiritual buttons, I call them. I broke down all over again, crying. When she left, she had left me with this magazine, and I prayed. I said, "God," I said, "I've committed this sin in Romans 1:26-28. It's not the sin of homosexuality, but I've turned my partner into you. The scripture there says that's wrong. That's my fault."
By that time, the doctor comes in. He's the bad cop. He immediately says, "I don't know why you've done this, but this is crazy." He said, "You're too young for this," making me feel every stitch in both arms as he sewed me up. Finally, he said to me, "Are you going to be okay, or do I need to lock you up for 72 hours?" That was the law in California. If you were going to be a danger to yourself or to other people, they could keep you in the psych ward.
I said, "What do you think?" He said, "I think you need your ass kicked all over the hospital. That's what I think." He said, "I'm not going to decide that for you. You make the decision. I'm not going to make it. You tell me. Are you going to be okay or not?" I told him, "I'm going to be okay." During my prayer before he got in, I felt what we called in the Pentecostal church, the joy of my salvation. It was like I could feel God there with me. Then Willie came in and said, "They told me I could take you home," and he took me home.
The next morning, he had to go to work. He entered my bedroom and asked, "Are you going to be okay, or do I need to stay with you?" I said, "No, I'm going to be fine." When he left, I was lying there, thinking, "Oh, my God, I've got to go buy long sleeves somewhere." If my work, if Sears, Roebuck knew that I tried to kill myself, they would fire me. I know they would.
It's so funny. After you try to kill yourself, the first thing you think about is, "Oh, God, I've got to make a living still." With that, all at once, that feeling I'd felt the night before when I prayed was there. Then it hit me, and I said, "Wait a minute, this can't be you, God. You can't love me. My church has told me you can't. Whatever I'm feeling can't be you. You just can't love me because I'm still a practicing homosexual. That hasn't changed."
With that, I tell people, 50 years later, that God spoke to me in a still, small voice in the mind's ear and said to me, "Troy, don't tell me what I can and can't do. I love you. I don't have step-sons and daughters." With that, I knew I could be a Christian and a homosexual. It took me a few months before it finally dawned on me, "My God, if God loves me, then God has to love other gay people too."
That was just a revelation to me, and then I thought, "I can't find any place to go to church. Yet, God, I know scripture tells me, I know number one, you call me to the ministry. Number two, I know that scripture in the Bible. You said, I knew you in your mother's womb. I knew all about you, God said in Hebrew scripture. I said, "My God, if God knows about me, God knows about other people."
With that, I really started dating. I dated a young man. We went to a gay bar called The Patch. It was the first gay dance bar in LA proper, but down near the dock areas of LA. He and I went down, were there, and he went over to buy us a beer. Another friend was sitting there, an older man, and Bill Hastings said to my date, Tony Valdez said—they started camping, cutting up as gay people called it back then, and he said something funny. My date said something funnier still. Then he said something funny. Then my date really said something funny. Bill reached over and slapped him on the rump, laughing.
He came back, handed me and my date a beer, and with that, three vice officers in plain clothes came over. I found out later what they were—they came over to us and said, "Come outside with me." I said, "Who are you talking to?" They said, "Not you." They pulled out their badges, and they said, "Him." They arrested Tony and Bill. I was just shocked. I'd seen the whole thing. Immediately, Lee Glaze, the owner of the bar, jumped up on his bar and said, "The vice had been here. They arrested two of our friends. We're going to the police station. We're going to get our sisters out of jail." That's what he said.
We got in cars and went to the police station. When we walked in, Lee was carrying flowers with him. Back at the bar he had stood up and said, "There has to be a florist here. I want to buy flowers to take with us." When we got to the police station, Lee was very effeminate, and he walked up to that counter, and I'm telling you, he said to the police officer—there were about 12 of us there. He said, "We're here to get our sisters out of jail." The cop said, "What’s your sister's name?" He said, "Bill Hastings and Tony Valdez” and scared the policeman to death. It was the first time I'd ever seen that happen in LA.
Immediately, he called for backup. We wouldn't leave. It took us about six hours to get them. We would not leave the police station. Finally, we got them out of jail. When I took Tony back to my house, he cried. He said, "I've never been treated that way. One of the cops was Hispanic, like I am. He kept talking to me in Spanish. He was saying, 'I'm going to call your parents. I'm going to call your job. I'm going to tell them about you.'" I said, "Tony, he's not going to do that." I was so stupid. I had no idea.
I said, "Look, Tony, I want to tell you something." Here, I'm trying to witness, as we call it in the Pentecostal faith now, to people. I told him, "Look, even if I thought people didn't care, God does." Tony laughed in my face, crying through his tears. He said, "Troy, I went to my priest when I was 15 years old, told him about my feelings, and he ordered me out of Catholic Sunday schools. No, Troy, God doesn't care about me. Would you take me home?"
I drove him home and came back to my house. When I did, I knelt and prayed. I said, "All right, God, I think I found my niche in the ministry again." I can't find any place to go to church. I said, "If you want me to start a church that has a special outreach into the gay community but is open to everybody, just let me know when." With that, that still small voice in my ears said, "Now."
With that, I took out an ad. I had to convince them that I wasn't a charlatan. The owners of The Advocate didn't want to sell me the ad. After talking to them for about 40 minutes, they said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, we'll do this. We'll give you your first ad if you buy two more for the next two months." I said, "Great, let me do it on credit. I'll give it to you, the money, after I hold the first church service." They agreed to do that. I took out an ad here, Reverend Troy Perry, and gave my home address in Huntington Park, California.
August: How many people attended the first meeting or service?
Reverend Troy Perry: The first service was on October 6th, 1968. After I'd taken out the ad, I went home and told Willie Smith, my roommate. I said, "Willie, I've taken out an ad. I'm starting a church." He said, "Oh my God. Troy, what do you mean by a church? You're the only gay person I've ever met who wanted to talk about religion." I said, "Well, I don't care."
He said, "You've taken out an ad and given our home address here in Huntington Park." I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, the police will be here with nets stopping people up as they try to enter. I don't believe this." I said, "Well, that's how it will be. You told me you went to the Seventh-day Adventist church and used to lead singing. I need a song leader, and you can do that." He said, "All right. I'll try to help out as I can," but he said, "Nobody's going to come to this."
It was very interesting. Twelve people showed up in the living room. That number twelve, don't ask me why. It was wonderful. There was one Jew with his Gentile lover. There was one person of color. There was one heterosexual couple. They came with their gay brother and her gay brother-in-law. It was just amazing when we all gathered.
When I did everything, we had our service, and I preached. I preached on the book of Job, the story of Job, where Job said, "Though God slay me, yet I'll trust God." That was my feelings. God said, God loves me, so God has to love all of you, too. Then, when we finished when it was time for communion, the mass, as you call it in the Catholic Church, but what we call communion, only three people came forward. You could cut the emotions with a knife.
Everybody in the room was crying. It was like the most emotional moment. Of course, I had to serve communion on a coffee table. I didn't have a chalice. I used a Jefferson cup my boss had given me. I used an ashtray to hold the communion wafers. It was just the way it was. That first offering from the church, the treasurer approached me and said, “You're not going to get rich. $3.18." I didn't care. I knew good things were going to happen.
As I tell people, the next Sunday, we had 14 in attendance. I said, "Oh, thank you, Jesus." Next Sunday, we had 18. I said, "Oh, blessed be the lamb forever." Next week, we had nine. I almost died right there. God seemed to speak to my heart and say, "Troy, quit counting the crowd. Don't worry about that." Within a year and a half, we were running over a thousand in attendance in worship service here in Los Angeles.
August: That first year that you found the church was the same year that you officiated the first gay marriage?
Reverend Troy Perry: That is correct. I received a telephone call from two young Hispanic men. They called me and said, "We've seen your ad in The Advocate. We're wondering, would you marry us?" I said, "You know what? Yes, I will." I didn't even really think about it. In my heart of hearts, I thought, "We're going to do everything any other church does. We're going to have Sunday school. We're going to have a marriage. We're going to have baptisms. We're going to have communion. We're going to do it all. We're going to feed the hungry. Whatever is needed, we're going to do it."
That young couple came, and it was very, very interesting. I hadn't told them how to dress. One was in a tuxedo, and the other was in a wedding gown. I used their names when I married them. A year later, I filed suit for the first marriage in California in 1969. I used an old law in the California books on common-law marriages for two women who we married. In those days, I had attorneys from the yin-yang who attended my church. I said, "Do your homework. Tell me how we can do this."
They found the law set, which had never been taken off the books. It was written in the 1800s, right after California became a republic. It said that if there was a common-law couple, and it was because California was so big, and they had to wait to get married, a priest or clergyman could marry them, and then the state would have to give them a license, but you would marry them first. I married the two women, and we took it to a judge in LA, who laughed us out of court. He would not even file the case. He told us it was a frivolous lawsuit. I thought, "Buddy, you're going to hope and live to see this. I am never going to give up on this."
I never did. Phillip and I are getting ready to celebrate our 34th marriage anniversary. When it was legalized in Ontario, Canada, the province there, I immediately learned you didn't have to wait. I called our pastor and said, we want to get married, and then I'll come home and sue. We flew to Canada, and it was very interesting. We went in, and the press was waiting by the time we got there. They all said, "But you won't be married when you go home." To quote a famous American cowboy, I said, "They'll take this wedding band off my cold, dead hand." I said, "I can tell you now. The US Constitution does not require couples to remarry if they're married elsewhere and become American citizens, or if American citizens go out of the country and marry, they don't have to remarry when they get home."
I told them we were going to sue, and after six months, finally, Phillip said to me, "Well, are we going to sue or not? It's been six months." I said, "Well, honey, you know me. I have my fleece before the Lord." There's a story in scripture about one of the prophets who put out a sheepskin and said, God, if you want me to do this, whatever, he was praying over it. He says, make the dew fall all around it, but not on the sheepskin. When he woke up the next morning, there was no dew on the sheepskin. Then he said, "Okay, God, I still have to do this again. If this is really you, make the sheepskin wet in the morning and the surrounding area dry."
The next morning when he got up, that's exactly what happened. The dew had only fallen on the sheepskin. I said to Phillip, I don't know. Well, one week later, a good friend of mine, Robin Tyler, called me and said, "Troy, I've just talked to Gloria Allred, and she said she would take our case pro bono for you and Phillip to sue for the marriage outside in Canada and us to sue for the right to marry here, but you're going to have also to claim the right to marry in the state."
I said, "Thank you." She said she's willing to do it pro bono with that. I said, "Oh, that's close enough to speaking in tongues for me." I caught up with my partner, and you know what? We did exactly that. We won in the Superior Court. We lost in the Court of Appeals two to one. Then we went to the state Supreme Court. When I sat and watched how the judges reacted, it was a majority of Republican judges who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan and other Republicans, governors of the state of California. They found for us five to four.
Then, the citizens took it away from us. It was so bizarre. They stopped marriage ceremonies but didn't propose what they were to do with all these married couples. Other couples then took it to the federal courts. Of course, we ended up in the Supreme Court. I wasn't surprised when we won in the US Supreme Court. Here we are today. No judge laughs at me anymore. I've taken more cases to court than anyone. I'm one of those people that I know what the courts are there for. They're to be used if you have to. That's the last thing I want to do, but if they mess with us, we have to mess back.
August: Did you always know in your heart that it would work out eventually? Did you get discouraged the first time it was terminated?
Reverend Troy Perry: You know what? I always had faith. When you go into the military, and you realize you could die, they tell you that over and over again at boot camp. You really get to that if that's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. It was in my church because MCC—we started nine months before Stonewall happened in New York. I was already holding demonstrations before Stonewall took place.
We had a young brother who was beaten to death by the police department of this city. I went to the inquest. Willie and I did. As I sat there and listened to the police officers talk about beating people to death. I was so shocked that I didn't know what to do. I went back to my church, and I preached. That was on Good Friday. On Easter, I preached a sermon on how to get the stone of ignorance rolled away from the tomb of truth.
It was probably just a month later when I received a telephone call from someone in San Francisco. He said, "Somebody's been fired from their job, and the company's office is in LA. Would you hold a demonstration there?" I said, "Absolutely." It was really funny, about eight of us showed up for that first demonstration. It was bizarre. I could not get at first why people were so frightened, but people were. Crazy me, I didn't know gay people were not supposed to use their real names, and I always did.
The homophile groups—when I went to one of their meetings for the first time after I'd read the One magazine article, were older gay men. I immediately noticed that my partner and I were the youngest in the room. The homophile groups were what existed before gay liberation. At the meeting, no one ever spoke to us. It was so different from what my church would be like, where, oh my God, everybody talked, I encouraged that. I made everybody shake hands with everybody as long as I could. Even at a thousand people, part of the peace, a person on each side of you, shake hands, say God bless you this morning, and do the sign of peace.
When we discussed demonstrating, I told the church, "You're going to have to go with me." In my first sermon about Job—I believed in a three-pronged gospel. The gospel of Salvation is a Christian group—the gospel of community. We who are not a people, God has made a people. I quoted from the Hebrew scriptures. The last was Christian social action, where we find and stop discrimination. I said, "Part of that is, you're going to come and hear me preach and feel good, but you're also going to help me demonstrate."
Finally, it dawned on me that the 800-pound gorilla was but what if somebody hurt us? What if somebody dies? I said, "Well, the Christian scripture teaches us that to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord. Even if they murder us, this will not be the end." In my first demonstration, we had about 200 to 300 people who showed up. The next demonstration I organized was in Hollywood. We were going to demonstrate against the police department. We had about 1,000 people show up.
This cop comes riding around the corner on a motorcycle, drives up on the sidewalk, runs up to me, and screams, "Who is in charge here?" I said, "Me. You know who's in charge here. What is it?" He said, "I want to let you know something. A bunch of Marines around Hollywood Boulevard are just waiting for y'all." I said, "Oh great. A lot of our men are into Marines." I said, "Listen to me. We don't want problems. You don't want problems. If we have problems, it'll become your problem."
Of course, any Marines around Hollywood Boulevard ran the other way when we marched. Nobody was going to bother us. We marched to the police station. It was an incredible act of courage by our people.