In the aftermath of Sept. 11...
One man's life continues to inspire.
Amid the scandal that divides a church ...
One man's life shines as a beacon of truth.

TAKEN UP: Father Mychal Judge is carried from 1 World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants, Judge was killed by falling rubble in the lobby of 1 World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, while serving as a fire department chaplain. As Judge was carried from the rubble, Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton snapped a shot of Judge's dust-covered but seemingly untouched body, eyes closed, head slumped on a firefighter's arm. In the days when it seemed impossible to escape from the endlessly replayed footage of the towers' cataclysmic collapse, the photo took on quasi-religious significance, an image of noble sacrifice amid the day's bloody chaos. It was quickly compared to the Pietà, the iconic image of a dying Jesus cradled in his mother's arms, and many outside the Catholic church, Rudy Giuliani among them, began referring to Judge as a saint.

There was just one hitch: Judge was gay, and openly so. As a Franciscan friar, he was celibate, but Judge's sexuality was well-known in the gay community, and Judge had discussed it with others, including Fire Department Commissioner Tom Van Essen. So despite the fact that Pope John Paul II accepted the gift of Judge's Fire Department helmet, Judge's order never proposed him for sainthood ... even though John Paul II's 26-year pontificate boasted more canonizations than in the previous 400 years combined. Even Father Mychal's supporters have yet to claim the most crucial evidence of sainthood: a miracle performed after his death in response to a prayer explicitly directed to him. But the fact that the Catholic church has yet to consider him even for a beatification, the first step on the road to sainthood, is difficult to separate plausibly from the church's newly stiffened anti-homosexual resolve.

Glenn Holsten, who directed Saint of 9/11, a documentary on Judge's life, says the movie's goal was not to enter the fray over Judge's canonization so much as to "challenge people's idea of what a saint can be. What it does, it brings him up as a deeply religious person who was also gay, and those things aren't necessarily a contradiction." Indeed, the movie makes the case that Judge's homosexuality was inextricable not only from his early ministry to AIDS patients, which goes back to the days when it was still called GRID, but from a general calling to minister to social outsiders, from the homeless to substance abusers. Even after he was ordained, in 1961, Judge himself struggled with alcoholism, finally entering Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1970s. He was just shy of 23 years sober when he died.

Holsten, the Philadelphia documentarian whose previous films include Gay Pioneers and Gay Bingo , says, "Mychal was never on the front line. He was always working quietly, in the hospital rooms, in the streets with the homeless. That's really what he thought his mission should be." He could be similarly self-effacing with regard to his sexuality. "He was out to people he was comfortable being out to, and closeted with people he knew it would make uncomfortable, where he knew it would interfere with his ministry," Holsten says.

For Judge, being closeted would have been a matter of omission, since many people would assume that celibate priests have no sexuality at all. But Saint of 9/11 makes it clear that Judge took his identity as a gay man as seriously as his religious calling. When the New York Fire Department's Emerald Society named him Irishman of the Year, Judge made a point of inviting his friend Brendan Fay, best known in New York's Irish community for leading the fight to allow openly gay Irishmen into the annual St. Patrick's Day parade. Not only did Judge insist that Fay and his partner attend, but he let them know he expected to see them dancing together when the band struck up a tune.

Such incidents, Holsten says, remind him of his own coming-out process. "It reminds me of when I used to bring my partner around to my family and say, 'This is my friend.' You find little ways of getting comfortable with people. As anyone does when they're coming out, you have to judge each situation for itself. I think Mychal's whole life was this process. And at his death, I think he was at his fullest."

The Catholic church, Holsten says, has had no official response to Saint of 9/11, which he finds revealing in and of itself. "They've chosen not to participate in any kind of discussion, because that brings attention to Mychal," he says. "One friar told me they'd prefer to just let him be, let him rest in peace. But it would be a shame if this story wasn't told. The current Roman Catholic Church is calling to seminaries not to accept gay people, and all I can think is, what a loss if Mychal's career had been aborted at that stage. I hope that's what people feel when they see this film. What a loss."

Lonnie Frisbee entered religious life not long after Mychal Judge was ordained, but he came to his calling by a much more winding path. In the mid-1960s, Frisbee was an art student in San Francisco when he literally saw God on a drug trip. Within a matter of months, Frisbee began to transform his life, preaching an eccentric brand of Christianity that frequently linked Jesus and UFOs. Around the same time, Chuck Smith, the pastor of a small Orange County church, decided to yield to his wife's urgings and investigate the growing hippie culture. He sent his daughter's boyfriend out to pick up the first hippie he saw. And that hippie was Lonnie Frisbee.

The conservative O.C. pastor and the lysergic preacher must have seemed an unlikely pair, but according to David Di Sabatino's Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, the combination helped start the wave of shaggy-haired evangelism known as the Jesus Movement. Making up in inspiration what he lacked in experience, Frisbee could rouse a crowd through sheer force of will; during one sermon where the crowd was failing to respond, Frisbee simply yelled out, "Get saved!" The response, as Di Sabatino documents, was electric. One man said that Frisbee restored his sight, and several of Di Sabatino's subjects recall being in church the day Frisbee walked in and caused a whole section of the congregation to fall to the ground, writhing with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Di Sabatino, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, takes the testimony of Frisbee's signs and wonders at face value. "The stories I would hear were like this guy stepped out of the Old Testament," he says. "You would get these very astute people who almost didn't want to tell you the story, because it sounded like you said you saw Elvis coming out of a spaceship. It wasn't just true believers. People would shake their head, say, 'I don't know what happened, but I was there.'"

PREACHER, MAN: "Jesus freak" Lonnie Frisbee in the early 1970s.

Di Sabatino says he's always been interested in "revival, bouts of fervor, times where God is sought." But what particularly piqued his interest with regard to Lonnie Frisbee was how little people seemed to talk about him. The two churches where Frisbee preached most often, Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Christian Fellowship, were central to the Jesus Movement, which eventually grew large enough to land on the covers of both Time and Life magazines in 1971. And Frisbee, who took pride in the fact that he looked like Jesus, was a poster boy for the new movement.

Right from the beginning, Frisbee was open about the fact that he'd had sex with men. It was part of his story ... an abusive childhood, a wrong turn into sexual deviance and a return to God's grace. But even though, according to Di Sabatino, Frisbee always discussed his homosexual past in terms of sin, he was never as straight as he tried to be. "At times, when he felt beleaguered, he would go back into the homosexual lifestyle," Di Sabatino says.

According to Di Sabatino, Frisbee's ongoing "lapses" were well known to his pastors, and many more besides. "Chuck Smith knew where he came from," he says. "They knew, although they won't admit it now." When an overworked Frisbee left Smith's Calvary Chapel, Shepherding Ministries' Bob Mumford advised him to take a year off from the ministry and "work on his marriage," ostensibly because a preacher ought to have his own house in order before setting himself up as an example to others. But it's not hard to read Mumford's advice as a veiled instruction: Get straight, or get out.

Eventually, while Frisbee was preaching at John Wimber's Vineyard, Frisbee was discovered having an affair with a male parishioner, and essentially drummed out of the church. Wimber, who had patterned his preaching style after Frisbee's, right down to wearing the same kind of fringed leather jacket, "acted surprised, but I don't think he was surprised that this was Lonnie's lifestyle," Di Sabatino says. "I think he was surprised that others knew. And that freaked him out. They were all worried about being tarred by guilt by association." Frisbee died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1993. In Wimber's written account of Vineyard's founding, Frisbee is referred to only as "the young man."

In conversation and in his movie, Di Sabatino treats Lonnie Frisbee's sexuality with sometimes frustrating obliqueness. Frisbee alludes only vaguely to its subject's "sin" until the movie's closing chapter, and although Di Sabatino will occasionally slip up and refer to Frisbee as "gay" or "homosexual," he most often uses words like "acts" or "lifestyle," terms that evangelicals use to distinguish the sinner from the sin. Wary of taking flak from the religious right or the pro-gay left, Di Sabatino chooses his words carefully, occasionally backtracking and, for example, replacing "the gays" with the less alienated "gays."

The fact that Di Sabatino won't discuss whether or not he thinks Frisbee's homosexuality was a sin more or less speaks for itself, but so does the fact that he's not willing to let Lonnie Frisbee's sexuality overshadow his sacred work. "I'm not making any statements one way or the other," Di Sabatino says. "I'm vexed by this situation. What I don't understand is treating these people with contempt. Like they're lepers. That can't be right. How do we include them in the body of Christ? That's my question. How do we be open to people with behavior patterns that are different from our own?'

On the one hand, Di Sabatino is openly mystified at the evangelical church's outsize antipathy to homosexuality. "You can go and say, 'I'm a habitual liar,' and that's OK," he says. But being homosexual is "the mark of Cain." On the other, he's clearly sensitive to criticism from Frisbee's friends and family, who, he says, "flipped out" when an early cut of the movie placed too much emphasis on Frisbee's sexuality. "They were like, 'This movie's about the gay preacher, then,'" he says. From the movie's few screenings in front of non-church audiences, Di Sabatino knows that they "don't appreciate when I hem and haw about the homosexual issue. But who cares what I think? That's not the point of my film."

The PIGLFF screening will be the movie's first gay and lesbian film festival slot, but Di Sabatino seems less worried about the audience reaction than he is excited to have the movie shown outside of an evangelical context. "Growing up evangelical, all day long, you preach to the choir. They have their own music, their own magazines, their own schools ... they spend all their time talking to themselves. But we're all invited to participate in the divine nature of God. People who think because of what you do you are anathema, you are excluded ... those people don't really understand what God is about. That's what I want people to know. That God chose this kid while he was in the midst of behavior that the church deems an abomination. That doesn't justify it ... I'm not saying anything about that. But God invited him to participate. That's important."

Thankfully, things have gotten a little easier for gay preachers since Lonnie Frisbee's day. Jay Wiesner is a pastor at Bethany Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, where he was ordained in 2004, a few months after he and his partner of five years were married in the church. Of course, Wiesner's ordination did earn the congregation a letter of censure from their bishop, and he has yet to be recognized by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). But while Wiesner is hesitant to characterize his bishop's actions, he does say that the letter of censure amounts to "a slap on the wrist. It's definitely the lowest amount of discipline or negative reaction we could get from the ELCA."

The ELCA's position, comparatively liberal among Christian denominations, is that gays and lesbians are permitted to serve as pastors, but only if they commit to celibacy. So while the ELCA has taken no material steps to sanction Bethany, their official position is that the church has no pastor. "It doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense," Wiesner says. "We try to help the church along in these things."

Wiesner's ordination, at which he is surrounded by hundreds of beaming congregants, is an emotional high point of Kirk Marcolina and Larry Grimaldi's documentary Camp Out, which is mainly set at a weeklong summer program Wiesner and two others run for gay Christian teens. Founded as an offshoot of The Naming Project, a faith-based outreach program for LGBT teenagers, the camp is Wiesner's way of creating a space that didn't exist when he was their age: a place where it's possible to be both Christian and gay.

Like many gay Christians, Wiesner, who was raised Catholic, struggled with the seeming disconnect between his sexuality and his faith. "When I was 5, I knew I was different," he recalls, "and when I hit puberty, I knew why. Then I tried to figure out how to get away from what was making me different." He was engaged to a woman when he was 18, and didn't come out until he was 24, at which point he was in his second year at a Lutheran seminary. He dropped out during his senior year, "because I knew I couldn't be closeted," and didn't return to complete his degree for several years.

Kirk Marcolina, who grew up in Philadelphia, recalls a similar experience. Raised and schooled Catholic until he went to Penn, Marcolina came out to his La Salle High School chaplain, who promptly offered him a three-step plan for conquering his homosexuality: Find a girlfriend, pray nightly for God to make you straight, and stay away from cute boys. "He said, it's like when you're on a diet, you try not to have things you like to eat around the house," Marcolina says. It didn't take ... Marcolina is married to a man, and has produced the reality TV series Gay Weddings and Boy Meets Boy ... but Marcolina says he "cried myself to sleep praying every night. It didn't work, but it made me have many years of really painful experience because of what my faith was telling me."

ONE BIG CHURCH: Pastor Jay Weisner in Minneapolis' Bethany Lutheran Church.

At this point, one might well ask why any self-respecting LGBT person would want to belong to a church that doesn't fully welcome them. But you might as well ask a gay Christian to stop being gay as to stop believing. The unique dilemma explored in Camp Out is that LGBT Christians have to come out twice, and that revealing their Christianity to their gay friends and family can be just as difficult. "There's knee-jerk reaction on both sides," Marcolina says. "Gay people are like, 'You're Christian, you must be a total homophobe.' And on the other side, 'You're gay, you must not really love Jesus.'"

Wiesner maintains that there is no inherent contradiction between being Christian and being gay, but both sides need work to understand the connections. "Sexuality and spirituality are so intertwined with each other," he says. "There are only two times when space and time no longer exist, when you're on a different plane. When you're in really good worship, you're not looking at your watch. And when you're having sex, I hope you're not looking at your watch. These are the two intimacies of our world, and I think that they have a lot more in common than any of us want to admit."

It's not that Wiesner is an anything-goes libertine. But while he says that "how we use our sexuality can be a sin," he maintains that sexuality itself is not. And that, he admits, is "an incredibly radical statement."

Radical statements, needless to say, have a tendency to rile the church. Wiesner presents the welcoming of gays and lesbians into the church, a central part of his ministry at Bethany, as a natural part of the church's mission. But with Episcopal congregations in Pittsburgh and elsewhere threatening to split with the church over the nomination of an openly gay priest to be the bishop of Newark, he recognizes that denominations that welcome LGBT congregations without strings attached risk the possibility of schism.

"The church gets very confused," he says, "because it wants to have that welcome to all of God's children, but it's very afraid of what will happen if it does. As kids, we're taught that God loves each and every one of us. But then we grow up, and we start to find out, Oh, but Jesus doesn't love you. Or you can't be who you are, because then God won't love you." The result of such confusion is, inevitably, mixed messages that make church officials sound like prevaricating politicians (with the exception of the current pope, who is as anti-gay now as when he called homosexuality "a disordered sexual inclination" in the 1980s). The ELCA, Wiesner points out, voted twice in the 1990s to welcome gays and lesbians into the full life of the church. "But even though they say it, it's not true," he says. "The congregations that do welcome gays and lesbians are censured, or somehow disciplined," his own being a case in point.

Forty years ago, the solution was for gays and lesbians to found churches of their own, like California's Metropolitan Community Church, founded by the Rev. Troy Perry in 1968. But Wiesner believes firmly that "we create one big church, not all these separate little churches. What I state over and over again at Bethany is that we're never going to get where we want to, but my dream is that we can create a diverse community, because it reflects the banquet table in heaven. It reflects what God wants for us."

Schism, naturally, is a threat to the idea of a unified church, but Wiesner is willing to accept the possibility if it means expanding the church's reach. "It would be a bad thing," he says, "but it wouldn't be the first time schism has happened, and it certainly won't be the last. There's continually been conflict within the church, because the church is a living, breathing community. I think we have to remember the mystical aspect when we're talking about the Christian church. Even though we are split up or divided on this earth, there is still this mystical body of Christ that unites the whole church."

Until the day Wiesner's "one big church" comes to be, LGBT Christians will have to weigh the sustenance of faith against the hostility and indifference of the church establishment. Many, of course, will leave the church, while others, like Kirk Marcolina, will try to find their own way. "I think there are lots of great things about Christianity and mainstream churches," he says. "And I myself feel like I'm a better moral person because I was raised Catholic, even though it hurt me in terms of coming to terms with my sexual orientation." But he admits he's an Easter-and-Christmas Catholic, and says he and his husband are struggling with how to raise their 3-month-old daughter. "I still consider myself Christian," Marcolina says. "But what are we going to tell her? I go to the Catholic church, but I don't want to bring my daughter up Catholic. I'm still trying to figure out where I am as a Christian. Where is my spiritual home?"

(sam@citypaper.net)

Saint of 9/11 screens Fri., July 14, 7:15 p.m., Arts Bank. Glenn Holsten will be present for the screening. Frisbee screens Sun., July 16, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater. Camp Out screens Thu., July 20, 5 p.m., Arts Bank, and Sat., July 22, 2:30 p.m., Arts Bank. Jay Wiesner, Kirk Marcolina and Larry Grimaldi will be present for both screenings.