Last Updated on February 28, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Peter Gomes was a gay black Baptist minister at Harvard and one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices for tolerance. He came out in 1991 and used his national celebrity as a “gay minister” to make the religious case for LGBTQ people, even though he reportedly disliked the label. He died at age 68 on Feb. 28, 2011.
A man of many contradictions, Gomes became a Democrat in 2007 after decades as a conservative Republican. He even gave the benediction at President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985 and preached at the National Cathedral for the inauguration of Reagan’s successor, George Bush.
Gomes (May 22, 1942 – Feb. 28, 2011) was born in Boston to a black African immigrant father and a mother from Boston’s African American upper middle class. He shares a birthday with LGBTQ-right pioneer Harvey Milk. Gomes grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He studied at Bates College (where a chapel was named after him in 2012). After earning a divinity degree at Harvard University, he taught Western civilization at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for two years before returning to work at Harvard in 1970. Four years later he became the first black person to serve as chief minister to Harvard. He held the positions of Pusey minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church and Plummer professor of Christian morals for the rest of his life.
He came out publicly as “a Christian who happens as well to be gay” at a student rally in 1991 after a conservative student magazine at Harvard published a condemnation of homosexuality. “I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he later told the Washington Post. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”
He can be seen making the case for marriage equality in a Video: Peter Gomes discusses: Would Jesus Support Gay Marriage?.
In his 1996 best-seller, “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart,” he showed how the Bible was misused to defend homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and sexism.
His 2007 book “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
Artistic tributes to Peter Gomes
Peter Gomes has a rainbow halo in an icon created in 2017 by queer Lutheran artist and seminarian Katy Miles-Wallace as part of her “Queer Saints” series. The series presents traditional saints with queer qualities and heroes of the LGBTQ community.
The icons are rooted in queer theology and in Miles-Wallace’s eclectic faith journey that began at a Baptist church in Texas and led to study at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. She drew many of them on the altar of a seminary chapel. For more info, see the Q Spirit article “New icons of Queer Saints created by artist Katy Miles-Wallace.”
“The Rev. Peter Gomes, of Plymouth, 1942 – 2011” by Jon Dorn
Among Gomes’s many admirers is artist Jon Dorn, who drew the portrait at the top of this post. Dorn is a cartoonist, filmmaker, and Master of Fine Arts student at Emerson College in Boston. He also serves on the Plymouth Cultural Council.
A musical tribute to Gomes is “I Beseech You Therefore, Brethren” by composer Craig Phillips, music director at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. It was originally commissioned by members of Harvard’s Class of 1978 to celebrate Gomes’ retirement, but he died before its premiere so it was sung at his memorial. The anthem has become a memorial to Gomes’ legacy. It is included on the 2014 album “Spring Bursts Today: A Celebration of Eastertide” by Harvard University Choir. Gomes himself selected the text, which was one of his favorite scriptures:
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” (Romans 12:1–2)
Quotes by Peter Gomes
Gomes’ blend of scholarship, wisdom and accessibility is expressed in a few selected quotations:
“Hell is being defined by your circumstances, and believing that definition.” — Peter Gomes
“The question should not be ‘What would Jesus do?’ but rather, more dangerously, ‘What would Jesus have me do?’” — Peter Gomes in The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
“To some, the temporal triumph of the Christian community in the world is a sign of God’s favor and the essential righteousness of the Christian position. The irony of the matter, though, is that whenever the Christian community gains worldly power, it nearly always loses its capacity to be the critic of the power and influence it so readily brokers.” –Peter J. Gomes in The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
“The battle for the Bible, of which homosexuality is the last front, is really the battle for the prevailing culture, of which the Bible itself is a mere trophy and icon. Such a cadre of cultural conservatives would rather defend their ideology in the name of the authority of scripture than concede that their self-serving reading of that scripture might just be wrong, and that both the Bible and the God who inspires it may be more gracious, just and inclusive than they can presently afford to be.” — Peter Gomes in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart
Books by Peter Gomes
The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart
The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News?
Sermons: Biblical Wisdom For Daily Living
The Good Life: Truths that Last in Times of Need
Strength for the Journey: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living
Peter Gomes prayer
May we honor Peter Gomes by living our lives with the same courage, scholarship and tolerance that are his lasting legacy.
Links about Peter Gomes
Peter Gomes at LGBT Religious Archives Network
Portrait of Peter Gomes Hung in Faculty Room (Harvard Magazine)
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Top image credit:
“Rev. Peter J. Gomes” by Katy Miles-Wallace of the Queerly Christian Zazzle shop.
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article has evolved and expanded greatly since the first version was posted in February 2010. It was published on Q Spirit in February 2017, was enhanced with new material over time, and was most recently updated on Feb. 28, 2024.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
I now have an unambiguous vocation a mission to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia. God bless us all!
There are many ways in which heterosexuals fall short of the ideals of the Gospel. Otherwise there would be no out of wedlock children, divorce, domestic violence, marital infidelity, living together without marriage, and alternative sexual activities that are viewed by many Christians as “aberrant.” Yet heterosexual Christians everywhere still adhere to their faith in Jesus and generally keep quiet their less-than-ideal activities and lives (whoever is judging what is an ideal Christian….cast the first stone!)
The same can be said about homosexual Christians, many of whom are in stable, loving relationships, many of whom have adopted unwanted children, many of whom are now marrying with at least a legal union, if not a blessing from their church communities.
Gone are the days of the stock and the “scarlet letter.” Gone should be the days when Christians judge each other based on behavior, tenets of faith, and interpretations of the Bible (many of which are inaccurate, and often based on inaccurate translations from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).
I commend Mike’s understanding that he is not fooling God, and neither are the vast majority of heterosexuals who do not live up the Jesus’ standards of behavior in a myriad of ways. None of us fool God, yet God still loves us enough to allow each of us to find our path to grace and transformation. And the primary way we do this is to live authentically as we find ourselves, without hiding our true selves and recognizing our need for affection and love…and struggling to bring it to perfection.
It is inherently impossible to be a serious, practicing Christian and a sexually active lesbian. Moreover, it is impossible to be a serious, practicing Christian while involved with Metropolitan Community Churches, which is decidedly NOT Christian. Anyone who is honest about the teachings of Jesus Christ and others in the Bible know the religion is inconsistent with embracing the homosexual lifestyle.
I am a gay man with a strong Christian background. I have chosen to live in conflict/disobedience of God’s Law. It is a free choice made with my free will. Despite how many gay and lesbian people interpret the Bible to fit their own desires, which has been done by many people/groups over the centuries, the truth is not want we want to hear but is the truth nevertheless.
We can claim the sky is green, the grass is pink and the earth is flat all we like, but it is an intellectually dishonest attempt to avoid the truth. Trying to make people who are practicing homosexuals and want to be practicing Christians feel better about themselves is misleading at best and blatantly dishonest at worst.
God allows us to choose. I have chosen a path He finds unacceptable. But He still leaves the choice to me. And I make that choice without fooling myself. Because I’m certainly not fooling God.
I disagree with your opinion, but I thank you for sharing a viewpoint that is seldom heard. I believe that Christianity is compatible with loving homosexual relationships.
Dear Mike-
I hear so much pain living with you and perhaps felt and expressed as anger in your comment. I wonder what it must be like to carry that around all the time.
I know for me, when pain (often experienced and expressed as anger) was my primary emotional state, the world was an ugly place. Everything was either good or bad, black or white, righteousness or abomination. When I defined the world in such dichotomies, most things ended up on the negative side of the equation because they had been touched by humanity and therefore were unable to live up to the kind of purity demanded by such “all or nothing” thinking.
But thanks to God’s persistence, and God’s people refusing to allow me to believe myself unworthy of God’s love, slowly, I started to believe God. I started to believe in God’s grace and mercy. I started to believe that I was fearfully and wonderfully made. I started to believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and that God loves me anyway. That’s why Jesus came, so that God could forgive my human frailty, my sins being no worse than any others. God doesn’t believe me unworthy of God’s love, but I sure did. Ultimately we’re all unworthy, it is only through God’s grace that we receive divine love. Who am I to argue with God’s grace?
I know God, and I know that God does not cut us off from God’s love. We try to cut ourselves off from it. We deem ourselves unworthy and convince ourselves that our judgement is superior to God’s. We hide from, and ultimately reject God’s love when we deem ourselves unworthy of it.
So, why not give it a try? I mean if it is true that God has already forsaken you, what difference does it make whether you believe that, or whether you believe that God loves you? What if I’m right, and you are, in fact driving God’s people away from God? Can you live with that?
Or what if neither of us is entirely right? Maybe we’re both a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and God is more complicated than either of our human minds can comprehend? Then “What is required that I may enter the realm of God? To love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor AS YOURSELF.” If you hate yourself how can you love your neighbor as yourself? You have to love yourself to be able to love your neighbor, and, in the words of an old timey gospel song, “If you don’t love your neighbor, then you don’t love God.”
So, I beg of you, if not for your sake then for your neighbor’s and for God’s, give it a try. Judge yourself worthy of love. Give yourself enough love that you can give your neighbor a little bit, and have some left for God too.
It’s not easy, so much of our lives we’ve been told that gay is the worst thing a person can be, it is the sin that God most abhors, and we’re not worth the air we breathe. It’s next to impossible not to internalize that, not to hate ourselves so deeply that we believe that God hates us too. I know in my bones that God loves me and that God loves you. God looked upon you as part of God’s creation and said, “It is GOOD.” Are you gonna call God a liar? Lean not on your own understanding. Believe God when God names you “My Child.”
You’re in my prayers, Mike. I love you, and so does God.