Out In CT - Rev. Paul Goodman

Born in 1952 in Oakland, California but raised in Milford, Connecticut, the Rev. Paul Goodman holds a B.S. in Special Education from Southern Connecticut State College and taught for 10 years at the Lorraine D. Foster Day School in New Haven/Hamden.  He also worked for the State of Connecticut in the Department of Mental Retardation at the Undercliff Campus in Meriden and for two years as Assistant Director of the National Council of Churches, USA’s Department of Child Advocacy.  

Paul is a 1983 graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he received a Master of Divinity degree and was ordained in the ministry of the United Church of Christ in 1989.  He has served churches in Milford (10-1/2 years as Associate Pastor), and interim positions in Westport, Enfield, East Haddam, and Ridgefield.

He is currently the transitional minister at Center Church/Hartford, the first officially designated Open & Affirming (ONA) church at which he has served.  Paul and Patrick, his partner of 11 years, were married at Center Church on June 21, 2009.

He is an avid snow skier, ice hockey fan (who may even see his Blackhawks win a Championship!), loves live theatre, reading, and works to satisfy his life-long love for all things railroad as a Conductor at the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat in Essex, CT.  He and Patrick live in New Haven and he is a member of Shalom United Church of Christ.
 

TRANSCRIPT

I’m  Paul Goodman and I was born in California in 1952.  ( I ) moved to Connecticut when I was five years old, so I consider myself a Connecticut person.  Grew up in Milford, a product of the Milford public schools and Southern Connecticut (back then) State College where I got a degree in special education.  ( I ) spent ten combined years as a special education teacher and took a three-year leave-of-absence from teaching to go to seminary and I did that in New York City at Union Theological Seminary; very much closeted in those days

After I got out of seminary, I went back to teaching, bounced around, kind of going back to New York working for the National Council of Churches, back to teaching, worked for the state Connecticut in the Department of Mental Retardation for about a year.  Then I work at Yale Psychiatric Institute in their education program very, very briefly.

No matter how much I  tried to change the window dressing of my life in relationships, or job settings, or anything else, I was finding myself in the same spot all the time and so I trotted my sorry little tail off to a therapist and began doing some work.  And it was at that point, in the early ‘90’s, when it was the first time that I'd ever said to anybody out loud “gay.”

And I can remember my therapist saying to me, “That's interesting, you’ve been here three and a half years and that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use the word “gay.”  And he was a great therapist because he used to often ask me, “What’s God think about this,” knowing that I was a minister.  And I've always had a sense that God always, kind of, knew about me way before I knew about myself.  And as I got more and more comfortable with who I am and, you know, that aspect of my life, the rest of my life actually started getting much better:  much less turmoil, much less drama, much less craziness.

It was made easy, I think, by the fact that I experienced no rejection from anybody.   I experienced no negative reactions from people when it came out to them.  My sister was fine, my best friends were fine, my mom was totally cool and continues to be at 91; just before her 90th birthday she was at Center Church when Pat and I got married.

I think there’s a gay agenda.  I think as far as I go, as I'm concerned, there’s an agenda as a gay person for my getting my civil rights.  That's an agenda.  I don’t know why they say that like it's a bad thing when there are people who don't have rights in most states, in this United States, to get married.  We do in Connecticut and we're really pretty well protected against discrimination and things.  So those of us in Massachusetts and Connecticut and, you know, in kind of the cool States might have a very, kind of, a notion of “Ahhh, the work’s all done.”  But the vast majority of the United States does not have that when thirty-six states have defined marriage and, you know, and anti-discrimination laws are not on the federal level and don't apply to us and things like that.  That's where the movement has to put its energy, but I think attitudes change long before legislation does and rights are given to people.  And so it's an ongoing process of getting people's heads and hearts to change, so that eventually there will be enough of them to elect some legislators with heads and hearts that are in the right place and we'll see discrimination for what it is:  discrimination.

When I came to Center Church in Hartford, one of the things that drew me here was this was going to be the first opportunity that I was going to have to serve a church that was Open and Affirming and for whom, when I interviewed, they asked me what my stance was on Open and Affirming, because it was a very important part of their identity.  They wanted to make sure that they didn’t want to hire somebody that had any kind of an issue with their stance of being open to and inclusive of all gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people.  It’s a diverse congregations and part of the diversity is that element of it.

God created a world filled with color and diversity.  It all needs to work together.  It's all interdependent and all reliant upon it and you can't pull out any one segment of it and declare it’s bad because it's all part, it all has a purpose and in human relationships it’s the same thing.  I would like to be able to float freely and not be discriminated against, but I don't want people to automatically say, you know, “Oh well, being gay is . . . . I don't care about that; it's not important to me.” And it's like, “Well that's part of me; that's important to me.”  I don't want you to prejudge me on that.  I don’t want you to be able to discriminate, you know, against me on that, but I don't want to have that become any, sort of, less of my identity than any other part.  And I don't want people to just take that part of me for granted anymore than any other part of me, because that's who I am.  That's part of who I am

I think I'm more of an activist in the realm of trying to help people become reacquainted, in a friendly way, with the church and with their spiritual sides, because there are others that are doing gay advocacy thing better.  Maybe part of my activism is really faith advocacy within the gay community.

That for me is all part of evidence of the miraculousness of being gay, having faith, of seeing our lives not as something that has to be some preconceived notion of what God's creation is.  But sort of looking at things that God creates and seeing them for their own beauty, and for their own a vitality . . . . for their own thing they have to contribute to the overall beauty of the world.