Louis R. Evans, Eli E. Kahn, and Samuel M. Meyer

Cambridge, Mass.

Louis R. Evans '13 is a social studies concentrator. Eli E. Kahn ’13 is a slavic languages and literatures concentrator. Samuel M. Meyer '13 is an astrophysics concentrator. They all live in Currier House.

REMEMBERING GOMES

To the editors:

Peter J. Gomes was never easy to label.

Conservative evangelicals were quick to criticize the firebrand liberalism he occasionally displayed during his long tenure as Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. And yet a photograph of Billy Graham, hero to evangelicals across the globe, towered above all others on the shelf behind Gomes’s stately office desk.

His high assessment of Reverend Graham stemmed from a terribly difficult period that began when Gomes announced in 1991 that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay.”

Immediately after he announced his homosexuality, several student detractors formed a group called Concerned Christians at Harvard, and with fifty members in their ranks, they held prayer vigils, wrote letters, and pamphleteered, all for the purpose of seeking Gomes’s resignation.

It was a low moment for the man who loved Harvard with all his heart and mind and soul. Many longtime friends remained silent, too. Gomes would endure the silent treatment for years to come from some of his old friends, and as I sat with him in his office last spring, it was clear that the memory of deserted friends still stung.

But his deep frown stood in the sharpest of contrasts to the warm smile he beamed when he looked at the photograph of Billy Graham.

Gomes invited Graham to speak at Memorial Church several years after the Harvard chaplain had come out. The two were not of one mind about homosexuality, of course.

In some ways, Graham was theologically closer to the Concerned Christians than he was to Gomes. But unlike those student activists, Billy Graham, at the seasoned age of 80, ascended Memorial Church’s mahogany pulpit in 1999 and publicly announced that Peter Gomes was his friend and brother in Christ.

Gomes, no doubt, smiled—and believed.

Michael G. Long

Elizabethtown, Penn.

Michael G. Long, is an associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Elizabethtown College.