Me and the "Mississippi Sissy"

Back when I was a New York Post columnist, I got an angry e-mail from a Vanity Fair writer named Kevin Sessums. He was mad at me for something I'd written, can't remember what. I wrote him back and told him I'd regretted getting such a nasty missive from him, because I'd so admired a piece he'd written about New Orleans for some magazine I'd just read. Well, we started corresponding -- he comes from southern Mississippi, and I from south Louisiana, so we had a regional background in common -- and we ended up meeting for coffee a couple of times.

I liked him. Kevin's openly gay, and he and I disagreed about some moral questions (come to think of it, that's probably why he wrote to me), but we seemed to enjoy each other's company. I loved hearing his stories about growing up in the small-town South. He had a really bad attitude about religion, and mentioned to me that he'd been molested by a Methodist clergyman in his youth. He didn't go into detail. We sort of drifted away from each other, after two or three of those meetings, and I'd lost track of him after he left Vanity Fair.

When I heard that Kevin had published some months ago a memoir called "Mississippi Sissy," I planned to read it to find out more about his childhood, but never seemed to get around to it. Well, somebody sent me a copy yesterday, and I opened it at random over breakfast this morning. What do you know, the passage I opened to occasioned the start of a Methodist minister's grooming of adolescent Kevin as a sex partner. In Kevin's account, the pastor, a prominent evangelist and religious college administrator named Andrew F. Gallman, wowed him with all his talk about Jesus. Then he presented himself as Kevin's special friend. Finally he asked Kevin's parents if the boy could go with him on a trip -- something that they were eager to agree to (as was Kevin), given Dr. Gallman's prestige. What could possibly go wrong with a sixtyish, married-with-grown-children pastor taking an interest in a young boy?

After Dr. Gallman drugged and forced himself on Kevin, a fifth grader, and the act was completed in the hotel room, this is how Kevin describes his feelings:

Fear. Anger. Utter sadness. They all surfaced to mix forever with my emerging sexuality, the same sexuality that Dr. Gallman had no doubt spotted that first time he saw me in my pew at Harperville Methodist church... . I closed my eyes. I became completely still. The trance commenced."

He goes on to detail how in his imagination, religion was thenceforth tangled up in sex. He writes of being unable to confess what Dr. Gallman did to him (and did to him on one more occasion) to his mother. He calls what Dr. Gallman did a "spiritual murder," as it surely was. (A friend tells me of a friend of his who was molested by a priest when he was a boy; that friend now cannot pass a Catholic church without the involuntary urge to vomit.) And he says that even today, he cannot separate his hatred for Dr. Gallman, who died some time ago, from his experience of sexual pleasure.

This is such a familiar story to anyone who has spent time reading the stories of clerical sex abuse, and hearing the accounts of the victims. It makes me so angry to read how what those wicked men of God did to their victims, how they wounded them for life -- and perhaps worst of all, how in many cases they permanently alienated their victims from God. Millstones, Jesus said these devils had coming to them.

It must be said that Dr. Gallman is not alive to defend himself. That should be remembered. Because under US libel law, you cannot libel the dead, Kevin can't be sued if he lied about Dr. Gallman in this book. But I don't think he lied, and here's one reason why. I googled Kevin's abuser's name. Here's something very creepy I found from a 2002 sermon delivered by a Methodist pastor, who delivered the sermon on Father's Day. He devoted his message to convincing men to develop deep friendships with each other:

Dr. Andrew Gallman, a United Methodist pastor and evangelist, led me to the place of surrender of my life to the purposes of Jesus Christ when I was a senior in high school. Andy’s ministry was more than simply preaching from place to place; he took hundreds of young “preacher boys” (as he affectionately called us) under his wing. He was our friend. In the summer of 1972, Andy sent me a bit of prose someone once wrote to describe an intimate friend, the kind of Christian friend Andy modeled before us:

What is a friend? I’ll tell you.

It is a person with whom you dare to be yourself.

Your soul can go naked with him.

He seems to ask you to put on nothing, only to be what you really are.

When you are with him, you do not have to be on your guard.

You can say what you think, so long as it is genuinely you.

He understands those contradictions in your nature that causes others to misjudge you.

He understands. You can weep with him, laugh with him, pray with him –

Through and underneath it all he sees, knows, and loves you.

A friend, I repeat, is one with whom you dare to be yourself.

How about it, guys? We can put on the masks of self-sufficiency, try to live the image that we really don’t need anyone else, retreat every night behind the wall of our castles, shut the doors of our hearts to all others, and live our lives of quiet and lonely desperation. Or we can enjoy the friends we can’t do without. We can open our hearts and minds and doors to the people with whom we can dare to be ourselves – to laugh and weep and pray and be accepted for who we really are. Being a Christian is all about relationships – with God and each other. We are most alive in the love and life of Jesus Christ when we are friends with God and each other.

This poor pastor probably didn't realize it, but "Andy" was grooming him. That "inspirational" prose is sick, sick stuff in light of Kevin's testimony -- and yet, absent the ulterior sexual motive, it reads as sensitive, almost touching. All the talk about the spiritual nobility of male friendships, and intimacies -- that was the same rhetoric Andy used to seduce little Kevin. And yet it didn't work on this pastor when he was a boy. In fact, this pastor was inspired by Andy's words and example. I found another blog that mentioned Dr. Gallman, talking about what an inspiration he was, "working harder for the Lord than anyone I knew."

Sometimes he was. Other times he was working for the other side. How do we judge the totality of a man's life? How much good did Dr. Gallman do? How is it to be weighed against the serious evil he did in Kevin's life? Is there ever enough good that a man can do to compensate for killing a child's soul like that? Are there other boys that he preyed on, trading on his reputation as a respected servant of the Lord to pry them away from their parents, and into his bed?

I am glad I'm not God, having to decide these things. I find the soul-murder of children molested by clergymen unforgivable. I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying that's the difference between the merciful God and me.