By Bishop Durrell Watkins, DMin
On November 15 at 4:15 a.m., I will turn sixty. Since 1966 was clearly only a few months ago, how in the name of temporal betrayal am I about to be sixty?
More importantly: how am I lucky enough to be sixty?
When I was in my twenties, I knew very few sixty-year-old gay men. I belong to the generation that witnessed the premature loss of an entire community. A viral monster took far too many gay men far too soon. Sixty-year-old queer men were rare, and I now get to be one.
My good fortune isn’t simply that I am alive. It includes the profound opportunity—and the absolute responsibility—to tell the stories of my generation. Stories about activist Marsha P. Johnson and trailblazing leaders like Barney Frank and Barbara Jordan. Stories about Torch Song Trilogy, An Early Frost, The Weather Girls, Freddie Mercury, Sylvester, thirty-year-old Cher, forty-year-old Cher, and Coco, the Golden Girls gay chef (for one episode).
I get to remember, out loud, the heyday of Metropolitan Community Churches, bars without outdoor signage, labyrinthine club mazes, hanky codes, and old-school drag, which was considerably less athletic back then. I get to smile as I tell younger queer folk about Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor, Rosie O’Donnell’s early VH1 days, and the rumored-to-be-gay Miss Barbara Stanwyck.
I get to—and I must—tell of the decades of relentless work that finally led to marriage equality. I speak of house parties and hideaway bars that were slices of heaven and bunkers of survival: veritable chapels, parlors, and forts.
And through tears, I am at once honored, saddened, angry, content, and obligated to recall the hope that accompanied nausea when AZT first arrived. I tell of salvage therapy, and I remind my younger friends that “condoms” and “protection” were once synonymous. I share stories of fear, grief, exhaustion, survivor’s guilt, and the combination therapies that changed the world and saved mine.
I’m sixty (or close enough for jazz). I’ve survived the Bible Belt, toxic theology, self-doubt, constant dread, coming out, marches, protests, petitions, sodomy laws, and HIV.
Along the way, I also found and fell in love with the best person I have ever known. For the last twenty-six years, we have been spiritually married—formalizing the paperwork the moment it became legal to do so—and for twenty of those years, we have found our spiritual home at Sunshine Cathedral.
I’m sixty this month, and I have lots of plans for the future.
Future. That was a word I would have used very cautiously back in the eighties and nineties. But today, I plan for tomorrow. I’ve made it to sixty, and I can reasonably hope for more. How amazing. I get to be a queer elder. That is the best birthday gift I could ever imagine.
Bishop Durrell Watkins, DMin. is the Senior Minister of the Sunshine Cathedral. Sunday worship is at 9:00 AM and 10:30 AM.
