Awards

• Winner of Lambda Literary Awards (Spirituality) 2001

Overview

He survived a turbulent childhood in war-torn London, earned degrees with honors from Cambridge University, was ordained in the Church of England, became an Anglican worker-priest, and emigrated to the United States. He has been a prolific broadcaster for the BBC, helped organize the Public Broadcasting System in America, was a founding chairman of National Public Radio, and became a senior management consultant for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He designed and directed the first system of suicide and crisis counseling centers in California (a model for later centers nationwide) and helped found the Parsonage, an Episcopalian ministry on behalf of gay rights in the Castro district of San Francisco. And all the while, Bernard Duncan Mayes struggled to reconcile his views on sexuality - and his experience as a gay man - with his theological and cultural beliefs. In an entirely honest and engaging voice, Mayes offers considerably more than autobiographical recollections of his life as priest, journalist, university teacher and administrator, and gay rights activist. Throughout Escaping God's Closet, Bernard Mayes recounts how social and doctrinal oppression posed fundamental challenges to his own belief system, but led him to revelations about sexuality, Christianity, and the nature of human existence itself.

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9780813920047

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Reviews

Bernard Mayes has led an unusual and exemplary life: He is part of the first generation of men who have used the means of civil society to affirm the validity of sexual desires, practices, and relationships between men, and on this topic he is thoughtful, eloquent, and at times very moving. - Richard Dellamora, author of Masculine Desire and Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending This is a fascinating account of a cleric's serious re-examination of the beliefs with which he grew up and how, in the course of his complex and fascinating life, he came to challenge those views and eventually discard them. - John Fout, Bard College

Author Information

A gay activist, NPR founder, and former Episcopal priest tells the story of his struggle with his culture and church doctrine

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