On a blistering Sunday in mid-July, as the athletes at the Gay Games entered their first full day of competition, several hundred people gathered at the Chicago Cultural Center for Faith and Fairness, a program celebrating gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equality in the eyes of God. Sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, it began with a panel comprising a Christian minister, a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, who decried the religious right’s assertion that gay people have chosen fallen lifestyles. “We are not ‘behaviors,’” said Joshua Lesser, rabbi of Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta. “We are an identity, a spirit, a vitality!” The audience, which ranged from young and pierced to dowdy and gray haired, roared in approval.
In a time when prominent evangelical leaders see sinister homosexual plots even in children’s cartoons (as James Dobson did with SpongeBob SquarePants last year) and gay activists see the Christian right as their primary enemy, Marin is walking a tightrope. So far he has managed to convince both sides that he’s more interested in fostering dialogue than promoting an agenda. “People can’t believe how I can go back and forth the way I do,” says Marin. “For me it’s just normal.”
Hours or days later–he says he can’t remember–Marin was in the passenger seat of Melissa’s car, telling her how surprised he was that Emily had come out. That’s when he says Melissa told him, “I’m gay too.”
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Later that summer, back in Aurora, Marin was riding in a car with Dan Kwak, a close friend since second grade. “Train,” Kwak said, calling him by a high school nickname, “I’m gay.”
Kwak remembers these events pretty much the way Marin does. But Melissa and Emily, who’ve since had a falling-out with Marin (a tangled feud unrelated to the work of his foundation), do not. They agree that they were among a group of lesbians that befriended Marin in college, but say he’s exaggerated how close their friendship was. Emily says she doesn’t remember coming out to him and Melissa flatly denies coming out to anyone at that time in her life. Neither of them has any memory of that dramatic rooftop conversation that Marin says was so formative in his thinking.
He refocused his ambition on academics. A psychology major, Marin became entranced with the idea of getting a grant to conduct research. He spent five months working as a scholar and research assistant on a National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research grant and seven months studying adults with intellectual disabilities through a grant from the National Institute on Aging. Then at the end of his senior year, as he was walking down Taylor Street toward the Blue Line, he says an idea slammed into his head like a line drive from God. “All of a sudden the Lord was like WHOOM!” he says, lashing the air with his arm. The idea: to combine his love of research with his experiences teaching Bible study classes to the GLBT community. He decided in that instant to conduct a major study on homosexuality and religion.
For years the conservative evangelical position on homosexuality has appeared inseparable from the vitriolic rhetoric of figures like Fred Phelps, the Kansas preacher notorious for coining the phrase “God Hates Fags” and for sending his followers to picket military funerals, ostensibly to protest the homosexual-loving U.S. government. While many evangelicals who oppose gay marriage and consider homosexuality a sin against nature have made a point of distancing themselves from overt hate speech, they still adhere to the literal reading of scripture. Marin may be more comfortable with homosexuality than the average evangelical, but he shares a belief in the Bible as the inerrant word of God. Which invites the question: does he consider homosexuality a sin?
