Many churches open their doors to gays and lesbians, but a St. Petersburg man has learned the limits of that acceptance.
ST. PETERSBURG -- Back in 1997, David Graves was looking for a place to worship. He didn't think he was asking for too much: a mainstream Christian church conservative enough to teach the unfettered Gospel, yet liberal enough to accept a gay man.
His parents suggested he visit their church, First Baptist of St. Petersburg, and he did. He found the people to be warm, the sermons compassionate. Graves figured it might be the right place for him. He arranged a meeting with the Rev. Walter Draughon.
"I'm gay and I'm a Christian," Graves said. "I need to know if you and your congregation can accept me as I am."
Homosexuality was a gray area as far as the Bible was concerned, Draughon told him. "I'm here to love you and to be your friend," he said. "My congregation is here to love you."
Two weeks later, Graves, 37, joined the church. He quickly became a leader, teaching singles classes and later singing in the choir and acting in the church play.
At a time when many Christian denominations are debating what place homosexuals have in the church, Graves' story offers a deeply personal, real-life look at the issue. After years of learning to accept himself, he thought he'd found a congregation willing to accept him.
He was convinced that being gay didn't matter at First Baptist.
Over the next three years, he learned that it did.
The son of a Baptist preacher, Graves was raised on Scripture and religious morality in Tallahassee. At 19, he wed his high school sweetheart, a staunch Pentecostal whose parents pegged Graves as a good candidate for the pulpit. He spent two years taking business classes at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.
After seven years of marriage and the birth of his daughter, Graves could no longer deny his emotional attraction to men. He stayed out late drinking and distanced himself from his wife to avoid telling her the truth. They divorced when he was 26. Soon after, Graves came out of the closet. He has lived in St. Petersburg since 1994.
He shied from churches, knowing many were not accepting of homosexuals. Several years passed before he started attending a small church where he felt comfortable, where the pastor knew he was gay and was kind to him. After that congregation disbanded, he found First Baptist, which appeared to be the church of his dreams.
Fellow church members wanted to get to know him. He was the new guy, a button-down-shirt-and-slacks 30-something with large round eyes, dark wavy hair and a jovial personality.
Some were disappointed to learn he was gay, though.
"Oh, that's a waste!" one woman told his friend Sheryl Meyeraan.
Others were more polite. Two women invited Graves to a friendly dinner of chicken and wild rice.
They had heard whisperings at church.
"Are you gay?" 60-year-old Betty Stone asked.
Yes, Graves told her and another woman that night.
His friends began to ask questions about his homosexuality and relationships, and Graves was at ease answering. The mood was light.
"We just don't understand," Stone said. "You're this attractive man. . . ."
Graves left that night feeling accepted. His sexual orientation would not be an issue, he thought.
But it was. Not long after that dinner, Stone pulled Graves aside. She had watched a Christian TV show and heard of a local religious group for gay people wanting to be heterosexual. One man on the show said he had changed, Stone told Graves.
Graves was ripe for the suggestion. Again he was questioning his sexuality. Did God really make him gay? After all, he once was happily married.
He found himself lying in bed crying for hours, deeply depressed. He got up only to take his rat terrier, Russell, for a walk through St. Petersburg's Old Northeast neighborhood. As they passed the oak trees, brick streets and flower-potted porches, something changed.
"Tons of emotion was churning inside of me," Graves remembered. "Something was happening to me. I don't know what."
He stretched his arms toward heaven, rain showering his skin. "I asked God to change me right then and there. I wasn't sure what kind of a change I was asking for," he said. "I want you to change me. Heal me. Come into my life."
God answered his prayer, Graves thought. He jogged home, Russell trotting alongside. Graves opened the door and headed straight for his rainbow flag, his Daisy Duke shorts and the pictures he had saved of attractive men.
He threw them all away. He believed God had told him he didn't have to be gay.
Three months after he joined First Baptist, Graves hooked up with a local chapter of Exodus International, a religious organization that encourages gay people to try to change their sexual orientation.
So sure of his transformation, Graves stood before First Baptist's congregation and gave an emotional confession. He had lived a gay lifestyle, Graves said, confirming what some already knew. But no more, he said. The Lord had changed him.
"He indicated that he was able to shed this (homosexuality) from the power of God," 70-year-old Bud Strawn recalled. "And I said, "Hallelujah!' I shed a tear."
Church members showered Graves with hugs and words of encouragement after the evening service.
Older members rallied around Graves' parents. Ray Graves, First Baptist's minister of senior adults, and his wife, Dorothy, had always accepted their son. Now a few members saw them as confidants. Secretly, they too had gay sons and daughters.
For 11/2 years David Graves went to weekly meetings for gays who wanted to change. He spoke about his struggle in front of religious groups. He told other homosexuals they could change, like him.
Then in 1998, Graves and six other men took a five-day trip to Sanibel Island. It was to be the ultimate test -- a chance to prove to themselves that they could spend time with other men and not get aroused, Graves said. They put on swim trunks, swam and palled around. They wrestled and played tackle football.
After three days of it, Graves said he had a revelation: "This is so stupid."
"I'm gay, I'm a Christian, and there's no need to be healed from it," he thought. "God made me this way. It's who I am."
He later shared his feelings with the Exodus group director. An argument followed. Graves insisted the ex-gay men were, in fact, gay, ending his stint with the support group and with life as a heterosexual man.
In the fall of 1998, Graves knew he had to talk to Draughon again. So much had changed.
Graves was a church leader now. Singles looked forward to his Bible teachings. He even considered becoming a minister. He traveled to leadership conferences at the church's expense.
But much of that had started during Graves' ex-gay phase, when he told the congregation he was changing. Now, "I was feeling a good bit of guilt," he said.
This would be a very different sort of talk.
"Walter took on this different stance with me," Graves said. "It was almost as if I was talking to him for the first time about the gay issue."
Graves could not have a gay lover and a place in church leadership, Draughon, 46, says he told him. He would have to make a choice.
Graves said he doesn't remember the conversation being so clear cut. He says Draughon told him he should make some decisions about his life and that the two should meet again.
These days, Draughon says he has no objection to gay couples being members of his church. Several sit comfortably in his pews. As he did with Graves, he assures them that First Baptist is a loving congregation. Yet, church leaders must sometimes give up their own rights for the sake of the people in the church, Draughon said. He gave an example:
It might be his right to have a scotch on the rocks at church, Draughon said. But he wouldn't, because some members would be offended. The sight of their pastor taking a swig would distract them from the greater work of the church.
Same thing goes for homosexuality, he said.
"We have people in our congregation who believe that homosexuality is a justifiable lifestyle. We have people in our congregation who think that homosexuality is an abomination before the Lord."
Graves said he left Draughon's office hurt and disappointed.
"I knew Walter may have had a difference of opinion," he said. "but it was God I answered to."
So Graves went on to help start a drama ministry that put on plays. He got involved in the choir and became part of a small group that leads the congregation in worship songs. And -- unbeknownst to Draughon -- he continued living as a homosexual.
In May 2000, Graves, a supervisor for Pitney Bowes in Tampa, started dating a man named Paul Stackhouse, 35, a friend of a friend. Unlike Graves' partners in the past, Stackhouse was willing to go to church with him. "I felt like I met somebody that God had sent to me," Graves said.
Graves introduced Stackhouse to his First Baptist friends on a Saturday as drama ministry members cleaned a church closet of old props and costumes. He was open about Stackhouse being his partner.
As at that dinner at his friends' house three years earlier, everything seemed fine. The clique of women seemed to be comfortable, Graves and Stackhouse said later.
Stackhouse visited First Baptist for several Sundays. He and Graves drove together. Graves introduced him to other church buddies. About 900 people come to two Sunday services at First Baptist, and while Graves sang in the choir, Stackhouse would sit among them with Graves' parents.
Then one of the women from the cleanup crew pulled Graves aside in the parking lot. She was a close friend and knew he was gay almost from the start.
But "People were beginning to make her doubt that this is okay," he remembers her saying. She began to cry. "I love you, I'll always love you," Graves remembers her telling him. "But I'm just having issues with the gay lifestyle."
Two weeks later, Tim Mann, the minister of music, called Graves. They arranged to meet in Mann's office. Graves told him about Stackhouse, and Mann said he had to talk to Draughon about it.
Mann called Graves at work two days later. Graves could remain a member of First Baptist, but he could no longer be a leader, Mann said.
"I couldn't even sit in the choir," Graves said. "I immediately told him I will not go back to that church under those circumstances."
Later, Graves got the full story from his father.
When Ray Graves heard his son had been asked to step down, he started asking his fellow pastors what was behind all this.
Turned out it all boiled down to that day at the cleanup. Either Graves or Stackhouse openly murmured sweet nothings that day. Perhaps the endearment "honey." Depending on whom you ask, the couple may have also held hands.
Flaunting a gay relationship in the house of the Lord?
Mann heard about it and told Draughon, who talked it over with a couple of other assistant pastors before making the final decision.
Graves and Stackhouse stopped going to church for seven months.
"If they're going to preach acceptance and love, they really need to know what that means," Graves said.
Sheryl Meyeraan, the friend who introduced Graves and Stackhouse, later decided First Baptist didn't suit her either.
"(Graves) just got you involved. He knows so much more about the Bible," she said. "To step down from all that because he's gay?"
Dorothy Graves continued her membership, but left the choir. How could she sing for First Baptist, knowing her son could not?
Others would not second guess Draughon's decision. Not even Graves' father.
"I don't think I'm in a position to challenge whether he did right or wrong," Ray Graves said. "I'm an employee of the church. I'm in a different position, and I might have handled it differently."
But he said his son and Stackhouse must step carefully in the sanctuary. "If their sexuality is such that they want to satisfy themselves in that way, that's their business, but it must not be flaunted," Ray Graves said. They can't come to church "looking like they're campaigning, like they're part of the gay rights movement."
Strawn, the church member who had cried during Graves' "ex-gay" testimony, compared Graves' return to the gay life to an alcoholic's falling off the wagon. The church had little choice but to remove him from leadership, just as it should a heterosexual in an adulterous relationship, he said.
Earlier this year, assistant ministers and Draughon met with Graves and Stackhouse to talk the whole thing over.
Draughon maintains this is not the story of a man asked to step down from leadership because he is gay, but rather the story of a man who didn't live up to his responsibility as a church leader.
"This is a case about loving the individuals of a church as brothers and sisters," the pastor said.
Encouraged by the discussions, Graves and Stackhouse started going back to First Baptist in April. The couple, who now live together, figure they have a better chance of changing religious attitudes about gays by standing their ground and staying visible.
"I am determined that God has sent me to that church for a reason," Graves said. "And I cannot walk away from it."
Still, Graves serves in no leadership role.
Graves' old friends, including Stone, have greeted him with smiles, hugs and welcome backs. "It felt as though I were coming back home," Graves said.
First Baptist simply is not ready for an openly gay man in leadership, he says.
"I'm kind of understanding that now. . . . It's a very small handful of people who are not ready. They are the ones who bring it up to the pastor. They are the ones who complain."
But he is optimistic. The day will come, he says.
"I think I can see it within a year or two," Graves said. "I think it's going to come about because of me and Paul not backing down, not backing away."