Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

REVEREND ROBERT CROMEY Minority Politics in San Francisco, 1964-1996

Interviews conducted by Martin Meeker, PhD in 2007

Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Robert Cromey, dated April 26, 2007. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Robert Cromey, Minority Politics in San Francisco, 1964-1996, conducted by Martin Meeker, PhD, 2007, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2007.

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Table of Contents—ROBERT CROMEY

Interview #1: February 12, 2007...... 1

[Audio File 1]...... 1

[Audio File 2]...... 27

Interview #2: March 13, 2007...... 59

[Audio File 3]...... 59

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Interview #1: February 12, 2007 Begin Audio File 1 Cromey_Robert1_02-12-2007.wav

01-00:00:06 MEEKER: Okay, could you just say your name?

01-00:00:09 CROMEY: My name is Robert Cromey.

01-00:00:11 MEEKER: Just date of birth and where you were born.

01-00:00:15 CROMEY: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 16, 1931, 76 years ago.

01-00:00:22 MEEKER: Excellent. Good, although I need to put this on if I'm going to be heard. I think that you're all right, if you won't just maybe move it up a little bit on your lapel, and it's actually out of the video screen, so you can't even see it. [laughter] But it looks like that it's recording, I guess. Okay, as I was mentioning just when I was introducing this project, from the vantage point of 2007, when, say, the media talks about Protestantism in the United States, it seems to be much more from the vantage point of an evangelical, conservative point of view, even to the point of being called right-wing. But when you were first ordained in the 1950s, it seems that mainstream Protestantism historically was much more liberal then. Can you just comment on that?

01-00:01:24 CROMEY: Well, I think it's quite true that the battles on the sexual level in the Protestant denominations in the [19]40s and 50s were largely focused [break in tape]. Other Protestant denominations, most of the Jewish groups were all pro-birth control. That seemed like a very big thing, and I think there was a lot of unity behind that. And I was ordained in 1956, in New York City, and there was also a kind of anti-Catholicism that united Protestants, liberal Protestants, the fear being that Roman Catholics in New York City were very strong, very

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pro-censorship, what you could read, what was on the movies, and that kind of thing. So there was a unity behind this censorship issue, and also the burgeoning, the beginning of the strong involvement on the concern of freedom for African-Americans. And I think that generally speaking, Protestants were behind that, except in the deep South, where some of the Southern Baptists and [others] were very conservative and didn't do much about the issue. I think they're okay about it now, but it was a long time for those Southern churches to do much. But in the North, and in the West, there was a strong liberal strain that united Protestants in general toward a liberal perspective on many things, because it was the end of World War II, and there was concern for peace, and then there was the anti-Communism craze. Again, I think generally speaking, in those days, the Protestants were pretty strongly against that kind of censorship, whether it was from the Church or from the state.

01-00:03:28 MEEKER: You know, it's interesting. I, too, think about, New York City, or in the East Coast, and the forces of what might historically be considered conservatism. I think of Will Hayes, of the Hayes Code, and he was Catholic, right?

01-00:03:44 CROMEY: I'm not sure of that, but I wouldn't be surprised. [laughter]

01-00:03:47 MEEKER: And then of course, Cardinal Spellman, who was rather notorious, particularly, as an anti-Communist.

01-00:03:55 CROMEY: He was very pro-military, pro-war, anything the government wanted to do was okay with him.

01-00:04:01 MEEKER: It was also a time, however, of kind of burgeoning ecumenic[ism], historically. And I'm particularly thinking of thinkers like Will Herberg, the Protestant-Catholic-Jew notion about these sort of three strains of Western

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civilization that, again, come together in the United States. And it also seems, historically—and I don't know, maybe you agree or disagree—but the different strains of Protestantism seemed to have kind of common cause at this point in time. Did you feel that when you were in seminary?

01-00:04:39 CROMEY: Yes, there was a good deal of talk about the ecumenical movement and great concern about that. The Bishop here at that time, James Pike, had the Pike Blake proposal, which was a proposal to unify the Presbyterians, who—that was Pastor Dr. Blake and Bishop Pike—and they had a sermon at Grace Cathedral, a dialogue sermon where they talked about how the Church could move forward by being united in its activities. And I think there was a good deal of interest in that, and by and large, it failed, partly because individual clergy who run their churches, they don't, Presbyterians, want any Episcopalians fooling around with them, and the local Baptist church, they don't want any Presbyterians giving them advice. I think it got to be very parochial, and I think in many ways, it fell down in that area. I think the ideas were great, and people really thought about them, and there are still ecumenical institutes going around today, trying to do that. I just think of my own self getting together with the Council on Religion and the Homosexual— [that] was the thing that I did in my ministry, really in conjunction with other partisan groups, but day in and day out, we hardly ever spoke to each other. And recently, for instance, the Episcopalians and the Lutherans got together. Well, okay, so I can go celebrate Communion in a Lutheran church and the Lutheran minister, but again, it doesn't really work out very well on a practical basis. I think it's still a good idea, but I think it doesn't seem to work out day by day.

01-00:06:25 MEEKER: So you were still in New York, you moved to San Francisco in 1960s—

01-00:06:29 CROMEY: '62.

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01-00:06:30 MEEKER: In '62. So in those, I guess, six years that you were a priest in New York, were there any ecumenical activities that you participated in?

01-00:06:42 CROMEY: Well, let me just back up one second about—I was born and raised in New York City, I went to New York University and General Seminary, all in Manhattan. So New York was really the basic part of my growing up until I moved to California in 1962, and there were many more, when I was a rector in an Episcopalian church in the Bronx, I used to meet all the time with the Presbyterian minister down the street, the Lutheran pastor, the rabbi. The Roman Catholics were pretty distant, they didn't come out and play very much. But it was, again, kind of informal, and we would do a few things together, but not really very much, so Thanksgiving joint services and things like that, mostly laziness, and then we all didn't have to run a service, but nobody came [laughter]. So we do one service when nobody came, so there was a New York City Council of Churches, I think it was called, and they were very strong and had a lot of activity to try to combat the censorship that was perceived and true. And then I came together very strongly on the anti- Communist witch-hunt, being against that kind of thing. So that was all I remember from New York City days.

01-00:08:07 MEEKER: Well, as for the other contours of that Protestant liberalism in New York City at the time—There was just kind of defining what was within that Protestant liberalism, like a country. [laughter] What would be within the borders, and what was outside the borders, and what was like near the borders?

01-00:08:31 CROMEY: Are you talking about issues now?

01-00:08:32 MEEKER: Yeah, yeah.

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01-00:08:33 CROMEY: For instance, there was constant discussion of trying to find a common way to worship. Well, that never got very far, as far as I could see. There were the meetings and endless blah-blah about doing that kind of thing. In those days, it was difficult to get churches to even take in an AA group, it was being rankled to let in an AA group. Now, it's quite common.

01-00:09:01 MEEKER: What were the fears around that?

01-00:09:04 CROMEY: The fears were "those people in our church" kind of thing, or aren't they going to be desecrating it in some way? I mean, people had no understanding who or what an alcoholic was, or what the real issues were, to see it as part of a disease. They were just bad people [laughter] getting together, and so it took a while, well, for the whole culture, to kind of get it, that alcoholism was a disease that had to be taken care of with love and caring, and not just laws and rules.

What else? Certainly, when the Korean War began, there was a peace movement, I would say that was outside of the churches. I think when the Korean War started, I think most of the denominations were 100% behind Truman and the fight in Korea to stem the spread of Communism. So the peace movement, I remember a group came to my church in the Bronx, and they were on a peace march, and they asked if they could spend the night at my church, Holy Nativity in the Bronx, and we had them stay, maybe 50, 60 people stayed on the floor of the gym. Oh, I got a lot of heat from that [laughter] from the parishioners, who'd say, “Oh, you know they're against our boys,” and that kind of thing. So that was a sort of outside the movement.

I think abortion, at that time, was—I think most of the Protestant churches were against any kind of abortion, that was outside the pale. Gay rights, absolutely you never talked about it. There were one or two single organizations around Manhattan, I remember, that tried to straighten out

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homosexuals. There was that kind of emphasis. Go to psychotherapy, and you won't have these feelings anymore.

01-00:10:59 MEEKER: There were a couple early homophile organizations active in New York at that time. Do you recall any of them?

01-00:11:06 CROMEY: I remember one of them because one of my good friends, who later became Bishop of New York, was involved in one of them, and I cannot remember the name of them. Also, the William Allenson White Institute for Psychotherapy, I know that they had gay therapists who were slightly out of the closet and were welcoming gay people who needed therapy, not necessarily for them to change, but just because of their problems of being gay in the world. Many men and women needed therapy, and that institute provided care early on, and that's one that I know about.

01-00:11:47 MEEKER: How did you know about that?

01-00:11:50 CROMEY: When I was in the seminary, I was advised to get some counseling on, for me, the issue of the difference between not being much more comfortable in my head than in my emotions, and I remember going to six or eight sessions with the therapist, and I found it quite helpful. But I didn't go very often, I didn't very much, but getting to know the Institute a little bit and hearing it from my therapist, whom I know was gay, he told me he was. And he was also a priest at the Episcopalian church, so we had that in common. I was in seminary at that time, so that's how I heard about that one.

01-00:12:35 MEEKER: How did you respond to finding out, one, that an Episcopalian priest was gay but also that he was to be your therapist?

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01-00:12:45 CROMEY: I felt fine. This particular therapist, his name was Al, was just a wonderful human being. Charming and funny and interesting, and I liked him personally. I certainly admired how smart he was and sensitive to what was going on and making that distinction between my brains and my emotional life and helped me begin to weld that together more. It didn't bother me. In my book, you may have seen that my father was bisexual, pretty clear evidence in the family. He never talked about it, never revealed himself being that way, we had a lot of— my mother and father entertained gay friends. I remember, Gilbert Fallensby's long dead, used to call him Jibblet Floppensburgh, he would call himself [laughter], he was just so funny. Even when I was a teenager, if he was around the house and he was having some problems, and I remember he stayed with us for a while. He was absolutely, flat-out gay man and made no bones about it. So I think I just, from being in the family, and in our family, we weren't allowed to—it was very clear, no anti-Semitic remarks, no anti-black remarks, no anti-gay remarks, these were all family and friends.

01-00:14:11 MEEKER: You never had to wrestle with a dissonance, perhaps, between what's said in the Old Testament and your encounter with people around you?

01-00:14:21 CROMEY: Well, by the time I got to seminary where I began to realize that this therapist was gay, I don't begin to wrestle with how to look at the Bible as a historical document written at a certain time in certain context, and that issue was being raised, and I would say that my own position at that time was that, probably, homosexuals needed therapy in order to change. That would have been my position, although I felt tolerant with all my friends and acquaintances who were gay.

01-00:14:58 MEEKER: So now, like an idea of arrested development or that they're not fully mature or something along those lines?

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01-00:15:04 CROMEY: What is it, weak father and strong mother, that was one, and then somebody else came along, strong mother, weak father, [laughter] round and round a ways. Ah, I went along with the conventional wisdom until the days in CRH.

01-00:15:20 MEEKER: Some of the other issues—you mentioned censorship as well—I'm wondering if you can kind of unpack that a little bit. You mentioned it in the context of the liberal Protestants in New York kind of lining up against Catholics who had a more stringent stance. How did that get played out? What were some of the issues involved with it?

01-00:15:43 CROMEY: Well, again, it was much more in the personal [vein] because I had a Catholic girlfriend when I was in high school, and she couldn't even go to certain movies. So the issue was what movie can we go to, and of course, she wanted to go to see the ones she wasn't supposed to see. So that made it almost kind of almost a joke, that we would find out the best movies to see by what the Catholics didn't want us to see. [laughter] And that became a very kind of cultural phenomenon: “Well, what is it they don't want us to see? We'll go see that one.”

01-00:16:14 MEEKER: So whatever didn't have the stamp for the Legion of Decency—

01-00:16:17 CROMEY: Yeah, it was probably too vanilla. I remember a certain movie, I remember Cardinal Spellman in New York condemned a movie called Baby Doll, and there was a big picture in Times Square of whatever actress it was—

01-00:16:37 MEEKER: It was Liz Taylor, wasn't it?

01-00:16:38 CROMEY: Who is it?

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01-00:16:39 MEEKER: I think it was Liz Taylor.

01-00:16:40 CROMEY: No, it wasn't. It wasn't that famous. Anyway, she had a thumb in her mouth, a clearly buxom babe in this crib, but it was enormous, it was the size of this house. And Cardinal Spellman condemned it, and then the dean of the Cathedral, James Pike, who later became Bishop here, he and his wife went and stood under this Baby Doll poster at the movie house, and had their picture taken. It was in the New York Times and all the papers, saying, “Cardinal, sorry. We think it's a good picture, and we don't appreciate the censorship,” that kind of thing. Lady Chatterley's Lover, I mean the first time I saw that, I think it was in the ‘50s, in a brown paperback volume that somebody had brought from England or something. So it was ending that kind of censorship, and certainly anybody in the intellectual world or certainly the seminary, we thought all these things were ridiculous. We should read whatever we want, and I think that was the general view of most Protestants.

There were, again, the very conservative Southern Baptists, and maybe in those days, there were Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, they all tended to be pretty conservative, but they weren't as vociferous as, say, the Catholic Church was. But certainly anybody I knew, including most Catholics, in those days thought that whole Legion of Decency, that was what it was called, was absurd. I mean, how dare they tell them, PhDs from Harvard, what movie you can go to or what book you can read [laughter]?

01-00:18:32 MEEKER: Do you remember there being conversations about what did lie beyond the pale, like whether, perhaps, there could be a good argument for censorship?

01-00:18:42 CROMEY: Oh, sure, I'm sure, pornography. In those early days, the skin flicks, that we [see everywhere] now, they weren't as readily available then. But certainly

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everybody knew a way you could get that. And I knew, I'd seen some, you know, college fraternities and—

01-00:19:00 MEEKER: Stag parties, right? [laughter]

01-00:19:03 CROMEY: What was it? Yeah, stag parties. Everybody had some of those kinds of things, but the Church was certainly against it, if it even thought about it, probably didn't think about it very much. Unless it comes up in a convention where church leaders get together and they have to deal with resolution, some church comes up and says, we should have an anti-pornography resolution, people wouldn't even deal with it unless somebody brought it up.

01-00:19:32 MEEKER: What about an issue like divorce?

01-00:19:34 CROMEY: Most of the Churches were against divorce in principle, but also most of the churches had a way around it, most of the Protestant churches, as does the Catholic Church, except it's very much more complicated [in] the Catholic Church. And certainly Judaism was very lenient on divorce, except, again, for the most conservative Jews. And in the Episcopal Church, there were regular discussions of divorce, mostly anti-divorce. The pro-divorce—now we're talking about the ‘50s and then even into the ‘60s. For instance, when I got divorced in 1969, it would have been impossible for me to get a job in the church. Five or six years later, it was a non-issue. Again, depending on where. Even today, if you were the director of an Episcopal Church in Mississippi and you got divorced, you probably couldn't get a job in Mississippi. So there's that conservative stuff that still goes on issues. Almost all issues having to do with sex or presumed where sex might be enjoyable [laughter], there is usually some church group against it, even within the liberals.

01-00:20:58 MEEKER: So, premarital sex, for instance?

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01-00:21:01 CROMEY: Absolutely. Everybody's against that, [laughter] except the people that were doing it.

01-00:21:07 MEEKER: Well, you know, it's interesting—With religion, not just with religion, but of course with many groups in society, the institution has a certain voice on it, a certain standpoint on an issue, but institutions and churches are made up of individuals, and so when you go and have an individual conference with a priest or a minister or something like that, those official standpoints often times can be ameliorated or made more liberal. And so premarital sex might be one instance in which that happens, or birth control, or even abortion.

01-00:21:54 CROMEY: Well, certainly, when I was ordained in 1956, certainly birth control was okay and acceptable. And I remember being in the parish in the Bronx and talking to a teenage group about not having sex before you got married. And I really, really believed that, then—I don't anymore. And it didn't take me long to give up that notion, and I think I was giving the church's party line, basically. I was a young priest and trying to do what I thought was the right thing to do. Yeah, I never really felt passionate about it, but when somebody confronted me with the issue, I sort of gave the party line. Although even early on, I had already begun to have some confrontations in my first two jobs in New York with gay men, issues around gay men, and I took a very liberal line. The choirmaster of our church was a gay man and very popular and delightful, and he went on some kind of outing with the kids, and apparently he made some move on some kid, who reported it to his father, who then they reported it to me. So I had a meeting with the three of them, and the father wanted me to fire him. And Edgar, [that was] his name—he's dead now too—Edgar said he was really sorry, it was a terrible thing to do, he had not done it before, we didn't do background checks in those days, but there was no evidence that he'd do it again or had done it, and he was very apologetic, and I just said to them, I don't see how I can fire him for this, it was a mistake, he confessed his

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mistake, and the Church is about forgiveness and moving on, if we can. So I left the church within the next six or eight months, not on that issue, but as I remember it, the boy and his father dropped out of the church. Edgar stayed on, even after I left. And then the boy eventually became a priest at the Episcopalian Church, which I thought was great. And he told me he's not gay, but he's a bachelor. I think he probably is, probably telling the truth, not the kind of guy who'd bother lying about that one.

01-00:24:30 MEEKER: Around things like this transition that you originally towed the party line around premarital sex, for instance, to a point at which you began to think differently or in contrast to what you were supposed to think, how did that happen for you? I'm wondering, what is the process by which you can begin to think differently than the way in which you are taught that you're supposed to think about something?

01-00:25:05 CROMEY: Well, as I've written, no secrets about this, I began as a clergyman to have an affair with a person in my parish, and I realized that I was very sexually driven and hungry. And for me to commit adultery, talk about going against the rules, that's the big one, not only to my wife, but God and Church and everything else. But I realized that my own sexuality had burst out and I realized I wanted more out of sex, more out of relationships than I was getting in my marriage, in my relationship to my wife. And it was certainly nothing that she ever did, I'm absolutely clear. These were drives within me that I didn't control very well and just acted out, so it became pretty clear that if I could justify committing adultery, the issue of pre-marital [sex] was a snap. Of course, people should— I often said that I was a virgin when I got married at 21, now I often said if I'd been fooling around and had some sex was 15, 16, 17, like probably my friends were— But I was on the path for the ministry so I was trying to do the straight and narrow. If I had had teenage sex when I was a teenager, instead of waiting until my 30s [to explore my own sexuality], it probably would have been much healthier for my marriage. So I think it was

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my own experience realizing how powerful my own sex drives were— And I channeled it pretty well all through seminary and my first job or a couple of jobs, but I began to notice my attraction to other women and desire for them and began to pick up that they were interested in me, too. And it wasn't very hard to enter relationships like that, so I would say it came from my own experience. I began to talk to other clergy, not particularly about myself but, say, about pre-marital sex, and I found most of clergy had had pre-marital sex, and they thought it was a non-issue with teenagers. They would say they just didn't bring it up or talk about it with the kids. Teenagers, it's not their first talk. It may be what they feel and think about the most, but that's not what they talk about much, at least with adults. And my wife being a high school teacher says, oh, God, almost everyone would talk about anything really, and I kind of remember the same thing, so it wasn't really a big issue. You didn't have to hide anything because they didn't talk about it and bring it up, and certainly, the Church at that time was not very big into sex education. It is more so now, it's one of the few institutions that really, since public schools are having such trouble teaching sex education, many of the churches are doing a fairly good job about presenting sex material to teens.

01-00:28:25 MEEKER: I was raised as a Catholic, so my personal experience in relation to this is sort of the counseling element of ministry to me was, it didn't really exist in my church, and the only counseling element that existed was the confessional [laughter], which was more sort of seeking forgiveness from sin, rather than speaking with an enlightened or spiritual person to help work through personal problem. Which is, I think, the way in which a lot of people think about ministry today. And I think a lot of ministers have degrees in psychology and so forth—so it's like a quasi-therapy or a quasi-counselor with a spiritual dimension to it. Before you came to San Francisco, and still your years in New York, to what extent was your ministry like that, to what extent did it involve a counseling element?

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01-00:29:32 CROMEY: Yeah, I would say that I saw that as the most important part of my ministry, it was counseling. Conducting the worship on Sunday was the basic job, we did that, that was what we did, but at least what I got both from my father—who I know did a lot of what we call pastoral counseling—I saw that as a model that I liked—and in seminary, I was in seminary from '53 to '56, I had to take a course in clinical pastoral training. It sounds like something you’d do to a dog [laughter], but it was kind of an education, and I spent three months at the Bellevue Hospital in New York City as a chaplain intern. I wore a white coat and had my name and "chaplain intern", and we called on people that were in the hospital, usually tried to find somebody who was in there for a while so we could follow up with them, and we had to do verbatim interviews. So if you were the patient, I would get all the information about you, and I'd have to remember everything we talked about, particularly what I said to you because our trainers were all clergy, all priests. They would say, “Now why did you say that? Why did you want to pray with them now? Why did you ask them about their wife?” So we had to write down everything we said, so what I learned most was learn to keep your mouth shut and listen because that's where the learning will come, and if you can be of any help, help the person discover their own treatment, as it were, and if you can say some things, fine. But learn to keep your mouth shut and listen, and I think I've become a good listener as a pastor, and I really like that role. And I realize now, there was an element of sexuality in that, the kind of intimacy that would happen with young women, or even older women, particularly, and it was certainly much more fun being a counselor to an attractive woman for me than any of the men, and I must say more women tended to come to counseling than men by the time I got into the ministry. So it was an expectation to be a counselor, and we made it available. We would say, clergy directors available for counseling by appointment at any time, so we— I can't say we hustled, I didn't hustle people for it but we were not allowed to charge, there was no money involved, we weren't expecting it, it was part of being a priest, part of being a minister,

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and it was the extension of the confessional. It was to say, of course, people, they tell you these things, they need more help than just, “You're forgiven.” So it was a real part of the training, and I would say, certainly in the liberal Protestant churches, and I would say across the board. Now, there's some of it in the Catholic church, I don't think it was ever to the extent, even today, that there was in the ‘50s for us. And today, anybody who goes to seminary has to do the same thing, they call it clinical pastoral education. You go to a prison or a hospital or a senior citizen home or something, and do those verbatim interviews, and you really learn how to listen and give appropriate feedback, and interestingly enough, it became—it was part of my ministry when it first started I wanted to do the most— By the time I finished, I thought, I'll never do this ever again. I don't want to hear anyone's damn problems or whining or giving them advice, like go jump off the bridge! And they don't do it [laughter], but it was so frustrating after a while. I think partly, I didn't think of myself as terribly effective at it, and then I got much more interested in social action, gay rights and black rights and this and that, that seemed much more exciting, much more available, much more involved in social, political change. Whereas the one-to-one counseling just seemed very frustrating to me. I think other personalities maybe were better at it and did it well and enjoyed it, and I loved it at first, to listen, to have somebody pour out their problems to me, oh it was just wonderful. Made me feel authentic. [laughter]

01-00:34:23 MEEKER: Well, maybe to a certain extent, in engaging in counseling for so many years, you realized that there is no changing people. They're sort of almost destined to live the life they're going to live, if that makes any sense.

01-00:34:42 CROMEY: Well, I really do think, I mean, again I have to bring it back to myself, I was a wonderful liar. I could lie, fabricate, I got away with screwing around behind my wife, just because I was such an excellent liar. And I really learned not to do that. I took some intensive counseling in the ‘60s and late ‘60s, and I learned that I can tell the truth, and the world doesn't die, and I'm sure if I had

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confidence in myself to tell the truth of how I felt to my former wife, we might still be married. But I didn't have the courage to do that, then. So I do think people do, can and do change. But I think it's hard. It was a very hard, laborious process. One of my friends, a counselor in later years, used to say, “Learning to tell the truth is a lifelong process.” You don't just learn it and start out, I'm going to tell the truth from now on because we bullshit and lie all the time or think we can, think we can get away with it. My wife and I have a rule. If I don't want to tell her, that's when I have to tell her [laughter]. That's a withholding—if I say, gee, I don't want to tell her about this, then obviously, this is something to talk to her about. But on the other hand, I agree with you. I think that it's very hard for people to make very substantial changes, but in some, it's possible. But I think it takes some work.

01-00:36:18 MEEKER: It's getting dark in here so I think I should— [break in tape] We're on again.

You mentioned the intriguing point that you've kind of lost interest in the counseling portion of your ministry and became much more interested in the social activism dimension of it. Can you identify a point at which that change happened?

01-00:36:48 CROMEY: I think it was when I was in college, to kind of pinpoint it. I went to New York University in New York City, which is very liberal, extremely liberal, everybody was— The most important [laughter] fraternity on the NYU campus in Washington Square were the Young Communists and they were out there everyday with a big sign signing up people, raising money. They were wide open. This is '52 to '53, so the entire place was rife. And I belonged to two religious organizations, one for Episcopalians, one for Christians in general, and again, the slant was very liberal, and we began to think about what's going on in the South. We would have lectures and talks like this, and then when I was in the seminary, Brown v. Board of Education came out, and I was absolutely shocked that half my class thought that [it] was terrible that

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racial discrimination in the schools should be ended by any means, even in the seminary. But I was elated, it was just wonderful.

01-00:38:11 MEEKER: So what were their objections to it?

01-00:38:12 CROMEY: Pardon?

01-00:38:14 MEEKER: Do you recall what their objections were to Brown?

01-00:38:16 CROMEY: Oh, [it will] ruin the schools and bring down quality of education.

01-00:38:21 MEEKER: Not that there was anything inherently wrong with ending segregation.

01-00:38:31 CROMEY: Mixing races isn't bad, but “We're not ready for that.” [overlapping dialogue; inaudible]. But I would say, it was one-third of the students, two-thirds maybe—actually the whole faculty was very liberal and very supportive of that kind of thing. So my first two jobs, I didn't do much—I did some sermons on peace and I wasn't very pushy about it.

01-00:39:04 MEEKER: What did that mean, peace, back in the 1950s?

01-00:39:07 CROMEY: Well, it was the Korean War and talking about the— I would say, probably at that point, I was for the war. I thought it was a great thing, get-those- Commies-out kind of thing, at least support the government. I think I was pretty suspicious about how terrible Communism might be, but certainly support the government, and so I reflected pretty much what the congregations in the two churches reflected. And I think the most liberal thing I did in my parish in 1960, was I walked around with my black cassock on with a big Kennedy button on. Everybody in this very Protestant, very conservative,

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fairly conservative church, it was a blue-collar church, they were pretty much voting against Kennedy because he was Catholic, not because he was a Democrat. I was regarded as pretty left-wing, pretty radical, but that was about it. I certainly did think that that was totally unjust to judge him just because he was Catholic, and—

01-00:40:16 MEEKER: And so the trend in your parish would have been toward Nixon, simply because along religious lines?

01-00:04:27 CROMEY: I think so. I think that, I mean one man who was a real leader in the church was a custodian in a public school, he swept and cleaned the toilets, but a good, solid Welshman, just a fabulous man, Al Hickinbotham. Somebody else worked for the life insurance, and then there were bank tellers, really there were one or two engineers, but [we] didn't have any lawyers, no doctors, no dentists, it was a real blue-collar, and they tended to be fairly conservative, and they would have been pretty much Democrats. But I think when the Catholic issue came up, and the neighborhood was about--this is in the North Bronx in New York City—the neighborhood was about 75% Roman Catholic and 20% Jewish and [laughter] 5% the rest of us, so there was already this sort of feeling like a minority group. The families intermarried, and in those days, if there was intermarriage, you were supposed to bring up your kid Catholic and sign papers, and oh, Protestants resented that, so [there was] huge hostility. So I think it was a big part of that [inaudible], even in New York.

01-00:41:40 MEEKER: Did you ever have any misgivings about Kennedy's Catholicism?

01-00:41:45 CROMEY: No, I thought he was a hero. As far as I knew, he was just fabulous. And I'm sure that the fact that he was a minority candidate from that point of view was one of the many things that made me want to support him. And also, I think that he was closer to my age, he was a young man. He was, what, in his 30s

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when he was elected? Thirty-eight or something? Who knows, my early 30s, and he was attractive and interesting, far more interesting now that we know all about him, [laughter] much more about him.

Just to go back to the point about the tipping point to really become a social activist, because that was kind of leading up to that, then I came to California, Bishop Pike was the Bishop here, and we got involved, a group of us in the Mission District here for five churches, we got together and we supported the NAACP and CORE in the picketing on Auto Row, if you're familiar with that issue or as I talked about it. And no blacks, no Latinos, certain no women in those days were employed in the auto industry. And so we picketed for several weeks, and I and others got arrested, and the Bishop, Bishop Pike, then said, “This isn’t right, I shouldn't be the only one making these public statements, I shouldn't be the only one urging people to do these things. You start to do it,” and he told it to me and to the other clergy, and he kind of loosened my tongue to be able to speak out and get involved in things, and I knew I had his support.

And then I went to Selma, and when I came back from Selma, I was on the board of NAACP for a while. Then, as the Black Power movement began to grow, white people involved in the black issue weren't as acceptable as it once was, so I felt a little bit shut out, and then I had the opportunity to meet with their [Two Cly?], the gay and lesbian weekend retreat, you know about that? They were also White Retreat Center. And Bishop Pike said, I've been invited to this damn thing, he said I don't have time for this, you go, you go for me, you represent me. So I was interested enough to go, and I was very glad I went, because here I met, and there were a dozen clergy and a dozen gays and lesbians including Phyllis and Del, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. I remember going to a walk in the woods with the two of them, we were just chatting about this and that, simple realization, well, these are human beings, you know? They were just human beings, they were fun, and a couple of them were very boring, not Phyllis and Del but some of the other guys, whatever,

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Bill, not very interesting. And others were fascinating, and they began to see that religious community had at least some people within it that were open to understanding what was going on with gays and lesbians. And about the same time, I was invited to preach at Grace Cathedral, and I chose as my topic something about talking to the outcast, I think it was, "Support, sympathy, outcast," and I mentioned, here at the Grace Cathedral, we have many gay men and many lesbian women, but they're not allowed to be out, we can take their money but not their identity and got some vocal publicity, I was on the radio, on the local television, and caused quite a stir. People tried to get rid of me from the Bishop staff, but he was very supportive, he said, well, that's just what you should do. I'm not sure how I -- he said, I don't agree with that, I think homosexuals probably need to get cured or something, I don't think it's natural. Then we talked about it after I came back from that retreat. He was the kind of person who got it, (snaps fingers) like getting a joke. He got it. He said, of course! Of course, it's a civil rights issue, it's a justice issue. Got it like that. And then he became a supporter, and shortly after that, he left. But it was that kind of thing that -- then after that, I just took on. I mean it was wonderful. I always loved it. The people in the Episcopal Church around here, they don't know whether I'm gay or [laughter] straight, but what they did know was I was really promiscuous [laughter], promiscuous straight man at that point. Anyway, that was the tipping point, I think his encouragement, I had been interested and nurtured along the way by a lot of liberal clergy, certainly going to NYU was fabulous, just everybody was on the left, the right side of things. And it was easy, it was just like that, it was natural. I didn't think of it as a big thing. My wife, she wasn't sure whether I was gay or straight, much as I tried to reassure her, by then I was fooling around, so that's another whole issue, but... So it was very exciting, and I was glad to take that role, and I liked it and enjoyed it and tried to stay with it.

01-00:47:53 MEEKER: Did you have any participation with organizations like NAACP prior to coming to San Francisco?

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01-00:48:01 CROMEY: No.

01-00:48:01 MEEKER: No, OK. So your public life in New York was limited to your parish work.

01-00:48:07 CROMEY: Parish. The two parishes, I was totally and completely involved in the parish. I don't think I was involved in any public issue that I can remember in New York. I don't remember writing a letter to the editor or --

01-00:48:24 MEEKER: To what extent were your churches integrated?

01-00:48:31 CROMEY: You know, I would say, there were no African-Americans in Bronxville, suburban town, and there may have been one or two very middle-class black people in the Bronx, I can't remember, but they were of a higher class than most of the white people in the congregation.

01-00:48:56 MEEKER: What about, at that point in time, I don't think the term Latino existed, but what about Spanish, people from Spanish-speaking countries?

01-00:49:05 CROMEY: Not in either of those parishes at that time. That neighborhood now is almost all Hispanic in the Bronx, where I left in '62.

01-00:49:13 MEEKER: And no Asians, I imagine, either?

01-00:49:15 CROMEY: I don't know. I've only been, I drove through one time, walked around the neighborhood.

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01-00:49:20 MEEKER: To what extent were the divisions among old-stock ethnics, or not old-stock ethnics but I guess European ethnics, important? To what extent was it important that one is Welsh versus English versus French in background?

01-00:49:41 CROMEY: That was never part of my history with these (inaudible). They teased each other about being from Ireland or something, but they were all intermarried and I didn't think any of that. I think you might have found that a little more in Catholic parishes. You got the Italians over here, and the Portuguese over here, and a little bit more dancing around, but the Episcopal Church, we take who comes, and we don't have any particular ethnic group that we appeal to, even though it's an Anglican church, it's not particularly English, except for the prayer book, The Way of Worship.

01-00:50:23 MEEKER: With any migration, there's push and pull factors, right? So you describe in your memoir, kind of what was pushing you out of New York, which was these kinds of relationships you were having and wanting to get away from them.

01-00:50:37 CROMEY: Yeah, screwing around. First of all, the Bishop, Bishop Pike, had come out here, he'd come out here in '59.

01-00:50:47 MEEKER: And you knew him in New York.

01-00:50:48 CROMEY: And I had known him in New York. And he was a real hero of mine in New York. I mean, he was just fabulous, and he made the headlines, and he had national television, and he and Fulton Sheen, the Catholics, and Billy Graham, were probably the three most famous clerics in the United States in the late 50s and early 60s, and so he was a real inspirer of me and got me thinking about the media, the use of the media to proclaim the Gospel or good ethics,

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not that I was interested in making people Christians or follow Jesus, but I was interested in social justice, and this was what he was saying that that's what the Gospel is all about. That's what Jesus Christ Ministry is all about, justice for people. And I didn't really learn that, I learned it sort of in the seminary, but pretty conservative in the seminary, and trying to get through and getting ordained, don't want to rock the boat. And so he inspired me to make that connection, to use the media, the way of proclaiming, way of saying things to the world, and to talk about the social and political issues, particularly justice issues that people face, so he was a great inspiration to me in those areas.

01-00:52:16 MEEKER: And so he invited you to come out to San Francisco?

01-00:52:19 CROMEY: Well, I knew I was in trouble in New York because of my fooling around with other people. I'd been in this parish two and a half, three years, I was kind of restless, I'd always been, I was born, raised, educated entirely in New York City, I had an itch to move somewhere else. My wife had a thought about London, thought about California, so I wrote around and wrote to Bishop Pike, and I got an invitation, he said it will be worth your time and my money to come out and take a look at the job of coordinating the churches in the Mission District here. So I came out and I was fleeing, I did a geographic, as they say in AA, to get away from my problems there, but also I was excited about working for him, working in a new city and in a new situation. But no question, a big, probably 75% of that push was my own personal life, it's wreckage [laughter] at that point.

01-00:53:29 MEEKER: So the kind of work that you were invited to do out here, which was, you said, coordinating churches in the Mission District --

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01-00:53:35 CROMEY: Yeah, there are four Episcopal churches in the Mission District. They each their own cleric, and they were all floundering, and I had the reputation of being a tough New Yorker and had urban experience, both in the Church and in my training, so they took the chance. And I had a mild reputation, at least as being kind of outspoken, even though I was not very public on things, and so they invited me, so I lasted eight months, trying to coordinate, and these -- as I said about the ecumenical clergy, the Episcopalians are worse [laughter]. It was just terrible. I couldn't get them -- the only thing we did was to picket together. We all got arrested, and some of us went to Selma together. We ran a summer camp, and that was kind of fun, but the day-in day-out running of the parish, basically I failed at that ministry, not because I didn't... The system didn't work. I had responsibility and no power. I couldn't do anything unless I got them to do it, so then Bishop Pike's assistant at that time became the director of a church in Oakland, and his name was Darby Betts, and Darby said, I think Cromey is -- you know, things aren't going so well in the Mission -- he remembered, he knew him from the New York days -- you can trust him, he's kind of a tough guy, that's the way I was described, and so I got the job. So here I was, 33 years old or something, and I was the assistant to one of the most famous bishops in the country and certainly the Episcopal Church in Grace Cathedral, and now uphill. And so it was very exciting, and what I did there was essentially answer his fan mail. He would get 100 pieces of first- class mail a day because he was on television on race issues, again, birth control, abortion, race, war and peace, the Vietnam War had started, and he was very much for that, and then he changed his mind, he was against it, [laughter] it was wonderful. It was wonderful, stimulating time.

01-00:55:58 MEEKER: I read, with interest, the work that you did in responding to his mail. And it would have been very interesting to talk about those issues in a religious context at that point in time when there seemed to be a big cultural shift going

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on. Do you have any idea if that correspondence exists, still? Did you keep copies of the letters you wrote out?

01-00:56:25 CROMEY: My understanding is that all of Bishop Pike's letters, which would have included the copies of anything I wrote and the original letters, are at the University of Syracuse. All his papers are there, I'm told, and there must have been a ton of them.

01-00:56:45 MEEKER: Did you keep an archive of your own work?

01-00:56:50 CROMEY: No, I did not. Really, once I got on my desk, I would sign his name for God's sakes. People have letters from my signature. I never saw that correspondence again, no.

01-00:57:06 MEEKER: When you say you were an assistant, and I know you described most of your work was responding to this correspondence, this fan mail, but you also describe it in kind of an exalted sense, like this was a big deal. I guess what did it mean to be an assistant to the Bishop of California, was that the title?

01-00:57:32 CROMEY: Well, the most exciting part, really, was being involved with the Bishop or with the Bishop's instigation in social and political issues, since I've been awakened to that kind of ministry. That was very exciting to have his support. And a lot of thinking went into answering these letters. I got tired of it after a while because I didn't get ordained to answer the mail. And so having to think about those things and reading his thoughts. He'd throw a book at me and say, oh it is something on abortion. He was very -- I imitate him because that's the way he was, very quick and jumpy. And intellectually very stimulating. He'd have Congressmen in and State Senators, so I'd meet all kinds of people. I met Martin Luther King through him, I remember the editor of the Atlantic Constitution came through and we had dinner at the Bishop's house, and it

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was all kinds of that kind of celebrity stuff, which was kind of fun. I hate it now, I absolutely will not go anywhere like that, political rally or anything. But being around him, just being around him, he was so interesting and thoughtful, always a million ideas and throwing them around and thinking about all kinds of things, got very interested in Christian origins and how did the Church really begin? And where, and what were the circumstances? And as I think I say in the book, but he was an alcoholic, and part of my job was to make sure he got home safely and hide the bottles or make sure that this didn't get out. He got involved with various women, and my job was to try to protect him as much as possible. That, of course, is exciting in itself, kind of intriguing. And, of course, I was getting involved, I was involved with women out here, so it kind of fit into my own personal problems as well. We could about here, I could talk to my Bishop about screwing around. You can't do that with most Bishops, and it was exalted, no question about it. It was very, very exciting.

01-01:00:05 MEEKER: Did you have ambitions, at this point, to sort of move up in the church hierarchy?

01-01:00:09 CROMEY: Yes, I thought it'll be great to be a Bishop. And then, two things happened. Bishop Pike said, you know, I get awfully tired of going to a church on Sunday and confirming all these children. He says, the Roman Catholics have a (inaudible) pastor does that, they don't have the Bishop do that. He didn't like that kind of administrative stuff of raising money and going to endless meetings with, he used to say, my wife goes to the socialites. I like to go to the media, but he'd have to go to the socialite stuff, he hated that. He was charming and he'd do it, but he much preferred the media people and bouncing ideas, and also intellectual, he had, God, professors and idea people, not novelists so much but historians come in and talk, sponsoring lectures and things like that, so that, where was I? I forgot.

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Begin Audio File 2 Cromey_Robert2_02-12-2007.wav

02-00:00:09 MEEKER: All right, so we're back on again. I actually just have a point of clarification. At this point in time, when I see published accounts refer to you, they describe you as Canon Cromey. Was that a particular title?

02-00:00:28 CROMEY: Yeah, when I worked for Bishop Pike, I had my offices where Grace Cathedral is, and because I was called Executive Assistant to the Bishop, I was a Canon of Grace Cathedral. Because I was on the Bishop staff, I got that title. And a Canon literally means the law, one lives under the law or under a rule, and there are Canons in the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. I don't think they use that here, but a Canon is usually an assistant clergyperson in a cathedral or usually connected to the Bishop who has access to the cathedral. So while I was his assistant, I was Canon Cromey, and then when I went off, when I no longer was his assistant, I moved to St. Aidan's Church full-time, then I no longer should use that, people used to call me that from time to time.

02-00:01:44 MEEKER: But it had to do with a particular position at a cathedral.

02-00:01:47 CROMEY: Yeah.

02-00:01:49 MEEKER: OK, so the period of time you were working to try to assemble the churches in the Mission District, were you participating in any of the civil rights activism in San Francisco at that point in time?

02-00:02:04 CROMEY: Yes, it was during that time that four clergy and some of the laypeople joined the picketing on Auto Row.

02-00:02:17 MEEKER: Well, you had never picketed before, right?

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02-00:02:22 CROMEY: I don't think I ever had, no.

02-00:02:24 MEEKER: How was it then that -- were you invited, was this something that you pursued on your own, I kind of wonder because for a lot of people, that's a big step to take.

02-00:02:33 CROMEY: It was, I remember. [laughter] We got kinda scared.

02-00:02:35 MEEKER: Especially if it results in getting arrested, which is another big step that a lot of people who are making public stands don't want to go that next step. That's a pretty substantial move to make.

02-00:02:49 CROMEY: I think my impression was that we were invited by NAACP and/or CORE. They knew that we had a team of clergy here, and I think they'd gotten in touch with us, and we said, well, should we do this, should we support this, and one of the churches had a number of black people, they were all for it, they wanted us to go for it. Interestingly enough --

02-00:03:15 MEEKER: One of the Mission Churches?

02-00:03:17 CROMEY: Yeah, one of the Mission, St. Barnabas, which is no longer -- that's the one that's closed now. It was interesting enough that the one almost completely black church, an Episcopal ch- (break in tape) Cyprian's didn't participate at all because these were middle-class blacks, they were well educated

02-00:03:38 MEEKER: What church was it?

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02-00:03:39 CROMEY: St. Cyprian's, it was called. It's out on, yeah that avenue, I can't think of it. But anyway, that's how they recruited us, and so we went to the -- I think I just went, got on the picket line and went. And we may, I don't remember even having particular instruction about going in and getting arrested, we sort of, I don't know, I don't remember [laughter] how we got to know, we knew it was nonviolent, we knew that if we got arrested, it was a kind of dance we did, we had a lawyer alerted. Some of the clergy went limp, I did not, I walked out with the policeman, who years later sent me a picture of him and me. About five years ago, he said, I've been long retired, but I've had this picture. I think you probably like to have it [laughter].

02-00:04:38 MEEKER: Do you remember the policeman's name?

02-00:04:40 CROMEY: I don't remember his name. I'll see if I can find the picture.

02-00:04:47 MEEKER: Going limp had the connotation of resisting arrest?

02-00:04:51 CROMEY: Kind of in between. If you go limp, you're not resisting arrest, but then they have to carry you. And some of us thought that puts the police at risk, they'd have to carry people of different weights, and so anyways, some did, and some didn't. And they put me in the paddy wagon with movie actor Sterling Hayden, he and I, (inaudible), but yeah, it was a big step. And the second one, I have a nice picture of the second one. I think we went to three in all, and we were arrested on the third one. And one of them, when I was babysitting my daughter, I have a picture of my daughter with me in that. Have you seen that picture somewhere?

02-00:05:36 MEEKER: No, I haven't seen that.

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02-00:05:36 CROMEY: I have one, it's really nice. She's 50 years old now, the little girl. Again, it's like the question of getting involved in the movement. It was just the next step. That's what you do next. And it was after that that Martin Luther King made a call for the clergy to call to Selma, Alabama, and they got beat up at the bridge. The march was there, and the same group all went to Selma together with Cecil Williams, who was probably the most famous of our contingent, that was of his later ministry.

02-00:06:13 MEEKER: And he only recently arrived in San Francisco.

02-00:06:16 CROMEY: Yeah, he had just arrived, yeah. He was kind of --

02-00:06:20 MEEKER: Did his reputation precede him when he arrived?

02-00:06:24 CROMEY: Oh, no, no. He grew in his fame in here. No, he was -- I guess he got to the Glide Church staff, they were probably looking for a black person to be there, and he got involved. He began to roll in his fame until he became pastor of the Glide Church, and that was probably in the late 60s. It must have been there in the 60s because I remember going there. It was late 60s or early 70s, I remember going there from time to time in the 70s.

02-00:07:00 MEEKER: What did you know of Glide at this point in time when you were just getting involved in the movement?

02-00:07:07 CROMEY: What did I know of it then? Well, lot of these dates merge together in my mind, but the Glide people, Lewis Durham and some of those leaders began to talk to me, I guess it was when we went to that meeting. They put together that meeting, I went to that meeting, and I got interested --

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02-00:07:34 MEEKER: That consultation, right?

02-00:07:36 CROMEY: Yeah, the consultation. And it was after that. Then they threw Glide's sponsorship. They pulled together various leaders, gay and lesbian and clergy to found the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and I was part of that founding group. Sat around and drew up the by-laws. And so that's where they got involved, and they had this grant for young adult work, and the head of the -- I think it was Ted McIlvenna -- said that well, young adults are gay people, and gay people need the ministry of the church, we have some money, let's do something about it. He was really wonderful. They had some resources, and I was glad to go along, I saw it as, again, my church wasn't doing anything about it, and I had [laughter] both the balls and the time to do it, I guess.

02-00:08:32 MEEKER: So before, I know that this consultation was end of May, early June, 1964, which was, from I remember correctly, about the same time that there was some resolution of the Auto Row and the hotel protests, and one of the things that was done to resolve this, this was just as Mayor Shelley, I think he was still mayor at this point in time, established the Human Rights Commission in San Francisco.

02-00:09:19 CROMEY: Is that when it was? I don't remember that.

02-00:09:22 MEEKER: You don't recall -- you didn't have any interaction with that (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)?

02-00:09:26 CROMEY: No, I think one of the members was the Dean of Grace Cathedral, his name was Julian Bartlett, I know he was on it for a long time.

02-00:09:33 MEEKER: What does it mean to be the Dean of Grace Cathedral?

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02-00:09:35 CROMEY: He was the chief pastor of the Cathedral. The Bishop is sort of the pastor, but he appoints a Dean, and again, it's one of those old English terms, and I think it probably comes out of a Roman background, I'm not sure of that. So he's the chief pastor of the Cathedral, he essentially runs that. The Bishop was going around to different churches on the weeks. Bishop Pike used to preach the first Sunday of the month at Grace Cathedral. Packed the place, packed it, it was wonderful.

02-00:10:07 MEEKER: But Bartlett was --

02-00:10:10 CROMEY: Bartlett was the Dean. He was the regular preacher and the regular pastor on the congregation.

02-00:10:16 MEEKER: Did you have any interaction with him?

02-00:10:18 CROMEY: Yeah, he hated me [laughter]. No, he didn't hate me, but oh, he just thought I was... See, I was the Canon of the Cathedral. So in some sense, I was technically under him, so when I got involved in the gay rights stuff and in the black rights stuff, I was being addressed as Canon Cromey as part of Grace Cathedral. And he began to say, well you shouldn't lend your name to things where the Cathedral might be named, and I said, you're not my boss, the Bishop is -- that kind of -- and he was just trying to... And he was really a good man, and a good liberal, but he had to keep the peace with the well-to- do, so I remember one time, he said he wanted before I made any action, any social or political action with my publicity, I'd have to clear it with him and his staff, and I said, will you do the same if you're going to the Debutante Ball and have your picture taken? Will you clear it with your staff? He said, well, that's different. So there was kind of that kind of thing, kind of snotty action. And then, I left to go to St. Aidan's Church, and it became moot after that, and

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we were relatively friendly. But after I left, being up the offices here, I had very little contact with them anymore. I became more of a parish priest.

02-00:11:56 MEEKER: Well, if memory serves, he was the chair, certainly a prominent member of the Human Rights Commission throughout the 1960s, and so that organization in that period of time really focused on racism and racial equality. I don't know, there's just these different strains in the 1960s, and it seems that he sort of went along that same path maybe that you were initially headed on, which was kind of liberal racial equality, NAACP, and working with the city government to ensure equality of opportunity and those sorts of issues. But it seems that you kind of veered off the path.

02-00:12:49 CROMEY: Yeah, I think that yeah.

02-00:12:50 MEEKER: Or is it the same thing?

02-00:12:52 CROMEY: Well, the analogy I use, in order to bring about social change, there has to be a lot of pressure from a lot of different sides. And I think that Julian Bartlett and the Human Rights Commission, they were there and could be in a position to help shape the laws, get the Board of Supervisors to make laws and that kind of thing, but without the kind of radical pressure that we could put on with the media and getting arrested, they would never have acted. I mean, I remember we picketed the Bank of America on the same issue, and an acquaintance of mine was a lawyer for the Bank of America, he was an Episcopalian. And he said, you know, Cromey, if you guys hadn't put that pressure on us on the street, we would have never changed the hiring policies, never, because status quo, it was going along fine, but you embarrassed us in public. You made us make a change, and so that would be, I think, an important differences in the ways liberals worked. Some worked within the established order of things and some of us were the noisemakers, where they put kind of pressure on,

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embarrassed organizations and the Church to do something, to get involved in things. And I still think that -- I still try to do that, I've done that all along. Julian Bartlett said, Cromey, trouble with you is you're a lone ego, you don't work within the system, and I said, that's right. I work with the other guys, the only guys in those guys in those days that were involved on street ministry, ministry to make the change on that level, and you can't imagine the Dean of Grace Cathedral would have started something like the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, but once the Council got started, then Human Rights Commission and the Church said, well, we got to take this homosexual stuff seriously. Anyway, that's the way I look at it, I may be wrong, but that's the sense I have. You got to push on this level, liberals, radicals on this level, and then it pushes the other levels to make change.

02-00:15:15 MEEKER: Did you ever have much interaction with the Council of Churches in San Francisco?

02-00:15:20 CROMEY: Not much, when I first came here, they were very nice, and I remember that guy's name was Smith, he was the head of it. (inaudible)

02-00:15:29 MEEKER: Do you know what denomination he was?

02-00:15:31 CROMEY: I think he was a United Church of Christ Congregationalist, but he was the head of the head of the Council of Churches. Left wing, us radicals said, they don't do anything. They sit around and pass resolutions and make nice, but they depended on money from each of the local churches, so they couldn't do very much, and they finally went out of business, I think in the 70s. They disappeared, I don't think it exists anymore. What I was saying earlier, you can't get the denominations to cooperate very well. The idea of cooperation is lovely, but when it comes down to pushing and shoving, then everybody wants to protect their own marbles.

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02-00:16:18 MEEKER: I've kind of always wondered about that, and this is just a suspicion, but I think particularly in this day and age, a member of an Episcopalian church may not have a clear idea of how and why they differ from Lutherans or Baptists or Presbyterians.

02-00:16:37 CROMEY: Absolutely true. The whole idea of denominational boundaries is almost entirely disappeared. My own daughter lives in Litchfield, Connecticut, the nice church in town up the street was the Congregationalist, United Church of Christ, so she and her husband went there, and had their kid -- I guess I baptized the kid but -- Sunday School. There was an Episcopal church, but it was a little further away, and very common nowadays. Very close friends of mine when I was at St. Aidan's, they moved back to Minneapolis and they're very involved in the area, United Church of Christ, I think, and very common. Not too much with Roman Catholics, Roman Catholic laypeople -- that's not true, a lot of Roman Catholics convert to other denominations, we have a lot of gay people who were Roman Catholic became Episcopalians at Trinity. One guy was Jesuit for 13 years and just realized he couldn't hide anymore, and he was wonderful. He finally died of AIDS about 10 years ago, but by and large -- and my wife teaches at a girl's Catholic school, all the faculty are Catholic, none of them go to Church, and they wouldn't think of becoming members of Lutherans or Episcopalians. Some do, but not many. It's not a windfall. But denominational boundaries are almost, almost completely gone. It's very good. That's probably the way the ecumenical movement is going work the best because people don't care about that stuff. It's the stuff, what is the Doctrine of the Holy Communion, what is that Doctrine of the Trinity. I don't even give a shit about that, I mean, historically, I know about it, but it's not affecting my day-in day-out life.

02-00:18:28 MEEKER: Well, it also seems that there's maybe a lessening importance of mainline Protestant denominations in the face of nondenominational churches,

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Evangelical churches that are one-offs or maybe a member of loosely of some sort of confederation.

02-00:18:53 CROMEY: I'm not quite clear your point, or was I supposed to respond to it?

02-00:18:58 MEEKER: No, I just waited to see if there was a response or not. I came across actually an article, I believe from Time Magazine from 1963, that talked about some of your work, and this must have been in the context of maybe your work in the Mission District, '63, I don't know if you were at St. Aidan's yet.

02-00:19:20 CROMEY: It was in Newsweek, and as I recollect, it was having to do with my being involved in the gay rights stuff.

02-00:19:32 MEEKER: Well, no, there was one in Newsweek on gay rights, but there was actually one in Time Magazine that looked, it was talking about the problem of the inter- city church and the changing demographics.

02-00:19:44 CROMEY: My name was connected to it?

02-00:19:45 MEEKER: Yeah, you were interviewed in it. Actually, I've probably got a copy of it somewhere around here.

02-00:19:52 CROMEY: I remember being interviewed by Time Magazine, and far as I know, I never knew that it was printed.

02-00:19:59 MEEKER: Yeah, here it is. I mean this is a --

02-00:20:02 CROMEY: Well, let me take a look. Maybe I'll see if it'll clear up my mind.

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02-00:20:07 MEEKER: Well, it's a rather long article, so let me fast forward to the spot that you're being interviewed in. It's basically, like I said, it's about the challenges facing inner-city churches, and so, it says, of the Mission District Presbytery, so --

02-00:20:27 CROMEY: Presbytery, yeah, they called it a Presbytery.

02-00:20:29 MEEKER: Last paragraph down there.

02-00:20:52 CROMEY: (long pause) I never saw this. (pause) Funny. April, 1963. That would have been one year after I came here. I usually like to say, I came on payroll of the diocese on April Fool's Day in 1962, so this is -- I remember a long interview, God, they must have talked to me for hours on the telephone, and I must have... Well, it's not like me to miss that because I'm very interested in publicity, especially if my name's mentioned, and so, anyway, good, I'm glad.

02-00:21:40 MEEKER: But what they're talking about in there, talks about this idea of starting kind of a storefront church or starting ways to begin to minister to minority populations in a way that they would be more used to, or be more like in their vernacular, I guess.

02-00:22:02 CROMEY: The idea of the storefront church, for instance, was that in Hunters Point in those days, there was no Episcopal church, so the idea was to get a way to gather people together, and we thought that people would come and we would have worship services and get to know the neighborhood and that kind of thing, and I tried to get the local parishes here to crack the neighborhood, as we called it. But it was totally unrealistic, I mean, first of all, the Episcopal Church Liturgy, like the Catholic Liturgy, takes a bit of getting used to. You don't just set up shop in the neighborhood and start saying mass and expect people to come or become interested, especially a lot of the black people,

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Baptists, Methodists, from poor congregations, and they have this fancy worship with fancy vestments, it was stupid. We didn't know what we were doing, we really didn't. The Evangelicals have been studying how to grow churches since the 60s, and now, there's a huge literature on church growth, how to grow a church, and how to make your church grow, and that's one of the things that I did at Trinity for twenty years, following a lot of those examples, and why I specialized in gays and lesbians. It occurred to me, when I went there in 1982, whenever it was, every Episcopal church wants to minister to husbands, wives, and 2.3 children, just like every Catholic church, every Lutheran church, every Methodist church, doesn't work. And my idea was to specialize, to have a group that wasn't being ministered to. I'd had enough contact by then with gays and lesbians, I was known in the -- I would give some talks and write letters to the editors and stuff, and invite gay people to come, and lot did, enough to make the Church kind of quite viable until AIDS hit, and that was a very good way to grow a church. But, so by then, you see, that idea of specializing and advertising and going into a neighborhood seeking like-minded people, which meant a lot of gay men, particularly, have educations, many have interests in the arts, many have kind of middle-class, upper middle-class values, so the Episcopal Church could appeal to that, especially if there was a socially relevant sermon, and that's what I was able to do then, but to do that in the Mission District in '63, we didn't know what we were doing. We had no idea of specializing, yeah, we want more black people, what does that mean? What kind of black people? How would you get them there? What would attract them to an Episcopal service? We didn't ask those kind of questions. We ask those kind of questions now. So that's why, that's the other reason it failed because really, we didn't have any real methodology, and to get people to cooperate, we only got the cooperation was on the civil rights movement, which was good in itself, but it didn't grow the Church, it didn't help the Church really minister to the neighborhood.

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02-00:25:22 MEEKER: What was the motivation to go into the neighborhood to begin with?

02-00:25:27 CROMEY: I was asked to help these churches grow, which meant more people, which of course meant more money, which they all needed, and also to find a way to minister to the particular group of people in Hunters Point. So that was what I was trying to coordinate these clergy to do, and we were trying to make the Church relevant to the neighborhood. But we didn't know who was in the neighborhood, we didn't know enough about the different kinds of people that were in the neighborhood, and even in the 60s, in the Mission District, you don't only have Hispanics, you got Nicaraguans, and Mexicans, and Bolivians, and Peruvians, and they don't even talk to each other. They're not just Spanish-speaking. We had no sophistication. Now, if we were going to start a mission down there, to who, to whom, the Peruvians, or the Mexicans? So that's why it failed. Because it was a good idea, we worked with other churches, there were Presbyterians involved and Methodists, but we didn't really have a methodology, we didn't know what we were doing.

02-00:26:40 MEEKER: To what extent was the Hunters Point neighborhood targeted as part of the broader Civil Rights agenda because I can't imagine that a church would go into that neighborhood thinking, oh, we're going to be able to maybe expand the number of congregants, but not really expect a financial return on that.

02-00:26:59 CROMEY: There was money for that, the diocese gave us some money for that, and I think the idea was we have a duty to minister to black people who are being ministered to by the Church. I think it was very altruistic and very genuine, I don't think we would have to convert them so that they would be saved or any of that, that's not our theology. But it was part of the whole system, to minister to people that were poor, who were lacking justice, lacking education, I think that was the real motivation, but we didn't know how to do it. It wasn't as if you went in and set up a school, where you could say, OK, everybody in the

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first time that would like to can come to our school. Church is different from that, and so it was just as I say, kind of naïve on our part.

02-00:27:51 MEEKER: So it wasn't really like a joint project with NAACP to help with uplift or anything along the lines.

02-00:27:58 CROMEY: As I said, it only lasted about a year.

02-00:28:03 MEEKER: Let's see here, so I think, for the rest of the half hour today, I want to focus on the CRH. I know that you provided a little introduction to it. From what I could tell, that sermon you gave at Grace Cathedral was probably in 1963, so if that's correct, that would have preceded your involvement in CRH.

02-00:28:28 CROMEY: That's right, that's right, I think it was in August, I remember it was in the summer because they had to reach down to the bottom of the barrel to get preachers for those Sundays. That would be right.

02-00:28:45 MEEKER: And so what motivated you to speak about this? Had you had previous experience hearing people talk publicly about this?

02-00:28:54 CROMEY: No, in my parish in the Bronx, I told you about the boy and the choirmaster. Previous director before me apparently was bisexual, he was married and had kids. And his father was an FBI man, and his father found out that his son was gay, and he persecuted his son and got the Bishop to get him out of there as director, and I thought that was so unjust and so awful. Again, I still had the idea that there was something wrong with them, but the injustice of that, it was no indication that he had done anything wrong or hurt anybody or even sexual with anybody except his wife, presumably. From what I gathered, it

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was not a very happy marriage, but that happens, so I remember that sense of injustice with Charles was very strong.

02-00:29:54 MEEKER: Not to mention the discrimination of a son by the father.

02-00:29:58 CROMEY: Right, and that was at the same time. When I was in Bronxville in the suburban town, a man came to me and he told me he was gay, and he was in therapy, and I said to the director, who later became a Bishop elsewhere. And I said, well, (pause) I didn't know what to say so I said, well, I guess it's OK as long as you're in therapy, you're working on it and I hope you can be happy here in the Church, and this is just the way you are. And I remember the Bishop saying, or the director saying, that was a good answer. He said, he couldn't understand, he said, being gay isn't such a bad thing. That's all he said. Very simple, he was older and wiser, and I gathered, I knew that later, later on, I found out that one of his very, very best friends was gay and also a Bishop, but I didn't know that then. Dr. Barrett knew that. So there was that kind of cumulative thing and, well, you probably figured that I liked to take chances and do some things unusually and in an unusual way, and I figured that would be pretty unusual thing to say. And a chance to say it in Grace Cathedral, a couple hundred people there on a Sunday morning, I forgot how it got the publicity, I don't think I sent anything out on it, but anyway, there was, I mentioned, a following of a lot of publicity. I think it was just part of my daring do, and that I think it seemed to be an issue that nobody ever talked about, and it was a chance to talk about it. It wasn't something I felt terribly passionate about at the time, but it was a way to create a fuss.

02-00:31:56 MEEKER: From the written accounts of it, it sounded like you talked about it in the context of outsiders and appreciating outcasts and something like that. And during that point in time, there was this kind of, in sociology for instance, discussion of the deviant, and there would be a ways in which various deviant

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groups were sort of talked about, and there was this kind of plea for tolerance behind it, it wasn't -- it was recognizing them as outcasts, and what they mean to society, and they would talk about alcoholics, homosexuals, people who go to pool halls, that sort of thing, right? To what extent did your sermon kind of link homosexuals with other outcasts, or was that the prime archetype you were dealing with, as far as defining an outcast?

02-00:32:59 CROMEY: (pause) It sounds like it, but I can't honestly say that I remember that this being in the air that you're talking about. I don't really remember that. I think it popped into my head as I was preparing the sermon, that here was an outcast group, I'm sure I probably had included blacks, never occurred to me that women were an outcast group at that time. Yeah, I don't, it may have been in the air, but I don't remember it being in the air. And you know, I would read the papers and read magazines, so I could very well have been reading some of this stuff, but I don't remember linking it.

02-00:33:46 MEEKER: Now, you had mentioned the reason that you went to this Mill Valley Retreat in the summer of 1964, was that Bishop Pike was invited and he'd deferred to you, or not deferred to you but said that you should go in his stead.

02-00:34:02 CROMEY: He ordered me to go.

02-00:34:04 MEEKER: He ordered you to go? OK.

02-00:34:06 CROMEY: Well, in the way Episcopalians order each other, said, I would like you to do that.

02-00:34:09 MEEKER: How did you feel about this?

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02-00:34:12 CROMEY: I was quite excited, actually. I thought that this is real, I was a little scared. I remembered being a little scared, first, but I thought it was a good idea. I was kind of interested and excited by it. I think I was a little frightened that something might happen to me, or I'd get attacked or something like that. And I remember being immediately comfortable, maybe just the way it was all handled, I never had anything but relaxed and fun, and we all told our stories, and I was very moved by some of the stories, some of the brutality and stuff that had happened to people, and just the gross injustice of it all, just turned my stomach.

02-00:35:05 MEEKER: Prior to going to this, had you had any encounter or knowledge of the gay rights movement or the gay rights organizations in San Francisco, like the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society?

02-00:35:21 CROMEY: I really don't remember which came first. I really don't.

02-00:35:28 MEEKER: This meeting, this weekend has always fascinated me. I feel, to see like a dozen clergy members and a dozen leaders of the gay community, I mean this is really historic first, in probably all of [laughter] human history, right, for something like this to happen? And I haven't ever really read any good accounts of what the weekend was like from individual perspectives. I have a list here of the people who participated and I have the agenda for the weekend itself, and in the time that we have left, I'm wondering if we can kind of go through this, to the best that you can remember.

02-00:36:16 CROMEY: Yeah, right, [laughter] I'll do my best, sure.

02-00:36:18 MEEKER: The way that I've, in doing my professional work, and oral history has a lot to do with memory, and I've found that sometimes, it's more difficult for people

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to remember generally, but if they can kind of focus on specific events, while there's a chance that they can misremember things, there's also an opportunity to remember things a little more concretely, so maybe we can talk about some of the individual people who were there as best as you can remember. And actually I just want to start with an absence, and ask you if there was any conversation about this. And that's that I don't see one makes sense, and one makes less sense, and I don't see any representatives, any Catholic representatives or any Jewish representatives. Was there any conversation about that missing component, or those two missing components, as part of the --

02-00:37:24 CROMEY: Not that I remember.

02-00:37:25 MEEKER: OK, because I know it makes more sense there wouldn't have been Catholics because of the very hierarchical nature and how that could have put individual's positions at jeopardy, but I know, in San Francisco, there was and still is a very prominent liberal Jewish tradition. People like Al Fine --

02-00:37:47 CROMEY: Right, I was just thinking of him, yeah.

02-00:37:49 MEEKER: -- or Earl Raab, who wasn't a Rabbi but was very involved in inner-faith dialogue. You don't recall any discussion of these people being absent at this?

02-00:38:01 CROMEY: No.

02-00:38:03 MEEKER: I sort of think, later on, Al Fine was brought in to participate with CRH? Do you remember any Jewish participation later on?

02-00:38:12 CROMEY: I really don't.

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02-00:38:14 MEEKER: OK, Bill Black, who was a Lutheran minister, the founder of the San Francisco Night Ministry, do you remember him?

02-00:38:23 CROMEY: Bill Black? I don't think that's accurate. Bill --

02-00:38:29 MEEKER: I got this off the Web, so it's possible [laughter] it's not accurate.

02-00:38:33 CROMEY: The San Francisco Night Minister, let's see, what was his name? I was one of the initial founders of the Night Ministry, on that board, and there was a guy, who I think was at that conference, but I don't know the name Bill Black, means nothing to me

02-00:39:00 MEEKER: Roger Burgess, who, you don't know that name?

02-00:39:02 CROMEY: No. What did he do?

02-00:39:04 MEEKER: That one says -- I should have gotten an original document for this because I can't vouch for its entire accuracy, but it says he was a Methodist and it says he was on their board of Christian Social Concerns, but it says D.C., and I don't know if it was then or now.

02-00:39:21 CROMEY: Yeah, don't remember him at all.

02-00:39:24 MEEKER: And then there's Cromey, [laughter], you, and Lewis Durham --

02-00:39:28 CROMEY: I remember Lewis very well.

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02-00:39:30 MEEKER: -- who was at Glide, and I see a lot of Methodists on here. What do you suppose the reason was for the dominance of Methodists?

02-00:39:39 CROMEY: I wouldn't be surprised if the Glide Foundation paid for it. I wouldn't be at all surprised because was Ted McIlvenna there?

02-00:39:49 MEEKER: Yeah.

02-00:39:50 CROMEY: I'm pretty sure that he was in charge of the Young Adult Project of the Methodist Church in this area, and he had Glide money for this Young Adult Project. And he and his board, Methodists always have a board, apparently decided to do work on the gay and lesbian issue as a part of that ministry, and I'm almost, I would bet you that they paid for it because I don't remember paying for it, I think. (pause) Back up one step. Do you remember Phil Burton's involvement in the establishment of connecting the gay and lesbian movement to the clergy, to the Church?

02-00:40:46 MEEKER: Why don't you tell me about it?

02-00:40:49 CROMEY: You know who he is?

02-00:40:51 MEEKER: Yeah.

02-00:40:52 CROMEY: I think, then he was in the state capital, I think he was in the Assembly, and this is the way I remembered, and I think I got it from Phyllis and Del. They told me that they were consulting with him on how to get some political clout, something like that, and he said, according to her, to them, get in touch in those kind of left-wing or radical clerics, that they're very interested in relating

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to the City, and they might be of help to you. That's the way I remembered it. Now, my bet is they went and talked to Ted McIlvenna, who probably -- I don't know which came first but my bet is they got together and talked about it. And again, I'm pretty sure that it was Ted and Lewis and the Methodist group got together and said we should have this conference. Very typically Methodist, you do everything by conference. They don't make a (inaudible) about anything without having a meeting. I mean it's a very good, in this case, use of the ideas. That would be my bet as to how it came about and why they were mostly Methodist because I would bet they had a hell with them getting people to come to this, (pause) the clergy I mean.

02-00:42:36 MEEKER: OK, so let's see, there was Lew Durham, Donald Kuhn, did you know much about either of these two?

02-00:42:47 CROMEY: Well, Lewis, I know. He died just a couple of years ago. Very amiable, kind of low-key kind of guy. And I think he was one of the assistant pastors of Glide Church at that time. I know he became very interested later on with the outfit that Ted McIlvenna founded about this National Sex Forum or whatever it's called now, and I know he was very much involved in that until he retired.

02-00:43:25 MEEKER: Do you remember if any of the clergy who attended were gay?

02-00:43:31 CROMEY: I didn't know then, but I'm trying to think. The Lutheran, do you got a Lutheran minister on there?

02-00:43:46 MEEKER: Who was that? Well, this guy, Bill Black, supposedly, but you didn't recognize his name.

02-00:43:54 CROMEY: Is he a Lutheran, no?

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02-00:43:55 MEEKER: Yeah, it says Lutheran.

02-00:43:59 CROMEY: Oh, what's his (pause) --

02-00:44:02 MEEKER: The other was also this guy, well, there are a couple people who later became involved that didn't go to the meeting, like Fred Bird, I remember.

02-00:44:12 CROMEY: Yeah, Fred Bird, I remember him. Again, I think just a kind of very soft- spoken but solid, liberal radical, interested in the cause. As far as I know, he was a married man, doesn't mean he's not gay, I know, but I never knew that he was gay.

02-00:44:30 MEEKER: There was also, I don't know, I can't remember right now. So there was one clergyman who was, but at the time, you didn't know, I guess.

02-00:44:43 CROMEY: You want to let me look at the list?

02-00:44:45 MEEKER: Yeah. (pause)

02-00:44:58 CROMEY: Geez. Kilmer Myers, was he there? Geez, I don't even remember.

02-00:45: 07 MEEKER: He was Episcopal, yes?

02-00:45:08 CROMEY: Yeah, I knew him. OK, there's nobody on here, except C. Kilmer Myers, who is bisexual. And I only know that because a member of my parish at Trinity said that he and the Bishop had sex with each other, so --

02-00:45:27 MEEKER: Interesting.

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02-00:45:29 CROMEY: And I know he had a very unhappy kind of life, was alcoholic and a great man in many ways, he was very outspoken and very solid on black rights. He adopted two Korean children and raised them.

02-00:45:46 MEEKER: Was he married?

02-00:45:47 CROMEY: He got married later on, but he was a bachelor for a long time.

02-00:45:50 MEEKER: So he was the Bishop, does that mean he followed Pike?

02-00:45:52 CROMEY: He was the Bishop-elect. No, that's not right. That's not right because he didn't become Bishop until 1968, so if this is '63, I don't think he was at that meeting.

02-00:46:09 MEEKER: Sixty-four. Oh, you don't think, so you don't think this list is --

02-00:46:12 CROMEY: But again (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) --

02-00:46:15 MEEKER: Well, I can do the research and look more closely.

02-00:46:19 CROMEY: I'll tell you for sure, he was not Bishop-elect in 1963. He may have been at the Urban Training Center in (inaudible) by then.

02-00:46:29 MEEKER: Well, there was, also it says Orville Luster attended.

02-00:46:32 CROMEY: Yeah, Orville Luster was a black guy, who was not a minister, but he had a wonderful, wonderful -- I wonder if he's still alive.

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02-00:46:39 MEEKER: No, he just died last year.

02-00:46:40 CROMEY: He did, yeah. I ran into him in a restaurant about 10 years ago, had a wonderful kind of reunion, but he was very interested in youth and may have been a Methodist, by the way, and I think that was why he was there. He was the only black member that I can remember

02-00:46:59 MEEKER: Do you recall, I would have to have interviewed him about this --

02-00:47:04 CROMEY: Youth for Service was the name of his organization, Youth for Service.

02-00:47:08 MEEKER: Which was Hunters Point sort of thing, right? You know, because I'm very interested in the perspective that African-Americans would have of this new group, not entirely made of white people but predominantly white people seeking recognition of minorities. Did you get a sense of how he responded to this notion within this group?

02-00:47:33 CROMEY: The only thing that I could possibly say about him was that he was very accepting and very sure, probably either already was very accepting of gay people or got it like I did at that time.

02-00:47:53 MEEKER: Let's see here, what do you remember of Ted McIlvenna?

02-00:47:57 CROMEY: Oh, I'd known Ted since before that, actually. Ted McIlvenna has never finished an entire sentence in his life. He has that wonderful way of speaking that he just goes from one thought to the other, where did I go? (gibberish) I loved to hear him speak, he was always wonderful. He had a wonderful mind, but I have trouble following him sometimes. I think he really pushed the

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Methodist Church's buttons on sexual issues and certainly on this issue. I think he was a powerful leader in getting things done in the Methodist Church, using the Methodist polity in the way of doing it. I have great respect for him, and he was the one who asked me to do this kind of a thing for his National Sex Forum, where they give a Ph.D. in sexology, this was years ago.

02-00:48:55 MEEKER: The Institute.

02-00:48:57 CROMEY: So I just think the world of him. We never really got close, but I think we always respected each other. I think I'm a little more radical in terms of being outspoken in public, but he, on the other hand, worked large meetings and sexology meetings and things like that, and do, I guess, very good work, helped develop all those films that they make.

02-00:49:24 MEEKER: So John Moore, do you recall him?

02-00:49:27 CROMEY: Just the name.

02-00:49:29 MEEKER: I think he was the lead pastor at Glide before Cecil, maybe.

02-00:49:35 CROMEY: Could be, I don't remember. (pause)

02-00:49:44 MEEKER: Yeah, I didn't realize there were a lot of these people from outside of the Bay Area, which is rather interesting. Well, so maybe you can tell me about some of your interaction with the activists who were there, you said that this is the first time you met Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon?

02-00:50:01 CROMEY: Yeah.

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02-00:50:05 MEEKER: What is your recollection of the circumstances of meeting them?

02-00:50:14 CROMEY: Well, just that they seemed like a very interesting and kind of amusing -- I don't know if they told the story then, they told it a thousand times, Del realized she was lesbian and she thought she was supposed to be butch, and she realized she didn't realize she didn't really like to be butch, but it was very hard for her not to be [laughter]. (inaudible) She tells that on herself, it's amusing. Just, I always found both of them very amiable and pleasant to be with, just sitting down, having a chat, and I think the thing that I used to say most was -- people would say, what did you do with all these people? I said, the thing that startled me most was how little we talked about sex. What we did was to talk about justice, we talked about behavior, we didn't talk about sex very much, and I just had an easy relationship with them, taking a walk with Phyllis and Del, but I don't remember any specific conversation or any particular strong emotion. It was, I always considered, a very amiable, friendly weekend with (inaudible), wonderful (inaudible) visitation, if you will, that's too strong, visualizing, just got it. Gay people are human beings, and they just like people best of the same gender.

02-00:51:46 MEEKER: There were a couple of other members of the Daughters of Boletus there as well. If this is to be believed, two of them were African-American women. Do you remember there being black women there?

02-00:51:57 CROMEY: No, what were their names?

02-00:52:00 MEEKER: One was Cleo Glenn, and one was Pat Walker.

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02-00:52:04 CROMEY: I remember Pat Walker's name, and I think she was involved in San Francisco politics for a long time. If you had asked me if there were any black people, or did you, I didn't remember.

02-00:52:17 MEEKER: But so you just remembered Orville Luster was there.

02-00:52:21 CROMEY: Yeah, that's right. I remember.

02-00:52:24 MEEKER: What about the men? Do you remember any of, like Hal Call, who was the leader of the Mattachine Society?

02-00:52:29 CROMEY: Tough, tough-minded, very aggressive, very assertive, and amusing. He was always very political, this is what we kind of have to do kind of thing, evangelical, if you will.

02-00:52:51 MEEKER: Do you remember having any kind of -- in these kinds of situations, it's interesting in this exchange between the clergy and then between the activists, I guess it's the activists who primarily have the agenda, but there's also the people on the clergy side who clearly would have had an agenda, I imagine particularly the Methodists, who were the organizers of it, right? How did you sense what the various agendas were? I guess, from the range from it being like very open-minded gathering of people just wanting to be educated to having a certain agenda of something that needs to be accomplished, where would you place that?

02-00:53:42 CROMEY: I would say, in my mind, what I can remember, I never had a sense that anybody was trying to tell anybody else what to do. I think the clergy was certainly there to listen and find out what was going on, and obviously, we were there because we were interested, and I had enough interested

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background, that's what I went for. And I didn't get -- even Hal Call, who I recollect as being very political, I don't remember anything particularly pushy that he said or did, I don't remember but...

02-00:54:29 MEEKER: Do you remember any of the clergy being skeptical of this notion of equality or gay rights?

02-00:54:37 CROMEY: I don't, I really don't.

02-00:54:41 MEEKER: Do you remember Don Lucas?

02-00:54:44 CROMEY: Sure.

02-00:54:45 MEEKER: What do you --

02-00:54:46 CROMEY: Again, just sweetness I always think of Don. Such a lovely man, and so clearly offended by the injustices against himself and other people, but kind of gentle about it and accepting and let's do what we can to move it ahead, the kind of guy who would always show up at a meeting, you could depend on him, absolutely. He's dead now, too, isn't he?

02-00:55:15 MEEKER: Yeah. There's very few people on this list, particularly on the activist side, who are still alive. I think that, actually, just Del and Phyl.

02-00:55:28 CROMEY: Really?

02-00:55:29 MEEKER: Yeah, as far as I can tell. There's a few names I don't recognize.

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02-00:55:34 CROMEY: Wow, that's amazing.

02-00:55:36 MEEKER: Yeah, yeah.

02-00:55:37 CROMEY: Who was the guy who was in jail all the time?

02-00:55:40 MEEKER: Guy Strait?

02-00:55:40 CROMEY: Guy Strait, yeah. He [laughter] was a character.

02-00:55:43 MEEKER: What was he like because he's --

02-00:55:46 CROMEY: Well, I can't say -- I knew him afterwards, too, at the CRH meeting, maybe there, but I'd see him around. But he was also very feisty and very funny, Jesus [laughter], he'd make you laugh. And he was very interested in pornography and that's how he earned his living, and he was always getting arrested and busted for it, he was always very frank. I can't remember what he was frank about, he's going to be frank about everything, but I don't remember specifically him talking about his sex life specifically except that he liked men. Did he get in trouble for getting involved with children or a boy or something or a child pornography, maybe?

02-00:56:28 MEEKER: I think he did, later in his (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) days.

02-00:56:31 CROMEY: I know he served some real time for that, or for something like that because I remember spending money from time to time for --

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02-00:56:39 MEEKER: I was actually able to get one of his FBI files because he died in the 1980s, so I think he did some hard time in a federal penitentiary, and I think that probably wasn't good for his health. Yeah, he was a really interesting character. I mean, one of the things that these people were involved in, particularly Guy Strait, was thinking about gays and lesbians as like a political block.

02-00:57:16 CROMEY: That resonates. That sounds...

02-00:57:23 MEEKER: Was there any thought about the religious life of the activists? Was there any conversation about that during these --

02-00:57:32 CROMEY: Not that I remember. I remember, I don't remember anything specific, but I think people would say, I was born up a Methodist, or a Catholic, or Episcopalian, but I don't remember much detail about it, and I'm really just saying that because it must have been so.

02-00:57:57 MEEKER: There's not a lot of time left on this tape, so, and I know that these questions are really specific and so, it's all right that these things come to mind immediately, but it's kind of like research, we're doing data dredging. You got to ask the questions because you never know (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) going to be there.

02-00:58:17 CROMEY: I don't mind saying I don't know [laughter].

02-00:58:20 MEEKER: I guess the whole weekend started out, according to this, on Saturday, May 30, and then there was a tour of gay bars. Did you go on that tour?

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02-00:58:34 CROMEY: There's something wrong here because if it was a weekend, why would it have started on Saturday?

02-00:58:40 MEEKER: Well, it wasn't a weekend, this is actually the agenda, it looks like it's -- I mean, it's photocopied from what really happened, so the way that it's described is May 31, to Jun 1, and Jun 2. Well, actually it says it started on May 30, on the evening, Saturday night there was a guided tour of gay bars, and then Sunday afternoon, people left from the Glide office building. I don't know if there was a bus or something like that but went up to Mill Valley, so it would have been like --

02-00:59:17 CROMEY: OK, because I was thinking all of us had church services on Sunday, so we couldn't have been, now I see.

02-00:59:22 MEEKER: Well, it's later afternoon.

02-00:59:23 CROMEY: Now I see, so Sunday afternoon, also May 31, was my wedding anniversary, I don't think I would have been away that night [laughter].

02-00:59:31 MEEKER: OK, all right, so perhaps you went up on Monday or something like that.

02-00:59:34 CROMEY: I know I had done a tour of a gay bar, bars, and whether it was that night, I don't know.

02-00:59:41 MEEKER: What do you recall about that tour that you did at one point in time? I'm guessing it was probably the first time you ever went inside a gay bar.

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02-00:59:50 CROMEY: I'm pretty sure it was. Little wary, a little scared, also I was kind of interested in what was going on, wondered if I'd see anything sexual, which I didn't. I remember enjoying seeing men dance with each other, and I enjoyed that. I liked it, and I thought I might see women dance with each other, but I found it amusing, after the initial kind of hesitation. I don't remember much about it besides that. It's just general impressions, I certainly got over my fear very quickly.

02-01:00:41 MEEKER: Did that surprise you?

02-01:00:45 CROMEY: Not particularly, I mean. I've been out and about in public quite a bit. That's all I have to say about that. I can't think of anything else.

02-01:01:01 MEEKER: You don't recall what part of town the bars were in?

02-01:01:04 CROMEY: I remember one of them was on Sutter Street, upstairs, maybe between (inaudible) I don't, Taylor and Mason, maybe. I don't remember (inaudible).

02-01:01:20 MEEKER: Did you ever go to the Black Cat?

02-01:01:22 CROMEY: I never did, no.

02-01:01:24 MEEKER: So that wasn't on this tour, then?

02-01:01:25 CROMEY: I don't think so.

[End of Interview 1]

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Interview #2: March 13, 2007 Begin Audio File 3 Cromey_Robert3_03-13-2007.wav

03-00:00:03 MEEKER: All right, this is Martin Meeker, today is the 13th of March, 2007, recording second interview with Reverend Robert Cromey, and last time we left off, I believe we were discussing the founding of CRH at the weekend consultation, and I'm wondering if you have anything additional you'd like to add about that particular weekend or events immediately between that and, I guess, the big ball that happens at the beginning of the following year.

03-00:00:57 CROMEY: Right, well, one of the things that I looked up in some old notes that I had and discovered that Kilmer Myers was indeed there, which I couldn't remember last time, but it was (inaudible) sort of brought some memories back about his being there, and he was soon after that, couple years later, was elected the Bishop out here. So I came away from that meeting, converted instantly that homosexuality was just the way it was for people. It wasn't an illness, it wasn't an aberration, it wasn't a sickness, it was just the way it was for people, and that was very important learning for me, as a straight man that had had very traditional views about gay life. And one of the things that I did was to talk to the then-Bishop of California, Bishop Pike, who was the one who asked me to go to the conference, and he could catch onto things almost instantly, and he said, yeah, you know, that's really right, that's really right. He had not had a good reputation, he was kind of persecuting gay people. I may have mentioned this last time, but I forget. He had gotten some priest of the Episcopal Church out of the ministry because of his prejudice about gayness and assumptions about somehow they were dangerous to Church. He very soon after that found two or three of the people whom he had gotten out of jobs and restored them to the active ministry, and I knew of three cases and I can only remember one name right now, and he had been director of a church here in town. After he was deposed, he went to work as a hospital orderly at St. Luke's Hospital. And the Bishop got him out of that and reinstated him and

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got him some kind of a job in the Church again. Alcohol was involved, so I don't want to mention any specific names, his name anyway, but that was the kind of thing that Pike did, and it was really as a result of just my coming back and telling him a little bit about this. I don't want to take too much credit for that, but that's kind of the way he was. He would get something like that, and say, yeah, that's right! And then go on and do something concrete to make a change. Then, as I recollect, the follow-up of all of that was the founding of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and I remember going to two or three meetings where the worst thing in the world that human beings ever have to go through is making up the rules and regulations of how an organization is going to get structured. I went to two of those, [laughter] three of those meetings, I thought I was going to kill myself. The usual stuff, what's the name, what are we going to call it, and what are the rules, and oh! But it got pulled together, and there was some tension. I remember there was one man, one gay man who was kind of hostile to the clergy and kind of thinking that we were trying to take it over, and I don't think any of the clergy were trying to take anything over, we were trying to kind of get the job done of getting it organized, but there was some hostility, at least on this one person's part. I think, for the other gay people, a couple of them were lawyers and professional people that kind of knew how to go through this dance to get an organization going. And the purpose of the Council originally was -- boy, were we naïve -- we would, could go to parish churches and educate them about gay life and gay people and the matter of justice and we're talking about the 60s [laughter] now, and we really thought that could happen. I'm sure we got no invitations ever to do that, certainly in the days of the Council. Maybe the Methodists had a little better luck, but the Episcopalians were not interested at all. I know even the Bishop didn't sponsor anything, I don't think he opposed anything, but he didn't encourage it particularly because it was pretty dynamite issues at that time. And so, that's these kinds of meetings, organizational meetings were what I remember best.

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03-00:05:40 MEEKER: A couple follow-up questions. First of all, about the point at which CRH formed and you said there were some debates, particularly this gay man who was fearful about the clergy were taking over, you don't remember who that was?

03-00:06:00 CROMEY: I really don't, I can actually see his face, and I don't remember, and I think that -- I don't remember him having much to do with the organization after that, or maybe he got disillusioned, but I don't really remember. I remember the confrontations because there was a lot of energy and excitement and anger, but then what happened after that, in as far as he was concerned, I don't remember.

03-00:06:32 MEEKER: And you also mentioned something about the name of the organization. Do you recall debates about alternative names or how, for instance, CRH was settled upon because, historically, from what I understand, that was the first organization with the word Homosexual in the title.

03-00:06:52 CROMEY: I honestly don't remember, I have no recollection. It was just that that was the name that was used, and I'm sure there were discussions about it, but I don't remember them.

03-00:07:04 MEEKER: Sort of back to talking about the way in which this consultation changed your minds and the way in which your discussion of it with Bishop Pike helped change his mind. The way in which homosexuals are disliked or sort of seen as bad in society, people usually talk about sort of three main things, right, so that there's a legal prohibition against it, that there's a religious or moral prohibition against it, and also that there's a psychological or medical designation of it as like an illness or pathology. Do you recall if one of those was more powerful in your particular perspective on homosexuality or if there

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was something else about it that made it to the point that there was something that you had to overcome?

03-00:08:19 CROMEY: I think it was the psychological one, that there was something wrong with these people. Them. The idea that it was categorized as a psychological and mental illness, and that people could get over it if they just went through therapy. That was the view I certainly held in the mid-60s until I went to this meeting, and I think the simplest thing that changed my mind is hearing stories of people and having dinner and sitting around and having coffee and just chatting, and taking a walk in the woods kind of thing. It was just getting to know people as people rather than by their sexual designation. And some of the people there at the meeting were, what would we say, kind of nelly and very funny, which had been my experience with gay people in seminary and before that, gay people I know that were kind of outward, little bit outrageous, and funny. They told their story about being in trouble with the police and how their families had thrown them out, and I began to have this great kind of sense of sympathy and closeness, and feeling close. I never felt threatened sexually, I thought I would, I was a little afraid when I first went, nobody came onto me. And people had come onto me before, and I was never the kind of person who was disgusted by that, I was a little bit pleased and a little bit frightened, and I would just say, well, no, thank you, and that was the end of it. I never had any really unhappy experiences, couple when I was a teenager, I remember being in a movie house, and a guy sitting next to me, I was probably 14 or 15, and a man put his hand on my body. Now, I don't know if he was gay or straight, my assumption was he was gay, but as I now know, it could have been a straight person. So those kinds of things were in my mind, but just being around in a situation of equality where we were all there for the same reason, and getting to know each other, telling each other stories. I would say that was the most important thing that changed my mind and my attitude. And it was immediate, I mean I didn't walk away with any feelings I had been duped or conned. Everything was very genuine, very real, very

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human, and I didn't [laughter] -- having been to theological seminary, I didn't see anybody that was any more weird than that group. Gay people had been the straight people of the seminary I went to, and it was just, I think you get gay people are self-consciously gay together, there's going to be some acting out of one kind or another, you get theological students together, where they're all for same reason, there's all kinds of trivial and blah-blah that goes on, and it all gets sort of absurd, but I didn't see any difference. It was all the same.

03-00:11:43 MEEKER: So around this time, did you have any encounters with psychologists or psychiatrists in which they were sharing with you their perspective on homosexuality, whether it was pathological or not?

03-00:12:00 CROMEY: I would say, the psychologists that I talked with about this were mostly from the point of view of helping the person, usually men, in my experience, only men at that time, helping them kind of get along, not necessarily saying they were sick, but how do you function in the seminary, how do you function in the Church, since you know you're gay, some people know you're gay, but not everybody knows you're gay, it was psychological coaching on getting through the system, and there was a little bit, well, not so much in psychologists, but there was certainly in the culture, in seminary, even in college, that they were child molesters. That was certainly in the air. I never had a strong sense of that myself, but that was certainly in the air. But the therapists didn't talk about that very much. I remember one of my mentors, I think I may have mentioned this on the earlier tape, that I went to the director of the parish, who was my boss, and said that this young man had talked about being gay. And the director said, that's not the worst thing in the world, something like this, this was 1956, that was, '57. And that's about where that went, but the attitude was it was something really wrong with these people.

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03-00:13:43 MEEKER: Do you think it was the question of psychology as opposed to immorality upon which Bishop Pike had problems with homosexuality?

03-00:13:53 CROMEY: Yeah, I think so. I think just a deep prejudice. He was just a pretty middle- class background and probably thought like everybody else did at that time. While he was pretty left-wing and outside of things, he was also a Bishop, he had to not rock the boat too much, so if there was somebody alleged to be a homosexual and you could get rid of them easily and they were pretty defenseless in those days, they couldn't rock the boat or nobody could bring charges against them if they were no longer active priests. And so I think it was very practical on his part. He had the prejudice, and this was a dangerous area, and let's get rid of them, and then when I talked to him about it and we talked about it in terms of civil rights, we turned it into rights of people and my talking about human beings, he said he just very quickly saw that he needed to change, he needed to change that whole attitude, and he did.

03-00:15:02 MEEKER: You did this question of civil rights, and then they are people, which is almost like an individuality, kind of thinking out loud here, but it seems to me like, I guess the question is: so when you were thinking about this first encounter in the summer of 1964, did your changing perception of homosexuals relate primarily to homosexuals as individuals, meaning that they're human people just like in a universal way, they're just like the rest of us, or this is in the context of the civil rights movement, oh, homosexuals, that's another group that's oppressed, like blacks are oppressed, for instance? Was one more important, or were they both ways of thinking both involved?

03-00:16:11 CROMEY: I think both, for absolutely sure. I think the thing that struck me after coming back from Selma and having been arrested in the civil rights demonstration, that this sense of injustice for black people was just so sickening to me, and I guess, certainly, at that meeting, that sense of injustice came up over and over

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again, as people told their stories and the oppression that they had faced. So that was a very strong interest and concern of mine perhaps initially, to even be willing to go to the meeting because I'd been so involved with the black rights, but then --

03-00:16:54 MEEKER: So, when you say your interest was on seeing this as an injustice about a group of people, about like a minority, maybe?

03-00:17:04 CROMEY: Right. So that was a kind of a strong impetus in my interest, and when I went and talked to people and found out that they were real human beings here, and that they're all different from one another. Some were men, some were women, then there were some that were kind of acting out, one or two, and others were very straightforward, there were no outward signs that this person was gay. It was all very human, this human contact with a variety of people who said they were homosexual, they were as different from each other as group of people would be, and I found that very wonderful, it was very freeing, to be able to say that, and to sense that.

03-00:17:53 MEEKER: Do you ever remember there being any sort of conversations or debates about this question, like oh well, homosexuals are a separate minority group in the same way that blacks are, or no, they're not, they're really just exactly the same except for this question of sexual behavior?

03-00:18:21 CROMEY: I guess I'm a little confused by the question. I would say that from what I recollect that certainly there was that element, that they're discriminated against, and the reason is because of their sexual behavior and orientation. Now, what was the first part of it you said --

03-00:18:39 MEEKER: It's this kind of question about I guess, sort of the background. The reason why I'm asking this question, so it might make sense, is that it seems to me,

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say from the 1950s through the 1970s and 80s, there seemed to be a big change in the way in which the society viewed homosexuals, and homosexuals viewed themselves, which was from maybe individuals who were immoral or pathological in some way to oh, certainly, they were individuals but they were also members of a minority group, in the same way that maybe African-Americans were members of a minority group, and that we can talk about gay people as opposed to, in the 1940s or 50s in which you might talk about a queer person.

03-00:19:41 CROMEY: Yeah, I would agree that there was certainly that kind of a shift, and I think it was brought about by the growing awareness of the injustice that caused the civil rights movements for blacks, and at least I certainly saw it as an injustice issue for this group of people who happened to behave differently sexually than this group of people, and so from my point of view, that's where I was in the 60s. And I think that is a good way of putting the shift, there were individuals, there was no community, of course it was a very underground community, we know, I knew. I found out after learning about gay people in the 60s, but certainly as a thoughtful person in the 50s, I had no idea about gay movement or whether the gay people were much concerned together about the issue. There was some, but not a lot.

03-00:20:56 MEEKER: So part of learning about gay people as a minority came through learning about the gay movement and the gay organizations you encountered.

03-00:21:10 CROMEY: Yes, because I can't remember which came first, but I remember hearing about the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, and I don't know whether that was after the consultation or not. I think I'd heard about the Mattachine Society, and there was a magazine I remember called One, O-N-E, that may have been in New York, somebody had given me a copy or heard about it because I was born, raised, and educated in New York City and in largely

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Manhattan, so there were gay people around and the whispering of gay life, and interesting in the Church, it was fairly well-known that many prominent bachelor clergy were gay, but they were very quiet and also, they were very strong in the church, too. They had a lot of power, and a lot of people followed them, not because they were gay, but because they were strong men, or men in those days. And wielded influence and they had money and knew people that had money, could raise money for organizations and charities, but I never had any sense that any of these men that I was very close to and fond of had any kind of inner organization. Maybe they did, but I didn't know about it.

03-00:22:36 MEEKER: [laughter] Underground, or something like that. So part of this consultation was that they took you on a tour of bars.

03-00:22:44 CROMEY: Yeah, you mentioned that last time, too.

03-00:22:46 MEEKER: Did you go on that?

03-00:22:49 CROMEY: I don't remember. I remember that I went, I guess I went with a group to -- the only bar I remember was on Sutter Street, and it was up a flight of stairs, it was a large room, and that there was dancing, men were dancing with men, and I thought it was kind of fun. I don't think I was there very long, I don't remember going to other bars, but it seems to me, when you said that, I kind of remember, I would kind of remember that that was part of the deal, to go to the bars.

03-00:23:20 MEEKER: I don't know if you've ever danced with us, it just kind of strikes me as mysterious in some way that you have a bunch of gay activists and they have the attention of a bunch of clergy, and they want to impress upon the clergy

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about the humanity of gay people, and then you take them to a bar, a gay bar? What are you supposed to reflect --

03-00:23:44 CROMEY: [laughter] Yeah, well, I think here we're in an age gap. Bars, for straight people, were very much like bars for gay people. They were a place to go hang out. I mean, the English pub is the perfect example. You go to the pub. And when I came to San Francisco, there were bars up and down the streets here, straight bars, you know, working men's bars. The plumbers went to one and the carpenters hanging out in the bars, so it was not unusual. Many is the time I stopped on the way home in a bar to have a cocktail before I came home to confront the children. So I think that that was really kind of natural. The gay leadership knew that we knew what bars were like. This was a gay bar. I don't know if that makes sense. Of course, they would do that. All these clergy, they know about bars. Maybe not the Methodists, the Methodists all knew, but they didn't tell people that they went to bars. I didn't find that unusual. When you point the question that way, it's very interesting.

03-00:24:55 MEEKER: So, it's interesting, like your response, it says to me that, well, going to a bar wasn't to show the clergy that the homosexuals were different or exotic, but rather they go have a drink after work just like you do.

03-00:25:12 CROMEY: Also, I think there was probably in our mind that a gay bar had a lot of overt sex in it. Now, I know now that some bars do, but I don't know, and I bet in those days, there wasn't quite as much as there is now, I hear. And I think the bar that I went to, I would consider, just looked like a regular bar, except that they were all men, and some of them were dancing. But it looked like a regular bar, and I didn't get the idea that there was overt sex, so maybe the idea was to get us straight clerics to see that a bar was just a bar. It wasn't an orgy. Again, it's a bit conjectural on my part because I was not part of the planning.

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03-00:26:09 MEEKER: But it also maybe says to me that that's how you experience going to this place was that that is how it impacted your thinking.

03-00:26:18 CROMEY: Yeah, it was kind of, it was a little titillating, and I remember going to gay restaurants and having the same idea that it was going to be different. It wasn't any different. Food was all right, sometimes it was a little better, not all that much, but just going to a restaurant that was known as a gay restaurant, that was kind of exciting in the 60s. And there, it was some 565 Union Street, I think, was the name of one of them. Well, the same kind of thing, it was very ordinary once you got there.

03-00:26:58 MEEKER: You said that you would occasionally go to a bar on the way home from work. Was there like a specific one that you would go to?

03-00:27:06 CROMEY: No, my office in those days was on Nob Hill, so at that point, I was living in Diamond Heights, so I had to come through this neighborhood. No, and I didn't do it very often, a couple of times, just stop in and have a drink.

03-00:27:21 MEEKER: But you didn't have your regular pub.

03-00:27:22 CROMEY: No, I didn't have a pub. I didn't have a local, they call it.

03-00:27:28 MEEKER: Interesting. There were a couple other organizations active at this time, maybe even a little bit later, in San Francisco that I don't know if you had much interaction with or not, and I want to ask you about those, and one of them was actually a Johnson War on Poverty program, sort of institutionalized organization. And that was, say like, when did the War on Poverty, it was like after 1965, right? And they started the various poverty program offices in San

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Francisco. I don't know, did you have any involvement in that, for instance, the Johnson --

03-00:28:24 CROMEY: You remember the name of it?

03-00:28:25 MEEKER: Well, just the Johnson's War on Poverty. Do you remember involving yourself in any of the community-based --

03-00:28:30 CROMEY: Are you talking about specifically for gay people?

03-00:28:33 MEEKER: No, I mean just any of the specific organization because the whole idea was maximum community participation and the idea was to do sort of grassroots, and there was always this conflict between the administrators and the grassroots, and I don't know if you had any involvement in this.

03-00:28:49 CROMEY: No, I really didn't have any involvement with that. In 1965, I became -- I was part-time with the Bishop and part-time at St. Aidan's Church in Diamond Heights, and so just doing those two jobs was really the bulk of my work. I was not involved in these kinds of programs.

03-00:29:10 MEEKER: The specific one I'm thinking of was called the Central City Poverty Program.

03-00:29:15 CROMEY: I remember the name, but as far as I know, I was never involved in it or even went to the meeting, but I certainly remember the name.

03-00:29:26 MEEKER: There was another one called on Vanguard, that was more focused on Glide, I think.

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03-00:29:33 CROMEY: Again, the name's vaguely -- that one's very vaguely familiar.

03-00:29:38 MEEKER: All right, and there was also another one called Citizen's Alert.

03-00:29:42 CROMEY: Yeah, now I was not -- was that involved with SIR, Society for Individual Rights?

03-00:29:51 MEEKER: I think so, yeah.

03-00:29:53 CROMEY: Yeah, it seems to me that may been an offshoot of that, and let me back up one second, and this may be jumping ahead, but because I and the other clergy kind of got involved with gay people in these days, I was the highest ranking cleric in that I worked for the Bishop and I had the title of Canon. So I was often invited to be a speaker at various organizations, and that was much more my role than being involved in the working of the organizations. For instance, I spoke a couple of times at SIR, Society for Individual Rights, and I'm pretty sure that it was in those meetings that I kept hearing about Citizen's Alert. And if you ask me now, I can't even remember what exactly it did. My bet is it has something to do with protecting people on the streets, maybe, or keeping track of people getting bashed and stuff like that, but see, that's all I can remember.

03-00:30:59 MEEKER: Well, that's precisely what it was. Look, now that you brought up sort of speaking at SIR and maybe other organizations as well, what do you remember about being invited and what they asked you to speak about and what you spoke about?

03-00:31:15 CROMEY: Why are you clergy getting involved in this kind of thing? Are you gay? Are you really gay? I got a lot of that. And it was friendly, but it was they wanted

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to know what we were doing here, we're not the kind of people that would ordinarily be interested in our organization, and I would say the same thing I'm saying now, that I thought that it's time for the churches, Protestant Church particularly, to get involved in caring for the justice and peace and concern of gays and lesbians, and I would talk a little bit about what I thought the theology of Jesus was about caring for the poor and the needy and for the outcasts of the society, and it seemed to me that was the most natural part of being a Christian, that being a Christian wasn't just building another fancy church and running Sunday Schools. It had to do with justice for people, and it came right out of the -- so a lot of the gay people were, on the one hand, kind of surprised that we have that emphasis, and on the other hand, had never even heard of that, they probably dropped the Church long before, rightly so, long before they'd gotten to that level of what was really Jesus all about. So I would say that was pretty much the... They wanted to know about my story, and I could say, I was married and children, and brought up in the Church, my father was a clergyman, and they were interested in me, and what was I trying to do? Well, I guess I was also trying to justify the Church's existence and concern for gays and lesbians, knowing that I didn't [laughter] have a wide following, but there were some leaders like myself who were interested in them.

03-00:33:26 MEEKER: So, speaking to groups like SIR and to let them know that it could be a Christian ideal to support gay equality is one thing, but then, you would also mention this other goal of CRH, which was to engage in a dialogue with parishes. What sort of work was done in that regard? I mean, do you remember engaging in dialogue with either laypeople in the Church, or clergy members, to say, listen, whether you're explicit about this or not, this is the way in which we should be thinking.

03-00:34:11 CROMEY: I spoke to a group of clergy here in the City, it was an ecumenical group, saying the same things, that's what I thought the Gospel was about, that's what

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I thought the Church ought to be involved in, and I remember one Presbyterian minister standing up and he said, this is the most disgusting discussion I have ever heard, and walked out of the room. He committed suicide a couple years later, cut his throat, and I have no idea why. Of course, I wanted to jump to the conclusion in that he had some kind of sexual issues going, but that's all conjecture on my part. But that often happened. People would say, this is disgusting, I don't want to talk about this, the Church shouldn't be involved in this. I had many Episcopalians at Church, not be involved in this --

03-00:35:02 MEEKER: Did you ever feel pressured or swayed by their objection, or were you of the status that you could sort of brush their objections aside?

03-00:35:16 CROMEY: Well, yeah. I'm a fairly diplomatic speaker. I could say, well, I can certainly understand your position, and I want you to understand mine, and we can agree to disagree. I eventually got squeezed out of the job as the Bishop's assistant. He went on sabbatical leave for six months, and during that [laughter] time, the then-leaders of the diocese that were left behind, squeezed me out of the job as the Bishop's assistant, which left me only a half-time salary, and I was married with three children. And Bishop Pike, all the way from England, arranged for me to have my salary for six months more. And so, I'm sure, I'm 99.9% sure it was because of my involvement with the gay rights stuff. No, I don't think any question about that.

03-00:36:18 MEEKER: Were there moments of regret about pursuing that?

03-00:36:21 CROMEY: I was scared [laughter] when I'd run out of money. No, more fear, no, I'm kind of a self-righteous bastard, and I felt good, and I felt I'm standing up for something, and we talk about sacrifice. It didn't seem like a big sacrifice to me, I was worried about my family, and rightly so, and the Bishop rescued

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me, and I was able to do enough up there at Diamond Heights to get enough, generate new people, partly they came because they knew I was an activist, and they were liberal people there, and we began to get enough money that my salary could be paid by the Church, instead of bleeding the Bishop's discretionary fund further. Yeah, but nah, I never felt bad about that. I think my former wife, I think she was not happy with my involvement with gay people. I think she, I heard afterwards that she often wondered if I was gay, and I know that it caused tension with her when I would go to these meetings and there was publicity. She didn't like her name and my name being together, so there was tension there at the Church. At St. Aidan's Church, it was, I think, almost complete support. Occasionally, there'd be somebody that'd think it was bad or immoral, and even in 1982, when I went to Trinity Church, I had a woman, because I was very open and inviting gay people, she said this is immoral and you shouldn't have them in the Church, and blah-blah-blah- blah, but I think she was the only one that was that vocal and hostile.

03-00:38:14 MEEKER: (pause) I actually went (inaudible) forget my questions. [laughter]

03-00:38:17 CROMEY: Yeah, I kind of rambled on there, I'm sorry.

03-00:38:19 MEEKER: No, no, no, it's good, I like the rambling on, it's improvisational thinking. Well, let's talk a little more specifically about CRH, and actually, I don't think that we've -- well, we need to speak about the ball, because we haven't spoken the ball. I guess, so thinking about CRH organizationally, it sounds like mostly what you did was kind of act as a public voice and went and spoke on behalf. Oh, I know the question I was going to ask, now. So when you were speaking about homosexuality and arguing for equality for gay and lesbian people, maybe it's impossible to separate this, but there's this sort of a social justice, maybe constitutional argument on behalf of gay and lesbian equality, and then there's what might be thought of as a theological, kind of Jesus-based

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argument. Did you see those as two separate, were they always intertwined, would you focus on one or the other?

03-00:39:45 CROMEY: No, they were always intertwined in my life. It seems to me, when you really find, look down, Jesus did not have, he was not organized. He was an inspirer, he talked about issues, he was not an organizer. If it wasn't for St. Paul's, there'd never be a church. He was the one that organized it. But Jesus set out some principles, and the principles of justice were there, and I think have been largely and is, to this day, largely looked in the average parish church. It's talked about as we should be concerned for justice in the world, period. I don't know how many sermons I've heard like that, and then I would say, I would think (inaudible), justice for whom, and give me an example. You don't like gay people, black people, women, but they don't know of justice in this day (inaudible). Well, I got it fairly early on, that justice was about specific situations, and that it was meaningless to talk about justice, unless you related it to what's going on, and so I think both things here, I had this idea of following Jesus and being a cleric of the Church, and right next to it at the same time was all this stuff going on in the civil rights movement. I mentioned earlier that I was in the seminary from 1953 to 1956, and in 1954, the Supreme Court decided there couldn't be discrimination in the schools anymore, right in the middle of my theological education, became one of the great moments for justice for black people in this country. So the two were inter-twined in my education, and I just followed that along. I was a bit quiet at first because I didn't know what to do in the Church, but when I got more out on my own, then it was very clear that those things are the same thing. Any action for justice for people, it seems to me, right out of the Gospel, right out of what Christians ought to be doing. The fundamental things Christians ought to be doing, besides worship, and I think when you come to worship, whatever that means to people, but when we go to Church and we worship, if that doesn't mean to go out into the world to serve the brothers and sisters, then it's meaningless, and so that's why I go out into the world. I always felt

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that the work in the community was much more important than the work in the parish, although I like the work in the parish, but I like the involvement in the community. So I don't know if that's too -- I think that kind of gets at what you're saying.

03-00:42:34 MEEKER: It's an abstract question, so it calls for a more abstract response but...

03-00:42:39 CROMEY: Yeah, I mean, if you ask a Jew, a Jew would probably emphasize the idea of justice that comes through the Old Testament. The Ten Commandments were attempts at bringing justice to people. The whole point of Passover was to bring justice to people that were oppressed.

03-00:42:57 MEEKER: Abraham opening his tent, welcoming strangers.

03-00:43:00 CROMEY: Yeah, I mean, there's no question. All of the great religions, mine happens to be Christian traditions, and so I think those are the models in my mind, but the underlying view of justice and caring for the oppressed, the poor, the homeless, and having compassion for the people, absolutely fundamental, to being a Christian, and I think to be a Jew, or I don't know enough about the Muslims to know, but I bet it's there. I'll bet it is. I've read a definition the other day by William James, he said, all religions know something's wrong, and they want to do something to make it right. Very interesting, he was really talking a wide view of religion, I resonate with that, just have that innate sense.

03-00:43:58 MEEKER: To what extent, at the time, did you see this movement for gay and lesbian equality in Church as specifically a San Francisco phenomenon?

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03-00:44:14 CROMEY: Well, because this is where I became really aware of it. Then, I very quickly learned of gay Episcopalians getting together to deal with this issue. So, the answer is, yes, in the very beginning, I only thought of San Francisco, and then it wasn't long before Stonewall and then Episcopal groups spring up around the country, Integrity, I forget the name, I think that's the Episcopal one, and chapters began to form.

03-00:44:57 MEEKER: That's another, five, maybe ten years later before that starts happening. I mean, Stonewall was '69, this was in '64, and I don't think Integrity forms until some time in the early 70s, '72, '73, so --

03-00:45:12 CROMEY: Really? Could be. I have no check on those dates in my mind.

03-00:45:17 MEEKER: But that was the first time that something outside of San Francisco hits your consciousness?

03-00:45:28 CROMEY: What was outside of San Francisco?

03-00:45:30 MEEKER: Well, I mean the first time that -- I guess I'm sort of interested in like your perspective of when people outside of San Francisco started to deal with homosexuality in the way that you were dealing within San Francisco.

03-00:45:47 CROMEY: I think that I was part of helping it happen in the Episcopal Church. I wrote an article for The Living Church, which is a rather conservative magazine, and they put it on the cover, and this was in the 60s, maybe '64, '65, and the front cover of this was "Ministry to Homosexuals" by Robert Cromey, and I got a lot of mail from all over the country on that one, and I think people will still remember that article of my age, and I think that after that, I began to hear from gay people and gay Episcopalians and some of the gay clergy. Gay

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clergy were well in the closet, as they needed to be then. And I began to hear about other organizations around, but not much, as you say, not until apparently the 70s that some of the other organizations start. So that article and the publicity that I was locally, some of that went national, I have clips around here somewhere of stuff from other newspapers, but certainly I had never heard of anybody else getting involved in it before, in a public way. We were public. I had known in my New York days, I knew of an organization to, what was that name, was it, and they were basically helping gay people cope with their basic function. I think they weren't involved in rights and justice issues. Are we getting to the answer there?

03-00:47:52 MEEKER: Yeah, did you ever travel out of San Francisco to spread this message?

03-00:47:56 CROMEY: Yeah, I talked to some groups in Los Angeles in the late 60s, there was a guy down there, I can't think of -- I went to Washington D.C. --

03-00:48:09 MEEKER: Probably Troy Perry? Troy Perry, the MCC guy?

03-00:48:12 CROMEY: No, he was a minister. I met Troy, but this was Hay?

03-00:48:18 MEEKER: Harry Hay?

03-00:48:20 CROMEY: Harry Hay. He was probably about Mattachine L.A., or something like that. I know I went down and talked to their group one time. I went to Washington, D.C., with Frank Kameny, and spoke to some organization there, or was at some meeting, I think I was a speaker. And then there were some meetings in Chicago of a gathering of gay organizations, gay and lesbian's, I think they were gay men's organizations, actually, and I was asked to moderate the meeting. They somehow that I would be [laughter] a good moderator. Little

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did they know how poor a meeting leader I am, but I was up there, and it was a restaurant, and all these gay organizations from all over the country were there, and they were passing resolutions about this, that, and the other thing, and I was having trouble just keeping my wits about me. Very sharp people making points and resolutions here and groups over there and so I spent, I think, a long weekend supervising that meeting, and I didn't think it really went very well, or at least my part in it didn't go well. I think those are the ones I remember most. L.A., Washington, and Chicago.

03-00:49:47 MEEKER: So I mean, CRH was primarily a Protestant group, were there attempts to sort of broaden out to Catholics or Jews?

03-00:50:01 CROMEY: Not that I know of.

03-00:50:06 MEEKER: Do you suppose that was because there was a sense those groups wouldn't be interested, or you don't know why?

03-00:50:14 CROMEY: I don't. I suspect, with the failure to even reach out to Protestant parish churches, to reach out to whole denominations or other religious groups, my guess was just not seen as viable. But I could be wrong. Maybe there were attempts that I don't know about.

03-00:50:34 MEEKER: Do you recall any attempts to reach out to local politicians?

03-00:50:42 CROMEY: I don't know whether I told you this story, but in some ways, it was somewhat the other way around, that two politicians, how did it go? Phyllis and Del told this story. Did I tell the story last time? Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin told me that they knew Phil Burton, who was Congressman, now dead, from this area. And Phyl and Del somehow knew Phil Burton, and he said there's some

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radical clergy in this city, who are really good guys, and you should really get in touch with them, and see if they can't help the gay -- now I don't know whether Phyl and Del were just talking about the Daughters of Boletus then, or maybe they were involved in the larger group, I don't remember -- but it was they, on Phil Burton's suggestions, came and began to recruit and talked to us, and they probably talked to Ted McIlvenna first, who then branched out and talked to others. So well, that one went that way. Another time, two politicians who were on the staff of then-State Senator McAteer -- there's McAteer High School or something out here -- they came and talked to me and a Presbyterian minister named Bill [Grays?], also now dead, about what were we clergy doing and interested in. Bill and I both thought there was an implied threat here, that we shouldn't be doing this, but they were affable guys, and in fact, Leo McCarthy just died, he had a big funeral here about a month ago. He was one of them. And he became like Lieutenant-Governor later, but they were very interested in our involvement with the civil rights, with blacks, and my increasing involvement with gay people. And they were kind of listening more than telling us, but at least, we were paranoid [laughter] that we were getting a little warning here, not to step out of line because McAteer was very Catholic and conservative and kind of known for that kind of towing the line.

03-00:53:18 MEEKER: What do you suppose they feared? What do you think was motivating them to keep an eye on you?

03-00:53:26 CROMEY: Good politics, I'm sure. Wanting to know what's going on, who are the decision makers, who are influencing the electorate, who are the people that may or may not be interested in issues that we are, and I'm sure it was purely political, they're just keeping their eye on the subjects [laughter].

03-00:53:48 MEEKER: Do you remember being involved in any fundraising activities for CRH?

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03-00:53:53 CROMEY: The only one I remember was the ball.

03-00:53:58 MEEKER: So the Episcopal Church didn't give any money directly to CRH activities, as far as you know?

03-00:54:07 CROMEY: As far as I know, they did not. I may have given some personally, or from my discretionary fund, which was very modest, from St. Aidan's. I may have, probably did, but I don't really remember.

03-00:54:18 MEEKER: Well, let's -- speaking of fundraising activities -- let's talk about the ball, but I have to change the tape first.

Begin Audio File 4 Cromey_Robert4_03-13-2007.wav

04-00:00:01 MEEKER: So we're back on again. So this ball, the infamous ball, it happened on New Year's Day, 1965, about six or nine months after that initial consultation in spring, summer of '64, and I'm wondering if you, I'd imagine you've probably told people about your experience of it before, but I'm wondering if you could just repeat that, and then I'll ask some more in-depth questions.

04-00:00:38 CROMEY: The first thing I remember about it is Ted McIlvenna calling us together and telling us that this ball was going to happen, but they really wanted to make sure that the police were informed, and that there'd be no trouble. And so I, and there must have been five or six clergy -- and I think maybe some of the lawyers were there, but I don't remember -- was in a meeting, and I remember there was a cop there, and his name was Nieto, I'm pretty sure that was his name, and kind of a wiry, dark-haired rat-looking guy [laughter], and so it was explained by somebody what was going on, and what was the purpose, it was

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going to be a dance, and a ball, and, I don't know, whether they said liquor was going to be served, and that there was a license, and everything is legal as possible. And we wanted to have cooperation, and we didn't want to have the police be surprised by anything, and we wanted them to know that we were expecting to follow -- all laws would be obeyed, we're not trying to do anything that was bad or wrong or illegal. And he listened, he may have said some things about warning us about this and that, I do not remember anything he said except at the very end, he said, looked to the clergy and he said, "You know these faggots are using you, don't you?" (pause) Well, I don't know what we said, I remember thinking theologically afterwards, well, that's what the Church is here for, to be used. Of course, we're being used. I don't mean in a bad sense, but sure, we're being used to help move an organization forward and a movement forward, for rights and freedom of people, and I didn't say that proper because that was my own reaction, and then I remember he left and he left his briefcase with him, and I remember Ted McIlvenna, I'm pretty sure it was he, said there's a tape recorder in that, I'll bet. Very interesting. I don't know if that was true or not. And so, I kind of looked forward to the ball, and it was for us, and I remember my wife not being happy that I was going out on New Year's Day Night, and I was in my clericals.

04-00:03:44 MEEKER: Was she invited?

04-00:03:45 CROMEY: She was invited and she chose not to go. So I got there, and I don't know, we were standing around, and people I knew, and then people started to arrive and some in fancy costumes, it was wonderful. I began to stand in and, I noticed there were a lot of flashbulbs and people, and I kind of thought, kind of like the Academy Awards or something, everybody's taking a picture. And then one of the CRH members or somebody said, a lawyer said, it was the police taking those pictures. We never talked about that at the meeting with Nieto, so there was a lot of flummoxing around about that, there was nothing much we could do about that, they were there taking the pictures, and I

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suppose, it certainly seemed, I remember feeling it at the time, that's a real violation of what we had talked about. So then people going in, and there was nothing much we could do, and I remember Cecil Williams was there, Ted and others. Hours had went by, the music, I guess, was going. I think I looked in, once in a while, to the dancing and that, and, then, somebody said, "Well, the police want to come into the ball." And so we thought that was not a good idea, and we were getting ready to get arrested, to stop there. And I remember a bunch of, I was [laughter] standing next to Cecil, there was a bunch of us clergy, and some of the lawyers and other members, seems to me, maybe 10, 12 stood in front of the doors, and the police came up and pushed us aside and went in. There was some confusion is all I can remember. And then the police, as they entered, pushed Cecil and me and Ted and the clergy, and they arrested the lawyers, or some of the lawyers got arrested, and --

04-00:06:10 MEEKER: The people who weren't wearing clerical collars, I guess.

04-00:06:14 CROMEY: Yeah, maybe, but you see, Methodists don't usually wear them. I think Cecil Williams wore them that night, but there were -- some of us wore clericals, and others did not. Yeah, it could have been. But I bet I knew the police knew who the lawyers were, too. They're not dumb, they may not be sensitive, but they're not dumb because to arrest us really would have caused a fuss because I'm sure they were aware of that. And then I guess I only heard afterwards that there were arrests of a couple of people for disorderly conduct, I don't think many, two, three, four, five, I don't really remember, and I guess the police left, and I left, and (pause) I think that's all I remember at the ball itself. Now I can talk about some things that happened after that, but I'll wait for you to --

04-00:07:25 MEEKER: At the ball, I'm wondering, so you were part of this organization, you were invited to come because it was a fundraiser for CRH, what did you expect that you would do once you arrived? I mean, was it primarily to come and watch

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and make sure it went off all right, greet people? What was the reason that you were there?

04-00:07:49 CROMEY: My idea was that I would probably go sit at a table, and have a drink, and watch the dancing and the partying, and leave early, which was my way of going to parties, anyway. That was my expectations, just to go and have a good time. I wasn't asked to speak, or I didn't even know if there was going to be a program, I really hadn't even thought of that until this minute, presumably there were. Ted McIlvenna was much more kind of leadership in all of that, I was much more follower-ship in the way it worked.

04-00:08:30 MEEKER: But the idea was really just to go and show your support and go home early, so once you arrived and you saw all the police there, that kind of --

04-00:08:41 CROMEY: Changed the focus. Then the question became, are we to do anything if the police want to go in, and that issue came up, I don't remember just how it did, so we decided to stand there and would have gotten arrested had they arrested us, but --

04-00:09:02 MEEKER: They didn't give you the honor of arresting you, sounds like.

04-00:09:05 CROMEY: [laughter] No, right. They were very shrewd that way.

04-00:09:09 MEEKER: What about the arrest of these folks inside for disorderly conduct? What do you remember about that?

04-00:09:16 CROMEY: Only what I was told. Probably drunk and disorderly, that would have been my guess. Somebody had been drinking too much and maybe started a fight or maybe, I wouldn't even -- I don't remember if they started a fight, what are

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you talking about? Disorderly conduct was the noise that went around, I never saw anything.

04-00:09:40 MEEKER: OK, and you don't recall who was arrested or anything like that, but you remember, of course, that the lawyers were arrested, right?

04-00:09:51 CROMEY: Let's see, I'm just trying to see if I can get the names before you tell me. Southern guy, I can't remember.

04-00:10:06 MEEKER: One, I need to remember myself. There was Herb Donaldson, he was one of them. Shoot, I don't remember any of the other guys' names.

04-00:10:19 CROMEY: Southern guy, Lamar something, La-something.

04-00:10:24 MEEKER: I want to say, starts with an E, there's someone whose last name starts with an E.

04-00:10:29 CROMEY: [laughter] Funny.

04-00:10:30 MEEKER: I'll remember it. Just for some reason, it's not coming to me, I'm going to erase that on the tape [laughter]. OK, so you mentioned after the event, you go home that night, you knew there had been some arrests at that point?

04-00:10:50 CROMEY: Say that again, please.

04-00:10:51 MEEKER: You knew there had been some arrests by the time you got home.

04-00:10:52 CROMEY: Yes, yes.

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04-00:10:54 MEEKER: Was there any discussion amongst the clergy after the arrests happened that, oh, we need to respond to this the next day or something?

04-00:11:02 CROMEY: Well, the response was, I got a call from Ted, saying he was calling a press conference and wanted as many of the clergy to come as possible, and that we were going to make a statement in protesting the police action and behavior, and so we went, and I'm sure you've seen the famous picture of us standing around with our crew cuts.

04-00:11:34 MEEKER: Where was that held?

04-00:11:38 CROMEY: Maybe at Glide? Yeah, I don't remember. I don't remember saying anything at the conference, but I remember Ted was the spokesperson, he was very articulate and certainly everything. If I said anything, it was just words to support what he was already saying and making it clear that we felt this was outrageous behavior. I did say something that got into the newspapers later, but I'm pretty sure I did not say it at the press conference, but I said, the police would never have gone into a debutante's ball where the well-to-do of the city were, where these 16-, 17-year old girls were drinking champagne. And I said this is just an outrage, this is one more illustration of discrimination against gay people, and that got some press, but as I said, I'm pretty sure I said that independently. You know who Herb Caen is, and I'm pretty sure he carried that for me. He was a fairly good friend, a fairly good acquaintance, but he was very, very concerned for justice issues, and I could always get something in Herb Caen if it had a justice edge to it.

04-00:13:04 MEEKER: Did he have to be convinced about the justice angle in gay and lesbians in San Francisco?

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04-00:13:10 CROMEY: I don't think so. I think that he always felt that that was just silliness to -- I mean, he would make, what we would consider politically incorrect remarks about gay people and lesbians, but it was always with humor and tongue-in- cheek and sort of tweaking both sides when he did it, gays, lesbians on one side and established conservatives on the other, and he'd give them a little bit of the needle, which was his wonderful style.

04-00:13:49 MEEKER: OK, so after this press conference happens, there was a trial for the lawyers. Were you --

04-00:14:00 CROMEY: Well, before that, there was publicity [laughter].

04-00:14:03 MEEKER: All right, so tell us about this publicity, then.

04-00:14:05 CROMEY: Well, there was the famous picture that was in the paper, and well, telephone calls, and I know I appeared on television, and I'm sure Ted and others must have too, and radio programs, and I [laughter] sure got a lot of mail.

04-00:14:27 MEEKER: Was the press conference covered on television as well?

04-00:14:30 CROMEY: You know, I don't remember, but those days, there were a number of local talk shows on television, all of them now have been something like -- Oprah goes national -- but there were kind of Oprah kind of programs in every city in the states as you know, and there were several here in town. And I remember being on those. A lot of flak, and by then, I think I was either out or just out of working directly for the Bishop. I may have been working part-time for the Bishop, so the Church got flak, the Episcopal Church because of my involvement.

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04-00:15:22 MEEKER: And that came primarily from parishioners, the flak?

04-00:15:26 CROMEY: Well, oh yeah. Members of the Church, and anybody else who wanted to criticize either the Church or gay people had a weapon now. They could either issue to attack me or to attack, why aren't they cracking down on the radical clergy and that kind of thing. That's all there is (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

04-00:15:48 MEEKER: Is that how it was cast? I'm wondering it sounds like you talked about the radical clergy, and then there's also the clergy who are kind of supporting gay and lesbian issues, was this just, for the public and the way in which you were attacked, was this just another example of the clergy becoming too radical?

04-00:16:12 CROMEY: Well, there weren't many of us. I mean, there were only two or three Episcopal clergy that were either involved or even very interested. In fact, most of them really kept away. This was a hot, hot topic because, see, I had, while I was Pike's assistant, I had his support, and so when he went away, as I said, I lost that support, I mean the position. Yeah, we were pretty radical, we were way out of beyond what most clergy were thinking and willing participate in, and I think... So when I was offered to speak to clergy groups on gay rights issues, they just thought I was one of the very few in the Episcopal camp who had very much to say about it. A lot of people were friendly, but nobody was going to talk about it in their church.

04-00:17:26 MEEKER: So, at the trial, were you called to testify, or was there an expectation that you might be?

04-00:16:41 CROMEY: (pause) Oh yes, now I remember. Gee, how could I forget that? No, was that? No, wrong trial, wrong trial. I was thinking of the trial when I was on the Van

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Ness Avenue sit-in. I don't think I went to the trial. That's right, we weren't arrested, so it was a trial for the people that were arrested. No, I did not go to that trial, now I remember.

04-00:18:07 MEEKER: This was also historically, from what I understand, the first point at which the ACLU becomes involved in the gay rights fight.

04-00:18:15 CROMEY: Oh, I'd forgotten that.

04-00:18:16 MEEKER: Did you play any role in speaking with them about the --

04-00:18:19 CROMEY: No, no, I did not. I was a long member of the ACLU, but I was not involved in that.

04-00:18:28 MEEKER: From what I also understand, I guess the negative publicity that resulted from this on the police department...

04-00:18:37 CROMEY: It was wonderful.

04-00:18:39 MEEKER: Well, how did you experience that? Could you see that happening? Could you see public opinion turning against the police department on this?

04-00:18:50 CROMEY: I think so. I know that again, I was at St. Aidan's, and people read about that. What are the police doing, what are they doing that for? I wouldn't say it was a great shift, pro-gay, but it was certainly a shift, saying, what are they fooling around, what are they spilling taxpayers' money running around, a whole squad of police on New Year's Day going to a ball? There was certainly that kind of feeling among the people I knew, and whether... I can only bet that

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there was that reverberation through the city because things did change after that, my friends reported.

04-00:19:28 MEEKER: So it was less of a groundswell of support for gay rights, but more kind of a disgust among civil libertarians on the encroachment of the state?

04-00:19:44 CROMEY: I would say it was more that. I don't think, at that point, even though there was beginning to get some support, I don't think it was pro-gay. It was anti-police action that seems absurd or wasteful. And I would say, now, as I would have said and how I thought about it, everything is incremental. That was just one more increment of if you get the police get a little calm about the gay stuff, that's a bit step.

04-00:20:21 MEEKER: So how did things, then, change after this, as far as you can remember?

04-00:20:26 CROMEY: OK, now, we're talking now about the time that I'm becoming more and more involved in running this church, and less and less involved in the wider community activities like CRH. This is also another time when I got a whole bunch of invitations to speak, usually in gay groups. Why are you getting involved, what happened at the ball, were you there, that kind of thing, almost entertainment value of it. So, then I remember going to some stuff for Society for the Individual Rights and who knows? I don't really remember just which groups when, but there was a good flurry. I got more involved in running the church and less involved in the community activity with gay people.

04-00:21:30 MEEKER: Do you remember something called the Episcopal Diocese Social Relations Committee?

04-00:21:33 CROMEY: Oh, I sure do.

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04-00:21:35 MEEKER: What was that about?

04-00:21:36 CROMEY: All right, the Episcopal diocese had a group of clergy and laypeople, and I don't remember whether the Bishop appointed them, or they were elected by the convention. There's an annual convention where all the churches get together, clergy and lay, and they elect members of various committees, it's possible that the convention elected some members and the bishop appointed some members. And their particular job was to look at the social and political issues that were going on that the Church should address, or possibly address. And so, basically it was the good, solid liberals who were on. Occasionally you'd get a conservative, but not very often, you get the liberal clergy and laypeople, and they were really concerned, they were concerned about civil rights, and they were concerned for black people, they were concerned about, oh, things like alcoholism and what's going on in the hospitals, St. Luke's Hospital is an Episcopal hospital here, and I remember that was always a committee report, education maybe, hard to remember. But I was in and out of that committee, and the way I remember it is, they took various stands, and sometimes the Bishop would agree or not agree, and sometimes they'd make things public, and then the top levels of the diocese, you shouldn't do that, you're not speaking for the whole diocese, just blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. It's interesting that that committee was under the Bishop, who just recently retired, was abandoned. They didn't want to have any discussion on social issues, just disappeared. Anyway...

04-00:23:34 MEEKER: Just recently.

04-00:23:35 CROMEY: Yeah, now, you're probably going to ask me, did they talk about gay rights at all, I don't remember. Did you read or hear something about it? Maybe that would refresh my memory, I don't remember.

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04-00:23:45 MEEKER: I think I just saw a mention of it, and the mention was in line with the way in which you described it, and I think that it was unclear the degree to which they addressed CRH or homosexuality.

04-00:24:03 CROMEY: My bad, it was probably thrown around and discussed, also I bet that probably no resolution was made or supported or brought forth because I don't think even that committee was ready to do very much about it.

04-00:24:16 MEEKER: What was the geographic reach of that?

04-00:24:19 CROMEY: OK, in those days, this diocese ran from Marin County all the way down to San Luis Obispo, and so it was 180 parishes. Now it's only 80. They split up into two other dioceses. But the people who came to those meetings were pretty much from the Bay Area. Occasionally you'd get somebody from San Jose or somebody coming from further south, but not very often. The farm worker stuff was big stuff. They were very interested in the farm workers in those days.

04-00:24:52 MEEKER: In what way?

04-00:24:53 CROMEY: Pretty much supporting the strikes, pretty much supporting the strikes.

04-00:24:58 MEEKER: So supporting the unionization of --

04-00:25:00 CROMEY: Unionizations, I mean that's the kind of thing they'd obviously have little opposition to. Probably in the southern end of the diocese or in the other dioceses of the Central Valley, they were against it because the growers had the money and the power.

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04-00:25:19 MEEKER: You'd mentioned that you were on the board of the NAACP in San Francisco for a while? Do you recall roughly what years? Do you recall, I guess, being on the NAACP board at the same time that CRH was happening?

04-00:25:39 CROMEY: I think so, and I remember going to very few meetings, I don't know why I got elected, I went to very few meetings, and I really felt out of place in the board.

04-00:25:50 MEEKER: Why?

04-00:25:51 CROMEY: I was white, also I'm a very not a good meeting person. I don't do meetings very well. White, black, gay, straight [laughter]. I hated them, I hate those meetings. They were doing good things, absolutely, but I wasn't interested in doing it that way.

04-00:26:09 MEEKER: Too much Robert's rules of order kind of stuff

04-00:26:11 CROMEY: Oh, endless, endless organizational crap. It has to done. I've always said, I'm so glad there are people out there that can do it and like to do it. I don't.

04-00:26:22 MEEKER: So there were very few white people on the board at the same time you were on it.

04-00:26:27 CROMEY: I'll bet I didn't go to three meetings.

04-00:26:29 MEEKER: So, in, let's say you went to three meetings, do you ever remember any of the San Francisco gay stuff being discussed?

04-00:26:38 CROMEY: Not at all. I don't remember. May have happened, but I don't remember.

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04-00:26:46 MEEKER: Was there a point at which you would say that you weren't really like actively participating in this issue anymore in San Francisco?

04-00:26:56 CROMEY: Yeah, I would say that as '67, '68, '69 moved along, except to speak here and there, I was not involved in the issue, although I would often write letters to the editor of church newspapers and the local papers if I saw something that was anti-gay because I always felt that as a straight person, I could defend or criticize people who were attacking homosexual people with more impunity than if a gay person tries to defend themselves. And so I had a fairly good, lot of articles in various church magazines. I remember a friend of mine calling me and saying, I really appreciated his article and was a very good defense of something that Church had said against gay people, and isn't that great, and he said, and then he asked me if I was gay, and I said, no I'm straight. And he said, oh, that's wonderful! Boy we sure need guys like you to help out. It's so self-serving if we do it ourselves, so I enjoyed that role, and I kind of played that role while I could.

04-00:28:24 MEEKER: I know that you weren't participating as much, but through the late 60s and early 70s, this is when historians describe the gay liberalization movement, the sort of radicalization of it. Having participated in an earlier period of the time, with the crew cuts and the suits and ties and all that kind of stuff, did it ever seem to you -- social movements were changing overall -- but did it ever seem to you that -- maybe I'm not putting this right -- but did the gay movement ever seem to take it too far, or was there a point at which there was some activism that you could no longer go along with?

04-00:29:04 CROMEY: Absolutely not. I thought everything, even the act-up stuff, which I cringed at sometimes, I thought was great. Incremental was my view then, and it is now. It happens a little bit at a time. No, I was proud of all of that stuff that I would hear about and read about, and I tried to support in ways that I could, but I

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wasn't going to go to meetings and I wasn't going to... I also felt that the particular role that I could have as a radical and as a cleric wasn't needed as much anymore, and I really did feel, this is now -- just like the black rights movement, this is for black people -- this is now for homosexual people, gays and lesbians, this is their game. I'll help any way you want me to help and occasionally, I'll do things on my own that involve my writing or my speaking or something, but I really did have that feeling. It was really sort of pass the baton kind of thing, and that felt all right to me. I always felt a little bit, I should have been doing more, but I couldn't figure out what to do, or I didn't want to do much more, and my career changed at that time in 1970. I left St. Aidan's Church, I left the active ministry, and so I was, as a therapist then, me having to hustle full-time to make a living, pay child support, support myself, and this and that, so my life really did change in a lot of ways, moving me more out of the public sphere than I had been. And I didn't even like that much. I didn't like being a psychologist. I prefer being activist, but that was the only way I could earn a living, or it was the way I chose to earn a living, and so I was happy when I got Trinity again in 1981, that I could be more public again.

04-00:31:08 MEEKER: Was that the point at which then you became more involved in these kind of public activist issues?

04-00:31:15 CROMEY: Yes, although I never really stopped, but I had more of a "bully pulpit" kind of thing as director of a church. As an individual therapist, I was just one of the batch, but even though it was a small church with a big building and a bigger reputation than it deserved, it was a bully pulpit. It was a place, when I spoke, I could speak to a couple hundred people, and when I wrote, a lot more people, and so it felt good to do that, and I was glad to have that as the last phase of my professional life.

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04-00:31:55 MEEKER: You know, this kind of thing that's interesting that I'm thinking about because it's pretty clear from the way that you described it that these gay and lesbian activities and their clergy friends were, to a certain extent, borrowing from the black civil rights model, and I wondered, since you became a public figure in the process of working with CRH, if there weren't other groups who saw what the clergy was doing to help gay and lesbian rights, might have approached you around any number of issues that were coming up in San Francisco at that time. I mean, there were soon to be disability issues, there were issues with immigrants, particularly I'm thinking in the 1980s around like El Salvador, illegal immigration, and refugees, there were even movements among punk rockers, there were transgender movements, do you recall any other groups who wanted to use the Church, to use the clergy?

04-00:33:04 CROMEY: Interesting, interesting. Well, the United Farm Workers certainly did, and that was all along. I don't want to make too light of this but it was amusing to me. Somebody wrote me a very long, passionate letter about animal rights, and I just had to say, I'm sorry, I just can't get interested in animal rights. And I'm sure there are a lot of issues here, important ones, and I can tell your heart's in it, but I just [laughter] can't do that. And interestingly enough, what I found out for myself was that, even today, I'm not very interested in the rights and problems of the aging, even though I'm 76, I'm not very interested in the problems of children, even though I have three children and six grandchildren, I mean those issues are really, really important. But unless my heart or my ripped emotion, I'm not going to get involved in them. So I was never, I was never approached by some feelers in the women's movement using the Church from time to time. Certainly, in the 80s, all this stuff with all those men dying, I don't know whether I said this on the tape or not, I sponsored as I didn't perform all of them, but we had 72 funerals at Trinity Church in seven years. That's a lot of funerals, of men between 25 and 40, and we opened to their families, and did I talk about that already? And it was a really important part

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of the ministry. I had gone to Trinity with the hope of building the church and lots and lots of people and invited, and many, many gay people, gay men particularly came, and then began to die. So that ministry turned from church growth to a real ministry of helping people who were sick, their lovers, their parents, sometimes their children, sometimes their grandparents, and conducting beautiful services if they wanted them in the Church. And we didn't charge for them, although people often gave us money, so that was the kind of a ministry we certainly didn't expect and certainly didn't want, but that happened, that was the best part of eight, ten years, you know. I was a central part of that.

04-00:35:45 MEEKER: I'm interested in a question actually about faith because I come from a background which I was raised in a faith but personally have had lots of problem believing [laughter].

04-00:36:00 CROMEY: Me too.

04-00:36:01 MEEKER: And I wonder, like as somebody who was a minister in a church encountering the AIDS epidemic, as it was becoming clear what was happening, did that inspire struggle around faith? I mean, I'm thinking like personally for you, how did that impact your relationship with God?

04-00:36:25 CROMEY: Well, implied in the question is, how can God allow evil? And at least from my point of view is the constant wrestling, but it depends on your definition of God. I don't believe in the fatherhood of God in the sense that He's the grandfather in the sky somewhere looking down, with a divine computer counting up my sins, which is what I think of lot of people's views, almost a childish view, a childlike view. I believe in a God that's "ground of all being," using Paul Tillich's phrase, or "being itself," God is being itself. It's not "a being," so that when I deal with the problem of evil, all these young men

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dying, I just think that's what the world thrusts on us, that's what being thrusts on us, just being alive. Now, we had that here, but God knows what's going in Africa now. Sick, we're talking about food or water. Why does that happen? It's just part of what happens. I don't, we can call it bad, it's certainly bad from my point of view, but my job in life is to do what I can, little as I can, to move things, to change things, to help bring peace and love and caring, so I don't blame God for evil. I don't think that the kind of God I believe in that that's not an issue. See, I don't believe that God is good or bad, God is totally different from that, even though most people in the world believe in the parody of God that I just mentioned. One of my sophisticated friends lost his wife two, three years ago. He's still blaming God for her death, and we loved Julia, and she's gone. And how many times he says -- John, you graduated from Harvard University, you're a brilliant man, and you have a concept of God that's absolutely childish. All I know is it's God's fault that she died, what a terrible God that is, and how can you believe -- he's in pain.

04-00:38:45 MEEKER: It's almost like God has sort of left there behind him, and giving and taking as He pleases.

04-00:38:49 CROMEY: Sure, and again, my friend, John, is in deep agony, and that's what he's dealing with. So my job is to deal with his agony, not to deal with his concept of God, because I could lecture him forever about that, that's not going to make any difference. I can be a loving, supporting, compassionate friend, and maybe that will help him get through this so he can move on.

04-00:39:10 MEEKER: So when the AIDS crisis stuck, your view of God was already such that it wasn't this kind of personal Jesus the relationship with, so there was no either gaining or losing faith, it was just another stage of existence.

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04-00:39:33 CROMEY: Which, I think, is what the underlying biblical view is. I am that I am. God is being. God is being itself. But in order to talk about God, you talk about a figure, you personify it in some way to make it comfortable, teach the children about it. But if you live with the personification, then it's pretty limiting way of looking at God. (pause) Again, even dealing with men and their lovers dying, why is God doing this to me, there wasn't much I could really say because that's the wrong time to try to teach, when somebody's in agony. Well you have the wrong belief system, that doesn't work. Care for the person as they are, as you meet them, that's the real compassionate, Christ-like, if you will, if I will, thing to do. It's a good question but it's a hard lesson to get across. When I go to Church, I look at these people and wonder what their view of God really is.

04-00:40:55 MEEKER: Well, how do you then minister to a population where you see probably a larger number than not who you're ministering to have a different view of God than you do.

04-00:41:12 CROMEY: Well, nowadays when I'm invited to preach, I try to talk about that issue. I talk about that issue is when I was in the seminary in the 50s, one of the most popular books of the idea of the time, it was entitled Your God Is Too Small. This was in the 50s, and that concept to try to educate people to a larger, deeper, broader view of God has been going on for a long time. So I would say I spent my whole ministry on some level, but there's more to do in a ministry than just talk about the notion of God or the belief in God. And you know what? Most people aren't interested in it. They're interested in it when they're in pain. But the average person, they're not interested in their concept of God, they live with that fine. Most often when they have trouble is when they get in pain, where they see suffering, and I don't blame them.

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04-00:42:07 MEEKER: Actually, I forgot to follow up on one this question that, a little intriguing bit that you just said about that letter you got from an animal rights activist. Do you recall when they contacted you?

04-00:42:21 CROMEY: I was Director of Trinity, I remember, so it was in the 80s.

04-00:42:25 MEEKER: It was in the 80s, all right. You were in that position until -- what year did you retire?

04-00:42:34 CROMEY: I retired in 2001.

04-00:42:36 MEEKER: 2001. OK. So maybe the one movement that has really drawn upon gay rights as the model is the transgender rights movement. Were there any people who are active in that come calling to you or the Episcopal Church in general to sort of use their moral authority?

04-00:43:06 CROMEY: We had one transgendered person, it was Alice, and Alice had been a male and a newspaper reporter, a journalist, and Alice was a member of the Church, former Roman Catholic and intrigued by the Episcopal Church, and was very forthright in telling me who she was and what she wanted. We sponsored -- she was a little careful. I said, Alice, you want to tell your story? Tell your story. So we had a meeting, and she brought two, three other transgendered person, they were all women, and sadly not many people attended but it was wildly publicized, and they told their stories, it was wonderful, and I was very proud that we could do that. and people said that's so controversial, why could you do that? And I said, what are you talking about, controversial? This is the way some people are in this society, and of course we'd sponsor this and answer questions about it. Alice did not ask me to go any further, it wasn't trying to get Episcopal support in any way, and unless I'm deeply in it myself,

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I will always say, you carry the ball, I'll sponsor you, you can use the church hall, you can use my name as a sponsor, and you carry the ball, and she's had health problems and she didn't want to go with it, and I'm interested to see how it's been going, but I've been involved in it except in that way.

04-00:44:50 MEEKER: So once you become Director of Trinity in '81, did you get involved in any, or did you tempted to become involved in any politics in San Francisco? Did members of your parish -- parishioners -- did they see you as someone who might be political or try to bring you into the political arena in any way, or were you tempted to go into that at all?

04-00:45:32 CROMEY: Well, frankly, I was ahead of most of them on almost every issue, including the gay men. A lot of gay people who go to Church are pretty conservative, it's amazing. Some of the biggest opposition I had to my preaching about gay rights issues were from gay men who were wealthy, who were closeted, and they didn't want to hear about this stuff, I'm telling you. I lost two or three parishioners the first year I was there because they said you're talking about this stuff too much, it makes me uncomfortable.

04-00:46:01 MEEKER: What were the objections?

04-00:46:03 CROMEY: Well, I think they felt that they were comfortable and they were quiet, they didn't talk about their gayness, they had gay friends and straight friends and they never talked about it. And they said, the Director of my church is talking about gay stuff more than I do. Haven't you seen that phenomenon among older gay men? I believe I have. One of my best wedding presents was from a charming older couple, two gays who lived together for 25, 30 years, both had been married, both had grandchildren, and they were embarrassed that I would in public say things and get in the paper once in a while. It was the kind of a older gay man that were really uncomfortable.

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04-00:46:48 MEEKER: So they were used to perhaps it being private and not spoken about?

04-00:46:52 CROMEY: Just, being a nice, quiet Episcopal Church. Well, that was not the kind of church I was interested in being in, and since they had almost nobody there when I got there, they had no places to go but up, and I felt in 1981, that gay men and lesbian women were a target audience. Most churches' target audience is husband, wife, and 2.3 children. Well, there were 18 other Episcopal churches in town that were failing at that already, so let's try failing at something better. And mostly gay men came at first, it was wonderful.

04-00:47:27 MEEKER: Well, in that 20-year period of time, how did the demographics, the population of your parishioners change?

04-00:47:35 CROME: Some more lesbians came. Some couples, not a lot, but some straight people. But I would say, to this day, it's probably largely gay men, even five years after I've gone, and the leadership certainly are gay men so far. I think they want it to be more open to more people, but I think churches today got to have target audiences, scatter-shooting is not going to work very well, but it changed not so much in demographics, it changed in attitude that the first 10 years were kind of controversial, especially with all those people dying because how angry people got at themselves, at their lovers, at their parents, everybody in the universe, Ronald Reagan, we were all furious and angry so it was very tumultuous in the Church, too. And then after 1990, '91, well, the last decade, 1991 to 2001, half the people, two-thirds of the people that were members of the Church had come there either because of me or while I had been Director, so I could say anything, and they would say, that's the Director again just shooting his mouth off, they didn't care what I said. It was wonderful, it gave me great freedom, so I would say the demographics, slight increase in others than gay men, so I would say that when I left, I would say

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the parish was probably 80% gay men, 20% lesbians and straight couples and straight singles, small 10%.

04-00:49:23 MEEKER: In raw numbers, how many, what did it change?

04-00:49:25 CROMEY: Three hundred, if you could find them. In the 20 years I was there, I presented 1000 people to be confirmed, which is the way you become an adult members of the Episcopal Church, and there were still only 300 people. People died, and we have the notion of revolving door in a church in this city. Until recently, people would move to a neighborhood, and three to six months, they were gone, or a year, they were gone. They don't move so fast now, the rents are high, but that was certainly true in the 80s and the 90s, it was a revolving door, they were great people, they really wanted to join the Church, they did, they often went to other churches. Two really great friends of mine moved back to New York, and they're very active in parishes in New York, and they became Episcopalians while they were at Trinity, and they were there for maybe a year and a half. So you had that kind of phenomenon all the time.

04-00:50:23 MEEKER: Why do you suppose churches now have to appeal to a niche market? Shouldn't Christianity be a universal appeal?

04-00:50:31 CROMEY: Yes, and it is, and in any church, I always said, this church is open to anybody who wants to worship here. But if you're a straight couple with a five-year old child and you walk into a church and you see 120 gay men, or men, and 18 women, you get it pretty quick that this isn't a church you're going to be very comfortable in.

04-00:50:55 MEEKER: Why wouldn't they be comfortable, though?

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04-00:50:57 CROMEY: A husband and wife, what's their expectation when they go to church? They want to see husbands and wives and children. We had no children, or very few once in a while. So yes, we're open to everybody, but not everybody will come. Not everybody will feel comfortable in their congregation, and one of the sad things in the Church, we need 18 Episcopal churches in this city, like we need bare feet, all these buildings and there are about five Episcopal churches that are viable. That is, really self-supporting. The other ones scratch along, the buildings are falling down, and trying to ministry, there isn't a solid, what do you call that, you got to have a certain number of people?

04-00:51:41 MEEKER: Critical mass?

04-00:51:42 CROMEY: What do you call it, critical mass? Yeah, most churches don't have a critical mass. See, Trinity only had 300 members if you could find them, and I say that in some jest because you never knew where they were.

04-00:51:58 MEEKER: Do you feel like Trinity had a critical mass when you were there?

04-00:52:01 CROMEY: Just about, just about, and when I left, of course, this always happens, some people leave. Took them a while to find a director, more people left because they didn't like the interim director, and they're back, not as bad as when I started, but almost. That critical mass disappears very quickly. Now, if you have a critical mass of 1000, or 500, then you can probably wade through a year or two without a strong leader. So when I say you need initiative, you have to be able to say, realistically, who's going to come to this church with the way that you style the service, for instance? The church I go to now, they have incense, smells and bells, and fancy vestments which I kind of like, but the average person who's a former Methodist or Baptist takes a look at that, they think oh my God, we're in Rome. It takes a year to get used to an

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Episcopal church service, so I don't think any church tries to say we keep anybody out, but what we try to say is, or try to be realistic is, who likely to come?

04-00:53:15 MEEKER: Do you go to service once a week?

04-00:53:17 CROMEY: Mm hmm, pretty much. I like to miss once in a while.

04-00:53:20 MEEKER: Why do you not go to Trinity?

04-00:53:22 CROMEY: I have been invited to stay away. The director there has taken the idea that the former director should not been around, even though it's been five years since I left, but that's... And I don't feel comfortable, he doesn't want me there.

04-00:53:42 MEEKER: Why is that?

04-00:53:44 CROMEY: Oh, he's young, he wants to put his own stamp on the place, and I'm pretty well-known and have a long reputation there, and a lot of the leadership are still people that came through me.

04-00:53:57 MEEKER: Who is the new director there?

04-00:53:59 CROMEY: His name is James [Trammell?]. Interesting history, he spent 20 years in prison, abetted a murder in Santa Barbara, his pal killed a homeless man, and they tried to cover it up, and they caught them. And the other man is in prison for life, and James got 20 years, but while he was in jail during the 20 years, he got a college education, a seminary education, the seminary sent students up, and he wrote papers, they tutored him, the Bishop got him ordained, and I

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think he was not experienced enough to take a complicated place like Trinity, but he got appointed, so --

04-00:54:44 MEEKER: Is he gay?

04-00:55:46 CROMEY: No, he's straight.

04-00:55:49 MEEKER: What was the process by which -- I mean, how did the transition happen -- how did you determine that you were going to retire, and did you have a sense that you would play a role in finding a successor?

04-00:55:05 CROMEY: Well, in the Church, in the Episcopal Church, the tradition is, not an absolute rule, that the director steps asides, and then the laypeople with the diocese go through a where do we want to go, what are we doing here with our ministry, and traditionally, I play no role, the director plays no role in that, and that's fine, and that was the way it was. I decided to retire, it was, if I was really a pious kind I would say, God spoke to me, but I was walking along the street one day and I said to myself, I really don't want to do this anymore. I've been here 20 years, and I'm finished. It was very, very simple. It was a bit of a shock later, when I kind of realized what I was doing, but I never had a moment's regret, and I talked to my wife and the leaders of the Church and the Bishop, and I left in two months. It was around Thanksgiving Time, November, and I left on my birthday in February 2001. It was a wonderful process. I felt very, I was 72, you see, I'd stayed on much longer. I'd had that 11 years out of the ministry, so I hadn't been in one place all that time, so staying on a few extra years was really not [lies?], my wife is 11 years younger, and she's just retiring this year, she's had plenty of time to continue working, and I've loved being retired, don't miss that at all.

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04-00:56:53 MEEKER: What are your plans now that your wife is going to retire, what are you two plan to (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) --

04-00:56:57 CROMEY: Well, we're going to immediately travel, we're going to travel for two months in Europe, and she's a great hiker and a walker and a reader, and I am a great, and I write 500 words a day, whether I need to or not, and send out articles here and there. I've written a memoir, and I've written a sex memoir, and I'm writing now a memoir for the five years I've been retired, and it's kind of fun, and I've written a lot during that time so that memoir will be easy. What did I write about during this time, what was my interests. I've been very involved in the peace movement, I stayed for part of a vigil in from the federal building. Did I tell you that already? In front of the federal building here in San Francisco, every Thursday from 12 to 1, we have our signs, "Get out of Iraq" and "Bring home the troops," it's about 50 to 100 old lefties like myself, some younger ones, too.

04-00:57:55 MEEKER: Have you had any opportunity to influence any of the elected officials in San Francisco have sent back to D.C. or have conversations with them?

04-00:58:05 CROMEY: No, not really. I've met them all. I've never even seen Barbara Boxer, I've met Feinstein a couple of times. She came to the church during the time she was a mayor. We had a couple of funerals of men that she knew, and at least twice, I think she came and she read the Old Testament Lessons, she was Jewish background. And she was quite wonderful and charming, and so we had little kind of chats. She's been on my mailing list, but her basic instincts have been sound on gay rights and AIDS and all of those kinds of things, I think even on the peace movement, but she's got to get through Congress and stay there. No, I wouldn't have a profound... Again, I don't like parties, I don't like political stuff you go to, and I don't feel like I've ever been able to be in a place or my

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ideas are important to a politician, or I haven't done what I could do to make that happen, I guess, but I guess the answer's basically no.

04-00:59:16 MEEKER: So there's only just a few minutes left on here, and I know four hours is only a very small of your life, but is there any note you would like to end on today, or anything you feel like we didn't cover adequately?

04-00:59:30 CROMEY: Well, the thing that I -- I think we covered things that I could remember very adequately. I feel like I haven't been able to be very specific as I might like to have remembered things. I think in terms of my own life situation, I've written my obituary, and one of the things that I have to say is that I think the thing I'm most proud of in my whole ministry has been working with gay and lesbian rights movement that came out of the black rights. And I think having been so close friends with so many gay people and gone through all that death and sorrow (crying) makes me sad but very proud. And I really, I've been very happy there's so much support from gay and lesbian people in my ministry and work. That's not the only thing I've done, but talk about the thing that has the most gripping and most power. That's in there.

[End of Interview]