Queer, There, and Everywhere

Ultimately, the lesson from our twenty-three incredible individuals is that there is no wrong way to be queer.

Fear of rejection, physical violence, execution, conversion therapy, and more still haunt millions of queer people’s daily lives.

George was whole—a gay man, a Japanese American, a social justice activist for those communities and others—not holding back any piece of himself.

George had known he felt about boys the way he was “supposed” to feel about girls from an early age.

There were no charges, no trial; like the other citizens who were rounded up and forced into internment camps, George’s only crime was looking kinda like the Japanese soldiers who had recently bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Let’s repeat that: SOLDIERS with GUNS came for George and his AMERICAN family in the middle of LOS ANGELES. They forced the Takeis to leave everything behind: their home, their money, their possessions. George and his parents, brother, and sister were given numbered ID tags and crowded onto trains with hard wooden seats alongside other Japanese Americans, under the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Father Michael Duffy gave the homily at Father Mike’s service. The church was packed with guests, including Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton. Hillary recalled that Father Mike “lit up the White House” when he had led a prayer breakfast there.

1986, the Vatican issued a statement calling homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil” (yikes!) and the strain got worse.

He ministered to queer people at a time when many priests wouldn’t. But his calling was also to the general public, and he especially served the homeless faithfully.

The relationship between queer people and the Catholic church was . . . um, strained during Father Mike’s life, to say the least.