A new book by noted Harvard Divinity School professor Mark D. Jordan, entitled, “Queer Callings” (Fordham University Press, 2024), credits me with a seminal role in the development of modern LGBTQ identity language during the early, formative days of the gay movement in 1970 and 1971.

Noting that “sexual identity…gained traction in the movement in the early 1970s,” he cites the day, November 11, 1970, when “more than 400 students and faculty from local seminaries gathered at the Pacific School of Religion, atop its glorious hill in Berkeley, for a public panel on homosexuality and Christianity. The preacher at the day’s liturgy was Nicholas Benton, who took as his title, ‘Was Jesus Homosexual?’

Jordan continues, “Benton had spent much of that year writing pieces that were soon published as a pamphlet, ‘God and My Gay Soul.’” “Benton,” he says, “wants a theological notion of gay identity to match what he hears in the ‘movement’ — to reproduce the fused meanings already in circulation (psychological and sociological, personal and political). But Benton adds meanings of his own, wittingly or unwittingly. He first distinguishes “gay” as a personal discovery from “homosexuality” and “homosexual” as labels of oppression. For Benton, the homosexual is analogous to the male-identified woman in allowing “her or his self-identity and life to be governed by the straight man’s value system. The gay, by contrast, is involved in the process of discovering a ‘gay’ self-identity and lifestyle. Again, ‘gay’ is the person, identity and lifestyle.”

He continues, citing me, “Since a sexual identity is the very person, it requires rights of free self-expression. It then expands with the horizons of self-discovery. The ‘perspective’ of ‘the new self-affirming homosexual self-consciousness’ is ‘totally different.’ It requires a revaluation of all (heterosexual) claims and the creation of a new culture — together with a new theology or spirituality. The soul has a new identity (as Benton’s title proclaims). Its liberation should lead to freeing ‘the World Gay Soul.’”

Indeed, those were heady days. How I got from there to here were summed up in these words I included in my book, “Extraordinary Hearts,” a compilation of 100 “Nick Benton’s Gay Science” essays published in a Washington, D.C. gay newspaper over a two-year period from 2010 to 2012:

“In the summer of 1971, (my friend Jim) Rankin and I developed the notion of the social paradigm shift that we felt gay liberation represented. I wrote in my essay, ‘We saw the movement aligned with radical feminism as an effort to end the war and oppression by transforming male-dominated society. To this end, we argued against those who saw gay liberation as only sexual freedom, or even as strictly a fight for legal rights. Many of my articles in the Berkeley Barb promoted the notion that, fully actualized, gay liberation had the potential to be socially transformative.’ But the ‘sexual freedom’ faction crushed us, and the rest is history until now.”

On my “exile” from the gay movement in 1973 until I launched the corporate structure for my newspaper, the Falls Church News-Press, in 1987, I will say only this:

“‘My decision to align my life with a strident, tightly-knit, pro-socialist configuration, if nothing else, saved my life. I struggled with demons by studying classics and advocating in remote places for ways to relieve droughts and feed the world.

‘I remember the moment when someone came into my office in July 1981 waving a newspaper to announce the news of a ‘gay cancer.’ An electric bolt shot through me and I immediately feared the worst. It turned out far worse than I could have imagined.

‘In 1985. I landed in the hospital with nonspecific symptoms, and feared I had AIDS, a death sentence. It turned out not to be so. That, the development of a test for HIV antibodies (I tested negative) and, the moral wheels having come off my associations by their exploitation of homophobia for political gain, compelled my emphatic break, with prejudice.

‘I proceeded to do what any good gay boy would do. I put my talents for the public good by starting a newspaper.’”

And it has now been 33 years of that.