A dear lifelong friend passed away recently. Darwin Gordon (Don) Tate, October 25, 1942 to October 22, 2025, 82, of Corona, California, passed away peacefully at home after a long illness. Don was a tour bus driver and guide for many years in both Oregon and California. He was known for being a very generous, kind and responsible man with a great sense of humor and a great love for his family.
Both from the same home town, we both wound up in Berkeley, Calif., where I was attending seminary. We got together on countless nights for coffee and conversation, and began a singularly important practice of exchanging cards at Christmas with detailed accounts of what we were up to and were thinking about things each year.
Neither of us ever missed a year, even though we never again met in person. This year, when his card did not arrive, I became concerned. I scoured the Internet until I found the news of his passing.
I am reminded of another dear friend who passed away many years after we’d last seen each other. On August 9, 2005 at age 63. Jimmie Ray Rankin died in his sleep, a friend wrote, with “a radiant smile that remained on his face in spite of death.” You see, “Jim beat the bad guy in high style, whupped his ugly ass, in fact, and found the God that he had sought all his life,” this friend wrote.
The account is published in Rankin’s book, “Divine and Healing Path, An Old Catholic Catechism,” by Jim Rankin, Old Catholic Bishop of San Francisco, Mystic Ways Books, 2000.
In it, Rankin wrote briefly about me without naming me.
“A dear friend of mine,” he wrote, “a seminarian then in the United Church of Christ seminary at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a man with a marvelous sense of humor, once wrote an explication of repentance using the Byrds song, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn.
“As you recall, the song takes the words of Solomon in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, that ‘to everything there is a season,’ as its basis, and repeats the phrase, ‘Turn, turn, turn’ antiphonally.
“‘In everything (Turn, turn, turn), There is a season (Turn, turn, turn), And a time for every purpose under Heaven.’
“I doubt that many people knew that this was a direct quotation from Ecclesiastes, who proclaims ‘Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.’ Yet what does the Preacher say, at the end, all earthly things are vanity, and only to walk with God is our calling. Nonetheless, it took my friend, with his wry sense of humor, to point out to me the implied call to repentance, and its echo in the Byrds song.
“To repent is to turn. But more than turn, to turn back to fundamental principles. And as Hannah Arendt says in On Revolution, that is the actual meaning of ‘revolution’ as well: to revolve as if upon one’s axis, and turn again to that which we held of old. There is nothing so revolutionary as repentance.
“Arendt used the American Revolution of 1776 as the primary example of what she was trying to say, pointing out that the relative success of the American Revolution was based on the fact that the Founding Fathers knew this. They did not ‘overthrow’ kings and princes, or cast down the old order, but rather sought out those fundamental principles of justice and social order that would allow any people to govern themselves well – if they would. Sometimes, it does look as if we won’t, but that is another matter. As Benjamin Franklin, asked when the Constitution was written and proposed to the States, replied, ‘We have given you a Republic – if you can keep it….’
“Only the pure of heart can repent, only the meek can repent, accepting the changes in the soul that must come as we turn away from what draws us, and turn to God.”
Jim Rankin and I founded the Effeminist newspaper in Berkeley in 1971, after I last saw Don Tate, and shared being pioneers of the pro-feminist wing of the Gay Liberation movement. Our last meeting was in 1974.
