Queer Places:
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
Paul Moore Jr. (November 15, 1919 – May 1, 2003) was a bishop of the Episcopal Church and former United States Marine Corps officer. He served as the 13th Bishop of New York from 1972 to 1989. During his lifetime, he was perhaps the best known Episcopal cleric in the United States, and among the best known of Christian clergy in any denomination.
Paul Moore was a graduate of St. Paul's School and Yale University, where, like his father, he was a member of Wolf's Head Society. He had been president of the Berkeley Association, the Episcopal student group, and a Boy Scout leader at Yale.[1] He was a member of one of America's richest families.[2] Moore was senior fellow on the Yale Corporation from the mid-1960s through the presidential administration of George H. W. Bush.[3] Moore joined the Marine Corps in 1941. He was a highly decorated Marine Corps captain, a veteran of the Guadalcanal Campaign during World War II earning the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.[4] Returning home after the War, Moore was ordained in 1949 after graduating from the General Theological Seminary in New York City. Moore was named rector of Grace Church Van Vorst, an inner city parish in Jersey City, New Jersey, in the former township of Van Vorst,[5] where he served from 1949 to 1957. There he began his career as a social activist, protesting inner city housing conditions and racial discrimination. He and his colleagues reinvigorated their inner city parish and were celebrated in the Church for their efforts. In 1957, he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana. Moore introduced the conservative Midwestern capital to social activism through his work in the inner city. Moore served in Indianapolis until he was elected Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1964. During his time in Washington he became nationally known as an advocate of civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. He knew Martin Luther King Jr., and marched with him in Selma and elsewhere. In 1970, he was elected as coadjutor and successor to Bishop Horace Donegan in New York City. He was installed as Bishop of the Diocese of New York in 1972 and held that position until 1989. Moore was widely known for his liberal activism. Throughout his career he spoke out against homelessness and racism. He was an effective advocate of the interests of cities, once calling the corporations abandoning New York "rats leaving a sinking ship". He was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain an openly homosexual woman, Ellen Barrett as a priest in the church. In his book, Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), he defended his position by arguing that many priests were homosexuals but few had the courage to acknowledge it. His liberal political views were coupled with fierce traditionalism when it came to the liturgy and even the creed. In his writings and sermons he sometimes described himself as "born again", referring to his awakening to a fervent Christocentric faith as a boarding school student. By birth, by inherited wealth, by friendships and career success, Moore was an acknowledged member of what was often called the "Liberal Establishment", a group that included Kingman Brewster and Cyrus Vance, along with many other graduates of Yale College.[6] He wrote three books: The Church Reclaims the City (1965), Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), and, after his retirement, Presences: A Bishop's Life in the City (1997), a memoir.
In his daughter’s telling, Paul Moore appears to have been that rare creature, a genuine male bisexual. As a bachelor Paul Moore had courted more than one woman, and Honor Moore, using her parents’ letters, reconstructs for us the winding road that led to Jenny McKean’s triumph over the competition. Then, beginning at least in seminary, already married, Paul Moore was having gay relationships. He continued having gay sex throughout his marriage. But when he and Jenny separated in 1970, probably because she knew about his affairs, they agreed to see other people…and soon, Honor later discovered, he was “dating no fewer than five women.” After Jenny’s death from cancer in 1973, a grieving Moore connected with at least one old female love but soon was re-married to a new love, Brenda Eagle. He seems truly, if inexplicably, besotted with his second wife, a falling-down drunk who wastes none of her small capacity for kindness on her stepchildren; but the marriage does not, at least, seem like a cynical arrangement meant to maintain a public persona. Meanwhile, Moore keeps his long-term male lover, abandons him when Brenda finds out, then goes back to him after Brenda’s death. He also goes back to women, taking at least one lover shortly before his death. (He told me about her when I interviewed him in 2002.) Long after he was out of the public eye, when he had no reputation to uphold, and when his children all knew about his gay past and present, he continued to love and make love to both men and women.
Rt. Rev. Paul Moore (1919-2003), Honor Moore (born 1945), Richard Nathan Olney (1927-1999) and Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), all descend from the same Mayflower Pilgrim, Ricchard Warren.
Tony
Scupham-Bilton - Mayflower 400 Queer Bloodlines
My published books:
