2008's Freedom Riders

Gay City News / Rundate: April 10th 2008 / Original Publication

Since 2006, young LGBT and allied activists engaged in Soulforce Equality Rides have visited 52 colleges and universities with histories and policies of silencing or excluding queer students. The young riders, many of whom come from religious and faith backgrounds, have brought Soulforce's unique style - combining what the group calls a "dynamic 'take it to the streets'" activism with the uncompromising non-violence principles championed by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. - to challenge religion-based and other homophobia, in schools ranging from Bob Jones University in South Carolina to the US Military Academy in upstate West Point.

This fall, roughly 25 activists will embark on a new Equality Ride through the South, and for the first time visit historically black colleges.

As part of its efforts to educate the wider LGBT community about its Equality Ride mission, Soulforce NYC will hold a benefit concert and party next Wednesday, April 16 at 8 pm. at Touch Nightclub, 240 West 52nd Street. The evening's headliner will be Ari Gold, the sexy R&B recording artist, whose own life has been, in part, a story of reconciling his gay identity with a youthful education in an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva.

Two alumni of last year's Equality Ride sat down with Gay City News this week to talk about what their experiences meant to them. Micah Matthias is a 24-year-old transgendered man, now working with mentally ill adults as a social worker in the Bronx, who first encountered Soulforce two years ago when Equality Riders turned up on his Eastern University campus on Philadelphia's South Side. Raised as a female, Matthias was still working to understand his trans identity on a campus where, as is the case he said with most Christian schools, open and extensive conversations about sex, never mind homosexuality and gender identity, remain "taboo topics."

The Equality Ride visit proved transformative. "I felt as though reinforcements were coming," recalled Matthias, who with a friend soon established a gay-straight alliance. What he saw in that Ride and its mission convinced Matthias to participate himself last fall - and he is applying to go on this year's ride as well.

Bram Wispelwey's years at Princeton were also life-changing - not in terms of his own sexual or gender identity, but rather in his belief system. Raised, as was Matthias, in a Christian home (his parents both attended Calvin College in Michigan), Wispelwey is heterosexual, and explained that he grew up with the belief that homosexuality was not an option as a way of life, and with the reflexive instinct to make fun of gay people.

But as an undergraduate student in biology, Wispelwey began to reexamine his thinking and even to write about the issue, trying to understand it in terms of both his academic discipline and his spiritual life. Speaking about his awakening very much in spiritual terms, Wispelwey, now a Columbia graduate student focused on nutrition with plans to go to medical school, said he came to feel "complicit" in the homophobia that earlier had been a given, just as he might have felt as a white in the Jim Crow South. Seeing the documentary "God & Gays: Bridging the Gap," which features an interview with the Reverend Mel White, Soulforce's founder, led him to investigate the Equality Ride.

In the several years since those college experiences, much has changed for both young activists. Each has engaged an entirely new conversation with their Christian families; neither has gained unalloyed support from everybody back home, but both seemed proud they are respected for the courage of their convictions.

On the road last fall, they encountered resistance by college administrators, threats of physical violence, and even the taunts from police sent to protect them. But when turned away by university officials, they insisted on making their presence known, even when that involved civil disobedience, always conducted with a code of "complete nonviolence."

But in converging on "the source" - those schools that work to keep LGBT students invisible - both activists discovered a good deal that encouraged them.

"The positive far outweighed the negative," Matthias said. "If just one person came forward to say what our visit meant to them, it made all the difference."

For more information on the Soulforce Equality Ride, which costs about $200,000 to stage for 25 participants, visit soulforce.org. To purchase $25 tickets to next week's concert, visit www.soulforce.org/concert.