Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1927: Fr. Robert Carter, SJ

(d. 2002) The early leader of Dignity and co-founder of the National Gay Task Force was gay long before he was Catholic. He had been born to Protestant parents, both from different traditions. He grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, and Park Ridge, Illinois. While studying at the University of Chicago, he wrote a review of a Tennessee Williams poem for the school paper, and was invited to see the opening of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago in 1944. This when Williams was still a nobody. Carter and Williams became lovers, briefly. Carter later wrotein an unpublished memoir, “He may have thought he seduced me, but he didn’t or at least gets only half the credit.”

Carter became interested in Catholicism after reading James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The day after graduating with his Bachelor’s Degree in 1946, he converted to Catholicism. He continued studying at Chicago, and picked up a master’s degree in Greek and went on to pick up a Ph.D. in 1953. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1954 and was ordained a priest in 1963.

In 1972, Carter co-hosted the first meeting of Dignity in Manhattan with fellow Jesuit Fr. John McNeill. Carter later remembered that meeting: “There were about 15 present. I remember walking to the meeting and wondering with some trepidation what I was getting myself into.” Carter became one of the Dignity’s board members and theological advisers. “No longer was I just the professor of Early Church Studies and a research scholar. Now I was giving hope and new life to many gay Catholics,” he wrote.

He marched with Dignity in the 1973 Gay Pride March in New York City. Howard Brown, a former city commissioner who had recently come out, invited carter to become a founding member of the National Gay Task Force (Oct 15). The New York Times reported on the new organization: “A number of homosexual and lesbian organizations were represented on the board. One member was the Rev. Robert Carter, a Jesuit priest and professor of historical theology.” This marked him publicly as a gay man. A subprovincial of the Jesuit order paid him a visit. “It seems that they were afraid I had had a psychotic break or something,” he wrote. But he was unfazed. “Since Jesus had table fellowship with social outcasts and sinners, those rejected by the religious establishment of his time, I consider myself to have been most fully a Jesuit, a ‘companion of Jesus,’ when I came out publicly as a gay man, one of the social rejects of my time. It was only by our coming out that society’s negative stereotypes would be overcome and we would gain social acceptance.”

Despite calls for his ouster, he wasn’t disciplined. This was before the Catholic Church’s stance on homosexuality had coalesced into a hardline position. Meanwhile, Carter kept busy with his work in Dignity. When the Catholic Church barred Dignity from meeting on church property, he began celebrating Mass in apartments. He held blessing ceremonies for gay couples, he testified before City Council in support of a gay rights law, and he continued to march with a Dignity contingent in Pride parades while wearing his clerical collar. In 1982, he went back to school and got a degree in Social Work from Columbia in 1081, just in time for the AIDS epidemic to hit. He counseled AIDS patients at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, and he was the supervisor of the AIDS outpatient program at Bellevue. When his Jesuit province banned him from saying Mass for Dignity, he travelled to Philadelphia, which was outside his province’s jurisdiction, to say Mass there. He died in 2010 at a Jesuit health care facility at the age of 82.