The New Yorker this week publishes an excerpt from the new book "The Bishop's Daughter" to be published in May. Honor Moore writes about her father, the Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, his faith, and his secret.
The article is not available online, but the magazine offers an audio interview with the author who talks about her father's public service and private life.
See also: A more complete synopsis of the New Yorker article
When she was a child, Honor Moore writes that she accepted her father as a force of imagination that flared and coruscated, an instrument of transformation.
At seminary, he learned to withstand the ebbs and flows of his faith. Honor says in the book that she realized early on that her father was in touch with something that couldn't be seen but that was also real. It took her decades, she writes, to escape the enchantment of her father's priesthood.
Honor recalls her father as one of several clergy members of the Episcopal Church who moved it toward a more tolerant position. His first parish was in lower Jersey City. He had chosen to work with the poor. She tells about his involvement in political and social action on behalf of parishioners.
In the book, according to an abstract from the publisher, Honor tells about her father becoming the bishop of New York and describes his social activism in that post.
Bishop Moore was known for his outspokenness against homelessness, racism, and the rights of all people regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. He was the first Episcopal Bishop to ordain an openly homosexual woman as a priest in the church. His liberal political views were coupled with traditionalism when it came to the liturgy.
The aspect of the book excerpt that has drawn the most attention, is Honor's revelations that her father was bisexual.
In the New Yorker audio interview, Honor describes her father's bisexuality as an "open secret" within their family, but something he was never able to accept in himself.
"He was a man of his generation," Honor says in the interview. "He was ashamed and embarrassed. It was disappointing to me because at the time I was having gay relationships and I thought we'd be able to talk. But he wouldn't. He couldn't. Now I realize that he was trying to protect his wife who he loved and to protect himself."
In 2003, he was given a terminal diagnosis by an oncologist. She describes visiting her father at his house on Bank Street in New York in the weeks before his death. She went to the hairdresser nearby and was told by one of the men there, "Oh, I know Paul." How did they know him?
As he became sicker, the writer spent more and more time with him. After his death, she was contacted by a man who said he had been a "very close" friend of her father's for thirty years.
She would find out more about the parts of her father's life that he refused to discuss when she got a call from a man called Andrew Verver in the story.
"[The caller] had a confident voice. Andrew Verver (as I'll call him) was the only person in my father's will whose name was unfamiliar.'
He told her about a trip he had taken with her father to the island of Patmos. "Did he talk to you about his sexual life?" the writer asked.
"I was his sexual life," Andrew said. Writer tells about going with Andrew to visit her father's grave on the first anniversary of his death.
She recalls an impassioned sermon delivered by her father at an AIDS memorial service. From Andrew, she learns that on the night her father gave his sermon at the AIDS memorial, he had mistakenly believed that Andrew was dead.
Full article: VirtueOnline - News - News - Bishop Paul Moore: His Secret Sex Life
Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr Was Gay | BGay