Memoir of My Intern Year (1966-1967), by Dr. Larry Mamiya

Memoir of My Intern Year (1966-1967), by Dr. Larry Mamiya

Memoir of My Intern Year (1966-1967) as the Minister of Young Adults at the Glide Memorial Methodist Church, by Dr. Larry Mamiya, Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Vassar College

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"Memoir of My Intern Year (1966-1967) as the Minister of Young Adults at theGlide Memorial Methodist Church
by Dr. Larry Mamiya,
Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Vassar College
I first learned of the Glide Fellows Program in 1965 from Neale Secor, a former lawyer who was studying for his Bachelor of Divinity degree (later changed to a Master of Divinity) at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where I was also a student. Neale was the first Glide Fellow and did his intern year as the first Minister to Young Adults at the Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco. He told me that Glide was composed of three institutional entities—the Glide Memorial Methodist Church, the Glide Urban Center, and the Glide Foundation. His work with young adults, both gay and straight, involved holding an open house during week nights in his family’s apartment, where both gay and straight young adults from the church could gather and socialize. He was married with two children. He also helped out with the work of all three Glide entities in the Tenderloin area surrounding the church.
In 1964 Glide had become the first Christian church to establish the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. The Rev. Ted McIIvenna of Glide helped to establish the Council. By doing so, Glide had
become a maverick in the United Methodist Church and Christian circles since the Methodists and most Christian denominations still do not approve of homosexuality nor gay marriages. Glide was able to maintain its independent stance and cutting edge, progressive urban ministries largely due to the financial independence the church had from its endowment in the Glide Foundation. Lizzie
Glide, whose family’s fortune derived from California oil and cattle, was also a devout Methodist. She saw that the downtown area of the Tenderloin had no church, so she established her own and
endowed it with funds coming from the profits of the Californian Hotel nearby. A team of Methodist clergy established in the early 1960’s both the Urban Center and the Foundation as appendages to the church. The Civil Rights movement had triggered a host of bold experimental ministries and Glide saw itself at the forefront of this movement.
I was in my second year at Union and was trained as a community organizer, doing rent strikes, welfare mediation, and general problem solving, from the base of a black church in upper East Harlem called the Triangle. Instead of teaching Sunday school which most seminarians do for their field work, two black women from the church and I were trained to run a problem solving clinic. A former Marine captain, lawyer, and associate minister George Fuller taught me how to organize using the methods and principles of Saul Alinksy, which focused on using nonviolent protest and conflict to bring about social change. This background of working as a community organizer in Harlem worked to my advantage when I applied and was accepted to become one of three Glide Fellows. Rich, a Union classmate, was placed in a suburban arts church, Barry from Canada went to Mendocino to work with Caesar Chavez and the farm workers, while I became the Minister to Young Adults at Glide itself. However, before going to Glide, I spent the months from May to July of 1966 as a civil rights organizer in the rural areas, sponsored by the Student Interracial Ministry and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Southwest Georgia Project headed by the Rev. Charles Sherrod (see my memoir (“SIM, SNCC and the Southwest Georgia Project”) in the online Civil Rights Movement Veterans archives: www.crmvets.org)."

Page 2: "That summer in Southwest Georgia was an extremely violent one since I saw more blood spilled at that time than for the rest of my life. I left Southwest Georgia into participate in my sister’s wedding in Hawaii. After spending a week in Hawaii, I headed for San Francisco. A Union classmate David Mann introduced me to the Rev. Fred Bird and his wife Ann. Fred, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, pastored a church in Chinatown and I stayed in their apartment for a week until I found a place of my own. I also bought a used car from David, a British made Sunbeam sports convertible, for $600. As the new Minister to Young Adults at Glide, I asked around about where many young adults were living and hanging out in the city. The answer was an area where two streets crossed, Haight and Ashbury. So I found an apartment on Parnassus Street below the U.C. Medical Center and on the outskirts of the Haight-Ashbury district. Little did I know that that little community would explode in 1967 with over a million young people coming through and become the center of a burgeoning youth counterculture.
As a community organizer, I knew that I had to hang out a while to find out what’s going on and what the important needs were in the neighborhood. In the beginning I did that in the Tenderloin district
surrounding Glide church with members of Vanguard who were meeting at the church. I spent three to four nights a week from 10 p.m. to about 3 or 4 a.m. talking to the young street hustlers (male and
female prostitutes, transvestites, and transsexuals) on the street corners or in coffee shops. Vanguard
was the first group of largely gay young people in the nation organized by Adrian Ravarour (later the Rev. Dr. Ravarour). He would always be introduced at Vanguard events as the “founder.” At that time, I did not know about the background of Adrian’s founding philosophy, which included Mohandas Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. among others. But it certainly was in harmony with my own views about the role of nonviolence in social change movements. In retrospect, Vanguard can be seen as the spearhead of a nonviolent social change movement of young gay people, the first in the nation dedicated to bringing about social justice and equal rights. Vanguard was established three years before the famous Stonewall incident in New York City, which is often viewed as the beginning of the gay rights movement.
By watching the police harass the young people on the streets or in the coffee shops I quickly discovered that there was a great need for a “safe space,” where they could be themselves, have fun, enjoy music and dancing, and be safe from the cops. So I arranged for members of Vanguard to use the large basement area of Glide as social hall for dances on Friday and Saturday evenings from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. The dances were a great success with anywhere from 100 to 300 people attending. It also made Glide the first church in the country to sponsor gay dances. Many of the members were great dancers and I enjoyed watching them. But most of my time during the dances was spent at the front admissions desk with several Vanguard members because there were always nosy cops or fire marshals coming around wanting to inspect the place. I also knew that their main motive was to shut down the dances if they could. So I always carried a snap on clerical collar in the pocket of my sports jacket. From my experience on the streets, I knew that many of the police and firemen were Irish-Catholics and they had a certain respect for a collar. Whenever I met them with my collar on, they always addressed me as “Father.” That respect helped me to succeed in never letting them in. As an organizer, one uses whatever leverage you have with the authorities.
Since Glide church had no youth group of its own, I sort of viewed Vanguard as the church’s youth group. The age range of Vanguard members were from 11 to 35 years old with the majority in their late teens and early twenties. Most of them had run away from or left their homes because of abuse, parental neglect, or not getting along with their parents. Many had been living on the streets, selling their bodies. Drug use was also prevalent. The harsh realities of the lives of Vanguard members shouldn’t be romanticized. These young people were among the most neglected sectors in American society."

Page 3: "However, the Vanguard organization did exist to make life better for everyone. Besides the dances, whichwent on successfully from mid-September until the end of December, I also got an office space for Vanguard to use since the office next to mine was unoccupied. J.P. Maurat, the President of Vanguard and some other Vanguard officers and members used the office everyday.
The Glide Urban Center was instrumental in getting the Tenderloin declared as one of the poverty areas of the city. Each poverty area had to develop an umbrella community organization, made up of local organizations in the area. This was Alinsky’s “organization of organizations” model of community organizing. Each local organization sent two representatives to the poverty council meetings. Mark Forrester, who was gay, was the community organizer for the Tenderloin. He prevailed upon Vanguard to send two representatives and they did. One of the goals of obtaining the War on Poverty funds was to establish a hospitality center, a safe space, for the youth of the Tenderloin. This goal was why the Vanguard organization as representatives of these youth was critical to obtaining the funds.
I gave my home phone number to members of Vanguard and said if you need help, call me. I was called several times between 3 to 4 a.m. and the person said I got arrested, please come and bail me out. My reply was to hang on until 9 a.m. and I will see the bail bondsman. The bail was usually set at $500 so I used the $600 bill of sale for my Sunbeam convertible as the collateral for the bail. I was extremely fortunate that the young people I bailed out showed up at their court dates. Otherwise I would have lost my wheels needed to get around the hills of San Francisco. I trusted the members of Vanguard and they trusted me.
In November and December of 1966, a dispute arose between J.P. Maurat and the clergy of the Glide
Church, Urban Center and Foundation. Since J.P. was using an office space at Glide and showed up every weekday, he felt that the church should put him on its staff and pay him a salary. However, it was not the church’s policy to pay salaries to officers of affiliated organizations. Glide had many affiliations and Vanguard was only one of them. Apparently, the situation became quite ugly. The clergy who ranked above me were directly involved in the meetings: the Rev. Cecil Williams, the new preaching minister and Pastor, the Rev. Vaughn Smith, Associate Pastor, and the Rev. Louis Durham, head of the Glide Foundation. J.P. Maurat decided that Vanguard should cut its ties to Glide and they left in early January 1967. Mark Forrester, the poverty council organizer, also said that the group could not use the name Vanguard because that name had been used in government contracts for funds that would be directed to the youth of the Tenderloin. If the Vanguard representatives to the council quit, then other young people would be appointed in their place. Thus, J.P.’s dispute with Glide led to the loss of an office space for Vanguard, the social dances on Friday and Saturday nights, the loss of representation on the poverty council and the loss of their own safe space in the Hospitality Center that was created a year later. One person’s ego led to a lot of losses for Vanguard.
Racial Rebellions
Racial rebellions (called “race riot” by the media) in the 1960’s began with the Harlem rebellion in the
summer of 1964. It was followed by the rebellion in Watts in 1965 and many others after that. The really large rebellions were in Detroit and Newark in 1967.
My background as a community organizer and as a civil rights worker led the Rev. Cecil Williams to have me accompany him whenever he was called to intervene in the racial rebellions in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point, Oakland, and the Fillmore district of San Francisco. On September 27, 1966 a police officer shot and killed 16 year old Matthew Johnson and three days of black rage erupted. While Cecil dealt with the police, I went with those who were rebelling on the streets. It was at Hunter’s Point that I learned how to"

Page 4: "survive in street rebellions. The lesson was to never stand in the front row of protestors because if the police shoot with deadly force then it is the front row that is injured or killed. I learned to stay on the side of the crowd but to move whenever the crowd moves. Not being white also helped. One black protestor looked at me and said, “Are you white?” I said, “No, do I look white?” And we moved on. (other sections will include The Artists Liberation Front and the Invisible Circus, a 72 Happening at Glide, the funeral of Chocolate George of the Hells Angels, Glide’s involvement in the Haight-Ashbury Hippie Community: the establishment of the Black People’s Free Store, the Diggers Thursday night dinners at Glide, and the establishment of the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic, Huckleberry’s for Runaways, crash pads, and free concerts in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. )"