On Alexandra Pelosi’s Film & Ted Haggard’s Closet

A new documentary — and new revelations triggered by it — have Ted Haggard in the news again. The HBO film by Alexandra Pelosi, The Trials of Ted Haggard, premieres Thursday. The revelation it unintentionally triggered is that Haggard had a previously undisclosed “consensual sexual relationship” with a twenty-something male volunteer that “went on for a long period of time … it wasn’t a one-time act.”

And, it turns out, New Life Church paid the young man off to keep silent. (New Life claims, “It was not a payoff. It was compassionate assistance.”) All of this will raise ratings for Pelosi’s documentary. And make Haggard’s Larry King Live appearance set for Thursday a far more difficult one. (His upcoming appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show was apparently taped prior to the revelations.)

The SF Chronicle talked to Pelosi about how the film was made:

[T]he 41 minutes that filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi creates out of a series of moments with Haggard shot during his exile has a more ambitious aim. The Emmy-nominated (”Travels With George”) documentarian and San Francisco-raised daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi aims for a tale of forgiveness and understanding, and an examination of the duplicity of the church’s teachings of forgiveness.

“Why the gay men and women of S.F. should forgive Ted Haggard is because there’s nothing wrong with being gay,” says Alexandra Pelosi, 38. “The Christians are condemning him for being gay and that’s not who we are. We liberals are supposed to forgive that and say it’s OK.”

She’s exactly right. There’s nothing wrong with being gay! She ought to tell that to Ted. Speaking as a gay liberal, I could forgive have some compassionate understanding for Haggard if he were to stop living a lie. He has not:

The point, Pelosi said, isn’t whether Haggard is gay or not. (She says she thinks he is “somewhere in between, and I know my gay friends hate when I say that.”) It is that while organized religion preaches forgiveness, at Haggard’s darkest hour, they turned their back on him.

I’m with those gay friends. I’m old enough to remember Harvey Milk’s message that we must come out of the closet. As true today as it was in the 1970’s, it is the closet that leads to hypocrisy, shame and disgrace. The proud and still all too difficult embrace of a gay identity could free Haggard, and his family, from his demons.

The fact that coming out won’t bring him good standing in his community of faith is indeed sad. But I’d like to see him leave insurance sales behind and devote himself to something far more meaningful. Say, for example, advocating for a Christian embrace of lgbt people.

He could even start a gay evangelical Baptist church (there’s one here in rural Georgia). Then the lgbt community might embrace him. He could write a best-selling book. And be comfortably back in the spotlight. There’s no question his media appearances would be far easier as an out proud gay man than as the shame-filled  “first-class loser” he looks at the camera and claims to be in Pelosi’s film.

LATER: This Newsweek interview –  his first magazine interview since the scandal but before the latest revelations — confirms the lying denial the man still lives in:

Haggard now thinks that he lashed himself too hard. “I understand why when a criminal is caught they will sometimes admit to things they didn’t do,” he says. “I wanted to overrepent, and I think I did overrepent. In my [resignation] letter to the church I said I was a deceiver and a liar, but I hadn’t lied about anything except to keep quiet about what was going on inside me.” [...]

He says he has never had an adult same-sex encounter with anyone other than Jones.

The lies are so bold-faced they make me sympathetic for the church, not Haggard. He’s living a cowardly lie and deserves no sympathy from anyone until he repents, comes clean and comes out!