profile
By the time he was majoring in church music at Oklahoma Baptist University, he finally started to reconcile with the truth about himself. Still very timid in his sexual identity, Davis ventured out to a couple of gay clubs. “I was still too scared to actually do anything, but I was curious,” Davis says. When university officials found out, Davis was threatened with expulsion. Instead, however, he was sent to reparative, or aversion, therapy and required to move back into the dorms — the all-male dorms. “You think I’m gay and you’re forcing me to live in an all-male dormitory?” Davis says with a laugh. On the subject of reparative therapy — popularly referred to as “pray the gay away” — all Davis says is that it finally stopped when he inexplicably yelled out “No!” in a crowded classroom. By this time, Davis was learning fast that his dreams of one day leading a big, Southern Baptist choir were well out of reach. “Not wanting to be gay is huge,” he says, the smile fading from his face. “There is that thing inside you that you’re constantly fighting.” (The same week of our interview, news broke that one of the largest reparative therapy organizations, Exodus International, had disbanded its board and abruptly changed direction, with President Alan Chambers apologizing for the damage wrought by his organization.) Whatever memories or scars Davis carries from his experience, he quickly focuses back on music and ministry. “You’d be amazed how many music leaders in the church are gay,” he says, almost conspiratorially. “A lot of them have really mastered how to live that lie. But if churches really started kicking out all the gays, there’d be no music leaders left!” The showbiz connection By the time the AIDS crisis started to hit in the early 1980s, Davis went to study music at the University of Houston. He saw the Christian-based response as not only lacking compassion, but as a sign that he needed to redirect his love of music elsewhere. “(The church’s) response to the AIDS crisis was … well, it was hateful. That’s when I decided to go into show business instead.” Musical theater took him to major cities in the Midwest, including shows in Wichita, Kansas, Oklahoma City and Chicago. But as the ’80s drew to a close, Las Vegas came calling. On Jan. 1, 1990, Davis got a part in “Forever Plaid,” which he did for about eight years. Almost 10 years later, he was hatching plans to move back to New
40 | Desert
Companion | September 2013
Next stage: Rev. Davis was in show business before joining the church.
York City when he took over the music department at Community Lutheran Church in October of 1999. “I had kind of fallen in love with Las Vegas,” he says. “And then everything I had ever wanted to do as a kid, I was getting to do (at Community Lutheran).” A few months after taking on his new role at Community Lutheran, Davis was feeling another kind of love in his life. In April 2000, Davis met Freddie Harmon at a Sunday country-western dance. “I saw him in the crowd and just as I saw him he looked up and locked eyes with me,” says Harmon, a native Nevadan and Chief Marketing Officer at the Tropicana Hotel. “As soon as I got home, I called him and left a message.” One of the first things Harmon remembers Davis asking was whether or not he went to church. In fact, Harmon says, his family was not very religious and he would just “float through” churches of any denomination — Baptist, Mormon, what-have-you — with none of them feeling exactly right. “It just never felt comfortable at church because of my sexuality,” Harmon says. Having grown up hearing about how homosexuality was a sin left a deep impression. “That kind of resonates with a kid. I don’t think I would have felt comfortable at any church. (I learned that) church and my sexuality didn’t go together.” Cut to 2000, and after a first date the day after they met, Rev. Davis has Harmon at church two days later. “It immediately took away what I had felt before. Being with Greg made it okay,” Harmon says. Isn’t church an unusual second date? Harmon laughs. “I just remember loving it at church, like I had been missing it. There’d been a void.”
Filling the void Perhaps it’s that void that calls so many different types of people to the littlechurch-that-could on Rancho Drive, well before Rev. Davis took the leadership role last fall. Even though Northwest is a United Church of Christ church, you’ll find Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, and even atheists who have finally found a respite amid the stormy waters of religion. Heartbreaking stories of being kicked out of churches they loved (as well as from families they were once a part of ) abound. Dr. Charlotte Morgan is just such a member. Raised in the evangelical Lutheran tradition in the suburbs of Minneapolis, the 53-year-old naturopathic doctor says she was a devoted Camp Fire Girl, spending summers out in the woods or paddling a canoe. Her other favorite pastime was singing in the church choir. “I always loved to sing,” she recalls. And then, in 1975, when Morgan was 15, a friend’s mom called and told her mother that her daughter had just come out as a lesbian. The friend’s mom concluded that if her daughter was gay, then Morgan must be, too. She remembers her mother asking her point-blank if she was a lesbian. “I think in 1975 I did not know about sex and sexuality. I had barely gotten my period about a year and half earlier. I told my mom, no,” Morgan pauses and adds, “I didn’t think that I was.” But her mother thought she was lying. And that belief caused a deep rift between the two of them. “That changed our relationship forever.” A few years later, when the choirgirl was ready to transition from the youth choir to the adult choir at church, she suddenly found herself uninvited to participate. In fact, it turned out the invitation to leave went beyond just