After decades of struggle, Providence has fostered a thriving gay enclave
in the only New England state not to sanction same-sex unions.
Two local gay pastors take bold steps early in the fight for civil rights By Mark Arsenault As gay pastors at the dawn of the homosexual rights movement of the 1970s, the Rev. Marge Ragona and the Rev. Robert Drechsler raised headlines in Rhode Island. Thirty years later, in separate telephone interviews, they reflected on their own chapters in the history of Rhode Island's gay community. Rev. Ragona, 78, now at Bethel Metropolitan Community Church in Birmingham, Ala., served as pastor of the primarily gay Metropolitan Community Church in Providence from 1977-78. "At one point I was working for my rent and $10 a week," Rev. Ragona recalls. "I got $10 out of the offering plate every Sunday, and [the MCC] paid my rent because the church office and chapel was in my apartment." She lived in a tenement house with her two teenage children, an associate pastor and a deacon. "In order to eat, we were on food stamps." She soon realized she couldn't maintain the church without another income, so she got a job in Boston as a medical secretary. She may be best remembered in Providence for her hunger strike in May 1978. To protest the refusal of the Providence City Council to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance, Rev. Ragona lived for eight days on the steps of the federal courthouse, consuming only water and herbal tea, and using the public restroom at the train station. At the time, she was 49. "People would come and sit with me and we would talk about what we were doing," she says. "Some [were] church members who weren't working who would come down with their children. "And the first night, three police cars pulled up flashing their lights on us. You know: 'What are you doing here?' We explained we were on federal territory and they did not have any authority to move us. They were a little upset because they couldn't get us to step down. I think they expected it to be gay men, and [that evening] it was two women and a blind man. And I think they felt a little ashamed." Her vigil came three months after the Blizzard of '78, during which MCC members had staffed an emergency kitchen at Mathewson Street Church, feeding police officers and firefighters who had worked through the storm. "I think the police suddenly realized who we were, that we were the same people that had fed them," she says. "And almost the entire time I was there, there was a police car parked at night across from where I was staying on the courthouse steps, seeing that we were safe." The nights were frigid; she remembers sleeping in a winter parka. "One night we had some young people who had been performing at an Irish bar see us out on the courthouse steps," she recalls. "We told them what we were doing, and they sat down and took out their instruments and were playing Irish sea chanteys for us. I remember going to sleep to the sound of Cumberland mountain hymns. "The last day was a Sunday. And everybody had gone off to church. I was all alone. One of the federal officers came out with a bottle of ice-cold cranberry juice. And handed it to me and said, 'You need to drink this for your kidneys.' The federal officer didn't have any responsibility for me, and yet was kind enough to do that. During the week, the head of the Rhode Island Council of Churches came down and sat with me for a while, and we talked about Gandhi and Martin Luther King and peaceful protest. That was very encouraging." She says gay Christians today have many more religious options than 30 years ago. "Here I am down in Birmingham, and we have Baptist churches that are open to gays. We have Methodist churches open to gays. We have certainly Episcopal churches open to gays. We're [not] the only shop in town where people have their spiritual needs met. That was the case in '78." IN 1967, THE REV. ROBERT W. DRECHSLER became pastor of Shawomet Baptist Church in Warwick. He liked to keep his church relevant to the everyday life of his congregation. In a Providence Journal story in 1973, Drechsler said he liked to "preach with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other." In the mid-1970s, The American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island appointed Drechsler chairman of a task force to study whether homosexuals could lead Christian lives. At the time, he was 40. The task force could agree only that Christ had died for everyone, including homosexuals. In 1976, Drechsler, an alcoholic, stopped drinking. He was struck by a persistent urge to come out of the closet. "And I kept saying, 'No way. What will people say?' " The next year, he stopped hiding his sexual orientation. Drechsler announced to his 350-member congregation that he was gay, and involved with a man. He had hoped to make his announcement and leave his post quietly. "And then a reporter from the Warwick Beacon got a hold of the story and put it on the front page," says Drechsler, in a telephone interview from California. "And there it was. It was one of the more exciting times of my life. I remember that being a time in which I finally got myself set free. That's a good way to put it, I think." He briefly became involved in the Providence MCC, running the church when the pastor was away. "In the process of doing that, I realized I'm not supposed to be doing this anymore," he says. "I sort of lost my calling." Drechsler and his partner drove cross-country to California and started a new life. He got a job working in management. He is retired now. Trained in counseling, he works part-time at a drug and alcohol rehab center in Riverside, Calif. He's still with the same partner. Thirty years ago, Drechsler wrote a goodbye letter to his Warwick flock, printed in the church bulletin. Over the decades, he had forgotten his own words, until recently they were read back to him. "I feel badly some of you are suddenly, after 10 years, turned off by me," Drechsler wrote in 1977. "But I want you to know that I hold no bitterness and have only love for you . . . I feel I must tell you that the issue of homosexuality will not go away because I have gone away . . . Perhaps some day we will be able to accept one another, each as a child of God, loved by God." After listening, Drechsler says, "I wrote that?" He laughs. "Good for me, I like that. Ah -- wow. I got goose bumps listening to that. There's my first reaction. It hasn't completely happened yet, obviously. This is a major issue within churches. The Episcopal Church is almost split over this, with the consecration of [openly gay] Bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire." His goodbye letter from 1977, "was heartfelt at the time, honestly, and it still has the same sentiment. And it hasn't yet come to fruition, darn it."
marsenau@projo.com / (401) 277-7231
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