To Our Readers: Email us your name and city of residence at editors@orthodoxyindialogue.com if you would like to co-sign this letter. You need not reside in North America or be Orthodox to sign. If you are a bishop, priest, or deacon, include your ecclesiastical title and the jurisdiction to which you belong. Your name will be added below as quickly as possible after we receive your email.

Please share this letter widely among your family members and friends who might feel moved to join their voices to ours. 

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Dear Metropolitans, Archbishops, and Bishops of the Orthodox Church in the United States and Canada:

Masters, bless. Christ is in our midst.

Please accept the present Open Letter as a respectful follow-up to our Sexuality & Gender: Open Letter to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America of September 24, 2018. We received no response at that time except from one bishop asking that we remove his name from our mailing list. (See Letters to the Editors, September 28, 2018.)

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has observed Pride Month 2019 by conducting a virtual listening tour for your benefit. The following thirteen voices represent a diversity of perspectives expressing a common plea: to be heard, to be taken seriously, to be loved, to be welcomed openly and without fear in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ, and to become contributing participants in an ongoing theological, spiritual, and pastoral dialogue among Orthodox brothers and sisters on questions of sexual and gender diversity in human nature. These questions include—but are not limited to— same-sex orientation, transgender identity, and biologically intersex bodies, as well as the spiritual ramifications of these for our ecclesial life in Christ slowly transfigured by divine grace and human ascesis. Read More

This is the twelfth voice to speak out in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

Today is the deadline to write for this specific series. We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to add your voice.

I’m almost 64 years old and an Orthodox Christian. I’ve spent the last 59 or so years being mocked and called names for not being a sufficient boy or man.

By the time I was 5 or so, my dad was calling me sissy. This meant faggot in his generation.

By the time I was 7 or so, my paternal uncles were sneering at me and taunting me, What’s the matter? Don’t you like girls?

When I was 9 or so, one of my teachers thought it was his duty to come to my house and announce to my parents that I was a queer. Then I had to overhear their fights over what made me that way. Mom blamed Dad. He tried being nice to me, but that lasted only a couple of weeks. Read More

Father Peter Smith’s little fundraiser for child cancer patients touches my heart for three reasons.

First, even though I haven’t seen them in 31 years, Father Peter, Terri, Kevin, and Kerin were among my family’s most beloved friends at St. Vladimir’s Seminary.

Second, his “Fadapita” handle comes from the fact that that’s how my son Aaron pronounced his name when he was five and six years old. Aaron and Father Peter adored each other. Read More

This is the eleventh voice to speak out in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

The deadline to write for this specific series is tomorrow, June 30. We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to add your voice.

To the Bishops of the Orthodox Church:

I don’t really expect to be “heard” when I write this. I’m not sure it will even be read. Yet, I still feel there’s some value in putting it out there. 

I’ve known I was gay for longer than I’ve known what sex is, longer than I understood what this “difference” that I’d always felt was. By 11, I knew what it meant, though. 

It meant God hated me and I would always be alone and never matter to anyone. 

I carried that into puberty, in shame and fear and desperate longing. Around 13 I spent hours one night begging God to kill me. I have rarely cried so hard or so deeply. As I fell into exhausted sleep I prayed, “Kill me or change me. I can’t stand this.”  Read More