The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, 1942–2011

Long before he addressed about 200 demonstrators from the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard in 1991, Peter Gomes was a famous preacher. He had pronounced the benediction at Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration and become the recognized spiritual leader of the Harvard community. But his public identity took on a new dimension that day in Cambridge when he spoke to a crowd protesting a conservative student magazine’s religious-based diatribes against homosexuality. “I am a Christian who happens as well to be gay,” he said. “Those realities, which are unreconcilable to some, are reconciled in me by a loving God.” The demonstrators gasped, then burst into wild applause. A few months later, he told an interviewer, “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”

A descendant of slaves, Gomes (rhymes with “homes”) was raised in Plymouth, Mass., said The Boston Globe. His father, a cranberry-bog worker, was an immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands; his mother was a member of one of Boston’s most prominent black families. After graduating from Maine’s Bates College, he planned to become an arts curator until his religion professor suggested he apply to the Harvard Divinity School. Upon graduation, he taught for two years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before returning to Harvard in 1970.

Gomes’s speaking voice was a force of nature, said The New York Times. The “rich baritone”—a blend of James Earl Jones and John Houseman—was suffused with the cadences of New England’s patrician class, of which he considered himself a member. And true to his word, after acknowledging his homosexuality in 1991, he used that voice “to rebut literal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.”

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After Gomes changed his party registration to Democratic in 2006 to vote for Deval Patrick in Massachusetts’s gubernatorial primary, he admitted that in making his place in Harvard’s liberal environment, it had been “much easier coming out as a homosexual than as a Republican.”