Canon Glasspool, 55, referred to her sexuality early in her profile: “It was during my college years (1972-1976) that I began to discern a vocation to ordained ministry and concomitantly to discover my sexuality. Both these areas were sources of intense struggle for me, as I wrestled with such questions as Did God hate me (since I was a homosexual)? or did God love me? Did I hate (or love) myself?”
Canon Glasspool also wrote of her sense about this election’s timeliness.
“It’s time for our wonderful church to move on and be the inclusive church we say we are,” she said. “I believe that the Diocese of Los Angeles is in alignment with the kairos — ready to move boldly into the future, with a strategic plan centered in the love of God and purposed with bringing God’s reign of justice and love further into being, modeling for the whole church an episcopal team. And maybe, just maybe, God is calling me to be a part of that exciting future.”
Fr. Kirkley, 42, wrote about his coming out as a gay man in the early 1990s and of becoming an adoptive parent.
“The gift in this is that I had to come to grips with both my own relative social privilege as a white, well-educated, male, and the marginalization I experienced as a gay man,” he wrote. “In whatever contexts I have worked subsequently, a commitment to the work of personal integration and social reconciliation has remained with me. This commitment took on a greater sense of personal urgency when my husband, Andrew, and I became parents. When we began the journey of adoption ten years ago, we didn’t anticipate that we would fall in love with a beautiful, African-American baby boy named Nehemiah. It was with some fear and trembling that we two white, gay men embarked upon raising our son.”