E-Mail This Article to a Friend HISTORICAL CYCLE Boston’s first gay wedding BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

When the Reverend William Alberts first heard that the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) had ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry last November, he felt vindicated. Thirty years earlier, in April 1973, the former Methodist minister made headlines when he officiated at the marriage of two male parishioners at Boston’s Old West Church — and subsequently lost his church assignment.

"I saw the [SJC] ruling as the fulfillment of something that we participated in early on," says Alberts, 77, now a Unitarian Universalist minister who works as a hospital chaplain at the Boston Medical Center. "I thought, ‘This is wonderful.’ I felt glad that I had done what I believed was right all those years earlier."

What was "right" was marrying Bob Jones and Harry Freeman. In 1973, Alberts had been the minister at Old West Church for eight years. Jones and Freeman, both theology students at Boston University, became regular parishioners at the church. They served on its governing body. They helped design its bulletins. One day, they approached Alberts to ask if he would marry them. "They believed their love was affirmed and blessed by God," he recalls.

It didn’t take long for Alberts to make a decision. He thought about his role as minister. About his duty to care for parishioners as Jesus had — the same Jesus who said "Love thy neighbor," the same Jesus who set the oppressed free. To him, performing a gay wedding seemed consistent with his ministry. "So," he says, "I said, ‘Yes!’"

This is not to say that Alberts didn’t anticipate repercussions. According to The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, homosexuality is immoral; in 1973, the Church discouraged its ministers from performing same-sex marriages (now, it expressly "forbids" them). To head off trouble, Alberts set up a meeting with Bishop Edward Carroll, then the head of the Southern New England Conference, at which he told his superior about the marriage. But Carroll, Alberts recalls, denounced the idea.

"He said, ‘Don’t do it,’" Alberts remembers. Instead, the bishop suggested that the minister conduct a "celebration of commitment" that would simply recognize Jones and Freeman’s relationship. Alberts wouldn’t hear of it. "These two men loved each other emotionally and physically," he says. "The bishop wanted a friendship ceremony, and that would have been a denial of who Bob and Harry were."

Days later, the two men at the center of the brewing controversy paid a visit to Carroll, only to be informed that, as Alberts remembers, "If I performed the wedding, I could lose my post at Old West Church."

Despite the apparent risk to his job, he went ahead with the ceremony. On April 7, 1973, he stood at the altar in a yellow robe specially made for the occasion and joined Jones and Freeman in matrimony. It was a joyous affair. Hundreds of people packed the pews. The ceremony, Alberts adds, his eyes gleaming, "was one of the most beautiful and meaningful weddings I’ve ever performed."

But its beauty was soon overshadowed by what Alberts calls "all that homophobia." Angry Methodists wrote letters to Bishop Carroll expressing their outrage over the marriage of two men in their church. People decried the union as an abomination. Some even called for Alberts to be defrocked. One month after the ceremony, the bishop wrote a column for the Zionist Herald, a Methodist newspaper, in which he described Albert’s act as the "foremost issue" for the Church in Boston.

"The foremost issue!" Alberts says, sitting up in his chair, raising a finger in the air. "Never mind the Vietnam War," he comments sarcastically, adding: "The foremost issue was not me, but I was turned into it."

Indeed. Alberts didn’t know it at the time, but his bishop had marked the controversial minister for removal. Carroll had even sought out Alberts’s former psychiatrist, Donald Devine, who gave an assessment of the minister as "paranoid" and mentally unstable. In May 1973, the bishop staged a press conference calling Alberts "sick" and "unappointable." Two months later, at the June 1973 annual meeting of the Southern New England Conference, the bishop finished his attack. In front of 700 delegates — and without warning to Alberts — Carroll presented eight "reasons" for dismissing the minister from his long-held post. One of them, not surprisingly, was Jones and Freeman’s marriage.

Although some of Alberts’s colleagues moved to strike the reasons — or to designate them as "charges," so he could receive a church trial — things did not look good for the minister. By the time the meeting ended that day, a motion had been presented calling for his forcible retirement. It passed.

That Alberts had been forced to resign after 24 years in the ministry left him "with a deep rage." In 1975, he sued his former psychiatrist for breaching patient confidentiality, as well as Bishop Carroll and another Church superior for inducing the breach and using the information to bring about his retirement. The lawsuit took seven years to wend through the courts. But it turned out to be worth the wait. In 1985, the SJC ruled in Alberts’s favor. Not only that, but the court’s ruling led to new case law making it illegal for physicians to breach patient confidentiality, as well as for anyone to induce that breach.

"I hadn’t expected that," says Alberts, who also received an undisclosed yet "substantial" settlement from the Church and Devine. "I feel good that my lawsuit can now be used to protect all Massachusetts residents."

Looking back on his struggle since that wedding in 1973, Alberts has no regrets. In fact, he has become more committed to the fight for same-sex-marriage rights. As a Unitarian Universalist minister, he is now part of a religious denomination that supports the SJC ruling. This year, too, he and 62 other retired Methodist ministers from the Boston area have published statements opposing a constitutional amendment that would thwart the ruling. Some of these ministers have gay and lesbian relatives. Others have evolved in their thinking about same-sex marriage. All are pushing the Methodist Church to be more inclusive.

Says Alberts, "When you go through what I did, it radicalizes you. It makes you feel all the more strongly that people must have the freedom to be who they are."