“The yardstick for Christian behaviour is always: What would Jesus Christ do in this situation?” he wrote. Christ’s teachings made the answer obvious to Wood, who concluded that the “saving message of Christ and the freely flowing grace of God are as much for the homosexual as the heterosexual", and that “the church must minister equally to both; that the demands of Christ apply to both; that both are capable of being moral, as well as immoral and amoral.” Wood’s book came well before the gay-rights movement gained traction with critical moments like the riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969. But Christ and the Homosexual did not make much of a ripple outside of largely positive reviews in gay publications. There were several reasons for the book’s lack of impact, according to Bernard Schlager, a professor of historical and cultural studies at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. Schlager said a lack of promotion led to a lack of reviews in major publications; gay men and women were still largely invisible to mainstream society in the early 1960s; and Christian denominations were still a decade or so from forming advocacy groups that educated church members about homosexuality. But he suggested a fourth reason: Wood did not out himself in the book. In fact, he would not do so until he retired as a pastor in 1986, although he lived openly for many years with his partner, Hugh Coulter, a former rodeo cowboy and artist, at parishes in Spring Valley, Newark and Maynard, Massachusetts.

Robert Watson Wood was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on May 21, 1923, to Harold and Edith (Beard) Wood. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a homemaker. Wood left the University of Pennsylvania to fight in World War II in North Africa and Italy with the 36th Infantry division. He encountered prejudice in school and the military. In an interview in 2000 for an Oberlin LGBT history project, he recalled a meeting with fellow undergraduates who frightened him by quoting negative Scripture verses about homosexuals.

“I realised they were using these texts to bash me and other homosexuals,” he said. “So I decided that when I went to seminary, I would learn my Bible as well as or more than they did so I could use Scripture to confront them.” He was ordained in 1951 and joined the staff of the Broadway Tabernacle in Manhattan before becoming pastor at the First Congregational Church (now the United Church) of Spring Valley. While there, he wrote an article in 1956 called “Spiritual Exercises” for a gay physique magazine that prompted letters from “men frustrated at having to hide their gayness in order to keep their Christian faith”. That helped him formulate the simple basis for his book: that it was OK to be a gay Christian, even if your church disagreed. Within a few years, he had turned his attention to more overt activism. He protested in Washington in June 1965 against anti-homosexual hiring practices by the federal government. Soon after, on July 4, he was in Philadelphia with a small group of gay and lesbian protesters who gathered outside Independence Hall, connecting the promise of constitutional equality to the gay civil rights movement. It was the first of five protests at Independence Hall through to July 4, 1969, that came to be known as the Annual Reminders.

“The fact that he was willing to use his name and appear in his clerical collar was astounding,” Malcolm Lazin, executive director of the Equality Forum, an LGBT rights group, said in a telephone interview. “He was putting his job on the line by virtue of his willingness to appear in public at these protests.” Wood kept his job, ministering quietly to his parishioners, as gay rights advanced on an arc that almost certainly could not have been predicted when he wrote Christ and the Homosexual. In his advocacy of same-sex marriage, he wrote that he would insist that any gay couple enter premarital counselling with him before he would agree to officiate at their wedding. He did not think at the time that many gay couples would want to marry. But, he wrote, “to say without reservation that homosexual marriages are immoral and should not be sanctioned by the clergy is to sacrifice the homosexual upon the altar of the status quo.” Decades later, he officiated at same-sex marriages when they became legal in Massachusetts and then, New Hampshire, where he had moved after his retirement. The New York Times