The Rev. Jerry Sloan died in November 2021. This story is based largely on archived news reports, Sloan’s own writing and previously recorded interviews with him and those who knew him.
Jerry Sloan had an obsession with far-right religious conservatives. He’d been a working minister himself, so he knew the Bible as well as any televangelist. After he moved to Sacramento in 1980, he formally devoted himself to tracking the radical religious right, and that’s why the liberal gay man with a fondness for delicate glass figurines found himself watching a TV show he loathed that Sunday in 1984.
“The Old-Time Gospel Hour” was Jerry Falwell’s show. He had raved about Sloan’s mother’s chocolate meringue pie when the two men were friends at Baptist Bible College in 1950s Missouri; launching his career as a pioneer of the Christian right, Falwell issued a “Declaration of War” on gay people. Later in the ’80s, he asserted that gay people deserved to die of AIDS. On this particular Sunday, Falwell said something that made Sloan especially angry. He went on a tirade against an LGBTQ-friendly church where Sloan had been a minister, the Metropolitan Community Church. He said:
“They are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is, going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally. … Thank God, this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there will be celebration in heaven!”
Sloan rushed out and bought a tape recorder to use for the rebroadcast — he wanted to keep a record of Falwell’s smear against fellow Christians. And that impulse to document hatred allowed the enterprising Sacramento activist to win seed money for the city’s first LGBTQ community center.
Sloan, who died in November at 86, was a pioneer in the Sacramento LGBTQ scene; The Bee is revisiting his story for Pride month. Although he first made his mark by successfully suing Falwell over those comments in the ’80s, he was an activist for decades, preaching that the machinations of Christian right called for constant vigilance. He co-founded Project Tocsin — named after an alarm bell — to monitor the far right. His skirmish with Falwell exemplified the kind of activism he loved: Confrontational, demanding and grounded in truth.
Sloan also networked with other activists to bolster their work. “He helped me understand the importance of extremist political tactics in (the) Republican Party,” said Hans Johnson, who was a young progressive organizer in D.C. when he was first introduced to Sloan. In the early ’90s, Johnson said, “The religious right was increasingly obsessed with anti-LGBT appeals.”
Johnson eventually moved to Southern California and was able to visit Sacramento to see Sloan in person more often. Over the years, he came to see Sloan’s point of view as more prescient than ever — particularly now, he said, as Republicans’ obsession with LGBT people reaches new levels of hysteria, with anti-trans and now anti-drag queen legislation garnering support in conservative legislatures across the country.
A SHOWDOWN WITH JERRY FALWELL ON KCRA 3
Sloan was attuned to bigotry against LGBTQ people decades earlier.
In 1984, Sloan hadn’t recorded Falwell’s comments with the intention of suing — he just wanted to track far-right attacks on gay people. But when the televangelist happened to come to Sacramento in July, a few months after the broadcast, Sloan decided to confront him during a taping of “Look Who’s Talking” on Channel 3. Falwell had been his friend. During the 1955-1956 school year, Falwell and Sloan had driven from their college in Springfield, Missouri, to Sloan’s hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, every weekend for work. Sloan’s mother, Gloria, often made the young men a Sunday dinner.
So he went to the talk show taping, and Falwell recognized him. And then, while the cameras were rolling and Sloan started to repeat Falwell’s own words to him, Falwell said, “That’s an absolute lie, Jerry.” The Sacramento Bee reported at the time that Falwell told him, “I’ll threaten you. … I’ll give $5,000 — I’m saying this on TV — if you can produce that tape.”
Sloan said sure, he had a tape. Later, he told The Bee, “The man called me a liar. … I needed some personal vindication.”
THE LAWSUIT THAT FUNDED SACRAMENTO LGBT COMMUNITY CENTER
Sloan, of course, produced the tape, and Falwell refused to pay him. So Sloan sued Falwell, not for slandering gay people, but for lying.
With the help of Sacramento attorney Rosemary Metrailer — who initially took his case pro bono and could not be reached for an interview — Sloan won his breach of contract case. The judge ordered Falwell to pay up, and the Los Angeles Times ran the memorable headline “Falwell Ordered to Pay $5,000 to Gay Who Met Evangelist’s Challenge.”
That triumphant gay told the paper, “I did it for the principle of the thing. … His statements are dangerous to the gay and lesbian community. He has said disastrous things about various and sundry people, and he’s always tried to squirm out of it.”
Falwell claimed in the paper that he was the victim of “harassment by a militant homosexual group in Sacramento” (the group was apparently just Sloan and Metrailer, his lesbian attorney).
As he promised, Falwell appealed, and lost again on appeal. Ultimately, his organization — the Moral Majority, a conservative political group that railed against women’s rights, abortion rights and gay rights until dissolving in 1989 — had to pay Sloan $8,982.90, the $5,000 plus interest, attorneys’ fees and punitive damages for a suit the judges found “wholly frivolous and totally without merit.”
As Metrailer told The Bee in 2014, “We made him be accountable for the hatred he was espousing. The case made international news.”
In an interview with CapRadio for StoryCorps, Metrailer and Sloan recalled that Falwell attempted to impose a “no gloating” stipulation on the check. He didn’t want Sloan to call a news conference. Sloan told Metrailer at the time not to bother fighting Falwell’s demand — he’d just have his mother, Gloria, call a news conference for him.
Sloan had a giant blowup of the check made. After his final 1986 victory, he told the Los Angeles Times that Falwell “indicated that I was a liar and that I was not a reliable person,” so the lawsuit “was a matter of personal integrity.”
He gave much of the winnings to buy chairs, plants and ceiling fans for the Lambda Community Center, which has since changed its name to the Sacramento LGBT Community Center and provides services to LGBTQ Sacramentans to this day.
“You can say that Jerry was kind of a godfather of the community center in Sacramento,” Sloan said in the StoryCorps interview. “We did dedicate a room there to him. It was the toilet.”
A LEGACY OF CONFRONTING HATE
Sloan became an activist after being shunned by his fellow Christians. When he came out in 1960, a pastor at his home church pulled him aside one day and told him he should leave and never come back. He later founded a Metropolitan Community Church in Des Moines, Iowa, and a local reporter covered the gay reverend at the new gay-friendly church.
The article made its way back to his alma mater, and, as Sloan recalled, “They wrote me, demanding that I send my diploma back to them. Not only that, but the vice president of the school, in a letter that he sent to me, closed it by saying ‘we hope that you return to the faith, or God wipe your influence from the face of the earth.’ So, I became quite an activist.”
Sloan saw the real potential for violence that lurked in Christian extremist circles. He spoke of “imprecatory prayers” — religious speech that invoked evil or curses on people. These words from the pulpit would inspire real violence, because believers might think to themselves, “Maybe God wants me to be the wielder of that two-by-four.” He brought this up repeatedly over his life, and more recently grieved when religious extremists murdered 26-year-old Satender Singh for his sexuality in 2007 while he was picnicking with friends at Lake Natoma. The men called him a “sodomite” before they beat him to death.
Sloan told the LGBT-interest magazine The Advocate, “I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done as long as these guys are preaching that we’re not normal and (are the) scum of the earth. I’m very pessimistic in that regard.”
Sloan had dedicated himself to fighting hate from the religious right, and helped other activists see the dangers from the fringe. A creature of a pre-internet era, he lived out his life surrounded by stacks of boxes filled with a record of Christian bigotry, which he would use to try to hold hatemongers accountable.
Particularly before the internet, “People’s ability to tell crisp stories and convey key facts in phone conversations really were essential components of good advocacy,” Johnson said. Sloan’s archive — and his love of phone calls to local chapters of organizations like the ACLU — helped prevent people from “reinvent(ing) themselves in just about any city they wanted to or any state capitol they wanted to.”
In addition to Sloan’s collection of damning records, he was also surrounded by the glass figurines he collected with his mother, and an impressive array of tie-dye T-shirts.
