Service Man

Talking about himself doesn’t come easy to Rodney Lofton, but talking about others is his great gift. It’s something he does all day, every day, and often deep into the night.

Though Lofton keeps regular hours in his office at Diversity Richmond, he works pretty much around the clock, answering emails and texts from people in the LGBTQ community at odd hours — lifting with his words, ministering to his vast flock.

That sense of devotion, and the driving intensity behind it, is evident in the office Lofton maintains, in the many Diet Coke bottles and Starbucks cups that clutter it. Lofton is addicted to these, as well as to his cigarettes — there’s a pack of Newports on his desk, too.

Trim and lanky, he puts forth a quietly charismatic presence in his crisp button-down shirt and slacks, but visible on his neck as he talks is a tattoo of a male figure holding his head between his arms. The nearly 50-year-old Lofton explains that it’s a symbol of his inner child — sometimes frightened, sometimes incensed, but always hopeful.

It’s an apt metaphor, in a way, for what Lofton is trying to do in his new campaign with the organization — to bridge divides, to heal wounds. More specifically, he’s working to make Diversity Richmond, well, more diverse.

More than five decades after the Civil Rights Act, it remains a troubling fact that at most institutions in this country, much power still resides in the hands and hearts of the white, wealthy and straight. And Diversity Richmond is not immune to this state of affairs. The staff and board of directors have historically been predominantly white, but the nonprofit has taken a hard look at itself, making an effort to diversify its current 14-member board of directors with five African-American members and eight female members. In the age of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the radical separation of the body politic into woke and un-woke, Diversity also is taking steps to better represent the communities it serves.

In fact, Lofton is the first African-American to hold a senior staff position in the history of the nonprofit, which opened in 1999 as the Richmond Gay Community Foundation (the name was changed in 2015 to be more representative of all LGBTQ individuals). Bill Harrison, the organization’s executive director, says that the position of deputy director was created specifically for Lofton because the work he was already doing in the city — and the people and communities he was reaching — deserved Diversity’s full, institutional support.

Harrison sounds like a man who has done a good deal of soul-searching when he says, at once contrite and forward-looking, “We’ve made a conscious effort through Rodney’s leadership here to look at why we have not been more inclusive. It’s not been intentional … but whether intentional or not, we still were not inclusive, and it’s true dating back to the ’70s. It’s been much more difficult, I think, for people of color to come out of the closet [than] it has been for white people.”

To reach out to the underrepresented, to inform and educate them, to help them get support that they may need — this is Lofton’s charge.

As he makes his endless rounds, he is part teacher, part counselor, part preacher, part paper-pusher, part auditor — working to ensure, he says, “that as a community center called Diversity, we are truly inclusive of all aspects of all sub-communities within our greater LGBTQ community.”

The sub-community he is most intently focused on is what he calls “queer people of color.” People who are aware of Diversity Richmond, who know what the organization is and what it does, but who have “sometimes looked at Diversity as not being a place for them,” he says, “because they didn’t see or they don’t see anyone that looks like them.”

The words are measured and thoughtful, and there can be no doubt, listening to them, that you are in the presence of a polished public servant.

But don’t be fooled for a minute: For Lofton, this issue isn’t mere policy — it’s personal.

•••

Lofton is one of many Richmonders who left and returned. He returned twice, actually — the first time because of a death sentence.

He was at that time working for a small independent public relations company in New York City with a client list that included music industry luminaries such as Kool & the Gang and Mary Wilson. On the side, he pursued his passion for writing, doing some freelance pieces on music and entertainment. His life was by no means perfect, but he was living it for himself as an openly gay man in the city that never sleeps, and working in the entertainment world had long been his dream.

Then, in late 1993, Lofton received the news that he was HIV-positive. “I was told I was gonna die,” he says. “And I prepared myself to die.”

To hear him describe it, it wasn’t so much that he prepared himself to die as that he did nothing to stop the forces that were about to undo him. He collapsed — physically, emotionally, mentally. Didn’t take care of himself. Let his apartment go. Stopped paying his bills. He thought long and hard about the kind of funeral he envisioned. “I wanted to be propped up in my casket so I could view from the afterlife all the people who came to my funeral and all this other stuff.”

The smartest, most practical, most healing thought he had was to leave New York to be near his mother, Mildred Lofton.

“The hardest call I ever had to make,” he says now.

She didn’t judge. She didn’t ask questions. “Without missing a beat, she said, ‘We’ll get through this.’ So when I came home, this incredible lady became my first educator. She had all the pamphlets, and she had recorded ‘And the Band Played On’ [a film about an epidemiologist investigating the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s]. HBO had already shown it, so we watched it and we cried.”

Her devotion was so strong and so unwavering that he was able, finally, to pull himself out of a pit of self-pity.

There is not even a trace of hyperbole or melodrama in his voice when he says, simply: “She saved me.”

There was reinforcement, too, in the form of Robert “Bob” Higginson, a physician’s assistant at VCU Health. “I went in to see him, [I was] this scared guy preparing to die, and he said, ‘I got this. You take care of you, I have this.’ ”

Higginson got him on the medication that would enable him to control the disease but credits Lofton with putting in the effort to manage his health. “He always kept appointments, he took his medications,” Higginson says. “Other than smoking, he pretty much stuck to everything we talked about. No one’s 100 percent all of the time … but I always got the impression he was always honest with me.”

When Lofton realized that he wasn’t going to die, he discovered a newfound purpose: to help others.

Leaving behind the glitz of the entertainment world, over the next decade he immersed himself in the more difficult realities of the LGBTQ world, first volunteering with a teen theater group in Richmond to spread HIV/AIDS awareness, then working on HIV prevention for youth at a Washington, D.C., organization, and then, much later, taking a job as a case manager in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he created a support group for HIV-positive men.

By 2004, though, he was homesick again and longing to be near his mother.

He worked at VCU for a couple years, still doing case management and HIV/AIDS work, but found he was getting burned out. “It became all-consuming,” he says. “There wasn’t a time where I could take my hat off as someone who was living with HIV. So either I’m living with HIV or providing services for those who were living with HIV.”

He took a new job working as an administrator of an after-school program, but he soon discovered that, though his HIV/AIDS advocacy had drained him, it was not so easy to abandon the community that needed him. “I missed the passion of helping others. I am a staunch believer that to whom much is given, much is required, and I had an incredible support system when I found out I was positive. I know friends of mine who didn’t, and I just wanted to make sure that someone knows that they’re special, that you can beat this.”

He returned to HIV/AIDS work, first as a case worker at the Fan Free Clinic, now known as Health Brigade, then as executive director of The Renewal Projects, a nonprofit working to assist those living with or at risk of HIV through programs and education.

When the Renewal Projects folded two years ago, there was no questioning of his purpose. This time Lofton understood, he says, that serving his brothers and sisters in the LGBTQ community was not just his work, it was his calling. It may be draining, it may take its toll, but it is the role, he says, he is meant to occupy.

It took Lofton years to accept that he was living with a disease, but it has taken him just as long to accept that he is a public servant.

•••

If it is a good thing for Lofton the man that he is no longer at odds with himself, it is also a good thing for Lofton the public servant. He needs that energy and strength to confront the many obstacles he faces in his current role.

Some of those hurdles are obvious.

For all its many changes in recent years, Richmond is still a city with conservative Southern roots. So far, at least, the city has not been riven by a controversy along the lines of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that rose all the way to the Supreme Court, but it would not be hard to imagine it happening, and the ways that this would affect an already divided city.

But some of those obstacles Lofton confronts are less obvious — at least for those who live outside the orbit of the LGBTQ community.

One is a place that poses complicated questions for what Lofton calls “queer people of color” — the African-American church. (See our piece below.)

Lofton has distanced himself from organized religion. “I ran away from the church when I kind of figured out that some of the rhetoric was telling me, ‘You’re not welcome here,’ ” he says, adding that if he had to choose a denomination, he would say Baptist, but he has no home church.

To come out is never easy. There are multiple anxieties, from fear of judgment to worries about discrimination and prejudice, even the threat of violence.

It is subjectively harder, though, in many ways, for black men and women, and the church is one of the reasons why. The black church has long been a shield against racism, a sanctuary in more senses than one. But for many in the LGBTQ community, it traditionally has been a place where homosexuality is labeled a sin.

Lofton has friends who were raised in the church and continue to attend regularly, but his distance comes from his own experience.

“Why would you want to go to a place that doesn’t nurture you, that doesn’t hold you up?” he says. “Because there are other places of worship where you can get the spiritual nurturing and be affirmed for who you are.”

At the same time, Lofton’s mixed feelings about organized religion haven’t stopped him from entering churches to share his own story and continue his work promoting awareness and understanding.

“I’ve never shied away from sharing that story in places of worship about how it has been difficult as a black gay man to go to a church that tells me that I’m not welcome, and when I’m going to church, I want to hear the message, I want to walk out feeling good and uplifted by the sermon.”

He says he has never felt unwelcome giving these talks, “because they knew we were there to do work. We weren’t talking about what was going on in the privacy of our home.”

Lofton even continues to work with Holy Rosary Catholic Church’s HIV/AIDS ministry, which he began while he was with Health Brigade. He has attended a few masses at what is now the oldest African-American Catholic church in Richmond, and he has become good friends with some of the parishioners. He says he felt remarkably at ease there: “They looked at me as Rodney, not the gay one, not the gay guy, it was just Rodney — here’s a member of our community who really cares about our community.”

•••

In large measure, Lofton’s work consists of getting people to see what they are not accustomed to seeing — helping them to complicate their world views, so that they can come at life with a more complex, more nuanced perspective.

In this sense, you could say that his work is shaped to a great degree by the person he is.

Having long existed on the margins, as a black man among a white majority, he is also a gay man who travels in both a white world and a black world, neither of which have ever been truly at ease with homosexuality. The fact that he is married to a white man only adds another complicating piece to the puzzle.

Lofton and his husband, Faron Niles, say they don’t think about race in the context of their marriage.

“It was his smile that first attracted me to him,” says Lofton, acknowledging that they are from two different worlds, but noting that they were able to find comfort with each other — somewhat unexpectedly— through Skyping and Scrabble.

Lofton recalls a quote he heard during a speech at the Metropolitan Community Church of Richmond’s 40th anniversary celebration: Always keep space in your mind and heart for the unexpected. “That’s how you have to live your life,” he says.

Niles told me that their connection was immediate and strong. They each found in the other a big heart and a deep and abiding love for community. “You don’t end up with somebody who you know there would be friction with all the time,” Niles says, adding that they recognized early on that “we have a lot in common, even though like [Rodney keeps] saying, we’re from different worlds.”

The two tied the knot three years ago, just days after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage legal.

It was a celebration that included 200 guests. “We had everybody here,” Niles says. “We had black, white, gay, straight, we had drag queens and transgender people, and I mean the whole gamut. … It’s about building a community of people that love you and you love back.”

Their renovated early 1900s foursquare in Highland Park functions as a kind of sanctuary for Lofton, a place where he can unwind with their three dogs — Princess Buttercup, Lady Addison and Duke of Highland — as well as the many friends and neighbors who regularly pass through.

But beyond the comforts of their home, it does not take much imagination to see that Lofton is still regarded as an outsider in some of the worlds he spends time in — the straight, white world and within some church communities.

Lofton chooses not to think about the challenges he faces. Even with all the many struggles he has faced in life, he has never regarded himself as an outsider. Rather, he sees himself as someone who exists to speak up on behalf of those who, for whatever reason, are unable to speak.

“Not that I speak for all black gay men or all people who are HIV-positive, but for me, I’ve never allowed those three quote-unquote subcategories [African-American, gay, HIV-positive] to stop me from doing what I’ve wanted to do in life.”

His journey has afforded him the ability to live his truth, unhindered by the obstacles that have made life more difficult for many who are gay or black, or gay and black. He says he never forgets what he has, or the enormous struggle he endured to get where he is.

“My identity first and foremost is that of a black man,” he says, “and that’s important to me, because it’s the first thing that you see. It’s how you’re going to judge me, no matter my credentials or the things I have done, that is the first thing you’re going to see. I hear all the time, ‘Oh, you speak so well, you’re so articulate,’ and my thoughts are, ‘Well, what were you expecting?’ Or, ‘You don’t act gay and you don’t look gay.’ Well, what does a gay person act like? What does a gay person look like? … My daily issues and concerns are … the same as yours.”

Whenever he encounters ignorance of this kind, he says he tries hard to brush it off. Not because talk of this kind is easy to ignore, but because he does not want to be dissuaded from more urgent, and larger, matters. In the same vein, he endeavors to be compassionate toward those who have yet to confront the essential and complicating truth of their existence.

“I would never force anyone to walk in my footsteps,” he says. “Maybe someone’s not at that point of coming out and they’ll ask me about if they should do it, and I’ll say, ‘When you’re ready, you’ll know it. You’ll know when you are ready to come out to family and friends without feeling ostracized,’ and the same thing goes for [a person revealing their] HIV status.”  

He has used this heightened sensitivity — this extraordinary empathy — to connect with anyone whose path he crosses. If he can help, he will. Even if it is just a kind word extended in passing. Even if it is just a text message.

Years ago, on a weekend retreat to raise awareness about HIV, Lofton was heading to yet another breakout session when he noticed a woman crying and went and sat down with her, seeking to soothe her.

Six months later, she sought him out, calling him to say that she was moved to become compliant with taking her HIV medications. “I just wanted to share that with you,” she said, “because you took the time to sit with me when everybody went to the next session.”

A small thing, but, says Lofton, sometimes it’s the smallest things that matter most.

Retired Richmond Police Major Odetta Johnson shares a similar story. Johnson, who serves on Diversity’s board of directors and who has been friends with Lofton since the fourth grade, met up with him at Kitchen 64 on Boulevard shortly after his mother passed away from cancer in 2016. Her intention was simply to catch up with him, see how he was, and be there for him in his time of need. But Lofton was more concerned about her. Health problems had begun to limit her mobility, Johnson said. Her old, dear friend, far from being sunk low by his own troubles, was entirely focused on what it was she needed to do for herself.

“He was telling me, ‘You don’t have to do this alone,’ and [here] he was going through so much himself and so many changes in his life,” Johnson says. “He was saying, ‘Just because you can’t do police work and military work and that’s all you’ve known for decades, you’re so much more than the titles you hold.’ ”

Much as Lofton was able to turn his HIV diagnosis into an opportunity to dedicate himself to others, he provided Johnson with a new outlook for her life: “How beautiful is it when you leave this place that you’ve made it better? Who cares about what titles you’ve had or how much money you’ve made? What matters is whether or not you’ve made it a better place. He helped put things in perspective.”

•••

In his twenties, Lofton did battle with a deadly disease.

In his thirties, he fought his own view of himself, not entirely sure he was ready for what seemed to be a calling.

Now, in middle age, he confronts the complex and historical forces of race and religion.

A lifetime of warring.

But change, real change, Lofton knows, never occurs without a struggle.

It is a lesson he learned early in his fight against HIV, and he has clung hard to that truth in the years since.

Perhaps for that reason, he never stops working.

In the spare time he manages to eke out, he has written two books published by Simon & Schuster, one based around his life (“The Day I Stopped Being Pretty”) and another (“No More Tomorrows: Two Lives, Two Stories, One Love”) that tells the fictional account of two men in a relationship, one of whom is HIV-positive.

The books have made him a sought-after speaker, both locally and nationally.

That elevated profile, along with his HIV/AIDS advocacy work, is no doubt what moved Equality Virginia to name Lofton an OUTstanding Virginian in 2015.

Not only does he never stop working, Lofton also never stops giving of himself. He seems almost constitutionally incapable of it, as if he would cease to exist if he did not exist for others.

He has two pet programs he is steering — programs he hopes will lay a foundation for others to pick up on his work and extend it.

One is the Black and Bold program at Diversity Richmond, which he helped to create. Now entering its third year, it serves to recognize LGBTQ African-Americans who have made contributions to the city. The program, held during Black LGBTQ Awareness Week, takes place every February. Lofton describes it as an opportunity for African-Americans to be candid about who they are — to show that “it’s OK for us to say who we are in public … to be proud of ourselves.”

The other is a similar program for the city’s burgeoning Latinx community, to take place during Hispanic Heritage Month this fall.

Nor does he intend to stop there.

Lofton regards himself not just as an executive with an important goal, but as the leader of a bold and urgent campaign.

His first offensive is to continue his assertive outreach to the many communities that are currently unaware, he says, that Diversity Richmond is there to serve them. While 8,000 people used Diversity Richmond’s 47,000-square-foot community center for free last year for everything from support groups to board meetings, and more than $50,000 in grant money is donated annually in support of LGBTQ programming, some still think of it just as “the Diversity Thrift store,” Lofton says.

“I just wanted to make sure that someone knows that they’re special.” — Rodney Lofton

Harrison, the executive director of Diversity Richmond, marvels at how much the organization has begun, since Lofton came aboard, to zoom in on its long-sought targets.

“The mission of this place has been expanded,” he says, “and we are realizing things that we need to do that nobody else in town is really doing.”

He and others connected with the organization marvel, too, at Lofton’s methods, which, they say, are at one level no more than talking.

Talking and listening.

So simple.

Except that until Lofton happened along, no one was doing it.

Domenick Casuccio, who joined Diversity’s board of directors last year, and who is also the director of communications for the Richmond chapter of the American Cancer Society, says that Lofton has opened up new avenues of possibility through his conversations.

“We have to continue talking about [LGBTQ issues],” Casuccio says, noting that the goals of the movement did not end with the triumph of marriage equality. “If [these issues are] not brought to light, then people assume there’s no issue. … We need to foster those conversations” in the larger world, but, just as important, he stresses, in the LGBTQ community itself.

Harrison echoes this sentiment.

“I think before we start going out there and changing laws which need to be done, we need to come together and heal in our own community. With the racial barriers, with the gender barriers, we need to have strong conversations within our own community and pull together because we’re a very diverse group of people, and I think there’s a lot of bridge building that needs to go on within our own community.”

Lofton has helped Harrison to see this.

For his part, Lofton does not like to hear such lofty talk coming his way.

Instead, as he did when he attacked his HIV diagnosis, he thinks small and focuses on details: a kind word; a brief conversation; reaching out with an email or text to someone in need at just the right time; organizing a gathering, whether at a public forum or in his Highland Park home, that makes a maligned group feel, even if for just a couple of hours, listened to and understood. Even a couple of hours, he says, can change someone.

Having lived a life of constant change, he knows — and believes — that change can also be for the good, that a better day is ahead.

As he wrote in his first book, “The Day I Stopped Being Pretty”: “I can’t tell you how this journey ends, for it is a new beginning.”

---

The Church and Homosexuality

Congregants and seminarians hold the keys to inclusiveness

In an age where more and more LGBTQ men and women are finding the courage to live their truth, they still can encounter a great deal of prejudice and judgment — and perhaps nowhere more so than in the one precinct of American life that for many hetero-normative people has long stood as a bastion of community: the church.

While a June 2017 Pew Research Center report shows increasing support for same-sex marriage among all religious affiliations, that support remains lower for black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants than other groups.

I sat down recently with the Rev. Dwylene Butler, the executive minister at Sixth Mount Zion Baptist for the past 12 years. Butler grew up believing that homosexuality was a sin in the eyes of God, and was also taught that homosexuality was a choice. But as she grew older and educated herself, she said her views began to change.

“In seminary, it shifted from tolerating them as sinner to believing that these people are created in God’s image and likeness and who they are is who they are period,” Butler said.

“[It’s] not the position of most black churches,” she told me ... but it is my personal position in how I treat people in the community of faith.”

She acknowledges that being accepting while still following the word of God is not something that comes easily for most people in her world who are split between showing love for all of God’s creations and upholding the teachings of homosexuality as sin. But Butler’s own education and discovery has cultivated her views on the LGBTQ community and the church.

Sixth Mount Zion is officially welcoming of all LGBTQ members to attend services, Butler said, but that is not to say that all members in the congregation are personally welcoming. She acknowledged the balancing act she manages, on one hand wanting to change minds, on the other not wanting to “condemn” parishioners for views they have held for 60, 70 years.

“There are issues that we’ve yet to deal with,” Butler says, “but we are further than we were.”

Inclusiveness within the church is a complicated topic, compounded by religious doctrine, generational lenses, governing bodies, and what has generally been passed down through sermons.

“We’re probably the most liberal,” says Jeanne Pupke, the senior minister at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond. “You’ve got these other people who will either kick you out or demand that you quote-unquote change your lifestyle.”

Many folks who identify both as LGBTQ and religious, she says, continue to attend churches that repeatedly preach to them that their identity is a sin. The result is that many LGBTQ parishioners are in “hiding” in these churches — visible, but silent.

“Until [we] welcome people,” Pupke says, meaning until we go out of our way to make people we don’t know feel welcome, “you don’t have the practice of seeing that they are normal.”

As hard as it is to come out, some LGBTQ churchgoers find it is just as hard to renounce their religious upbringing.

Corey D.B. Walker, the new dean of Virginia Union University’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, says that American religion is undergoing a dramatic transformation, with more than a quarter of all churches now identifying as nondenominational. “How do we train the next generation of religious leaders with a theological framework that is open, that is inclusive, and that is affirming of all of God’s creation?’ That’s our role and responsibility.”

And this is an issue that many churches face, Walker says.

“The majority of your communities across the spectrum, across the racial spectrum, are conservative on this issue, so it is not something inherent within the black church. You’ll find it within Latino Christian communities, and you’ll find it in particular within white evangelical communities.”

And there’s progress being made every day, Walker insists.

“We’ve seen it in Richmond and on a national scale. I firmly believe with the majority of African-Americans and African-Americans in the pews having an open, affirming and inclusive vision, you will change that leadership and with seminary leadership dedicated to a true liberatory theology that is open and affirming of all of God’s creations, then we are well on our way.”