LGBT Book & Video Blog

At first glance this seems like a simple story, about a woman who tells a secret she believed was at least partly hers to tell.

But stories about secrets are rarely ever simple.

The woman is Honor Moore and the secret she tells, in her recently published memoir, "The Bishop's Daughter," is about her father, the late Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr., who rose through the ranks of the Episcopal Church to the powerful position of bishop of New York.

Paul Moore was a giant of a man in many respects — a leader in the civil rights movement who counted Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy as friends, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, a tireless advocate for the urban poor, and the first Episcopal bishop to ordain an openly lesbian woman into the priesthood.

But though Moore was a married man with nine children, he had clandestine relationships with other men for much of his adult life — the secret his oldest daughter has known for almost two decades but only now is divulging to a wider audience in her book.

And in making public that secret, which is entwined with Honor Moore's understanding of her own sexuality and relationships, she has inserted herself and her father's life, in retrospect, into the worldwide debate about the crisis in the Anglican Communion.

For it is perhaps ironic, but not coincidental, that Paul Moore's struggle over sexual identity, both within himself and — now — his family, mirrors in many ways the conflict that threatens to tear apart the Episcopal Church.

Both involve a conflict over truth — who knows it, who defines it, who has claim to it — and how truth is lived, both in one's personal life and in the wider life of the church. See Honor Moore Shares Family Secrets In Memoir
Hartford Courant