LGBTQ activist ordained on deathbed

Key points:

• The Rev. Dr. Rick Huskey was ordained in a Pennsylvania hospital room as he lingered near death.
• Huskey had gone on to a successful medical career after being refused ordination in the 1970s because he was gay.
• A bishop said it was a full-circle moment, and Huskey wanted it known that he forgave the church for the long wait.

The Rev. Dr. Rick Huskey finally got long-sought affirmation from The United Methodist Church on his deathbed at a Pennsylvania hospital.

The longtime LGBTQ advocate was ordained an elder in full connection on June 14, earning the “Reverend” title nearly 50 years after he was turned away from the ordination process after telling his bishop he was gay.

After General Conference removed the denomination’s decades-long ban on gay clergy last year, Huskey requested to re-enter and complete the ordination process. In dramatic events starting the evening of June 12 at the 2025 Minnesota Annual Conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Huskey was approved for ordination.

After the annual conference ended June 13, Bishop Lanette Plambeck and her team rushed to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, to conduct Huskey’s long-awaited ordination ceremony there.

Huskey, who was seriously ill after “a medical episode,” was aware of what was happening during the ceremony, Plambeck said. He “laughed in joy” and said “hallelujah” and “amen.”

He died the following day, June 15. He was 75.

“I had known of Rick’s legacy, but it was only in recent months that I came to know him personally,” Plambeck said. “In our conversations, I encountered a man who had carried pain but not bitterness. He radiated peace and grace, just a very gentle soul.

“He was honest about the harm he had endured. You hear in him the prophetic and the pastoral and priestly voices, and his ongoing love for the church, the kind of steadfastness that is nothing shorter than Christ-like. He had a gracious understanding that he believed that the church would catch up to what he already knew.”

Retired Bishop Karen Oliveto said she “wept when Bishop Plambeck texted me saying that he was dying and she was going to Pennsylvania to ordain him.”

Oliveto is now on the faculty at United Methodist-related Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, and board chairperson of the Center for LGBTQ+ United Methodist Heritage at the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History.

“What an act of reconciliation and healing that he could pass into the arms of God being the person with the call he always knew he had,” added Oliveto, The United Methodist Church’s first openly gay bishop.

Although he was unable to comment much at his ordination, Huskey had said plenty over the years about his career, including being sidelined just as he was approaching ordination in 1977.

“Some will say my life exploded when I was defrocked,” Huskey wrote in 2000. “Others say I imploded. Whichever way, my path has been marvelously filled with incredible moments of ministry.

“I grieve the absence of the pulpit in my life activities. The interval time has been devoted to a medical career and teaching geriatric medicine.”

After being denied ordination, Huskey attended and graduated medical school in the Dominican Republic.

“My area of medicine was internal medicine specialized in geriatrics,” Huskey said in a recent interview with Ashley Boggan of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History for the archives at its Center for LGBTQ+ United Methodist Heritage. “I was a young punk who was going to help older folks, and now I’ve grown into it.”

Spending part of his medical career in Washington, he taught geriatrics at George Washington University and advised three mayors there on issues around elderly health and nursing home administration.

But he never abandoned his advocacy for LGBTQ people in The United Methodist Church, said Jan Lawrence, executive director of Reconciling Ministries.

“I really didn’t know Rick,” she said. “I may have met him twice … but I always knew of him, and he is really one of the reasons that the Reconciling movement ever existed.”

Huskey, along with Gene Leggett, founded the United Methodist Gay Caucus, which soon changed its name to Affirmation UMC. To organize the movement in local churches, Affirmation UMC launched the Reconciling Congregations Program, which eventually was changed to Reconciling Ministries Network.

“So if Rick and his co-founder of the United Methodist Gay Caucus had never formed that caucus, we might not be here having this conversation today,” Lawrence said. “(Reconciling Ministries) played a significant role in moving the denomination to make the decisions that it did at the 2020-2024 General Conference, I’m sure.”

The United Methodist Church’s top lawmaking assembly ended denomination-wide prohibitions against LGBTQ people being clergy and same-sex weddings.

“And so Rick is embodied in all of that, right?” Lawrence said. “Even those who never met him, who were never in the same room with him, have heard the stories and certainly understand the pain of what he went through.”

Huskey “didn’t accept ‘no’ as ‘no,’” Lawrence added.

Huskey and Leggett were present at the 1972 General Conference where Texas lay delegate Don Hand proposed the insertion of the critical passage that “the practice of homosexuality… is incompatible with Christian teaching” into the denomination’s Book of Discipline. (It was removed in 2024).

“(It was done) in the darkness of night, like at midnight,” Huskey told Boggan. “A lot of people had left already from the conference, and Don Hand put in those horrible words of incompatibility.”

Things “fell apart” after that, Huskey said. “I personally, and so many of us were disgusted at General Conference in ’72 because we realized all of a sudden all the promises of baptism, all the promises the church made for being raised within the faith, our faith was taken away from us.

“And I stayed in the church because I didn’t have any alternative. All I knew how to do was I was learning how to be a good pastor. So I stayed with that.”

After completing his doctorate in ministry at Chicago Theological Seminary, Huskey pursued a career in medicine, all the while considering it part of his ministry, as was his activism on behalf of LGBTQ people.

When the Book of Discipline language was stricken from the Discipline at General Conference last year, the Rev. Beth Stroud, who lost her ordination after coming out as a lesbian, successfully applied for reinstatement. On the first evening of the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference on May 21, 2024, ordained clergy voted overwhelmingly to readmit Stroud as a full member of its body.

Through a friend, Huskey consulted with Stroud on how to do the same.

“He would send me a note every time it advanced, and he was so very happy each time,” Stroud said.

The bedside ceremony wherein Huskey was finally ordained “was extremely, extremely moving,” Plambeck said.

“It was beautiful to see the laying on of hands that happened, and just the genuine affection that was being displayed by people who didn’t know Rick,” she added. “It clearly became holy ground in that room. …

“Full circle for him was not only that his ordination would be completed and recognized, but this was also for him a way of saying to the church, ‘I forgive you,’” Plambeck said.

Randall Miller, a friend and fellow LGBTQ activist with Huskey and a United Methodist layperson, said that he mourned Huskey’s death, “but if ever there was someone who lived a rich, full life, it was Rick, with his devilish grin and wicked sense of humor.”

“And the fact that he was ordained before his passing makes my heart sing.”

Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.