Category Archives: Atlanta Magazine

The Day Atlanta Died

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How the 1962 Orly plane crash, which claimed 115 Georgians, forever altered the city’s destiny

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/June 1992

atlanta magazineThe jet that crashed was six time zones and 4,000 miles from Atlanta, in France. But it was this city, not Paris, whose destiny was altered forever in an instant in 1962 — more than 100 of Atlanta’s best and brightest violently consumed by flame, the quiet of a Sunday June morning punctured by news so unexpected, so immense that it was beyond understanding.

A city was thrown into a summer of grief, of funerals, of learning to cope without people who were so much a part of the fabric of leadership, of life.

“Everyone I came into contact with that morning couldn’t believe that it happened,” says Ivan Allen Jr., who was Atlanta’s mayor in 1962 and who knew most of the dead. “People were just not willing to accept it.”

A plane crash is always tragic because of the suddenness with which a group of healthy, happy people, usually thrown together by chance, engaging the benign exercise of air travel, perish in one horrible, gruesome instant. But the crash at Orly Airport in Paris on June 3, 1962, was unique in that its victims were not strangers hailing from distant points.

On board were 115 Georgians, 106 from metro Atlanta.

None survived.

At the time, former Mayor William Hartsfield called the disaster the biggest blow to Atlanta since the Civil War.

The roster of the dead was made up disproportionately of members of the city’s powerful gentry. They were a Who’s Who of Atlanta: businessmen, members of prominent families, the ladies in charge of good words. They were a close-knit bunch, had grown up together, lived near each other in upscale neighborhoods on the northside like Buckhead and Ansley Park. They worshiped together in churches like Second-Ponce De Leon Baptist, First Presbyterian, St. Philip’s and Christ the King cathedrals. The lunched together at the Piedmont Driving Club, the Capital City Club. They were people who had the time and money to travel through Europe for a month. On board the plane were 27 married couples, 11 major corporate executives, 13 women active in the Junior League.

And arts patrons. Especially arts patrons.

For the common threat that brought these Atlantans together was the Atlanta Art Association. Only members of the association, which promoted arts programs and ran an art school and museum, were eligible for the trip, designed to promote the group and expose its members to the treasures in the museums of Europe.

Many on the tour were longtime members who had worked hard to promote the arts in the city, but perhaps a third of the people on the plane joined the association just to go on the European trip.

Only about 45 people had taken the full, month-long tour organized by Air France and American Express, considered a bargain at $895. Over the course of a month, those travelers had gone sight-seeing and museum hopping in London, Amsterdam, Lucerne, Venice, Florence and Rome, before ending their tour in Paris. The rest of the group went to Europe on a charter, traveled on their own and then returned to Paris for the trip back home.

Atlanta Constitution columnist Doris Lockerman described those who perished on the plane as “couples rewarding themselves with the adventure of a lifetime; the bon vivants who took these European jaunts as regularly as opportunity presented itself, stepping upon a transoceanic airplane as casually as if they were boarding a Peachtree bus; the wives whose husbands had no taste for sight-seeing, or no time to take from their work, and had urged them to go on this holiday with their friends; the parents awakening the sensibilities of their children to the world around them; the widows, radiant, gallantly self-reliant, filling unaccustomed spaces of time with new interests.”

The list of the dead was a list of men and women of achievement:

Roby Robinson, partner in the Robinson-Humphrey investment firm, and his wife, Louise, who lived for many years in the landmark Pint Castle on West Paces Ferry Road.

Frances Longino, a member of the city’s library board and daughter of the co-founder of Davidson’s department store.

Katherine Bleckley, clerk of the Georgia Supreme Court and a descendent of one of Georgia’s most prominent families.

Morris Brandon Jr., owner of Superior Syringe Co. (Morris Brandon elementary school in the city was named for his father.)

Raiford Ragsdale, who the year before had completed a two-year tenure as the only woman on the Atlanta school board.

Charles Shaw Sr., a Sears executive and superintendent of the Sunday school at Druid Hills Baptist Church.

Ruth McMillan, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in 1955, who campaigned to allow women to serve on juries and enroll at Georgia Tech.

Sidney Wien, a retired businessman whose passion was buying artwork and donating it to museums.

Rosalind Williams, a vice president at Tucker Wayne and Co. advertising agency.

Dr. Christopher McLoughlin, a well-known physician on the staff at Piedmont Hospital.

William Cartledge, owner of the El Morocco supper club. His wife, Helen, president of the Theatre Atlanta Women’s Guild.

Redfern Hollins, a transplant from England who was director of research at W.R.C. Smith Publishing Co.

C. Baxter Jones Jr., a lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1952. His wife, Julia, was a past president of the Junior League.

Del Paige, who headed the Atlanta office of the national accounting firm Ernst & Ernst and was president of the Atlanta Art Association.

Of course, not everyone on the tour was rich or prominent. But each one had a story that ended that day at Orly.

Helen Seydel was an artist who told a friend that she saw this trip to Europe as a “spiritual resurrection.” Her marriage had ended suddenly, unexpectedly, upending her life. Now, at age 46, refreshed by a pilgrimage to Florence, Seydel believed the was ready to return to Atlanta and begin again.

After the crash, Life magazine printed a picture of the room where she painted at her home on Lakeland Drive. Her artist’s tools were as she left them, in strict order. The tubes of paint were lined up neatly, the brushes reposed on the left edge of the table. On the wall above the easel was a self-portrait of a middle-aged women with auburn hair and green eyes.

Paul Doassans, 42, was the district manager for Air France in Atlanta who helped organize the trip. He had not actually taken part in the tour, but he decided to fly to Paris and make the return trip with the group. He was coming home to a new bride, a stewardess for Delta Airlines he had married just five months earlier.

Douglas Davis Jr., 33, had not been on the tour, either — he lived in Paris — but he was among home folks. He was the son of pioneer Atlanta aviator Douglas Davis Sr., who died in a plane crash in 1934. The younger Davis left the city in 1958, embarking on a career as an artist. In Paris, he had met up with an old friend on the tour, Tito Italgo, with whom he had studied art in Atlanta. Italgo wanted to stay in Europe, so Davis took his seat on the plane to come home to help his mother move into a new home.

Betsy Bevington got on the plane with her mother after she bid her husband, Milton, goodbye in the terminal at Orly Airport. He didn’t take part in the tour, but he had surprised his wife by meeting her in Paris for a short vacation.

“We just did the normal ‘touristy’ things,” he says — seeing the Louvre, Saint-Chapelle, taking the Michelin guide and walking the city.

But the Bevingtons would not be together on the flight that afternoon. He was booked on a later plane because she didn’t like them to fly together. Her caution would, in hindsight, seem like a premonition.

“She was somewhat apprehensive of airplanes in general. Our sons at that time were 7, 8 and 9. She thought it would be unfortunate if we had an accident and both parents were taken out,” Bevington says.

“I kind of pooh-poohed the idea.”

The skies were clear and sunny. It was nearly half past noon, Paris time. The plane was a half-hour late because the Atlanta travelers had dawdled in the airport’s duty-free shops, making last-minute purchases.

Captain Roland-Paul Hoche moved the Air France Boeing 707, named Chateau de Sully, away from the terminal toward runway No. 26.

Happy, full of the experience of Europe, the travelers were on their way back home.

The takeoff proceeded normally. Then, after the plane got just a few feet off the ground, the wheels touched back down. The plane veered off the runway.

“At that point, you could see black smoke, and you got a pretty good idea that something was wrong,” says Bevington.

He had been watching his wife’s plane take off through a terminal window.

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R.P. Turner Jr. first heard the news over his clock radio when he woke up that Sunday morning in his Atlanta apartment.

He was 19, a student at Georgia Tech. He had grown up in Marshallville, a small town between Macon and Americus famous for its devotion to colorful camellias.

Turner’s mother, Louise Turner, painted watercolors of camellias in exacting, botanically correct detail. She had give up a career as a fashion illustrator in New York to return to Georgia with her husband, and she had developed a renown for capturing camellias as no one else could. But Mrs. Turner didn’t limit her repertoire. She plucked people off the street to pose for her and made her two sons sit and pose when what they really wanted to do was go play baseball. She worked in the light of sun porches on either side of the Turners’ brick home on East Main Street, and she would move from one porch to the other as the sun moved through its day.

That afternoon, R.P. Turner was to meet his parents at the Atlanta airport. His mother liked to travel and expose herself to a wider world of art, and her husband would accompany her on forays. Even though she didn’t live in the city, she was a member of the Atlanta Art Association.

The Turners had gone with their friends to Europe. They were to return home in time to see their youngest son, Tom, graduate from high school the following Tuesday.

When he woke up, R.P. heard the news. A plane had crashed in Paris. Early reports were sketchy and only hinted at the magnitude of news to come.

“The first thing I started doing was figuring flight times,” he says. “Thinks started clicking in.”

The first wire service report of the tragedy, from United Press International, reached Atlanta at 7:27 a.m.: Paris, June 3 — An Air France Boeing airliner crashed today at Orly Airport with more than 100 persons aboard, airport authorities said. The French news agency France Press said, “Few of them escaped death.”

There was no mention yet of the plane’s destination; that would come 15 minutes later, from the Associated Press: The plane was bound for New York, Atlanta and Houston.

Newsman King Elliott was on duty at WSB Radio that morning when the first rudimentary reports arrived, saying that an undetermined number of Atlantans had perished in a plane crash in France. There was no mention yet that this was the art association’s plane. Elliott decided to alert Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. and called his home.

Allen was out of town, at his family’s farm in Heard County, about an hour west of the city near the Alabama line. He had been mayor for less than six months, after winning a hard-fought campaign against segregationist Lester Maddox. It had been a rocky few months. Voters torpedoed a bond issue proposed by Allen, which included money for an arts center in Piedmont Park. And he had taken some hard hits after ordering erection of a barricade on a street running between white and black neighborhoods where racial tension had risen.

He hadn’t fared well in his first tests as mayor, and now he was to face one that was unprecedented.

The mayor’s wife, Louise, called him at the farm and passed along the few details Elliott had given her. He told her to call back if she heard more information and started out the door. Then, Allen says it dawned on him that it had been a month since he had gone to the airport and bid farewell to the art association tour. He knew they were scheduled to return after a month, and he began to fear the worst.

He called his secretary, Ann Moses, and asked her to open City Hall. Still in the work clothes he was wearing on the farm, he tuned his car radio to WSB and drove back to the city.

“(The news) was very fragmentary at that point,” Allen says. As he was driving back, he heard an announcer say that Jack Glenn, a friend of Allen’s, and his wife were among the victims.

“I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew they were in Atlanta,” Allen says.

But he was also hearing names of people he knew were on the tour.

King Elliott had made another call that morning, to Aubrey Morris, then news director at WSB. Morris wasn’t home, either, and Elliott passed on the information to his wife.

Morris, too, knew many of the people on the tour and had seen them off at the airport. In his years covering news in the city, he frequently came into contact with them. He was at an early church service in Sandy Springs that Sunday when an usher tapped him on the shoulder and told him that his wife had call the church and wanted to take to him about a plane crash in Paris, France.

“I knew immediately what it was,” he says.

The crash happened at 6:29 a.m. Atlanta time, as the city was just beginning to awaken. News did not have the immediacy in 1962 that it has today. It was almost an hour after the crash before reports started reaching Atlanta, and the details were sketchy and incomplete. Some early reports said that only 18 Atlantans had died in the crash, that most of the people on the art association tour were still in Europe.

By 10 a.m., that hope would be gone forever.

As Atlantans got in their cars and went to church, they began hearing the full story. Of the 132 people on the plane, 130 had perished. Only two French stewardesses, who had been thrown from the plane as it broke apart, survived.

Back in Paris, Milton Bevington encountered the stewardesses when he went to an Air France office in the terminal, knowing that the plane had crashed but still clinging to hope that his wife might have survived.

“They were sitting in the office. When I saw them, I guess I thought I might see some other people …” he says, his voice trailing off. But he learned there were only two survivors, and neither one of them was his wife.

Betsy Bevington was 33. When she graduated from college, her parents had promised her a trip to Europe, but she didn’t go at the time, choosing to marry instead. One decade and three children later, her father decided to make good on the promise. He was supposed to accompany her on the trip but died the January before. Her mother came from Florida to take the tour instead.

Once he knew his wife had died, Milton Bevington put in a call to some friends in Atlanta, asking them to take his sons to a cabin on Lake Rabun so that the wouldn’t hear the news on the radio or television. He wanted to tell them himself.

“The next day, when I came back, I went up to the cabin and broke the news,” Bevington says.

At the time Betsy Bevington and the rest of the passengers died in 1962, the Orly crash was the worst single-plane disaster in the history of aviation. The only local disasters that Atlantas of 1962 could remember through their own experience to rival the crash were the Dec. 7, 1946 fire at the city’s supposedly fireproof Winecoff Hotel that killed 119; and a tornado that hit Gainesville in 1936, killing more than 200.

But neither of those tragedies had taken so many of their personal friends.

In 1962, WSB Radio broadcast Sunday services from the First Presbyterian Church. The day of the crash, the broadcast was interrupted to that Morris, at the Air France office on Forsyth Street, could begin reading names of the dead. Assisted by a businessman who had come to the office and knew many of the victims, Morris began giving short biographies, trying to be a reporter, and keep his emotions from creeping into his voice.

Then he got to the name of Ruth McMillan. He knew her and her sister, May, very well.

“It was in their house that I had my first room when I came to work at the Atlanta Journal after coming from the University of Georgia,” he says.

When Morris got off the air, he put in a call to May.

That afternoon, families and friends of the travelers crowded into the Air France office to receive confirmation of what they deep down already knew. A woman on the airline’s staff, Collette Lautzenhiser, checked a passenger list for the anxious, repeating over and over in her light French accent, “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

In the archives of the Atlanta History Center is a passenger list of the ill-fated flight, with names in green-tinted teletype ink. Beside some names are check marks, beside others question marks. In the margin of several pages, in a delicate hand, the word “notify” is written, followed by names and addresses.

By late afternoon, a traffic jam had developed downtown along Forsyth Street. Word had spread that the Journal was planning a special edition, the first since Margaret Mitchell was hit by a car and killed in 1949, and a crowd had gathered in front of the newspaper offices. The extra carried a straightforward banner headline: 119 Georgians Killed In Fiery Paris Jet Crash

A Paris newspaper was more dramatic: Catastrophe a Orly. Un Boeing S’Ecrase: 130 Morts

Ivan Allen wasn’t sure what a mayor should do to respond to a disaster of this magnitude — there was no precedent. By that afternoon, he had decided that his place was in Paris.

“I thought it was the right thing to do. It was purely to be a help to the families (of the victims),” Allen says. “I had no position of authority outside of Atlanta.”

He also had no experience in international diplomacy. Atlanta mayors then were not the worldwide travelers they are today, so he would have to rely on his education and instincts. Reflecting on that afternoon years later in his book, Mayor: Notes on the Sixties (written with Paul Hemphill), Allen wrote that one thought that crossed his mind was how fortunate it was that he, and not Lester Maddox, was representing Atlanta.

At 5:55 p.m., Allen, accompanied by Assistant City Attorney Ed Sterne, left on a flight to New York. They would catch a connecting Air France flight to Paris on a Boeing 707, the same kind of plane that had crashed.

Morris traveled with Allen and Sterne. When he had heard that the mayor was going to Paris, he went to his boss at WSB, Elmo Ellis, and told him that he thought the place to cover the story was in Paris. To his surprise, station management let him go. He would be the only Atlanta journalist on the scene for two days. Mayor Allen, not used to the crush of media in New York, asked Morris to also act as his unofficial press aide. He agreed.

When the Atlanta entourage arrived at Orly, they flew over the crash site. They saw the skid marks on the runway, evidence of Captain Hoche’s ill-fated attempt to stop the plane. They saw the wreckage, off the end of a runway next to a cherry orchard near a small French village.

When the mayor’s party toured the crash site a short time later, the debris was still smoking, and many of the victims’ personal belongings, thrown from the plane as it was breaking apart before the explosion, were strewn all over the runway. They found unbroken bottles of champagne, and the mayor picked up a banner from the West Point Rotary Club, which belonged to a friend on the trip, Morgan Ganty. He saw a dress that, because of the color and style, he recognized as belonging to Nancy Frederick.

“She was the first date I had as a young man,” Allen says. “I remember going over to her house on my red bicycle on a Sunday to pay a call.”

At the time of the crash, Allen described the victims as “my generation. We were boys and girls together.” Thirty years later, Allen, now 81, points at a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from those dark days ans says, “There’s a list of my friends.

“It’s still emotional.”

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Roland-Paul Hoche was 40 and had been a pilot with Air France for 16 years. Eighteen months before the crash of the Chateau de Sully, he had tried to qualify to flying the Boeing 70 and failed. Four months later, on his second try, he passed.

Some early reports speculated that the plane was perhaps too overloaded to get airborne. The absolute maximum capacity of a 707 was 312,000 pounds, and, on June 3, the Chateau de Sully was carrying 303,000 pounds.

Yet, the official investigation found that the plane should have been able to take off with the weight it was carrying. It was a series of human errors that prevented the plane from getting off the ground.

The first mistake was made when the flight crew incorrectly set the angle of the horizontal stabilizers (the small wings on the back of the jet). When Captain Hoche put the engines in full thrust down the runway and tried to pull up on the controls to get airborne, the plane rose only a few feet, then returned to the runway.

What Hoche should have done at that point, according to investigators, was pull up forcefully on the controls. Instead, he threw the engines into reverse thrust, put on the brakes and tried to stop the plane. It was his last, fatal error.

When a jet is hurtling down a runway, it reaches a point of no return, after which a pilot is committed to taking off. Under procedures used at the time of the crash, the co-pilot called out the point of no return to the pilot.

Calculations made by investigators show that Hoche was past that point when he tried to stop the plane. The question, however, is whether he knew that he was, whether the co-pilot called out the proper warning. In 1962, there were no voice recorders in the cockpits of planes as there are now. (In fact, after the Orly crash, aviation officials in the United States started looking at requiring cockpit voice recorders in all planes. They are now standard.) So what was said, and by whom, died with the flight crew.

As Hoche tried to stop the plane, it began careening down the runway and crashed through some runway lights. The left wing hit the ground, and the tail section of the plane broke away, throwing the two stewardesses who survived, as well as a steward who later died from his injuries, free from the plane.

The front of the jet then crashed through a fence and leveled an unoccupied house in the village of Villeneuve le Roi. The fuel then caught on fire and exploded.

The passengers burned to death.

“We just only hope it was instant,” says R.P. Turner. “They told us it was.”

The plane crash occurred three days before the anniversary of the D-Day invasion, and the villagers of Villeneuve le Roi were holding a ceremony commemorating the liberation of prisoners of war. Firemen and policemen in dress uniform rushed to the scene to put out the fire.

It took two hours of fire fighting before the bodies could be removed. They were laid in the cherry orchard and later taken to five morgues in and around Paris. Allen and his party would later visit all five morgues to see if they could visually identify any of the bodies.

They could not. It would take several weeks before all of the bodies were identified through finger prints, dental records and personal effects.

Damage claims were filed against Air France on behalf of 122 victims. However, international flights are governed by a treaty known as the Warsaw Convention, which limited the amount of damages that the airline would have to pay to $8,300 per victim. Lawyers for the Orly families argued that since the flight was a charter, not a commercial flight, it was not governed by the treaty. They took that argument to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals but lost.

In February 1969, the final claims against Air France were settled. The average payment was $84,000 per victim.

Three days after the crash, the people of France participated in an interdenominational memorial service at the American Cathedral in Paris. During the service, a choir sang the standard hymn, “God Be in My Head.”

“Every time I hear that song, I’m reminded of that occasion,” says Aubrey Morris. For him, the service in Paris is his most vivid, emotional memory from those days 30 years ago.

After the service, Ivan Allen’s party returned to Atlanta, arriving in the city at 7:40 p.m. Wednesday evening, June 6. Morris recalls that the crowd at the airport, which included families of the dead, applauded as the mayor came into the terminal. “God bless you, Ivan,” one man said to Allen.

Over the next seven and a half years in office, the city would see grace under pressure from Allen in other troubled times — during the Summerhill riots in 1966, while testifying for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But his handling of the plane crash established Ivan Allen as a leader and a legend.

Members of the mayor’s party had virtually no sleep over the course of three days in France. For Allen, it had been an emotional time, seeing his burned friends in morgues, seeing their belongings on the runway. After reporters at the Atlanta airport had asked their questions, the mayor’s wife, Louise, took him by the arm and said, “Will you please excuse him?” then led Allen away.

The day before the service in Paris, two Atlanta churches hard hit by the crash, the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King and St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral, held memorial services. Each had lost 20 members in the crash.

Christ the King was crowded past capacity, the largest Mass in the church’s history. Life magazine ran a photograph of a woman who could not get a seat inside, kneeling in worship on the cathedral’s steps.

The first three bodies came home on June 15. Over the next month, as the dead came back home, there were as many as five funerals a day.

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On June 3, 1966, four years to the day after Atlanta’s European voyagers perished at Orly, their next-of-kin gathered at 15th and Peachtree streets, next to the old High Museum, to break ground on the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center.

Not long after the crash, Atlantans had begun talking about what they might do to commemorate those who died. What they decided is quintessential Atlanta: They decided to build something.

In this case, it was a $13 million arts center, built with private funds raised in the names of the victims. Today, the memorial center, now a part of the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, is home to the Atlanta Symphony, the Alliance Theater and the Atlanta College of Art. The current High Museum was added in 1983.

The citizenry had rejected an arts center before the crash. Afterward, it embraced the idea.

There were predictions at the time of the crash that it might take 25 or 30 years for the city to recover from the vacuum in leadership caused by the crash; that turned out not to be so.

On the occasion of the opening of the arts center, the French government gave the city a bronze cast of Rodin’s The Shade, which still sites in the main stairwell of the building.

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After hearing news of the plane crash on the radio, R.P. Turner got a friend to drive him back to Marshallville. When he arrived, the yard of his parents’ house was filled with people. Both the Methodist and Baptist churches had canceled services, and mourners came to pay their respects.

“It was a true outpouring,” he says. “Mom and Dad had so many friends.”

R.P. Turner did not return to Georgia Tech. He and his brother, Tom, took over the family’s farm, which they still operate today. They took all of their mother’s artwork and put it up in the attic of his parents’ house, where R.P. and his family now live.

About a year ago, R.P.’s wife, Susan, brought out Louise Turner’s extraordinary collection, which includes 250 works. Among them is a self-portrait, which she painted while looking in a mirror.

The family decided that her legacy shouldn’t sit in a musty old attic. They are now selling prints of two of the camellia watercolors and working with an Atlanta curator to set up an exhibition of Louise Turner’s work.

When their mother was making them pose instead of letting them play baseball, the sons resisted. Now, they feel blessed that they have these pieces of their past and their mother.

She is back home, in her own house. But for her son R.P., the memory of the news on the radio that morning in Atlanta doesn’t go away, not even after 30 years.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it.”

For Milton Bevington, who remarried three years after the crash, what he witnessed that day in Paris is still hard to talk about, even after three decades. But he says what usually comes back to his mind is not the smoke but the faces of the travelers in the terminal, a vivid picture of both his wife and her mother.

“It’s always in your mind. I won’t say it’s on your mind, but in your mind,” he says. And as for getting over witnessing such a disaster, “you kind of decide you don’t have much option but to go on.”

“You just decided you’ve got to do it, and you do it.”

And that’s what Atlanta did.

Is It Possible to Be Both Christian and Gay?

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Chris Glaser’s 30-year struggle to answer that question — for himself and for the church

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/November 1995
(Note: This story won the first place award for feature writing at the 1996 SPJ Green Eyeshade Awards, saluting excellence in journalism in the southeastern United States.)

atlanta magazineIt was Sunday morning, and from the earliest days of his childhood, Sunday morning was a time set aside for Chris Glaser to stop, separate himself from the day-to-day and trivial concerns of life and give himself over to the message and grace of Jesus Christ. To spend Sundays this way was as much a part of his natural order as eating or breathing, and almost as necessary. And though this morning he was in the middle of a celebratory secular parade and not sitting on the sacred surface of a church pew, he was still about to see the message of Christ become physically manifest.

Or rather, wildly different interpretations of the message of Christ.

As Glaser and the other Gay Pride marches cross Third Street at Peachtree, parishioners at The Lutheran Church of the Redeemer stand behind a folding table set up on the sidewalk on the right side of the street. They hand cups of water to the overheated marchers who have already been out in the midday sun for 45 minutes but are, as of yet, only halfway to Piedmont Park, their destination. In the next block, volunteers from St. Mark United Methodist Church, including the senior minister and his family, carry small cups of water on trays and walk into the fringes of the marching line of gay activists. “Everyone is Welcome at St. Mark” reads the banner draped above the door of the church’s sanctuary.

Directly across from St. Mark, at the church on the left side of the street, there are no welcoming parishioners, not a drop of water. A uniformed guard sits watch, perched inside a white truck with the words “First Baptist Security” stenciled on the side. This year, two other guards and a handful of church elders watch impassively as one of the marchers takes blue chalk, writes “Bigot” on the sidewalk and adds an arrow pointing straight at the towering steeple of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta.

Friends of Glaser who had warned him about the dichotomy of the welcomes he would and wouldn’t receive know that he applies to himself, quite comfortably, both the adjectives “gay” and “Christian.” Indeed, both labels have become so integral to how he reacts to his world and enjoys and lives his life that they have taken on a significance stronger than adjectives, a power more vibrant than a mere label.

So as Glaser stood giving witness as a gay man while watching the Methodists and Lutherans give witness as Christians, what came into his mind is a familiar passage of Scripture: For truly I tell you, whosoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will be no means lose the reward.

“We may not have known we bore any resemblance to Christ,” Glaser would later write, reflecting on the experience. “But these Christians saw Christ in us. Their reward was that we saw Christ in them.”

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In the Old Testament, an ancient psalmist facing uncertain exile cries, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” For people with a Christian spiritual imprint who come to accept their sexual identity as gay, the psalmist’s cry is all too familiar.

To live openly as a gay man or a lesbian is to contradict 2,000 years of church tradition. To live openly as a Christian — a word that gays and lesbians who have felt more preyed upon than prayed upon use as a synonym for oppressor — is to be politically incorrect in a community that values political conformity.

Why cling to an institution that at best doesn’t fully include you and at worst persecutes you? Why push the church to change its time-honored conventions and moral standards to accommodate your reality? Why not find a way to fulfill your spiritual needs that doesn’t conflict with you sexual identity? Why not find a way to fulfill your sexual needs that doesn’t conflict with your spiritual identity?

To be both gay and Christian is, in the eye of ideologies at either end of the debate, to be fully neither. To be both requires gay and lesbian Christians to redefine, or even reinvent, their spirituality. The journey can be painful and scary and last a lifetime. It can also be joyous, a time of spiritual growth and discovery. If you ask a dozen gay and lesbian Christians why they persist on the journey — what sustains them — their replies almost always focus on the joy.

Their belief in Christ and his message may have been challenged, even shaken, but, they say, it still gives them a peace that passes all understanding. They are also comforted by the rituals and fellowship so woven into the fabric of Sunday mornings in the South. They want to live out Christ’s social call by contributing to institutions that feed the homeless and minister to the sick. They need the camaraderie that comes with raising voices in unison with other believers in praise of their almighty God.

“We are all confronted with not knowing,” says Eugene Schoenfeld, a professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia State University, who is currently studying how faith impacts Atlanta’s gay and lesbian Christians. “The church has always provided reassurance of the meaningfulness of that existence and the continuation of that existence. That isn’t any different for gays and lesbians.”

_______________
As he was growing up a devout Baptist in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Chris Glaser, now 45 and a Yale-educated writer and theologian, couldn’t always see Christ in himself or believe others would see Christ in him. In his early teens, he felt a growing attraction to men — and with it a growing terror. Homosexuality contradicted everything he had been told about who God was and what he would accept.

“At first, I believed it was a sin or a sickness. And I would pray to God to change. I would repent, confess my sins. Sometimes I would pray several times a day. I prayed to God that I would grow out of it. But I didn’t.”

It was during this time that the volunteer youth minister in Glaser’s church was forced to resign. Glaser and his family had been friends with the man, had invited him into their home. But when the church’s leadership found out the youth minister was gay, he was asked to leave. It didn’t matter that the man vowed he was celibate and fully agreed with the church’s teaching that homosexuality was a sin.

The rumors that were swirling through the church coincided with a scheduled field trip to Disneyland. Despite her friendship with the minister, Glaser’s mother pulled him aside and admonished him that while at Disneyland, he was not to go into the restroom with the older man.

As Glaser had begun to feel his true sexual identity emerge, he had also begun to experience a call from God to the ministry. So as he watched the life of his friend, the only gay minister he knew, being destroyed, Glaser grew more and more frightened.

“I felt like the fearful reaction that the people in the church were demonstrating toward this man was the same reaction they would have toward me, if they knew who I really was.”

_______________
If the church of Glaser’s youth helped accentuate his terror, his overriding belief in God’s wisdom and mercy delivered him from it.

“As a child, I had been taught that I could talk to God about anything and everything. And so even those things I couldn’t talk about with my parents or a minister or a psychiatrist, I could speak about with God. And it really was the beginning of my prayer life because I spent a lot of time talking to God about my feelings and about my doubts and my loves.”

As he read the Bible, Glaser began to identify with its outcasts, those characters who were treated badly and persecuted not because they were sinful or evil but because they were different or sought God differently. Jesus himself fit into that category. And the discovery that he could see himself in the Bible’s mirror convinced Glaser that no matter what he was, he was known by God.

It was that sense of acceptance that was his security blanket even during those times when he was having trouble accepting himself.

When Glaser got to college, he left the Baptist Church and became a Presbyterian. Its traditions, he felt, were less dogmatic, more receptive to the value of personal introspection and possibility of debate and dissent.

College was also when he first fell in love with a man. He was Glaser’s best friend, completely heterosexual, and no romantic or physical relationship developed from it. Glaser never even told him how he felt. But the experience was transforming and profound, especially on a spiritual plane.

“I suddenly realized that my sexual orientation was an ability to love. And since I believe all ability to love ultimately comes from God, I came to believe this was a gift from God. I recognized that my feelings for him were really sacred.”

After finishing college, Glaser entered the Yale University Divinity School in 1973. Though at the time the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) didn’t explicitly ban the ordination of gays and lesbians, Glaser knew that under church rules a congregation would have to hire him before he could be ordained. Unless he covered up his sexual identity, chances were slim that any congregation would want him. But this obstacle didn’t diminish the call he felt from God. Because he had suffered and struggled with his own identity, he was convinced he could empathize with the suffering of others and minister to them, especially other gay men and lesbians.

So Glaser decided to go to New Haven anyway, telling himself that it was purely for theological study, not necessarily in pursuit of a pulpit. But he didn’t disclose his sexual identity to members of a committee set up by his home presbytery in California to monitor his work at Yale.

_______________
Homosexuality has traditionally be such a taboo subject that gay and lesbian Christians, even those who grew up in conservative churches in the Bible Belt, don’t remember many fire-and-brimstone sermons on the subject. That’s not to say that they didn’t know the church disapproved mightily. Rather, the notion that homosexuality was an abomination was so unchallenged that preachers says little need for reinforcement.

But in June 1969, four years before Glaser started at Yale, an event occurred that began to subtly alter the position of gay people in society. Patrons at the Stonewall In, a gay bay in New York City, rioted after a police raid. The uprising was the seminal event of the modern gay rights movement, and it is commemorated every June in parades in Atlanta and around the country.

The dialogue touched off by Stonewall about the place of gays and lesbians in American life began to seep into churches and seminaries. The Rev. Elder Troy Perry, who a year before the riots had started an outreach ministry to gays called the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, came to the Yale University Divinity School to give a lecture that Glaser helped arrange.

As part of his work at the seminary, Glaser had been involved in a ministry directed toward the gay and lesbian community. What he was doing had begun to draw attention, and bringing in Troy Perry would no doubt draw even more.

When he returned to California after his first year at Yale, the committee charged with overseeing his education called Glaser in for a visit. They asked a series of questions about his ministry. Then one of them finally asked the question. Glaser told them the truth. He had decided he wouldn’t pursue ordination at the expense of honesty.

Even though the possibility of Glaser becoming a minister was now remote, and the committee members’ reaction to his admission was mostly negative, they nonetheless decided to let Glaser complete his studies at Yale. He was thus one of a handful of openly gay people who became eligible for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the mid-1970s, touching off a fierce debate about what the church should do with them. In 1978, the General Assembly, the Presbyterians’ governing body, voted to formally bar gays and lesbians from ordination as either ministers or elders. But far from settling the issue, the vote hasn’t even slowed down the arguing.

Today, the debate goes beyond ordination, addressing the broader issue of how far the church should go in including gays and lesbians equally in every aspect of church life. And no item in this discussion about equality generates more raw emotion than the argument over whether the church should recognize committed relationships between two people of the same gender.

_______________
On a sunny Sunday afternoon last October, family and friends filled the pews in the Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, a small, gray stone structure in southeast Atlanta, where Chris Glaser and Mark King, 34, were to formalize their longtime commitment to each other. Glaser had met King, an AIDS educator and activist who grew up in Louisiana, while both were living in Los Angeles.

In the Presbyterian tradition, marriage is an occasion not only to join two lives but also to worship God. Glaser and King wanted a church setting to lend full reverence and ceremony to their worship.

Facing them as they came up the aisle were two Presbyterian ministers: the Rev. Howard Warren, from Indianapolis, who is gay, having stated his sexual identity after decades in the pulpit, and the Rev. Peter Denlea, then the church’s pastor, who is heterosexual. As Denlea stood there waiting to preside at the covenant ceremony he had helped design, he was well aware that he had climbed way out on a limb.

Since his arrival at Ormewood Park in 1989, Denlea’s watchwords had been full fellowship. This was to be a community of believers where all could come together and participate equally and fully in all the parish had to offer. That included black people, homeless people and gay people. It was a message that made some longtime members angry enough to launch a campaign to get rid of him. An imposing former Navy commander and father of five who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, Denlea, 61, had survived 50 air combat missions in Vietnam. His message to his critics was succinct: Don’t you dare get between me and the people to whom I need to preach the Gospel.

But when Glaser called and asked Denlea if he could use the sanctuary to formally join his life with King’s, Denlea flinched. He swallowed hard. The church’s elders had previously agreed to let him bless same-sex unions performed outside the church. But to do it right there in the sanctuary? The space where one whispers out of respect for its sacredness?

“Damn it, it was either full fellowship or it wasn’t,” says Denlea. The elders agreed, unanimously.

Glaser and King later put an announcement about their ceremony in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a notice which included both the location of the service and the fact that Denlea presided.

The elders at Midway Presbyterian Church in DeKalb County read the item and decided that this just went too far. They formally petitioned the Presbyterian Church’s regional governing body, the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, asking that Denlea be disciplined and Ormewood Park’s elders be counseled “regarding their mission as spiritual leaders.”

_______________
When the elders at Midway looked at the totality of the Bible’s teachings, they were — and are — convinced that King and Glaser, with Denlea’s help, were acting contrary to Scripture.

“We have to have something to turn to and find out what we believe. We have to have a home base,” says the Rev. Ronald Hieber, the pastor of Midway Presbyterian, which, though inside the Perimeter and just east of Decatur, sits in an isolated enclave with an almost rural feel.

At Midway, home base is the Bible. Sitting around a table in an office just off the parish hall, Hieber and a group of elders say they are not hateful people, not spiteful or intolerant. They are not archconservatives, ascribing inerrancy to the Bible’s every word. But they firmly believe that the ceremony Denlea performed went against the Bible’s total teaching.

“And we don’t see ourselves jousting at windmills,” says Ralph Murchison, one of the elders who drafted the overture to the presbytery (which, after an emotional debate, was defeated). “We don’t see ourselves as alone.”

And they are not. In a world of astonishing change, in an era when sexual roles and the definition of family have blurred nearly beyond recognition, the church has stood for many as a bastion of comfort and continuity. And though in the last 30 years churches have been faced with issues such as civil rights, women’s rights, abortion, homelessness, drug abuse, contraception, violence, the morality of the nuclear arms race and the explosions of divorce and illegitimacy, fully including gays and lesbians is a Rubicon that seems especially wide and tumultuous.

This is a frontier many in the pews would just as soon not explore. But the Chris Glasers of the world prod them on — not because they want to be revolutionaries but because they want to be Christians.

For Glaser, with each year that goes by, the realization grows that he may never be ordained. He has written four books about the gay Christian experience, including The Word Is Out: The Bible Reclaimed for Lesbians and Gay Men, and he travels the country lecturing and preaching. His ministry without ordination brings him more notice than he would receive laboring as a minister in a local parish, typing the church bulletin and baptizing babies. But he still wants the authority and respect that comes with being ordained. He wants to be part of a church where the level of one’s participation is shaped only by talent and desire and God’s call.

And in the face of everything he’s gone through in the last 30 years, Glaser has gotten philosophical about the struggle. He simply paraphrases theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Anything worth committing your life to requires more than a lifetime to achieve.”

Love Is A Money-Splendored Thing

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Want to cash in with the perfect romance novel? Keep your bodices unripped, avoid the “P” word and for God’s sake, give ’em a happy ending.

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/January 1992

atlanta magazineKatrine Campbell screamed and tried to make a break for it. But her kidnapper, Raith MacLean, quickly grabbed Katrine, clamping a hand over her mouth.

“Try that again,” he whispered, “and you’ll become intimately acquainted with my dirk.”

Intimately acquainted with his what? I was only on Page 10 of “Tender Feud.” They couldn’t be ready to do that already. Where were the pages and pages of verbal foreplay? Where was the plot line where boy meets girl, they hate each other instantly, then fall in love, then deny their love, then accept it, then lose each other, then meet again for passion and happily ever after? And what was going to happen in the other 290 pages? Extended afterglow?

I scrambled for my dictionary, only to discover, much to my relief, that dirk is a Scottish term for a type of dagger. This made sense, given that Tender Feud was set in the Highlands in the 1760s. It seems Raith was threatening to kill Katrine, albeit in a way that was suggestive of something else, something that perhaps would be more pleasurable.

She was indeed frightened now. She was scared out of her wits. A knife at her throat, a hard male body pressing against hers — surely enough to disturb the natural sensibilities of any gently reared young lady!

Surely.

Katrine quaked. Did he intend to murder her?

Surely not.

For in the world of Raiths and Katrines, the endings are always happy. It is the cardinal commandment of romance writing, one authors are loathe to violate because readers will not brook such transgressions. So even though Raith holds Katrine hostage, even though their families have been bitter enemies for generations, we readers know he will do her no harm. The story is as time-honored as the tales of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, where deliverance lies in the triumph of love between a strong man and a good woman.

A predictable conclusion? Yes. But the woman who created Raith and Katrine says the mandatory uplift at the end is not a limitation, but rather the genre’s attraction.

“It’s the idea of love being able to conquer all,” says Anne Bushyhead of Duluth, who writes romances under the pen name Nicole Jordan. “The good things in life triumph over the bad.”

Of course, the good things in life do not always triumph over the bad. We all know people do evil stuff to each other, and fate is frequently unkind. So it would be easy to dismiss romance novels as unrealistic fluff, as many of the genre’s detractors are quick to do.

Easy, except for the fact that these books sell. Romances account for 40 cents out of every dollar in paperback sales, some $200 million a year. While their genesis reaches back into previous centuries, when Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and, later, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” established a pattern for writers, romance novels began to enter big-time popular culture in 1958, when Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises began mass producing paperback romances, heavily marketing them and selling them at a reduced cost. At one point, they even gave them away in boxes of detergent.

Now, some of the biggest names in publishing — Bantam, Penguin, Warner Books, HarperCollins — have a romance subsidiary. About 120 titles are released each month for a readership, estimated at 22 million, that is extremely loyal. And the audience has spread beyond America and into languages other than English.

Upon learning these tidbits, my questions were twofold. First, what are the inherent intricacies that make these novels so popular and such a cultural phenomenon? And, more importantly, what would it take for me to write one and cash in?

Well, let me preface my tale of how I learned to write the perfect romance novel by suspending reality just a bit.

The three Georgia romance writers whose brains I picked all informed me that anyone who wants to write romance novels should both be familiar with them and enjoy the format. Patricia Potter, who writes three to four novels a year at her home in Stone Mountain and whose works have been translated into Portuguese, Swedish, German, Italian and Japanese, says she gets somewhat offended by people who think they can just plop themselves down and whip out a romance for the money — in other words, people who attempt what I’m about to attempt.

“The good ones are written by people who enjoy doing it,” she says. “You have to want to write one.”

So I proceed from this point, with apologies to Patricia, by admitting that I was not a romance aficionado prior to setting out on my quest to learn how to write one. We’ll just have to pretend that I know what I’m doing — we’re writing fiction, after all.

Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So I had to spend several weekdays propped up on my couch, a package of Oreos at my side, reading books entitled “Tender Feud,” “Follow the Sun,” “Rainbow” and “Twice Blessed” — much to the chagrin of my friends who have to work for a living at real jobs.

But hey, all this skipping back and forth through history is tough work. I went from modern-day California to 18th century Scotland to the antebellum South and then to the New Mexico Territory, circa 1878. I met geriatric Swedish diamond thieves, slave owners involved in the Underground Railroad and a Texas ranger who faked his own hanging.

“You can do bizarre things. The quirkier you can be, the more you stand out,” says Deborah Smith, a romance writer from Dahlonega who once worked as a reporter for the Marietta Daily Journal and whose books have sold more than a million copies. And Deb knows quirky. In her book “Follow the Sun,” the heroine starts out as a jewel thief’s widow living on a boat in Long Beach who rediscovers her Cherokee heritage in north Georgia and then learns that she is actually the rightful heir to the throne of a small, albeit fictitious, Scandinavian country.

When she frets about not really knowing where she belongs, the hero — whose name is Jeopard Surprise — has the answer:

You can be a Cherokee and a Scandinavian queen at the same time.

Yes, dear reader, you can have it all.

The next task I faced was to find a pseudonym. Many romance writers write under a name that is not their own. This is not, I discovered, because they are ashamed of what they are doing. In fact, they believe their craft is getting a bad rap from those high-and-mighty critics who dismiss, with an upward turn of the nose, anything that does not meet their definition of Literature with a capital L. After all, they sniff, Danielle Steel is the role model here, not John Steinbeck.

“We’re sort of like Rodney Dangerfield — we don’t get any respect,” says Potter, who believes the writing in romance novels is equal to or better than that in other genres. “It’s a matter of educating people to take a look at them.” She’s now got her 82-year-old father reading them.

“I frankly make no apology for what I like to write or what I like to read,” says Bushyhead.

“I think the readers are more sophisticated than before. And the writers are more sophisticated. They treat this as a business,” says Smith. “Nobody’s taking this lightly.”

The Barbara Cartland-esque image of romance writers as matrons reclining in lacy gowns, dictating their fiction between bonbons and sips of tea, or as bored housewives dashing off a chapter between the dusting and the laundry, don’t hold true. Indeed, today’s romance writers insist they are serious, driven professionals.

“We hate Barbara Cartland,” insists Smith. “That image has done us more harm than anything.” She and Potter came to romance writing from careers in journalism. Bushyhead has a civil engineering degree from Georgia Tech and worked for Procter & Gamble, overseeing the production of Pampers, before deciding to write her first book. For these women, this is clearly more than a way to while away free time.

“I want to be on The New York Times best-seller list, and I want to be rich,” admits Smith.

And today, romance writers such as Sandra Brown, LaVyrle Spencer and Jude Deveraux do get their books published in hardcover and do make the vaunted best-seller lists. Potter’s newest book, “Lawless,” is coming out in hardback.

And while everyone breathing in Georgia knows of the phenomenal punch of Alexandra Ripley’s “Gone With the Wind” sequel, many may not realize that her previous books can be found in the romance sections of local bookstores.

Faced with outside skepticism despite their commercial success (many prominent book critics still refuse to review romances,) romance writers have banded into a close-knit community. About 250 published and unpublished writers in the Southeast are members of a group called Georgia Romance Writers. Nationally, the Romance Writers of America organization has 5,000 members. It even has its own award for excellence, a la the Oscar, called the Rita.

Local romance writers get together weekly to critique and edit each other’s work — a process they refer to as “tough love” — with published authors helping newcomers get started. It’s a camaraderie born of a common calling.

Or, as Smith puts it, “When you’ve spent your whole day thinking of a euphemism for penis, you need to get out and talk to somebody who understands.”

Many romance writers use pseudonyms because some of the publishers in the field, including Harlequin, still the industry’s giant, require them to do so. The publishing house then keeps the right to use the name. (Romance readers tend to follow particular authors, and the pseudonym system keeps writers from taking their followings with them if they switch publishers. Not surprisingly, writers are not big fans of the process.) In other cases, a pseudonym is used when two people collaborate on the same book. And some writers who work for publishers that would allow them to use their names create pen names anyway to foster the image that goes with their books.

“Bushyhead is an old Cherokee name. It is not a particularly romantic name,” says Bushyhead, who chose Jordan because it is her middle name and Nicole because she liked the sound of it. (Smith and Potter use their own names.)

I had to pick a pseudonym for another reason as well. Most romance writers, and virtually all of the genre’s readers, are women. Though a few of these books are written by men (3 percent of the membership of the Romance Writers of America is male,) you’ll find few masculine names on the covers of the romance section. Male romance writers usually take a female pen name.

So what will it be? Well, let’s follow Bushyhead’s lead. My middle name is Louis. That’s not really a last name, unless we change the spelling to Lewis. For the sake of continuity, let’s use a first name that starts with an R. Rebecca? No. Something more dignified and regal, perhaps. Regina? Yes, Regina Lewis. A new star in the literary galaxy.

Now, Regina is faced with the task of naming the two characters who must be in any romance novel — the hero and the heroine.

These protagonists don’t go by names like Sam Smith and Jane Jones. Nothing so mundane is permitted. In romance novels, you’re more likely to run across Meara O’Hara and Quinn Devereux.

“Most women are married to men named Bill and George,” says Smith. “Women are looking for something they don’t see every day.”

And just how do authors come up with these unusually melodramatic monikers?

“You want to know the real secret? We all have those baby name books,” says Potter. Telephone books are popular as well. The idea, the authors say, is to create an image through the name.

Of course, the names picked will also depend on the type of book being written.
While there are degrees and slight variations, romances generally fall into two broad categories, historical and contemporary. From here, the process is further refined.

Romance publishing houses have what they call “lines,” series of books that come out under the same title, such as Harlequin’s Superromance, Bantam’s Loveswept, Silhouette’s Desire, Signet’s Regency or Berkley Books’ Second Chance at Love. Books in the same line contain common elements to appeal to the same audience. Smith, for example started out writing in the Loveswept line, contemporary romances with an emphasis on humor that are “highly sensual,” according to the publisher’s introduction. Bushyhead has written a number of Regency period novels, a particular segment of romances that are all set in early 19th-century England and fall in line with the very formal manners and mores of that era. Readers buying a particular line or a particular author know in advance what to expect from the book.

There are also two different formats for the novels. Many of the books that hold to a particular line, particularly contemporary series books, have fewer than 200 pages and come out with a stock cover that varies little from book to book. They have a unique title but, given the large number of titles produced each month, are also given a number (Smith’s story of Jeopard and the Cherokee-Scandinavian princess is also known as Loveswept No. 326.) Writers are required to write to a particular length, and editors make sure that the books don’t stray from the guidelines.

Those thicker paperback books you see in the grocery store — frequently emblazoned with a muscled, shirtless hero and a heroine whose silky bosoms are straining against her bodice — impose less structure on the author. The plots are generally more complex, and, in the case of historical novels, the research more elaborate.

Potter has a stack of obscure reference books, with pictures of popular fashions through the ages and the weapons of the Civil War, materials to which she refers when writing in an effort to keep the details as authentic as possible. When she decided to send the protagonists in her book Rainbow to Murray, Ky., she called its Chamber of Commerce.

“For my plot, I needed woods,” she explains. “If that part of Kentucky didn’t have any woods, I would have gotten letters from Kentucky. Readers will write you if you do not have your history correct.”

Yet, in these historical romances, it is the romance, not the history, that takes center stage. The historical details — the proper clothes, the proper weapons — are but props for propelling the hero and heroine into each other’s arms. These are not epics like Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War,” where the romantic entanglement between two characters is interrupted by chapters of commentary on military strategy and where the protagonists interact with Hitler, Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. For in “Winds” and other works of historical fiction, the characters are the props, used to impart the historical details to the reader in a compelling fashion. The fact that the characters fall in love is a sideshow.

Thus, that quintessential Southern epic, “Gone With The Wind,” would not be a romance novel under the strict definition of the term. The story of the death of the Old South was as much the focus of the book as was the romance between Rhett and Scarlett. Besides, Scarlett was carrying a torch for Ashley, and neither relationship ended happily. (But then, if Ashley had fallen into Scarlett’s arms after Melly was dispatched to the Great Beyond, professing his love for the Irish vixen, we would have to reconsider. In the next sequel, perhaps.)

In their quest for accuracy, authors also have to be careful not to use any slang terms that were not actually being slung during their character’s lifetimes. And when picking names for a character, the writers have to check their etymology, being careful not to give a Jewish surname to an Irish Catholic. Contemporary characters need contemporary names, and it is not a good idea to call your 16th-century French heroine Debbie. Raith, the name of the hero in “Tender Feud,” was actually in use in 18th-century Scotland. (Bushyhead says she had few good choices for that character. Men in that time frame usually went by not-so-dashing names such as Hector.)

The argument could be made that your average 20th-century American romance reader would not be sufficiently versed in the history of Georgian Britain to know a name was incorrect. That’s not the point. The writer would know.
“I hate to make historical errors,” says Bushyhead. But she admits she did rewrite history on one point. People in the time frame of “Tender Feud” did not bathe. They thought water would make them ill. Katrine, however, takes a bath in the book because, Bushyhead says, “I just didn’t want a dirty heroine.”

Now at this point, Regina is a torn woman. She can’t decide whether to go contemporary, put her characters in 1840s Oklahoma or in an early 20th-century Western mining town (cut her some slack — she hasn’t been doing this very long.) Awash in indecision, she decides to take a shortcut and pick her names form the Bible. Yes, those should be adaptable to just about any setting in the Western world in the last 2,000 years. Besides, basing the names on the Good Book opens up an array of catchy titles possibilities — “Biblical Interlude” and “Scriptural Fire” come to Regina’s mind.

For the hero, how about Philip or Andrew? Both are noble names that can be shortened into nicknames quite easily. (This is something romance characters seem to have a penchant for doing. Jeopard becomes Jep. Meredith becomes Merry.) No, these are just a little too plain. Jesus? Regina thinks that might get her in trouble. Herod? Well, he did have some blood on his hands, but the name connotes ruling strength combined with a wee bit of roguishness and danger. Yes, that will work. And for the heroine? Esther and Bernice will have to be rejected. Mary? No, she needs more fire, a name that’s more esoteric. Drusilla? Voilà. Herod and Drusilla.

Now, it’s time for a plot.

Back in what many romance writers consider the bad old days, shading in the outlines of Herod and Drusilla and sending them out to wind their way through a romance would have been simple. Until the early 1980s, these novels were written according to a strict formula from which writers had little freedom to vary.

The central focus had to be on the heroine. In fact, the entire book, while written in the third person, had to be told from her point of view. If Regina were constricted in this fashion, readers would never get inside the head of Herod or any of the secondary characters, only Drusilla. They wouldn’t know what he was thinking — they would only know what she thought he was thinking.

The women, pre-1980, were generally in their late teens or perhaps early 20s, from a lower socioeconomic background, pretty but not overtly beautiful. The men were in their mid-30s, wealthy and extraordinarily handsome. They were complex, often brooding, with a secret in their past. But they were also Supermen, without flaws, possessing an unwavering, sturdy character. Worldly problems — alcoholism, handicaps, social disease — never intruded on the fantasy. Virginity on the woman’s part was usually a must, although the man was more, shall we say, worldly. And in the relationship, he was clearly in control.

These novels also came to be known as “bodice rippers” because the hero frequently raped the heroine, who promptly fell in love with him. Today, in times of raised consciousness on the issue of violence toward women (at least, raised in comparison to a decade or two ago,) rape is rarely an element in the interaction between the hero and heroine. But the impression created by this outdated tradition of assault continues to dog modern romance writers, much to their consternation.

“I’ve never had a bodice ripped in any of my books,” says Potter. “It’s an image we are trying to fight.”

The rape scenes, and plot lines where women were the victims of gratuitous violence, stopped under pressure from both readers and writers. And during the 1980s, authors were also successful in convincing the powers-that-be in romance publishing — mostly men — that the audience, while enjoying the basic format, would accept and, indeed, appreciate more sophistication, with better plots and better writing and characters more richly drawn. Smith says the emergence of more female editors, who better understand what women want in romantic fiction, also helped lead to the changes.

The traditional plot elements have not disappeared. Writers still use them, but they are no longer required to incorporate all of them. The focus must still be on the relationship between the characters, and the ending must still be happy. But other than that, there are few hard-and-fast rules or verboten subjects.

Today’s romances are told from points of view other than the heroine’s. We now know what the hero thinks, and the writing can even be from the villain’s point of view, formerly a major no-no. However, there is one caveat to this, according to Smith. When a female writer tries to put herself inside a male character, she has a tendency to create a man who reacts emotionally in the way women want men to react to them, not the way they actually do. “If I wrote a man who acted like men really do, (readers) would probably hate him,” she says.

Oh, I see. What I have to do is to use a female mind-set in writing Herod so that he will think in the way a female thinks he ought to think, rather than the way I would have him think, operating from my male point of view. Of course, in putting myself in the female mind-set, I will probably make the female react like I would want her to react, instead of the way she would really react. (Regina is getting a headache.)

Today, the women in romance novels can have a sexual past. They are also stronger, more of a partner with the man than his handmaiden. “You’re also less likely to find a hero who has bedded everything female,” Smith says. The distasteful side of the real world intrudes as well. Heroines are former prostitutes. Heroes can be recovering alcoholics or dyslexic — or perhaps both. Jeopard Surprise whips out a condom during a love scene with his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen (however, the “c” word itself is not used — it’s referred to as “a small package that she recognized immediately.”)

However, there are still a few things that are frowned upon in the romance genre. While a heroine can have a sexual past, she cannot hop from bed to bed between the covers of the book. Clinical names are not used for sexual organs, particularly male sexual organs (thus, we read about Raith MacLean’s “splendid arousal.” No mention of the “p” word.) After they meet, the hero and heroine rarely become romantically involved with anybody else. And Drusilla, it seems, should not be caught cussing like a sailor. Our star-crossed couple must adhere to certain standards of proper conduct.

“You don’t have your heroine going around smoking dope,” Bushyhead says. “You might have a secondary character do that, but there would have to be some reason (in the plot.)”
Also frowned upon by many authors is gratuitous sex. The explicitness of the sex scenes in these novels varies from extreme to tame, depending on the author and the line. But all three writers insist on having a mutual attraction and affection between their characters that motivates them to have sex — and the aspect is as important as the actual description of what’s going on between the sheets.

“They may be going at it like bunnies, but you talk about the emotional side of it,” says Smith. Bushyhead describes it as “the difference between (writing about) making love and copulation.”

However, one bizarre plot device still pops up frequently in romance novels. The hero, it seems, has a penchant for kidnapping the heroine, who subsequently falls in love with her abductor.
In “Tender Feud,” Katrine is accosted in the first paragraph. Seventy-eight pages later, she makes the observation that was crossing my mind as I kept seeing kidnapping as a prelude to affection:

It would be imbecilic in the extreme to develop an attraction for her lawless captor.

Yet Katrine proceeds to do just that.

“It’s a fantasy, but it’s also possible,” says Bushyhead, pointing, as an example, to the case of Patty Hearst, the California heiress who joined the terrorist group that kidnapped her. Indeed, the abduction scenario is an illustration of a long-held observation about romance heroines; namely, that the woman’s attraction to the man is not willfulness on her part, but rather something that is out of her control.

And what the readers also know that the heroine doesn’t is that the hero is usually doing her a favor by kidnapping her. Jeopard kidnaps his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen to save her from assassins sent by a smarmy, wicked pretender to the throne named Olaf. She, of course, forgives Jeopard when she finds that out, even though he chained her up in a cave.

Believe it or not, romance novels have actually been the focus of collegiate study. Yes, the ivy-covered halls of academia have thundered with discussions of whether these novels are yet another tool of male oppression of women — whether the escapism they represent is harmful or helpful.

An assistant professor of film and literature, Tania Modleski, in a book subtly titled “Loving With a Vengeance,” put forth the theory that the books are a way for women to deal with the men in their life. A common feature in romances is that the hero, even after he falls in love with the heroine, refuses to admit his love and acts with hostility toward her as a defense mechanism. Modleski subscribes to the notion that, by showing male hostility as a manifestation of love, these books allow women to believe that male hostility in their own lives has the same motivation. (Regina thinks Tania ought to lighten up a bit.)

The authors themselves — the people from whom, after all, these novels spring — subscribe to theories that are not as psychologically deep.

“This is the one genre that speaks to women’s fantasies and doesn’t degrade them,” says Smith. And she rejects those pundits who believe women become addicted to these novels in an attempt to escape the deficiencies in their own worlds. “We know the difference between fantasy and reality.”

Bushyhead attributes the popularity to the “feel-good” aspect of the books, believing her readers are simply people who “don’t want to wallow in pain and agony (when they read.)” And Potter hits upon what might be the most basic reason of all.

“They’re good entertainment,” she says. “They have likable characters, and they are generally pretty fast-paced.”

So the bottom line appears to be that Herod and Drusilla have to be likable, redeemable and, despite twists and turns and tension that keep them apart, desperately in love with each other. He will probably kidnap her at some point — but only for her own good. She won’t spend her idle time chugging tequila or watching porno movies, but she won’t be sitting in her room doing needlepoint and waiting for her prince to come, either. When they make love, the experience will be ethereal, not carnal. And, of course, they will live happily ever after.

Regina has her marching orders. See you on The New York Times best-seller list.