Harvard University has a simple, one-word motto: veritas, or truth. But when Larry Houston arrived on campus two years ago, he found a community that has strayed so far from its Christian foundations that truth was almost nowhere to be found.

"Harvard is pretty liberal," says Houston, a cook at the freshmen dining hall on campus. "They have Memorial Chapel, which is the campus church, and the senior pastor is an openly gay black gentleman. There are lesbian proctors, lesbians in relationships in charge of some of the women’s dorms. The gay community is not about truth — it’s about lies and half-truths."

It wasn’t so long ago that Houston, 44, was struggling with that same lie himself. Now he wants to share with other homosexuals the truth of Christ that has set him free.

Born into an Illinois farm family of seven children in 1957, Houston rejected his heterosexual identity by the time he was 13. His father not only had a drinking problem, but constantly cheated on his mother — and Houston knew he wanted to be nothing like him. Through it all, Houston had a rudimentary understanding of Biblical truth: his parents had taken him to church until he was in sixth grade, and as a senior in high school, he began attending a Lutheran fellowship, where he remained through college. But something was still missing in his life.

"Going through college and a couple of years after that, I was involved in church life and teaching Bible school, but I hadn’t had my defining moment," he explains. "I wasn’t happy. I set a couple of goals—not to drink and not to do drugs. But I’d had some marijuana with some people in college, so that fell by the wayside. The other goal was to be a better farmer with my father, and how do you know when you’ve reached that goal?"

Between the ages of 22 and 25, Houston drifted from Christian setting to Christian setting: from a Wisconsin boarding school specializing in dysfunctional families, where he learned to cook; to a Christian camp in Southern California, where he had a few more anonymous encounters; to the Associated Free Lutheran Bible School in Minneapolis — where his life finally changed forever.

"Faith is a relationship with a person, and that person is Jesus Christ," Houston says. "Unfortunately, some churches don’t emphasize that relationship with an individual — they talk about knowing God and being a good person. So you can go your whole life being a good person and going to church and never knowing Jesus. And you can tell the difference — those who have the joy of the Lord in their life and those who go to church because it’s how they were raised.

"I finally figured it out — you have to admit you’re a sinner and ask Him to save you."

A holy kick in the pants
Houston enrolled in the school’s three-year seminary program, but his homosexual urges were still not fully under control. During his first year, he had a few anonymous sexual encounters.

"People encouraged me to go on to seminary, and I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t feel called to be a parish pastor’ — and the reason was the struggle with homosexuality," Houston says. "I was angry, I wasn’t happy, I was a cold person. It was obvious to everybody that there was something wrong with Larry. The people who wrote my recommendation for seminary knew about my struggle with homosexuality, but they never said, ‘Hey, Larry, your character is lacking. What’s up?’ That takes time, and the church is very poor about making relationships. People come to church and they have a mask. You spend time with them and the mask slips and you see them for who they are, but brush it off because you don’t want to get involved."

But a few months before graduation, Houston got the holy kick he needed to get out of the closet and into the light: Somebody told the administration about his first-year bathroom sex, and the seminary dismissed him.

"God works in all kinds of ways," Houston says now. "I didn’t fight it because they were right. But I had a dilemma. Was I just going to go off and be a good little Christian and serve God someplace else without anyone knowing? I wasn’t going to. I was going to own up to what I did."

So Houston picked up the phone and made six calls to men he knew — the president’s and dean’s sons included — told them he had been kicked out of seminary, and why.

Six times in a row, Houston heard the same words: "Larry, I knew you had a problem. Larry — you’re not a homosexual."

"By the last call, I was going, ‘Wait a minute, God, I’ve heard this before!’ " Houston says. "After all those years of believing I was (gay), He got me in a corner, and that was my defining moment. These people acknowledge they didn’t know what to do, but they acknowledged the truth and said we’d just be friends.

"God is good, because rumors weren’t sent around and there was no condemnation — and I was done with walking in the darkness. I told enough people that there was no wiggle room for me not to deal with it anymore."

Houston got involved with an Exodus International group and took a job cooking at a Minneapolis hospital. In late 1999, he spotted a prayer request in an Exodus newsletter, asking for someone willing to start a branch ministry at Harvard.

"I live my life on faith, so I said, ‘God, I’m open to that — going to Boston and starting something,’ " Houston says, breaking down into tears. "A few weeks later I was praying and I said, ‘I will not do it unless I can cook at Harvard. And I will not do it unless you immediately give me friends who are not broken the same way I am — friends I can tell why I came to Boston.’ "

Houston spent the next month considering his options and praying with Exodus president Bob Davies about the decision. Then he punched up the Boston Globe online — and discovered that Harvard University needed a cook. He flew out for an interview in January 2000, got the job, found a Vineyard church in Cambridge, and started work within 10 days.

Persecution in Beantown
"It’s just something I felt I was supposed to do — something God confirmed by giving me a job at Harvard and surrounding me with people who are not broken the same way I am," Houston says. "They say, ‘Why did you come to Harvard?’ and I say, ‘The job looks good on a resume, but I’m here to minister to gay students.’ And they harass me for that."

Despite making the rounds of all the campus gay groups his first semester to introduce himself and his agenda, Houston didn’t raise many eyebrows.

"They thought they could just ignore me and nothing would come of it," he says.

But that all changed last September, when a freshman journalism student assigned to do a story on the cooks’ union contract renegotiations met Houston, heard his personal story, and wrote a 5,000-word article about him in the campus magazine Fifteen Minutes.

Chaos ensued. Within a month, the college was investigating Houston. David P. Illingworth, an associate dean, told Fifteen Minutes the other deans were worried Houston was proselytizing, and encouraged any freshmen who’d had "a negative experience" with him in the dining hall to go straight to him with their concerns. United Ministry (UM) — an umbrella organization of Harvard religious groups headed by the openly gay Rev. C. Irving Cummings — also investigated to see if Houston was officially connected with any of the campus ministries so he could be officially punished. All UM chaplaincies must sign agreements that neither their leaders nor members will proselytize on campus.

Cummings concluded that Houston is not under UM’s jurisdiction.

"I personally think he’s way out of line to be doing anything except what he was hired to do," Cummings told Fifteen Minutes. "But that’s not my call to make. I’m not his employer."

Ironically, Houston took much of his fire from the religious community — particularly the Catholic Student Association Interfaith Committee and a discussion group for Catholic bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgendered students called Cornerstone. Gay students — seniors Christopher Pierce and Jeffrey Morgan — who argued that Houston represents "a chaplaincy based on intolerance and conversion" chair both committees.

"The university has the opportunity to screen out those religious organizations and individuals who would prey upon unsuspecting students," they wrote to Dean of Freshman Ibby Nathans, who helped conduct the investigation.

Other UM members seemed perplexed by the idea of a renegade Christian sharing his faith in the course of day-to-day life.

"What happens when someone is acting in a religious way but is not part of the ministries?" one unnamed member asked the paper. "Can any religiously oriented person come here and set up shop on their own?"

In late November 2001, the university concluded its investigation. Nathans and Deputy General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano said Harvard would not take any action against Houston because the school protects free speech.

"Harvard can — indeed sometimes must — also provide protection for what most in this community might find uncomfortable or offensive or even extraordinarily misguided or wrong ideas," Nathans wrote of Houston in a letter to the gay religious groups.

Unruffled feathers
Through it all, Houston remained unperturbed, partly because university officials never contacted him about the investigation — leaving him to find out about it from the reporter breaking the story — and partly because he had nothing to feel guilty about. He is up-front with his motives when meeting with gay students, but only shares with them when invited — and so far, has met only one gay student comfortable enough with him to call him a friend.

"I want to encourage and equip the students to speak up, so the school can go after their own community of students, not their employees," Houston says. "I don’t go around putting up fliers or looking for people. I’ve met a few gay people that can hang out with me, because I’ve told them, ‘If my life doesn’t reflect what I’m telling you, you can reject what I’m telling you. I want to develop a real relationship with you.’

"The Christian groups won’t make an avenue for people to speak up because they’ve been intimidated into silence," he continues. "This is a no-talk subject on campus, but it was in the newspaper with the lawyer saying we could talk about it. So why don’t we? Let’s be bold and step out."

In the meantime, Houston cooks for the Harvard freshmen, builds relationships wherever he can, and seeks God for the next step. He thinks it may have something to do with a queer studies program the school is considering implementing in the near future ("There’s a lot of myths and half-truths that the gay community has put out and people have accepted," Houston says. "I have some secular information that would say it’s not so — it’s amazing what the gay authors themselves write.") He’s been spending time in the library, researching gay anthropology for a possible book.

After the mountaintop of having God’s will for him so radically confirmed, did Houston find himself in the valley of persecution last fall? He doesn’t see it that way. "I see these last two years as being in the will of God," he says. "I see it as a time of waiting on the Lord, and He is making a way. That’s why I came to Harvard. "It’ll be a mountaintop experience when I can finally minister to some students on campus."