Michael Glatze was a hero to the gay community. And then he was a villain.
In the late '90s and early 2000s, he was a leading advocate for LGBT rights, a devoted student of queer theory, and an editor at the influential XY magazine. Then, after a health scare at 29, he renounced his gay identity, embraced Christian fundamentalism, married a woman, became a pastor of his own church, and started calling his old friends "abnormal." As Glatze pivoted from one sexual and religious identity to another, his own motivations remained inscrutable; he was, and remains, a true iconoclast in an era where the kind is practically extinct. How can one man embody such extremes within himself? If we could answer such a question, we'd be closer to understanding how such extremes can coexist in the same country in the first place.
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