Photo: Joelle Blanchard
Writer: Michael Morain
When the Capital City Pride Parade marches through the East Village this June, it will follow its usual route on Grand Avenue, west from the state Capitol to the river. It’s a direct path from Point A to Point B.
That’s the opposite of the zigzagging journey that brought Wes Mullins to his new job as Capital City Pride’s first executive director. He was born 43 years ago in a small Appalachian town in eastern Tennessee where, he likes to joke, “scientists believe Dolly Parton’s local influence made young boys gay.” He grew up in a conservative church, endured five years of conversion therapy, studied to become a minister, got kicked out of one seminary and excelled at another, served as a pastor in Oregon, Colorado and Missouri, and finally landed here in Iowa with his husband late last summer. So, yeah — it’s been a wild ride.
The noisy Pride parade will be different from his journey in another way, too. When Mullins was a kid, his parents took him and his sister every Sunday to the Churches of Christ, an evangelical denomination whose members prohibit musical instruments during worship. “And if that’s sinful,” he said, “you can imagine how many other things are sinful, too.”
He was in middle school when he started to suspect he was gay. He tried to shove aside his feelings until one night when he was 16. In a flood of tears, he woke his parents and told them how he felt. He was overwhelmed by fear.
With his parents and youth minister, Mullins decided he should try “ex-gay reparative therapy.” He attended solo and group sessions through the end of high school and into college in Nashville, even though it was slowly tearing him in two. “I’d go to bed at night praying to wake up as one person,” he said.
The big breakthrough came in 2003, when he was studying theology in grad school in Abilene, Texas. He visited the LGBTQ-affirming Metropolitan Christian Church one Sunday morning just to see, as he put it, “a bunch of gays playing church.”
But then: “I cried through the entire service,” he said. He’d never seen gay couples, with and without kids, being comfortably themselves in a Christian setting. The minister reminded them that God loves everybody, no exceptions.
Over the next year, he joined the church and transferred to the divinity school at Texas Christian University after his first seminary revoked his scholarships for living with a boyfriend. He graduated at the top of his class and took his freshly printed master’s degree to Portland, Oregon, where he served as an assistant pastor for the Metropolitan Christian Church.
From there he transferred to another congregation in Colorado Springs, where he met and married his husband, Kevin. Together, they moved to St. Louis, where Mullins led a congregation of 250 for about 10 years. In all three states where he worked as a pastor, he helped advocate for same-sex marriage. He officiated Missouri’s first same-sex wedding, in 2014.
It was a college buddy who told him about the opening with Capital City Pride. By that point, he was ready for a new challenge outside of church work, so the Mullinses packed up their stuff and their pets and moved to Norwalk.
Mullins said one reason he applied to work for Capital City Pride was because it organizes events year-round to promote four main themes: education, health and wellness, families and community. He has some new ideas, including programs for LGBTQ seniors, but plans to round out his first year before making any major changes.
“In bigger cities, Pride is already sort of locked in,” he said. “I chose the job here because I saw a vision for something that’s still being built, something that I could help flourish and shine.”
That vision will shine, at least for a day, when the parade waves its rainbow flags up and down Grand Avenue. But he senses a more serious mission, too, about the importance of visibility and representation. It takes him back to a Sunday morning 21 years ago in Texas.
“That church saved my life,” he said. “If I hadn’t walked through those doors, my story would not have ended well.”
