Santa Barbara’s first openly gay spiritual leader, Reverend Mark Asman, led Sunday service for 21 years at the Trinity Episcopal Church. A soft-spoken human rights activist, he cofounded Casa Esperanza in 1999 and in 2003 the city’s interfaith chapter of CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice). For nearly two decades, he opened Trinity’s small parking lot overnight to the homeless, who were banned from sleeping on the street.
On the eve of his retirement, he spoke with The Santa Barbara Independent about growing up in 1950s America, coming out during the AIDS crisis, and his activism.
Did you grow up in a religious family? The 1950s was sort of the high-water mark of church in the United States. My parents woke up, metaphorically speaking, and realized we were the only family in our neighborhood not at church on Sunday morning. My mother, church-shopping around Lafayette and Walnut Creek, discovered the Episcopal Church, and so that’s where we started to attend as a family. My sister and I were baptized. We were all confirmed into the Episcopal Church, and that became my religious formation as a young boy.