The Rev. Daniel M. Hooper was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1947.
Hooper was educated at California State Polytechnic University in San Luis
Obispo, California, and studied for his M. Div. at Pacific Lutheran Theological
Seminary in Berkeley, where he was involved in the first (secret) caucuses of
lesbian and gay seminarians less than a year after the Stonewall rebellion in
New York.
After serving a year of internship in Long Lake,
Illinois, he was ordained 1974 by the American Lutheran Church, and served
congregations in Phoenix, Arizona, and Inglewood, California. Between those
assignments, he served as a program director for Lutheran Campus
Ministry–Southern California, as Director of Lutheran Olympic Ministry 1984 in
Los Angeles, and as interim Executive Director of Ecumedia, the media and public
interpretation office of the Southern California Ecumenical Council. During
these years, he also helped to found a private international support group for
gay/lesbian Lutheran church professionals and published its newsletter.
In 1985 Hooper co-authored “A Call for Dialog”—the first major position paper
of Lutherans Concerned/North America, which was addressed to the Lutheran church
bodies in the United States and Canada. As a result of response to that paper,
he begin writing and teaching extensively about celibacy, relationships and
sexual ethics. Hooper later authored “A Call for Repentance” for LC/NA, and in
2002-04 produced the LC/NA CD-ROM resource package “Reconciling Ministry Planner
1.0” for use in LC/NA’s Reconciling in Christ program. This resource is still
available through Lutherans Concerned/North America (www.lcna.org).
Fourteen years after being outed and removed from the Lutheran ministry in
1988, Hooper was admitted in 2002 to the roster of the Extraordinary Candidacy
Project, a credentialing authority which parallels that of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America (except that it lacks the ELCA’s requirement of
celibacy for LGBT candidates and pastors), and helps to supply qualified LGBT
candidates to ministries partly supported by Lutheran Lesbian & Gay
Ministries.
Hooper met his life partner and husband, Carl Hunter, in June 1976 in
Phoenix. In February 2004, with along 4,000 other couples they were married in
San Francisco City Hall with a marriage license that has since been declared
legally invalid but is has been contested in a California Supreme Court
case.
Hooper has long been active in Lutherans Concerned, was a founding member of
the Phoenix chapter (1977) and helped re-start the Los Angeles chapter (1980)
and presently serves on its Steering Committee. Hooper and Hunter were
publicly recognized by Lutherans Concerned/North America in 2004 for their
life-long contributions, and awarded honorary life-time memberships.
That same year, Hooper returned to active parish ministry when he was elected
to serve as pastor of Hollywood Lutheran Church in Los Angeles, a Reconciling in
Christ congregation which has hosted several other LGBT community organizations
for many years. As a result of its selection of Hooper as Pastor (who is not on
the ELCA Clergy Roster) the congregation was disciplined by Southwest California
Synod and its Bishop Dean Nelson. The ELCA does not recognize Hooper as a
validly-called pastor but considers the Hollywood Lutheran Church pulpit to be
“vacant.”
Hooper is an active member of the Interfaith Gay and Lesbian Clergy
Association of Los Angeles.
(This biographical statement provided by Adrian Ravarour.)