If a mother thinks something is important enough to take a public position about, shouldn’t she teach her children that value? Where else should children be at the time of public debate? At the local video arcade? I don’t think we should pretend that these vital issues don’t affect children.
—Shirley Phelps-Roper, letter to the editor, Topeka Capital Journal, August 26, 1991
I didn’t understand what was going on, not at first. The signs simply appeared one day and never left, like some undeniable force of nature. I’d guess Topekans experienced their arrival that way, as well. My mother’s family had been a well-known and polarizing presence in the city for decades—but in my memory, the picketing is the beginning, and it started at Gage Park.
It sure didn’t look like a park to me. There were no swings or slides or jungle gyms—just an open field that separated the place where we parked from the busy intersection of 10th Street and Gage Boulevard. As pastor of the tiny Westboro Baptist Church, my grandfather would drive the big red pickup filled with signs he’d made, and the rest of the church—consisting almost entirely of my aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents, and siblings—would follow in a caravan of vehicles. I couldn’t read the messages Gramps had carefully written since I was still a few months shy of kindergarten, but when I saw photos as a teenager, I was surprised by how small and restrained some were compared to what came later: WATCH YOUR KIDS! GAYS IN RESTRMS.
The adults would pick up as many signs as they could carry, walk them across the field, and lean them against the trunks of the two biggest trees. The rest of us just had to walk by and grab one. During those first few months—June, July, August of 1991—our habit was to hold our signs and walk in a big circle just next to the roadway, cars whizzing by in all four lanes of traffic. The baseball hats my dad made us wear always gave me headaches, but I was glad to have them once I was out there walking in the heavy afternoon heat.
As I got older, I came to learn the story of Gage Park and the events that prompted our first protests. In the summer of 1989, two years before we started picketing, Gramps had been biking through the park with my brother Josh, who wasn’t quite five years old at the time. My grandfather’s custom was to ride ahead a bit, and then circle back—ride ahead, and circle back. One of the times he did so, he thought he saw two men approaching my brother, apparently attempting to lure him into the wooded area shrouded by bushes at the southwest corner of the park. Alarmed and livid, Gramps got to work. He spoke with one park official who told him, “At any hour of the day or night, male couples may be seen entering and exiting the area.” The official also mentioned that he regularly passed along citizen complaints to his superiors—but to no avail. My grandfather soon discovered that sex in the park was a well-documented issue in the local media; sting operations conducted by the Topeka Police Department had resulted in a string of high-profile arrests over the years. A nationally circulated gay and lesbian travel guide listed the park as a “cruisy area”—a place where men could cruise for anonymous sex. Even now, Gage Park is listed in that guide, though a warning was added shortly after Westboro’s picketing began: AYOR. At your own risk.
Armed with this information, my grandfather took action. He began by detailing his findings in a letter to the mayor, opening with a colorful description of the problem (“A malodorous sore with the scab off is open and running at the extreme southwest corner of Gage Park”) and concluding with a question: “Do you think Gage Park’s running sore could be permanently fixed? Your consideration is appreciated.” The mayor’s response acknowledged that the city of Topeka was “well aware of the situation” at the park, and that they were “in the process of putting together a program to bring the situation to a halt.” Nearly two years passed, during which time my grandfather monitored the situation, with no apparent improvement. He continued to write letters to city officials and to appear regularly at city council meetings, insisting that they clean up the park. According to church lore, my grandfather accused city officials of