I was surfing at a Christian forum yesterday and came across a thread about one of the influential people of the Jesus Freak era named Lonnie Frisbee. The thread caught my attention because I have a keen interest in the Jesus Freak movement from a historical perspective. I claim to be no expert on the subject but I am intrigued and fascinated when I read the Jesus Freak stories online because of my interest in the subject matter. Even though I vehemetly disagree with the sinful lifestyle Frisbee chose which helped contribute to his death (of A.I.D.S.) in 1993 at age 43, his place in Jesus Freak history can not ever be denied or rewritten.
Or could it be denied and rewritten?
According to a man by the name of David Di Sabatino who is responsible for the web page lonniefrisbee.com, the denial of Frisbee’s place in Jesus Freak history is to the point where the revisionist history has already taken place. In fact, the first words you see on the forementioned web page reads:
What do you do when the Jesus freak who started your church dies from AIDS?
Simple. Erase him from history.
Mr. Di Sabatino, influenced by his research done for his book The Jesus People Movement: An Annotated Bibliography and General Resource (and I am going to have to procure me a copy one day) , was so impressed with the Frisbee story that he waited ten years before making a DVD documentary entitled Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher to make sure he got the story correct.
The documentary is controversial in nature because it not only goes into Frisbee’s battles with homosexuality, but deals specifically with the question as to why Frisbee has never gotten the credit he deserves for being instrumental to the birth of the Jesus Movement. In fact, according to this article :
…if you were to take a look at the written histories of Calvary, Vineyard and Harvest (Church of Riverside, CA pastored by Greg Laurie), you’d find barely any—if any—mention of Lonnie Frisbee. Vineyard doesn’t even cite him by name, referring only to “the young man.” Three local Christians I’ve asked about the original hippie preacher at Calvary assumed I was referring to Smith, as if the bald-headed Christian firebrand had been the preacher with the flowing brown mane in those old news photos. Mentioning Lonnie to Laurie is said to be verboten.
Some of Lonnie’s friends are stated as being upset at the documentary because of the mentioning of Frisbee’s immoral lifestyle because they ‘did not see Lonnie that way’ and that Sabatino has comments from two controversial gay people portraying themselves as Christians in Mel White and Metropolitan Community Church founder Bishop Troy Perry in the documentary. They are afraid that even though Frisbee has this problem with homosexuality, the comments from White and Perry turn the documentary from the life of a fallen evangelist into the biography of Christianity’s first gay martyr (I too would have a serious problem with this if the documentary did portray Frisbee as a gay Christian martyr instead of a fallen man in need of God). Di Sabatino in this interview states that :
Lonnie is not the poster child for gay Christianity. That would be a horrific thing to do to his memory. Voltaire said history is playing a pack of dirty tricks on the dead — turning Lonnie into a “gay preacher” would be a horrible thing to do to him.
In fact, after Di Sabatino’s first interview with OC Weekly, Frisbee’s ex-wife talks about Lonnie with this followup interview where she tells her side of the story and how she caused the breakup of the marriage with an affair that caused Lonnie to go back to California without her but later on, they had brief contact with each other.
History is always very tricky to document because it appears as if there are infinite sides to every coin of history even though the truth is present. However, this documentary would be interesting to watch and see how Frisbee is portrayed as the Jesus Freak Revolutionary, is portrayed as a person who is not in hell, or as a frail human being who made some poor choices called sin and reaped the consequences of those choices.
