Johnny Rose

An ex-Moonie named John drove me home from the airport tonight. He told me his father was a preacher (Church of Christ, with which I'm not familiar) and a schoolteacher in New Jersey. When he graduated from high school his parents gave him a deal: if he went to the whatever religious college they wanted him to attend for a year, they'd pay for that school or whatever other school he wanted for the rest of the time. His year at the religious college was difficult (this was back in the early 70s, and the school had an issue with hair that was long enough to touch the collar), so after that he went to the University of Texas.

Right after he got there, he met the Moonies on campus. Moonies, of course, are the followers of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. I have to admit that I'm not too familiar with these guys, either. But John got involved with their fundraising arm pretty much right off the bat. And he raised money for the Moonies for the next 11 years. He visited the Rev. Moon about 1 month into it, at his multimillion dollar mansion in Tarrytown, NY; that helped me understand why the fundraising was so important.

One of the things the Moonies did (do?) was sell roses in bars. I suppose guys would buy them for whoever they were with at the bar, but the first thing that I thought of was guys buying them for their wives so they don't get too busted when they stagger home. John laughed at that and said that he always told guys to knock on their door and throw the rose inside; if it didn't come back, the guy was in relatively good shape with domestic governance.

John said his parents really had a good time with him with all this. He mentioned that he had a younger brother, so I asked him about how his brother turned out. He said that one summer when he was staying at the Rev. Moon's mansion, his brother came to visit him and told him that he was gay. John asked whether he had told their parents, and he said that he had. At that time, their grandmother was living with their parents. Evidently, when all that came out, she told the brother, "I don't know why they're making such a big deal about this. When your father was your age, he was queer as a three-dollar bill."

John still sells those roses in bars on Friday and Saturday nights. Everybody calls him "Johnny Rose." He says sometimes he gives away more roses than he sells. Sounds about right.