Lonnie Frisbee - Sexuality Revealed

Sexuality Revealed

Although Frisbee's homosexuality was documented as a "bit of an open secret in the church community" and that he would "party" on Saturday night then preach Sunday morning, many in the church were unaware of his "other life". Eventually some church officials felt that his inability to overcome what the church considers sexual immorality became too big a hindrance to his ability to minister. An article in The Orange County Weekly, headlined "The First Jesus Freak," chronicles Frisbee's life, in which Matt Coker writes, "Chuck Smith Jr. says he was having lunch with Wimber one day when he asked how the pastor reconciled working with a known homosexual like Frisbee. Wimber asked how the younger Smith knew this. Smith said he’d received a call from a pastor who’d just heard a young man confess to having been in a six-month relationship with Frisbee. Wimber called Smith the next day to say he’d confronted Frisbee, who openly admitted to the affair and agreed to leave."

In a 2005 interview by Christianity Today film reviewer Peter Chattaway with David Di Sabatino, the documentary director of Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, the two spoke about addressing Frisbee's homosexuality with his family. Said Di Sabatino, "I brought to light some things that not a lot of people knew. I've been in rooms with his family where I've had to tell them that he defined himself as gay, way back. Nobody knew that. There's a lot of hubris in that, to come to people who loved him and prayed for him, and to stand there and say, "You didn't really know this, but..." In the same interview Di Sabatino also stated, "His early testimony at Calvary Chapel was that he had come out of the homosexual lifestyle, but he felt like a leper because a lot of people turned away from him after that, so he took it out of his testimony—and I think that's an indictment of the church." Di Sabatino commented on Frisbee's homosexuality as a flaw and stated that Frisbee's brother claimed Frisbee was raped at the age of 8 years old and postulated that an incident of that nature "fragments your identity, and now I can't say that I'm surprised at all." In other research Di Sabatino revealed that Frisbee had come from a broken home and entered into Laguna Beach's gay underground scene with a friend when he was fifteen.