Recent YouTube videos by well-known island cleric Father Tryphon have led to controversy, a coffee boycott, and pain for LGBTQ+ islanders.

Now, a new group calling themselves Not On Our Island is organizing islanders to show solidarity with the island’s LGBTQ+ community in response to Tryphon’s condemnation of Pride Month and filming of pride flags displayed on private property.

Tryphon is the abbot of the All-Merciful Saviour Monastery, a Russian Orthodox church and retreat center founded on Maury Island in 1986. His active YouTube page has 28,600 followers.

During the first week of June, Tryphon published two widely-viewed videos on the page condemning Pride Month, and then subsequently removed both following an uproar on “Vashon Chat” and other local social media pages.

One of the videos was shot from the window of a slowly moving car, showing Pride flags waving in the breezeway of Vashon Center for the Arts (VCA) and hanging outside uniquely identifiable private residences on Vashon.

The video was backed by Tryphon’s stern narration of five Bible verses from the Old Testament book of Proverbs.

“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate,” recited Tryphon. “Everyone proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord; though they join forces, none will go unpunished.”

A second video, bannered with a preview image of Tryphon in front of a Pride flag, was titled “The Source of All Evil” — splashed in large red letters across the graphic.

In that video, Tryphon observed that he saw “more pride flags and gay flags than American flags” on Vashon, and said that although it was not his place to judge others, he believed a “dark and diabolical” new religion had now replaced Christianity in the United States.

“I am saddened that our nation has chosen to set aside a whole month to celebrate pride when pride itself is the source of all evil,” Tryphon said.

The videos, said members of Not On Our Island, have shattered their sense of safety on Vashon.

A subsequent apology video posted by Tryphon, asking for forgiveness, did little to quell the outrage. In his apology, Tryphon said that filming private property was a mistake and apologized to anyone “who unintentionally might have been hurt” by his actions and statements, which “were not directed at any individual.”

But “he failed to acknowledge the harm done to our entire community,” said a member of Not On Our Island. “Our flag represents our community, and calling us evil and saying that we need to be punished is a direct violent threat to our community.”

Most of the group’s members, which includes transgender islanders, requested anonymity in an interview for this article.

In an interview, Tryhon said he was not anti-gay and had been misunderstood by those who criticized him.

“I am going to be judged by these people and there is nothing I can do,” he said. “I’m waiting it out and dealing with it, and people are going to do what they will and they are going to treat me like they’re going to treat me.”

A dangerous climate

In a national climate of sharply rising anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in numerous states, hate crimes, and vigilante attacks, members of Not On Our Island said, Tryphon’s pronouncements could serve as “dog whistles” — seemingly innocuous statements that can provoke violent behavior among a target audience — for extremists among his thousands of YouTube followers, or others online, to target and harm LGBTQ+ islanders.

In May, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued similar joint public service announcements warning of potential violence by foreign terrorist organizations or their supporters at LGBTQ+ events and venues worldwide.

The same month, the U.S. State Department issued an unusual travel advisory to LGBTQ+ Americans traveling abroad during Pride Month, also warning of terrorist violence, and in 2023, the Canadian government advised Canadian travelers they could face risks by traveling to U.S. states that had passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

In recent weeks, members of Not on Our Island said, they have felt newly afraid to be in public on Vashon — a community that according to U.S. Census data from 2000 and 2010 had the largest concentration of same-sex couple households in Washington State during that period.

“My domestic partner and I moved here after extensive research because we wanted to live in a place we could feel safe and welcome and a part of the community,” said one transgender member of the group. “I transitioned here — because I was safe. I probably would have never transitioned anywhere else, and the community has been so loving and kind. So it has shaken my world to hear a member of this community saying horrific things about me — a person he doesn’t even know.”

Not On Our Island, they said, is modeled on a national nonprofit project, Not in Our Town, which guides communities in collective responses to acts of hate and bullying.

The group has already held one meeting, attended by 26 islanders of various backgrounds, and plans another at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, June 29. Attendees are asked to RSVP and find out the location by writing to the group’s website at notonourisland.org. (The group can also be reached by contacting hello@notonourisland.org.)

Members have currently designed a graphic that islanders can place on their car and home windows to signal their support for the LGBTQ+ community.

In the meantime, a group member expressed their gratitude “to community members and businesses who have shown their solidarity and support in helping us create a healthier and safer environment on our island that we all love.”

Coffee boycott

Throughout June, many islanders who viewed or heard about Tryphon’s videos called on social media for a boycott of Monastery Blend Coffee — a product sold by All-Merciful Saviour Monastery in local grocery stores for decades to support their efforts.

Last week, first Vashon Market IGA and then Vashon Thriftway removed the product from their store shelves.

In brief interviews, both Shawn Hoffman, the owner of IGA, and Bill Hart, store manager of Thriftway, said the removals were temporary as they assessed the situation. Both also said that in their decades of owning and working at their respective stores, they had never been asked before to consider removing a product from their shelves.

“We’ve had enough customers who were upset that we had to do something,” Hart said, though he added one customer had asked, instead, for the store to keep the coffee on Thiftway’s shelves.

Hoffman also said he too, had received many requests to stop selling the Monastery’s coffee but had been told by one customer that he would no longer shop at IGA if the product came off the shelves.

Hoffman said he was upset by the situation.

“We serve everybody equally, so to be put in a position of choosing — I have a problem either way,” he said. “My team members don’t need that confrontation in the checkout line.”

He said he hoped to see reconciliation in the community and never again be placed in a similar situation.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “Let’s hope we all learned our lesson.”

Hart summed up what had happened differently.

“What one person does affects more than one person,” he said.

Video content

Tryphon has posted almost 600 videos to his current YouTube page in the past five years — with some espousing not only his religious beliefs but also harsh condemnations of moral decay and “woke culture” in the United States, as well as what he calls “trangenderism.”

For Not On Our Island members and other islanders, Tryphon’s Pride Month videos crossed a line.

Allison Halstead-Reid, the director of VCA, said she had been alarmed by the videos.

“Any act that targets and identifies a place as an ally of [LGBTQ+] people with hate language is inviting harm to that place and the people who work and perform and learn there,” she said. “… I would hate for anyone to feel fear coming here because of something he has done.”

Not on Our Island members also said, in an interview, that some islanders whose homes were shown in Tryphon’s “drive-by” video did not want to report the situation to authorities, for fear of being further identified and targeted.

Group members called Tryphon’s filming of the residences “doxxing” — a prohibited act in Washington State that is defined as the “unauthorized publication of personal identifying information with intent or knowledge … or with reckless disregard for the risk (that) the information will be used to harm the individual whose information is published.”

A list of personal identifying information covered by the law, which allows someone to sue if they were harmed by a doxxer’s actions, includes “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.”

Tryphon responds

Tryphon has long been a public figure and newsmaker on Vashon, and for many years, beloved by many on the progressive island — which seemed to be a place he loved, too.

Interviewed for a 2008 Beachcomber article about the addition of a cobalt-blue onion dome to the monastery, Tryphon recalled his discovery of Vashon and his decision to found a monastery here.

“Our immediate experience was how very friendly and accepting islanders were,” he said, recalling his first visit to Vashon with his monastic order. “They didn’t look at us like we were strange. They were very inclusive of a variety of people.”

In the 2000s, he was known for supporting the island’s 10-year-long successful fight to stop an international corporation’s plans to build a large gravel mining operation on Maury Island on the land that has now become Maury Island Marine Park.

In 2008, he helped organize a vigil, attended by many islanders, in the wake of vandalism at the Vashon Havurah, which was broken into and defaced with graffiti stating “God Hates Jews,” and swastikas scrawled on its walls.

He also served as the fire and police chaplain for 18 years on Vashon, but left that position in 2021 after refusing to submit to Gov. Jay Inslee’s mandate for first responders to be vaccinated against COVID-19 — saying in a Facebook post that he made his decision about the vaccine based on “the knowledge handed down by so many holy elders that this is the precursor to the Mark of the Beast.”

In a phone interview, Tryphon said that both his removal of the videos from YouTube and his subsequent apology video came at the urging of Thiftway owner Clay Gleb — a fact confirmed by Hart, the store’s manager.

But Tryphon also said that he had known his apology, which he had worked hard to write, would not be accepted.

“I knew there would be people who would see it as not real and not enough,” he said. “I am going to be judged by these people and there is nothing I can do.”

Tryphon called the episode “painful.” He said that his monks had been yelled at by people on Vashon and that he was no longer comfortable going out and about in town.

He said he is not a bigot or homophobe, but instead, the same person he has always been.

“The accusations against me are hogwash,” he said. “I’ve been here 37 years. I’m 78 years old and spent 18 years as a police and fire chaplain.”

Asked if he saw a path forward to reconciliation, Tryphon said he intended to move on.

“There is nothing I can do except forgive them and love them,” he said, referring to those who had criticized him. “I have lots of support that has come this way — in most cases from people who are afraid to say [publicly] they stand with me, so they don’t let anyone else know about it.”

Regarding his criticisms of Pride Month, he said they were shared by many.

“I agree with a lot of gay people on the island who are sick of Pride Month,” he said. “The same way I know Black people who are sick of Black History Month and Black Lives Matter.”

By June 26, members of Not on Our Island said many islanders have now responded to their efforts aimed at making Vashon a more inclusive place for all. These efforts include the design of a poster for community members to display to show their solidarity with LGBTQ+ and other marginalized groups on Vashon.

“The allyship demonstrated by so many on our little island has been overwhelming and so meaningful,” they wrote in a message to all those contacting them via their website. “We have learned from history and we say: Not here. Not On Our Island, never again. We choose to move forward — to focus on what we do want here; a safe place for all to live in peace.”

Note: This article updates the version that appeared in the June 27 print edition of The Beachcomber, and adds context in additional quotations from Father Tryphon and Not on Our Island.