By Mike Feazel
Marvin Moss has been well known as one of Fluvanna County’s most active and generous residents for the last 30 years. He’s somewhat less well known as a key player in Congress and elsewhere, and even less well known as a gay man, a fact he goes truly public with for the first time in his new book, “Witness to the American Century.”
Moss was truly a “witness,” as detailed in his book — spending years in Africa in the postcolonial era, traveling extensively through Europe, briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense as a Defense Intelligence Agency staffer, winning a Bronze Star in Vietnam, meeting the high and mighty on multiple continents, and spending nearly four decades as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill.
Moss also was witness to the key societal changes of the 1960s and ’70s, protesting the Vietnam War on weekends off from his Pentagon job, frequenting gay bars in the 1960s and living with a future Orthodox monk.
But Fluvanna residents primarily know him as a former county board member and board chairman, the longtime head of the Fluvanna Historical Society, the driving force and designer behind iconic county buildings, parks and other structures, and the person whose knowledge of Washington and Richmond grant processes brought more than a million dollars to help transform Fluvanna from a rural county of 12,000 when he arrived in 1991 to a beautiful, thriving community of more than 28,000.
Moss’s book details how he bought the historic Glen Burnie house in Palmyra, which had been abandoned for 18 years, in 1991 as his future retirement home, then oversaw its extensive multiyear renovation before moving in in 1995. Glen Burnie was eventually listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, and Moss placed it under a historic easement that protects it from development.
Moss notes that he was “unsure how [his longtime companion Stephen Juli] and I would be received in this very conservative traditional community” of Fluvanna, but he seems to have settled in well. Friends were well aware he was gay and living with Juli and his identical twin brother, who were both Orthodox monks, but most of the county apparently was not.
Moss notes he was “quite secure financially” when he retired at 57, having come from a well-to-do Hagerstown, Md., family, having invested well, and with a federal pension. But he says in his book that he was worried he could become bored in retirement.
Instead, Moss quickly became actively involved in Fluvanna, arriving just as the county was beginning an unparalleled population increase. He became active in the Historical Society and Fluvanna Heritage Trail Foundation, using his knowledge of federal and state grant processes to benefit the community, he says in his memoir.
He recalls helping design and build Palmyra Village Park, chairing the design committee for the Route 15 bridge, getting grants for Village Park and the Palmyra mill, raising $750,000 for the Pleasant Grove restoration, leading the effort to fund and design the Palmyra fire station, helping raise almost $300,000 for the Farm Heritage Museum, spearheading the effort to place thousands of acres of rural Fluvanna land under conservation or historic easements, leading the effort to convert a CSX easement into a rail trail, and helping buy Maggie’s House and restore the Holland-Page Place.
Before Fluvanna, Moss tells of being chief of staff to Maryland Sen. Paul Sarbanes, helping pass the 1978 Panama Canal Treaty, pushing bills cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay and completing the D.C. Metrorail system, plus the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act that now requires corporations to do better financial reporting to investors.
The Washington career was only part of the justification for Moss’s book’s subtitle: “An Unexpected Life Well Led.” One chapter, titled “A Gay Boy Goes to West Point,” tells of “entering West Point, fully aware that I was gay, [and it] was a rash, bold decision involving considerable trepidations,” and his infatuation with a non-gay roommate.
Another talks of “growing up” during his adventures in postcolonial Africa, which he called “a mecca for the bizarre,” including participating in an umbrella duel, hosting the crown princess of Morocco, and meeting the woman who would become Queen Noor of Jordan, the president of Senegal and the prime minister of Rhodesia.
Yet another chapter discusses Moss’s transition from Lutheranism to Catholicism to Ukrainian Byzantine Catholicism to Ukrainian Orthodoxy to Russian Orthodoxy to Bulgarian Orthodoxy, ultimately establishing an Orthodox monastery in Glen Burnie.
“Witness to the American Century” also notes Moss’s presidential appointment to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, that he was chief of staff on what he calls the most important study of the Naval Academy in modern history, his role on the Richmond Capital Square Preservation Council, his chairmanship of the Rivanna River Basin Commission, and his receipt of the statewide Virginia Unsung Hero Award.
All in all, “Witness to the American Century” is a revealing book about one of the most consequential people in Fluvanna County history, as well as a history of postcolonial Africa, gay America in the 1960s and ’70s, the Vietnam War and the inner workings of Congress, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
“Witness to the American Century: A Look Back on an Unexpected Life Well Led” was published May 6 and is available on Amazon for $19.99 in paperback, $49.99 in hardcover or $9.99 for Kindle.
