“Churches played a widespread role as early gay community centers during the expansive gay movement growth of the late 1960s and 1970s. How did these space-sharing relationships shape the politics of queer inclusion? How they came to be erased from denominational histories and from accounts of LGBTQ+ movement emergence? ”
In many U.S. cities, the first gay community center was in a church. In recovering the history of these transformational facility arraignments, this project spotlights the central role of religion to a germinal moment in LGBTQ+ history: how the activism unleashed by the 1969 Stonewall riots grew into a national grassroots movement in the buildings of established churches. In New York City, that community center was the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Episcopal parish located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It provided meeting space to surprising cross section of homophile, gay, lesbian, and other queer-identifies organizations during this moment of expansive movement growth. This New York story is one example of a larger pattern. In many other cities and towns, church basements and community rooms were movement centers and meeting spaces, which facilitated the grassroots emergence of gay politics, communities, and institutions during the late 1960s and 1970s.
This project explores the scope of this pattern by creating a national listing and map of church-based gay community centers. It will gather information from previous community studies and LGBTQ+ archival records and will add depth to this picture by completing new site-intensive research on three congregations. The local, grassroot focus of this project offers new interpretive frameworks for connecting LGBTQ+ movements to the history of American Christianity. By investigating congregation's enabling roles in queer movement development, this study brings into view the ways that religion--and Christianity in particular--has formatively shaped historical developments previously seen as fundamentally secular in nature.