LGBTQ+ people have always been part of the life of faith communities, but our stories are often not told from the pulpit, not included in adult formation programs or religious education classes, and rarely preserved in congregational archives.
When a community does not know its queer history, it loses the valuable witness of people whose faith sustained them through exclusion, and it loses the memory of its own failures as well as examples of its own courage.
Celebrating queer religious history is not a matter of simply adding a few names or events to a bulletin insert. Rather, it is an act of truth-telling and recognition that shapes how a congregation understands itself. As we have been celebrating this past year through our This Month in Queer Religious History series, queer religious history can be found in Buddhist monasteries and Quaker meetinghouses; at medieval trials and at a New Year’s Eve ball; in a Manhattan living room and on the US National Mall.
Here are some ways your congregation can celebrate this history:
- Build a Calendar of Commemoration: Anchor the work in the rhythm of your community’s year. Mark National Coming Out Day (11 October), Transgender Day of Remembrance (20 November), World AIDS Day (1 December), and Pride season with prayer, preaching, music, and shared learning. A recurring date does more to form a congregation than a single special event, and it signals that this history belongs to the community’s ordinary life rather than to a one-time observance.
- Preach and Teach the Stories: Introduce specific figures and let their lives tell a story. The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, who became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest in 1977 after a lifetime of navigating race, gender, and law. Issan Dorsey, a former drag queen and US Navy veteran who became a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher. Marsha P. Johnson, whose fierce and syncretic spirituality has too often been separated from the story of her activism. Joan of Arc was condemned as a cross-dressing heretic at nineteen by a church court. These are not footnotes to religious history. They are religious history, and they are our religious history.
- Recover Your Own Congregation’s Story: Often, the most powerful stories are local. Who were the queer members of your community twenty, forty, and sixty years ago? Who was quietly welcomed, and who was quietly asked to leave? Interview longtime members while you still can, gather photographs, bulletins, and newsletters, and record oral histories. Communities have been built this way before: DignityUSA began in 1969 with an Augustinian priest in San Diego, and Congregation Beit Simchat Torah began in 1973 when a small group of LGBTQ+ Jews gathered in a Manhattan living room.
- Tell the Whole Truth, Including the Harm: Queer religious history includes people called to positions of spiritual leadership and people condemned by them, sometimes both in the same lifetime. Resist the temptation to tell only stories with happy endings. Instead, name the exclusions your own tradition took part in and, where appropriate, mark them liturgically through lament, confession, and public acknowledgment. Congregations and religious communities that can speak honestly about past harm become far more trustworthy to the LGBTQ+ people sitting in their midst today.
- Preserve and Share What You Gather: Do not let the work end with a single presentation. Deposit materials with an archive that will preserve them and make them readily available to scholars and to the public; add books on queer religious history to your congregational library; and share what you have collected with your judicatory, your local historical society, and neighboring religious communities and congregations. Invite a historian or archivist to speak. Encourage young people to take part in remembering your community’s queer religious history, since they will be the ones who carry that memory forward.
All religious traditions ask us to remember, and remembering is never neutral. By telling these stories, your congregation joins a long line of people who insisted that the sacred and the queer belong together, and you make it possible for the next generation to know that they were never the first.
