1 November 2025

This Month in Queer Religious History*

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray

Rev. Dr. Pauli Muray North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill

 

On 8 January 1977, history was made when the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. Yet this groundbreaking moment was merely the culmination of an extraordinary life spent breaking boundaries of race, gender, law, literature, and faith. Murray’s story offers profound insights into the intersections of civil rights, gender identity, and religious calling; her story is a testament to one person’s courage to live authentically across multiple marginalized identities.

Born Anna Pauline Murray on 20 November 1910 in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Murray’s journey defied every conventional category. Long before ordination, Murray had already revolutionized American civil rights law, coining the term “Jane Crow” to describe the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. As a lawyer and scholar, Murray’s legal theories would later influence landmark Supreme Court cases, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg crediting Murray as foundational to gender equality jurisprudence and naming her as co-author of the brief in the pivotal Reed v. Reed case.

Murray’s activism began early, challenging segregation at the University of North Carolina in 1938 and later organizing sit-ins that predated the famous Greensboro protests by decades. After earning a law degree from Howard University in 1944 (where she graduated as valedictorian with a senior thesis arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson should be overturned) Murray became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School in 1965. Her Howard thesis would later guide Thurgood Marshall and others in strategizing the Brown v. Board case, though Murray’s contribution was mostly unacknowledged for years.

What make Pauli Murray’s story even more remarkable was the navigation of gender identity and sexuality in an era with severely limited language for such experiences. Murray’s personal writings reveal a lifelong struggle with gender identity, describing feeling like “one of nature’s experiments; a girl who should have been a boy.” Murray privately used masculine pronouns in personal journals and sought medical intervention, asking doctors to test hormone levels and requesting testosterone treatments. Murray even attempted to convince a doctor to perform exploratory surgery to determine if she had “secreted male genitals.”

This experience of what we would now recognize as gender dysphoria caused Murray significant distress, leading to hospitalizations throughout her twenties and thirties. Were Murray living today, many scholars believe she may identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, making her eventual ordination as a woman priest particularly complex and even revolutionary.

Murray’s romantic relationships were exclusively with women, though she resisted the term “lesbian,” associating it with negative stereotypes. Instead, Murray saw herself as a man attracted to what she called “bisexual” women, that is, feminine women whom she believed were drawn to her masculinity. Murray’s longest relationship was with Irene Barlow, whom she met in the 1950s while working at a law firm. Their partnership lasted until Barlow’s death in 1973. Murray also had a romantic relationship with Peg Holmes, whom she met at Camp TERA during the mid-1930s, and they traveled across the country together.

Despite her openness about her relationships within her personal circles (her family, friends, and fellow civil rights leaders knew of her queer identity) Murray faced the particular challenges of being a gender non-conforming, same-gender loving Black woman in an era that demanded respectability from civil rights leaders. The movement’s emphasis on educated, heterosexual, married, and Christian leadership made Murray’s identity disruptive to these dictates, contributing to the historical erasure of her contributions.

The path to priesthood began in the 1970s when Murray felt a profound calling to ministry. After studying at General Theological Seminary, Murray was ordained to the diaconate in 1976. The following year, on that historic January day at Washington National Cathedral, Murray joined the first generation of women priests in the Episcopal Church’s history.

Murray’s first celebration of the Eucharist took place at Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, marking the first time a woman had celebrated communion at an Episcopal church in the state. This moment was captured by CBS television correspondent Charles Kuralt for his beloved On the Road series, preserving Murray’s joy and the historic significance of the occasion for posterity.

As a priest, Murray served parishes in Washington, DC, focusing particularly on ministry to the sick and marginalized until retirement in 1982. Even in the pulpit, Murray continued advocating for justice, viewing priesthood as an additional avenue for the same work that had defined a lifetime. Murray’s theological work helped lay the groundwork for what we now know as womanist theology.

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray died of cancer in Pittsburgh on 1 July 1985, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy. In 2012, the Episcopal Church added Murray to “Holy Women, Holy Men,” officially recognizing this pioneering priest as a saint. Murray’s autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, published posthumously, remains essential reading for understanding how one person’s courage can bend the arc of history toward justice, though notably, Murray removed explicit mention of her same-sex relationships from the text while leaving clear traces in her archives.

Murray’s experience resonates across multiple aspects of the LGBTQ+ community. Her same-gender loving relationships and writings about gender dysphoria make her an important historical LGBTQ+ figure whose contributions to civil rights, gender equality, and religious life deserve recognition and celebration.

SOURCES

This Month in Queer Religious History

*Each month during 2025-2026, our 25th anniversary year, CLGS is honoring an individual, event, or movement of consequence in queer religious history. Although we will be able to highlight only a very few of those individuals and movements that have contributed to the thriving of LGBTQ+ persons and communities throughout history, we are eager to share with you the stories of some of the people and movements that have created positive change for LGBTQ+ people, our families, and our communities.