When You Don’t “Dig Religion” but You’re Meeting in a Church: New York City’s Gay Movement and Church Meeting Spaces after Stonewall, 1969–70

Gay liberation participants called their meeting space “the community center.” It was also a church. The Church of the Holy Apostles (Episcopal) was a multi-racial Black, West Indian, and white congregation and was located adjacent to the Penn South housing development in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. Holy Apostles provided meeting space for every major homophile and gay organization during the months preceding and the year following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, from May 1969 and through June 1970. The space of the church thus helped to facilitate the expansive movement growth of this historical moment. These events included weekly dances and discussion meetings of the West Side Discussion Group, the regular meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, a lecture series organized by the Mattachine Society, as well as events organized by Gay Youth, women’s dances organized by Gay Women’s Liberation Front (later Radical Lesbians) and the Daughter of Bilitis, as well as additional meetings and events involving Gay Youth, the Student Homophile Movement, and others. This paper gathers and analyzes the commentary among movement participants about this meeting space as a representation of religion, an assessment that was frequently suspicious to downright critical. “Many of us do not dig religion” was the summary provided by an organizer with the West Side Discussion Group. This commentary about the queer uses of church space supplies a grounded critique of “organized religion” from movement organizers whose most practical choice was also to meet within its walls.