Born Again Queer: Evangelical Gay Activism in the 1970s

While historians have almost unanimously associated Christian movements for gay rights in the late twentieth century with “liberal churches” and “liberal Christianity,” variously defined, a small but influential network of evangelical gay activists emerged in the 1970s, and by the end of the decade, these activists had aroused the angst and ire of many other evangelicals. This paper introduces the history of these activists and their impact. It also argues that the field has insufficiently historicized evangelicalism’s antigay positions and relied on what I call “hermeneutic determinism”: attributing subjects’ actions primarily or exclusively to the ways in which those subjects purport to read their scriptures. The paper’s three case studies are Bob Arthur’s pamphlets for the Metropolitan Community Churches, Ralph Blair’s newsletters for Evangelicals Concerned, and Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Mollenkott’s book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? As evangelical gay activists made their case that God affirmed gay people and gay relationships (when those relationships took certain forms, that is), prominent antigay evangelicals responded by denying and distorting the substantial resemblances between themselves and these activists. Those denials and distortions were so effective that the history of evangelical gay activism became buried, and the term itself became practically illegible.