Though the categories of “queer” and “religious” were long considered incongruous, historians in recent years have increasingly recognized that religious history has a rightful place in queer history, and queer history has a rightful place in religious history. The fact that the very concept of “queer religious history” no longer raises so many eyebrows is fortunate, but now that historians no longer need to focus on justifying the concept, it is time to focus on critically reexamining and creatively developing this young field. What subjects and sites have queer religious histories thus far overlooked? How might alternative approaches challenge our assumptions and alternative lenses shift our perspective? This panel will experimentally answer these questions, covering a range of contexts in the twentieth-century United States.

The first paper, presented by Ahmad Greene-Hayes, explores the religious, racial, and sexual worlds of Prophet Joseph Rajah Lyons, who founded the Emperor Haile Selassie Supreme NuWay Radio Ethiopia Mystic Lights Baptist and Spiritual Kingdom in New Orleans in the 1930s. By observing connections between Lyons’ religio-racial identity formation, his transnational politics, and the queer sexual practices within his church, Greene-Hayes illuminates how both religion-making subjects and religion-policing subjects in the Jim Crow South strategically cultivated relationships between nonnormative sexualities and nonnormative religions. In the second paper, Heather R. White examines the largely overlooked site of the Church of the Holy Apostles (Episcopal) in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, where every major homophile and gay organization congregated between May 1969 and June 1970. White analyzes commentary from these organizations’ members about the religious building where they congregated—commentary that often contained suspicion and critique. From both their commentary and the site of the building itself, White reveals grounds for a fresh approach to thinking queer and religious histories. The third paper, presented by William Stell, uncovers a small but influential network of evangelical gay activists in the 1970s. These activists came from self-identifying “evangelical” communities and deployed recognizably evangelical discourse to argue that God affirmed gay people and relationships. Stell demonstrates that prominent antigay evangelicals noticed this network and responded by denying and distorting their substantial resemblances. Those denials and distortions proved so effective that the history of evangelical gay activism became buried, and the term itself became practically illegible, even to historians. In the fourth paper, Lynne Gerber discusses two little-known gay Christian theologians in 1980s San Francisco: Kevin Gordon worked with the San Francisco Archdiocese’s Social Justice Commission, and Rev. Rick Weatherly wrote a column called “Religion and Us” for the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s major gay newspaper. Both Gordon and Weatherly, Gerber shows, fostered a public conversation on sexuality and religion in a city whose LGBTQ communities are often depicted as secular. Their efforts to shape gay religious politics in the city were curtailed by gay politics, church politics, and the ways that AIDS changed both.