Abstract
This essay recovers the history of the church that served as New York City’s first gay community center. The parish hall of the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Episcopal congregation located in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, supplied meeting space for gay and lesbian organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the movement growth that followed the Stonewall riots of June 1969. This moment’s rise of gay radicalism has been framed as quintessentially secular—fueled by antiestablishment protest and by leading activists’ rejection of religion. This article recontextualizes this secular political emergence by situating it in a parish hall—a nonreligious space by church definition and a religious space by gay activist definition. The aim is not to refute post-Stonewall organizers’ deliberate secularism but to question the notion that religion was absent in this development. To rephrase a well-worn metaphor: religion was not only “in the room” of these activist meetings; religion was the room. Taking a closer look at the parish hall concretizes the shaping influence of American Protestantism on the secular—in this instance, as the very walls, floors, windows, and doorways of the rooms that facilitated queer identity pride.
“This year is going to be different.” The aspiration opened Angelo d’Archangelo’s resolutions for achieving sexual liberation in the year 1970. Humor was d’Arcangelo’s medium, as fans knew from The Homosexual Handbook (1969), which one reader enthusiastically dubbed “the first text book on ‘How to Be a Happy, Well-Laid, Well-Satisfied Faggot.’”1 The author was a regular columnist for GAY, and the list of resolutions appeared in the February 1970 issue, just as the fledgling New York publication topped The Los Angeles Advocate to become the largest gay newspaper in the United States.2 Self-improvement was the aim of this to-do list, as was typical for the genre. Atypically, these checkboxes would abolish personal guilt, dismantle the American military establishment, end heterosexual marriage, and dispel the power of religion—all through one gay man’s disciplined commitment to sexual pleasure.
Buried in this paean to sexual freedom was an enigmatic reference—part joke and part serious dig—which suggested the author’s curious familiarity with the religion he sought to dispel:
I may attend a dance, a discussion, or even a debauche [sic] at some neophytic church or temple—for pastors like patrolmen are training in their narrow trade and want feeding from time to time and will prostitute their call rather than seek honest work—I will never bend the knee or neck except to spit on some low altar, or to mock scripture.3
The sharpest twist in the joke was not the threat of sacrilege, whether by spit, sex, or mockery. It was that readers active in New York’s gay movement would have recognized this unnamed church and its pastor, the man who purportedly “prostituted” his calling.
It was Father Robert Weeks, rector of the Church of the Holy Apostles, who routinely opened the doors of the parish hall to gay movement events. Holy Apostles was—and is—an Episcopal church located at the corner of Twenty-Eighth Street and Ninth Avenue, at the northern edge of the Chelsea neighborhood and a mile uptown from the center of gay and bohemian life in Greenwich Village. The dances and discussions d’Arcangelo referenced had been taking place at the church for the past six months—since August of 1969—and were organized by the West Side Discussion Group (WSDG), a homophile organization founded in 1956. The announced discussion topic, to take place that first week of February: “Size Queens.”4 This room was also the weekly location for two new organizations—the seven-month-old Gay Liberation Front on Sunday nights and the recently founded splinter group, the Gay Activist Alliance on Thursdays.5 D’Arcangelo first set foot in the church building in May of 1969, before the founding of these younger activist organizations, to give a book talk on The Homosexual Handbook. The event was part of a weekend conference organized by the Mattachine Society, the city’s oldest homophile organization.6 The week before, the parish hall was the venue for an All College Gay Mixer organized by the student homophile leagues of Columbia and New York Universities.7 The swelling foot traffic from these homophile and gay organizations quickly—and vastly—exceeded the parish’s own membership, turning the church into an unexpected center for New York’s rapidly expanding gay movement.
The grassroots growth taking place at this time has been attributed to the now-iconic Stonewall riots, a series of protests that began on June 28, 1969, in defiance against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar.8 This incident galvanized a generation of new activists, but later movement narratives made even bolder claims about its importance as the wholesale beginning of the modern LGBTQ movement. This place-making focus on Stonewall occurred through the annual event now known as LGBTQ Pride, which began as a mass march held in New York on June 28, 1970, to commemorate the first anniversary of the riots. Christopher Street Liberation Day, as the commemoration was first named, reflected organizers’ focus on the street where protestors rallied rather than the Stonewall Inn.9 The bar, which closed a few months after the riots, operated through Mafia connections and was complicit in the police targeting of its patrons.10 In subsequent decades, the expanding celebrations of Pride helped to popularize a “Stonewall myth,” which increasingly focused on the protests at the Stonewall Inn as a birthplace of the LGBTQ movement.
In contrast to the cultivated memory of the Stonewall Inn, the church that served as the movement’s on-the-ground community center has been largely forgotten as a movement space. This absence reflects no lack of acknowledgment at the time. Events calendars in gay newspapers listed the parish hall as “the community center,” accompanied by the church’s street address. Donn Teal, who reported on the first year of gay liberation, frequently mentioned Holy Apostles and noted the ubiquity of church-based venues: “Probably the greatest number of American homophile/ homosexual organizations meet and have social affairs in church facilities.”11 The number of gay groups meeting at this site expanded through 1970 to include Gay Youth, lesbian dances, and the Sunday afternoon services of the gay-welcoming Church of the Beloved Disciples, an independent Catholic parish. Within the next few years, three other gay-welcoming religious groups met in Holy Apostles’ buildings: the New York Metropolitan Community Church, an ecumenical Protestant congregation; Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a Jewish synagogue; and the Episcopal Gay Service, an outreach of the host church that later dovetailed with Integrity, the movement for LGBTQ inclusion in the Episcopal denomination.12 As a venue for dances, discussion groups, strategy sessions, religious services, and other events, Holy Apostles’ buildings functioned as a gay community center during the year surrounding the June 1969 riots—at a time when gay social space was vitally needed and difficult to secure.
This essay focuses on the parish hall as a movement space that facilitated gay identity pride. Locating gay movement space within a church upturns a figurative map, which equates the inside of religion—the ideological core, depth, or innermost heart—with sexual and gender conservatism. At the same time, queer identities and politics figure as constitutively secular—taking place outside of religious institutions.13 This assumed map, as queer scholar Ann Pellegrini notes, creates a form of “structured unseeing”—a framework that erases religion and spirituality as resources for queer movements while at the same time unmarking the structural power of Christianity in brokering the very meanings of the religious and the secular.14 This essay’s focus on the parish hall offers a dual “seeing of structure”: the forgotten history of how a movement sparked by a riot created a community center in a church is at the same time a case study of inside/outside and religious/secular as negotiated boundaries rather than fixed properties. Understanding how religion was vital to queer activism, that is, does more than reveal an unacknowledged “elephant in the room.” Rather it makes tangible Christianity’s ambient presence as the very room in which movement participants came out into gay social life.
Religion in and as the Room
The history of homophile and gay religious organizing, writes historian Jim Downes, was obscured not only by antigay religious opposition but also by the gay movement’s own narratives, which focused on the “sweaty political struggles in the streets . . . rather than the radical push by gay people of faith.”15 Religion infused homophile and gay activism in many ways—informing traditions of social critique, movement strategies, and protest tactics, as well as participants’ backgrounds and motivations. Beginning in the 1950s, homophile leaders deliberately cultivated alliances with religious leaders. The 1964-founded Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco was the most prominent of these partnerships, but the connections were just as formative in New York City, where Episcopal church leaders played an especially important role throughout the 1960s in advocating for the repeal of sodomy laws, challenging invasive policing, and urging moral toleration of homosexuality.16 Dick Leitch, writing as president of the Mattachine Society of New York in 1968, identified the Episcopal Diocese of New York as “one of our most dependable pillars of support.”17
These alliances continued after 1969 with the emergence of gay liberation, even as many of the newer radicals voiced strong criticisms of religion.18 Founding documents of New York’s Gay Liberation Front, formed in July 1969; and the Gay Activist Alliance, which splintered from the GLF in December 1970, named “Judeo-Christian religion” as a root of antihomosexual oppression.19 This critique reflected many participants’ experiences of religious rejection and included the strong participation in New York of activists reared in Jewish and Roman Catholic traditions.20 Gay publications also documented growing awareness and interest in yoga, Buddhism, new-age, and other outsider religious traditions.21 This mix of religious, spiritual, and nontheist backgrounds fed grassroots radicalism and fueled criticisms of institutional religion. It also overlapped with a spiritual renewal movement started by the 1968-founded Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles, which set a model for gay-welcoming synagogues, independent Catholic churches, denominational advocacy groups, and faith-based organizing that spanned every major religious tradition.22
In many locales, as in New York City, religion was not only figuratively present in the room as a spiritual resource or political strategy; quite frequently, a church provided the room itself. Church basements and community centers, in most cases belonging to mainline Protestant or Unitarian Universalist congregations, were often early meeting locations as new homophile and gay organizations outgrew members’ homes.23 Churches’ role as the material infrastructure for the emerging gay movement has remained unmarked as a form of religious involvement in no small part because it remained, quite literally, in the background.
Surprisingly little has been written about progressive mainline Protestants’ infrastructural support for countercultural political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s—such as gay liberation as well as Black power, the Young Lords Party, peace activism, free speech, women’s liberation, and others.24 What has been documented are the more public forms of progressive religious involvement in these movements, an involvement that drew clergy and lay participation from across the progressive-leaning wings of mainline Protestantism—a collective that historian David A. Hollinger terms “ecumenical Protestantism.”25 This moment of countercultural ferment marked the apex of mainline Protestantism’s institutional power, but ecumenical Protestants continued to exert cultural influence even as their denominational membership declined. Much of that influence, argues Hollinger and others, may be seen in the ways that Protestant thinkers channeled the radical social critiques of countercultural movements across more mainstream American audiences. Ecumenical Protestantism, Hollinger argues, served as a “commodious half-way house,” through which “many Americans found themselves able to engage sympathetically a panorama of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural varieties of humankind.”26 The resulting progressive cultural shift has been axiomatically described as a secularizing trend, particularly in discussions of queer inclusion.27
The “commodious half-way house” as a metaphor conveys part of the material role of Holy Apostles and other host churches that facilitated grassroots organizing. What the metaphor fails to capture, though, is the complicated materiality and institutional consequences of these arrangements. Activists’ space-sharing relationships with churches were not only “commodious”: there was often negotiation and disagreement, power differential between property owners and occupants, as well as issues of maintenance, security, expenses, and who had the keys.28 In many cases, controversies over the use of space percolated up. When queer organizations’ uses of church spaces prompted questions or attracted publicity, these local controversies often set into motion a ripple effect that drew in broader constituencies. Ultimately these dynamics would set into motion the denomination-wide debates over homosexuality in the 1970s and 1980s.29
These dynamics point to how built environments cannot be abstracted from the complexity of human interaction. French social theorist Henri Lefebvre famously argues against the tendency to view rooms and buildings as merely “passive receptacles” or as “empty ‘mediums,’ in the sense of containers distinct from their contents.”30 Lefebvre’s materialist terms complicate Hollinger’s notion of the “half-way house” as a one-way channel. The space-sharing relationship with churches was something more like sticky entanglement, which marked and shaped all sides of the facility arrangement.
Situating Episcopal Churches
Church buildings, as physical spaces of practice, offer unique insights for understanding communal and collective practices of faith. Katie Day, a scholar of this “ecological” approach, argues that buildings, neighborhoods, and streetscapes—as the “synapse between communities of faith and communities at large”—are locations for unique insights about religion.31 For Holy Apostles, the adaptive uses of buildings showed how successive generations of a changing parish reimagined, renovated, and reinhabited a vision for Christian life first set into stone and brick by nineteenth-century white elites.
Holy Apostles’ Episcopal affiliation linked this congregation to what one Episcopalian historian terms “the quintessential elite urban denomination.”32 The Episcopal Church was created through the geopolitical ruptures of the English Reformation’s separation from Roman Catholicism and the American Revolution’s separation from England. The resulting US institution, while formally independent of England and Roman Catholicism, cultivated a spiritual identity anchored to its English and Catholic roots, with church buildings as a visible sign of this orientation. Nineteenth-century Episcopalians transformed the look of US cities with a building boom of neo-Gothic-style churches, which marked fashionable neighborhoods with replicas of medieval English Catholic parishes.33 The denomination’s High Church movement, centered in New York City, invested these structures with sacramental meaning. A sanctuary for Christian worship, advised one nineteenth-century theologian, should offer “an exposition of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity, clothed upon with material form.”34
Holy Apostles’ main church building, completed in 1848, was an outlier to the neo-Gothic trend, but ecclesiologists—theological experts in church architecture—affirmed its design, by Minard Lefever, as having an “exceedingly churchlike appearance.”35 Later renovations added transepts, which reshaped the sanctuary according to the Gothic pattern. In contrast to the dense symbolism of the “church proper,” the adjoining three-story brick rectangle, built in 1867 as a Sunday-school building, could appear devoid of spiritual meaning. This building is not mentioned in the congregation’s published history until a decade after its construction, when parishioners rallied to renovate it as a “parish house,” a name that signaled Holy Apostles’ status as a self-identified “institutional church.”36 The Protestant institutional church, noted one church historian in 1943, supplied a “material environment through which [Christ’s] spirit may be practically expressed.”37 The largest parish houses in New York included gymnasiums, dormitories, dining facilities, and more, which equipped church work in education, philanthropy, and social reform. These buildings’ utilitarian design, seemingly absent spiritual architecture, signaled their complementary relationship to the sanctuary. Church halls, advised one book on church buildings, should be built to accommodate everything “so purely secular that it is not wise to hold them in the sanctuary.”38 The multipurpose functionality of this space defined it, in Christian terms, as “secular”—not the sacred site of worship but an extension of the church’s Christian mission into social life. Purpose-built as an auxiliary to the sacred, the parish hall could be described as the structural expression of the Protestant secular, which likewise “clothed upon with material form” a shaping design for Christian life.
The renovation of Holy Apostles’ parish house was to accommodate lay-led benevolent and reform initiatives to uplift residents of the surrounding neighborhood. That neighborhood had transformed—several times—since the church’s founding. A history of the church, written by its longest-serving rector, the Reverend Lucius Aaron Eldelblute, narrates the “unfavorable factors” besetting north Chelsea in the early twentieth century.39 Rapid industrial development dovetailed with an influx of Irish and southern and central European immigrants, whose Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish religious backgrounds, Eldelblute asserted, ”changed the neighborhood as an Episcopal field.”40 When Edelblute departed in 1950 after thirty years as rector, the church he described as a “bastion of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism” seemed to have no future.41
The next two decades brought another transformation, which remade Holy Apostles into a racially integrated neighborhood parish with strong Black and Afro-Caribbean lay leadership. In the 1950s and 1960s, the “white flight” of Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish residents followed the earlier departure of the neighborhood’s white Protestant demographic, and north Chelsea became increasingly African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican.42 Another rector, the Reverend Robert Griswold, who was white, actively cultivated relationships with these neighbors through programs that invited them into the church buildings—including a scout troop,43 a boys’ choir led by African American choir director George Hall Jr.,44 and active partnerships with Black civil rights organizations.45 In both the islands and in the United States, Anglican and Episcopal traditions held historic importance for Black American and Afro-Caribbean communities, and these neighbors made Holy Apostles their spiritual home.46
The church and these new parishioners faced other neighborhood difficulties in the mid-1960s, as a massive new housing development reconfigured twenty-three acres of land immediately surrounding the church. The city-financed Penn South Cooperative razed blocks of apartment and tenement buildings and displaced existing residents, most of them Black and Puerto Rican, as part of so-called slum clearance.47 The parish lost a significant number of its members, and the church itself narrowly missed being demolished. Community pushback preserved Holy Apostles and three other churches located in the development zone.48 The ten-building Penn South complex, completed in 1966, turned a neighborhood of rowhouses with front stoops and corner stores into a new streetscape of recessed apartment towers surrounded by shrubbery. A local reporter interviewed Griswold, Holy Apostles’ rector, as the Penn South development opened. He admitted the church was struggling: “We’re in a kind of a transition period . . . I hope we’ve hit rock bottom.”49 According to Griswold, “When the old houses were torn down for the cooperative, about half the parish was displaced and moved away.”50 In two years’ time, at the age of sixty, Griswold himself left the city parish for a church in rural Wyoming.51
Father Robert O. Weeks, who was white, began serving as the new rector in June 1968. Weeks knew that a large portion of this pastoral appointment would involve building maintenance.52 A letter to diocesan officials described the rectory as uninhabitable for his family—his wife, Ann, and their three daughters. Other church facilities were in similar disrepair.53 Weeks quickly proposed a series of overdue updates and renovations to the rectory and the parish hall. Walls and ceilings would be re-plastered and painted, floors scraped and refinished, and security mesh installed outside first-floor windows to guard against damage or break-in.54 Financing came from a sizable mortgage loan and two other smaller loans. Weeks set this consequential financial decision before the vestry, the church decision-making body, who approved it with trepidation.55
Materially speaking, Holy Apostles’ relationship to the groups that met in the church space was part landlord, part charitable host. The phrasing used by the rector and lay leaders to describe the exchange was a “cost-sharing” or “space-sharing” fee, and the rate was well below market. The arrangement capitalized on the church’s circumstances, as Weeks described it years later, of being “poor on financial arrangements, but rich on buildings and meeting spaces.”56 The exchange—money for meeting space—was instrumental on both sides. The church needed money to repay sizable loans. Gay organizations also had few other options for public meeting space.
Attending to how activists inhabited and made use of church spaces in the late twentieth century necessarily complicates the picture of ecumenical Protestantism as only or primarily commodious. It brings into focus how the exchanges among ecumenical Protestants and New Left activists were located engagements—taking place within the city’s religious real estate, in buildings, neighborhoods, and streetscapes shaped by contested legacies of Anglo-Protestant power.
Holy Apostles’ facilities’ relationship with New York’s gay movement took place amid this larger activist habitation. It was a “cost-sharing” arrangement, and the church’s rector shepherded this financial transaction for spiritual as well as practical reasons: “the Lord . . . wanted me to be in the area of homosexuality,” he later explained.57 The cost-sharing arrangement addressed urgent needs on both sides of the exchange: gay groups needed space; the church needed money. Church buildings supplied a transitional space as grassroots organizations sought a more permanent community center. On the other side, the fees aided a congregation struggling to maintain and repair an aging structure built for markedly different uses.
Claiming Space in a Church
The updates to the parish hall are visible throughout photographs of gay movement meetings, which capture in the background details of the building known to movement participants as the “community center.”58 The venue, in most cases, was a multipurpose room located on the first floor of Holy Apostles’ parish hall. The details are mostly indistinct and decidedly utilitarian: neutral walls, plain flooring, and movable folding chairs and tables. Only the Tudor-style leaded window, a neo-Gothic feature, might signal a connection to Christianity. Photographers’ intentions were not to document the background but to feature participants in the movement, such as Zazu Nova, who appears in the photograph in figure 1. Nova, who was Black, participated in the Gay Liberation Front and was a founding member of Gay Youth and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). The photograph shows Nova’s feminine style: patterned scarf, form-fitting jeans, and a t-shirt knotted just below her chest. With hands at ease in her lap, she has claimed a comfortable seat on the top of a folding table.
The gay movement meetings in Holy Apostles were one example among many, in which progressive urban churches in New York and other cities served as organizing sites, protest stages, and community centers for grassroots movements of the New Left. Holy Apostles’ relationship with the gay movement extended from the rector and congregation’s earlier and ongoing space-sharing relationships with activist groups and community organizations. These included community theatre, walk-in counseling for military draftees, and rallies for tenants’ rights. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held temporary national headquarters on the second floor of the parish hall, and the Episcopal Peace Fellowship leased office space on the third floor.59 Across the city, other churches similarly served as centers for women’s liberation, peace activism, Black power, welfare rights, and many other causes.
To be sure, radical activists, and especially activists of color, did not always receive a warm reception from clergy and congregations—especially when their protests deliberately challenged those churches’ complicity in systemic injustice. In 1969, a series of church building occupations made headlines in New York, as Black power activists and members of the Young Lords Organization seized buildings belonging to mainline Protestant churches as part of organized protests. On May 4, 1969, Black power activist James Foreman interrupted services at Riverside Church with a reading of the Black Manifesto, which urged white churches to pay reparations for slavery and racial injustice. The incident was followed by a wave of sympathetic occupations in New York and across the United States, which demanded reparations from white religious establishments.60 Even more controversially, in December 1969, the Young Lords Organization, a Puerto Rican activist organization modeled after the Black Panthers, occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church of Harlem. For nearly two weeks, the Young Lords operated a community center—with classes, a meals program, and other social services—out of the rechristened “People’s Church” 61 In these confrontations, as historian Felipe Hinojosa writes of the Young Lords, churches “became the site[s] of a dramatic and important struggle.” In contesting the rightful use of church buildings, activists “crashed the sacred and secular” and reconfigured the space of the church as “as both a holy site and a community site.”62
A delegation from the Gay Liberation Front visited the People’s Church during the occupation to learn how the group was putting the space to work for their community. Martha Shelley, a young Jewish lesbian, authored a report for the GLF’s monthly newspaper. “What could GLF do with a church?” Shelley mused in the article’s conclusion.63 The question reflected GLF’s ongoing search for a more permanent community center. For homophile and gay organizers in New York, finding meeting and event space confronted zoning and policing practices designed to force queer life into the private sphere, out of public view. A thicket of laws and city ordinances made it effectively impossible for public venues to legally serve a gay clientele and remain in business. Owners and managers of businesses faced legal sanction, including arrest, if they allowed patrons to openly express same-sex affection or nonnormative gender behavior. The bars that permitted such open display, such as the Stonewall Inn, were managed through Mafia connections, whose management of police and other regulatory agencies allowed semilegal bars and clubs to garner a profit serving populations with few other options for public social space.64
For many in the gay movement, the liberation struggle involved a total rejection of oppressive gay spaces, including the existing gay bars. One Gay Liberation Front author voiced a sentiment that appeared frequently in this group’s publications: “GLF must demand the complete negation of the use of gay bars, tea rooms, trucks, baths, streets, and other traditional cruising institutions. These are exploitative institutions designed to keep gay men in the roles given to them by a male heterosexual system.”65 Activists in the Gay Liberation Front and other gay organizations rejected these compromised social spaces and strategized about creating a “space of our own” that would be “free”—meaning liberated and open—and where gay people “can become as fully actualized gay people.”66 Key to this ideal of “free space” to become “actualized gay people” was the practice of coming out. The Gay Liberation Front’s monthly magazine was titled after this practice, in the form of an imperative: Come Out!
The phrase alluded to the closet as a metaphorical space for hiding a stigmatized identity. To “come out of the closet” was to emerge from hiding into the social spaces of the movement. Conceived in this way, “coming out” linked self-actualization and self-acceptance to a collective insurgency of liberating and occupying public spaces. “We need to have space,” an ongoing refrain, was followed by lists of what could take place in this site: “karate, theater, crafts, discussion groups.”67 In such spaces of freedom, gay people would work collectively to enact new selves and new sexualities, “to remold our homosexuality by developing a communistic sexuality of sharing, cooperation, selflessness and total community.”68
These visions of a new world demanded a different kind of real estate—a public social space in which gay people could gather and freely express themselves. The newsletters of the GLF, the GAA, and other groups that regularly met at Holy Apostles supplied regular updates on fund-raising efforts, real estate hunts, and other incremental progress toward the shared ideal of a community center “of our own.” In the interim, gay organizations found various venues: the GLF also held dances and meetings at Alternate University, a leftist organizing center in the village. Navigating the contingencies of available venues brought these organizations, one after another, to the church at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 28th Street. The homophile and gay groups that met in the parish hall chose the venue for its availability, affordability, and convenience, and they did so despite many participants’ discomfort with an aspect of the building that remained inseparable from the space itself: it belonged to a Christian congregation.
Many authors in gay-identified publications not only regarded institutional religion critically; they frequently portrayed it as an oppressive closet from which an “out and proud” gay identity must be liberated—by exiting. At least one Gay Liberation Front participant directly connected this critical view of religion to the movement’s meeting spaces. Jim Clifford reported to journalist Donn Teal that he “felt ashamed even meeting in church facilities. . . . It’s a closet kind of thing.”69 It wasn’t until 1971—when the Gay Activist Alliance started renting the Firehouse—that gay-operated space became regularly available for large public events.70 Even as religion stood in as a symbol of the closet, it was in a church building that many movement participants actually came out into gay community life.
Gay Liberation in the Parish Hall
Perry Brass attended his first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front in November of 1969. The group had recently begun holding Sunday evening general meetings at the church. Alternate U continued to host the weekly gay community dances, which were advertised in the Village Voice. After enjoying three of those dances, Brass decided to attend the general meeting. “I walked into this room at Holy Apostles church,” he recalled, “and there were maybe sixty or seventy people in the room, about evenly divided between men and women, and everyone just smiled at me and said hello to me. And then this older man named Bob Kohler . . . got up and he said, ‘Brothers and Sisters.’” This moment of being welcomed into a family was what sold Brass on the GLF, and this community, as he put it, made him a “convert” to radical gay activism.71
Movement participants’ perspectives about meeting in a church were, no doubt, as diverse as the people in the movement. The religious connections of the room, in Brass’s memory, were inobtrusive. Brass was Jewish, and he experienced Father Weeks’s occasional presence as kindly and welcoming. Because so many progressive organizations met in church buildings, there was little that Brass found to be surprising or unusual about the GLF’s decision to meet in a church. The one conflict he could recall occurred about a year after the GLF started meeting there. Weeks asked that they start paying a fee to use the space. The GLF, despite initial resistance and considerable debate, agreed to the amount. On the other hand, Karla Jay, another Jewish GLF participant, remembered feeling uncomfortable about meeting in Christian institutions, which she did for many gay, feminist, and lesbian organized meetings. But, she shrugged, “Where else were we going to go? We had no centers.”72
Even as the congregation and the rector often thought of the parish hall—or the “community center”—as nonspiritual space in comparison to the sanctuary, the records of gay groups that met in this space show the careful ways they managed the religious connections of their meeting space. This is not to say that the churchiness of this building made it distinctly “unfree” in contrast to the genuine liberation of other sites. Even when activists and organizers held the keys to their own centers, as historian Finn Enke notes, these sites were “already built around exclusions and privileged access.”73 The responsibility fell to group members, amid discussion and debate, to manage access to these spaces in ways that did not reproduce social hierarchies or inflame in-group tensions. When these questions involved church space, these moments of tension and uncertainty played out in ways that made salient the buildings’ felt “religiousness.” These issues included the rent payment, mentioned earlier by Brass. They involved questions about appropriate behavior, such as dancing or alcohol use, and gay groups’ decisions about the closeness of their involvement with the rector and congregation.74
Even as each of these gay organizations distanced their use of the church space from involvement in religion, the space-sharing relationship fostered collaboration. The most public and consequential of these collaborations took place after a devastating police raid on March 8, 1970. Officers of the Greenwich Village Sixth Precinct conducted mass arrests at the Snake Pit, under claims that the gay bar was operating illegally—without a liquor license or certificate of occupancy. The police detained over 160 patrons and immediately transported the people in custody to the station, a tactic designed to curtail another mass protest. The scene at the station was chaotic, and one of the detained men, twenty-three-year-old Argentinian immigrant Diego Viñales, panicked and attempted to escape by jumping out of an upper-level window, only to be impaled on the spiked fence outside. The rescue team that transported Viñales to St. Vincent’s Hospital had little expectation that he would survive.75
The next day, news of the raid spread as Viñales reportedly remained in the hospital in critical condition. Participants in the GLF and GAA quickly organized a demonstration for that evening, a march that would start at Sheridan Park outside the former Stonewall Inn, proceed to the Sixth Precinct Station for a protest, and end in front of St. Vincent’s in a vigil. A sizeable crowd of five hundred gathered for the action. Father Weeks participated in the march and accompanied GAA president Jim Owles as a visible clergy presence during heated negotiations with the police.76 When the marchers proceeded to the hospital, Father Weeks was permitted as clergy to visit Viñales. He also led a prayer during the vigil.77
After this incident, in May 1970, Father Weeks publicly expressed his support for the movement with an article published in Gay Power, a biweekly newspaper that combined reporting, reviews, artwork, and nude photographs. In this mix, “The Homosexual and the Church” stood out; it was a sermon directed to the gay movement.78 The rector passionately countered the perception that Christianity was antigay with the message that God was on their side. “Confront the churches,” he urged, “make us more responsive, more honest, better able to love the brother and the sister who were made in the image of the living God.”79 This published support for the gay movement echoed a growing trend among progressive clergy. Many of them were urban ministers serving congregations that adjoined neighborhoods with visible queer communities. Instances of police abuse, like the raids on the Stonewall Inn and the Snake Pit, propelled these clergy activists from behind-the-scenes support into roles of public advocacy.80
The Snake Pit raid also renewed efforts among activist groups to commemorate the previous summer’s uprising outside the Stonewall Inn. Organizers began to plan in earnest for a mass march that would start on Christopher Street and proceed north along the Avenue of the Americas to Central Park. This Christopher Street Liberation Day March took place Sunday, June 28, 1970. Two churches, Holy Apostles and Washington Square United Methodist Church, served as open-door community centers during the weekend of the demonstration march. At Washington Square UMC, GLF participants used the church basement as a center for free food, workshops, and a crash pad for anyone who needed a place to sleep during the weekend. A placard posted over the church’s exterior door brightly welcomed visitors: “Gay Liberation Front. Come in and Come out!”81
Holy Apostles was a drop-in community center throughout the weekend as a “women’s only” space. Women in the gay movement often found themselves wedged in small numbers among larger crowds of gay men. The parish hall supplied another kind of “space of our own” for a collective of women involved in the Daughters of Bilitis, a homophile organization, and the newly renamed Radicalesbians (formerly GLF women). For that weekend, the parish hall became the “Lesbian Center,” where visitors gathered for discussions, music, shared meals, and placard-making. Friday night kicked off with a workshop on “Women’s Liberation, Sexism and Lesbianism.” On Saturday evening there was a communal supper and dance.82
The weekend events, from the march to the community gatherings, made real to organizers and participant the importance of communal space. A member of the Daughters of Bilitis reflected on how the weekend community centers renewed gay organizations’ efforts to secure more permanent centers. Holy Apostles and other sites helped make that goal tangible:
Ever since the first Christopher Street Liberation Day, following the Stonewall Resistance, all the gay groups in NY have been talking about starting a gay community center. The idea was to provide an alternative to the bars we must patronize to associate with other homosexuals, whether or not we like bars. Since this year’s Gay Pride celebrations, gay dances at Alternate U, Columbia U, New York U, and the Church of the Holy Apostles have shown us how beautiful it can be to get together outside of the bars. And cheap.83
The full list of available venues also showed how the movement’s meeting spaces had expanded during this year. In the case of New York University and Columbia, gay student groups gained access to campus venues through protest. University administrators initially barred publicized gay events from campus.84 Holy Apostles’ parish hall, in this moment of movement growth, supplied the space for public gay sociality, a critical need for the emerging politics of identity pride.
Conclusion
As a transitional gay community center, the parish hall enabled gay organizations to gather, grow, and secure funding for their own more permanent centers. By 1972, all of the gay organizations that initially met in the parish hall had established their own community centers. GLF men opened Liberation House in December 1970; the Daughters of Bilitis and Radicalesbians together opened a Lesbian Center on Prince Street in January 1971. The Gay Activist Alliance opened the Firehouse, a large event space, just before the second celebration of Christopher Street Liberation Day, in June 1971. The West Side Discussion Group continued holding their Wednesday night discussion and dance at Holy Apostles through March 1972, when they opened the West Side Discussion Group Center.85 As these groups left, others cycled through—including the Church of the Beloved Disciple, the gay synagogue (later Congregation Beit Simchat Torah), and the Metropolitan Community Church of New York.
The church buildings were not merely a channel or a “half-way house” that shaped the sociality of gay movement meetings. To be sure, the church’s auxiliary rooms and buildings were already multipurpose, designed for flexible community use. Nonetheless, gay movement participants also reoriented spaces designed for parish use and inhabited them queerly—through dances, consciousness raising sessions, planning meetings, lectures, public discussions, and other social practices. They navigated the ambient religiosity of these spaces and put them to new uses. This habitation created gay community, a social identity formed in place. Secularization narratives position the birth of gay identity at the exit door of a Christian-constructed closet. However, the gay movement did not exit the architecture of Christianity as they came out of the closet.
The history of the church that hosted the gay liberation movement is also an untold history of religious organizing and transformation. Holy Apostles’ space-sharing relationships with gay and lesbian community groups precipitated new spiritual practices for the rector and parishioners. Father Weeks would go on to officiate quiet ceremonies that recognized same-sex relationships; gay parishioners created a Sunday afternoon Gay Episcopal Service; and one of these parishioners, Ellen Barrett, would begin the first steps toward the priesthood. Barrett’s ordination, which took place in Holy Apostles’ sanctuary in 1977, is often referenced as the opening incident in the slow movement toward LGBTQ acceptance in the Episcopal denomination. The subsequent denominational debates, which roiled around abstract issues of inclusion, percolated up from this earlier history of shared space.
The absence of a historical memory of the church’s instrumental support also speaks to the way movement narratives about the past are shaped by the collective investment in a useful history. In contrast to the useful history of the Stonewall Riots, raised to iconicity through the celebrations of Pride, no similar investment in memory has created a useful past out of the involvement of establishment churches. Indeed, neither the gay movement nor the parish itself, during those early years of movement growth, deliberately memorialized their history of shared space. As a result, the dominant picture of religion and LGBTQ movement development is often told through abstract spatial metaphors of contending opposites—a secular movement that later trespassed into sanctuaries. Attention to the materiality of shared space reverses this chronology: it was in church buildings that the movement came out.
Notes
Several memoirs reference meetings at Holy Apostles. See Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace, 84, 124; Jay and Young, Out of the Closets, 27; Vining, Gay Diary, 220.
Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory,” 740–41.
For more on secularism as a Christian viewpoint, see, Jakobsen, Secularisms; Pellegrini, “Feeling Secular.”
Leitsch, Correspondence (January 25, 1967–December 9, 1968), letter to Colin R. Anstey, December 9, 1968.
Gay Activist Alliance,“What Is Gay Activist Alliance?”; Gay Liberation Front, “Draft Platform of Gay Liberation Front.”
Discussion of this infrastructural role may be found in Hinojosa, Apostles of Change, 29–30; Fernández, Young Lords, 166, 184, 188; Lechtreck, “‘We Are Demanding $500 Million for Reparations’”; Gill, Embattled Ecumenism; Rossinow, “The Break-through to New Life,” 329–30; Moody, Voice in the Village, 261–62.
On spaces and queer social movements, see, for example, Enke, Finding the Movement; Hanhardt, Safe Space.
Reverend George Ayliffe Poole in The Appropriate Character of Church Architecture (1842), quoted by Stanton, The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture, 9.
The building had various names throughout its history, including the Sunday school building, the parish house, and the community center. Current parishioners call this building the Mission House (Edelblute, The History of the Church of the Holy Apostles, 81–82, 108–11).
Abell, The Urban Impact on American Protestantism, 162; see also Luker, “Missions, Institutional Churches, and Settlement Houses,” 101–3; Holifield, “Toward a History of American Congregations,” 40–42.
Edelblute and the Church of the Holy Apostles, In Community, 19.
Green, “Ethnic and Social Mix Disappearing”; Goldberg, “Rebirth of Old Chelsea”; Hudson Guild Records, 1896–1990s, “Building the New Chelsea.”
Chelsea Clinton News, “Scouting at Holy Apostles”; Chelsea Clinton News, “Cub Cake Sale.” For a Cub Scout dinner, parents and friends prepared the food, which included “the fascinating variety” of baked ham, fried chicken, arroz con pollo, veal parmigiana, chopped liver, spaghetti, macaroni and bean casseroles, salads, candied yams, and homemade doughnuts (Chelsea Clinton News, “Cub Scout Dinner at Holy Apostles Church”).
Chelsea Clinton News, “Team Performance.”
Chelsea Clinton News, “Churches Volunteer as Freedom Schools”; Chelsea Clinton News, “Women’s Guild Card Party at Church of the Holy Apostles.”
Edelblute and the Church of the Holy Apostles, In Community. For a history of Black Americans and the Episcopal church, see Shattuck, Episcopalians and Race.
Chelsea Clinton News, “Open at Last.”
Chelsea Clinton News, “Religion in Chelsea and Clinton.”
Chelsea Clinton News, “Father Griswold Reminisces.”
Chelsea Clinton News, “Father Griswold Reminisces.”
Father Robert O. Weeks, phone interview by author, October 22, 2008.
These details are referenced in Rev. Robert O. Weeks to Mr. Edmund J. Beasley, March [day is illegible], 1969; Church of the Holy Apostles, 1968 Mortgage.
Church of the Holy Apostles, 1968 Mortgage. The financing for these and other renovations are also mentioned in Edelblute and the Church of the Holy Apostles, In Community, 41–42.
Weeks, phone interview.
Weeks, phone interview.
Unlabeled photographs of Holy Apostles are included throughout the New York Public Library’s digital collection of Diana Davies Photographs.
Weber, “SNCC in Chelsea”; Chelsea Clinton News, “Long-Silent Bell”; Chelsea Clinton News, “Draft Counseling Center Moves”; Chelsea Clinton News, “Gay Dance.”
Lechtreck, “‘We Are Demanding $500 Million for Reparations’”; Dillard, “Black Power/Black Faith,” 204, 203.
Come Out!, “Community Center.”
Come Out!, “Community Center.”
Dansky, “Hey Man,” 2. For more on uses of these spaces, see Vider, Queerness of Home, 83–105.
Perry Brass, interview by author, June 21, 2019.
Karla Jay, interview by the author, July 2015.
Gay groups records address these and other incidents. See, for example, Leitsch, Correspondence (1968-1969), To Robert Griswold, May 21, 1969, 161–62; Penn, “From Our Leadership,” 11; White, “Gay Rites and Religious Rights,” 79–90.
Firsthand accounts include DOB Newsletter, “Aftermath of the Snake Pit,” 2–3. This incident is also detailed in Carter, Stonewall, 238–43.
Father Weeks was also a visible clergy presence at a confrontation between Chelsea parents and the NYPD on June 11, 1969. Parents forcibly blockaded part of Twenty-Sixth Street to stop cars from entering a “killer street” outside of Public School 33, where a taxi driver had hit and killed a young boy (Díaz, “Twenty-Sixth Street Closed”).
DOB Newsletter, “Aftermath of the Snake Pit”; Carter, Stonewall, 238–41. I have found no record of what happened to Viñales.
Teal, Gay Militants, 324. Reportedly, two people from the Young Lords visited the church to check out the use of community space.
Newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis/New York, “Gay Community Center.”
Newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, “Gay Community Center”; Eisenbach, Gay Power, 169–70; Rosán, “Gay Meeting Places.”
