My coming out stretched over a four-year period in the mid-1960s, from my junior year in high school, when I first "did it" with a guy, until sometime in my sophomore year of college when I finally said to myself, and to a few friends, "this is it. This is the way it's gonna be."
It was an incredibly intense and tumultuous process and, frankly, when I look back on it, almost everything else I've had to deal with—from disastrous relationships to job discrimination to the deaths of more friends from AIDS than I can count to the health challenges of me and my sweetie—has seemed easier emotionally. The trauma of coming out in those years prepared me for life.
One of the costs of that preparation was God and religion. It's hard to describe how devout a Catholic I was. I went to Mass more than once a week, fasted during Lent each year, confessed my sins almost every week, went through the rigors of applying to seminary when I was a senior in high school, and never fell asleep at night without saying my prayers. But, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't reconcile my sexual desires and emotional longings with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I guess my survival instinct must be pretty strong because, confronted with this incompatibility, I jettisoned religion.
This break with religion affected how my activism developed once I became involved with gay liberation in the 1970s. Oppressive as organized religion might have been ( and the history of religious oppression of same-sex love is not a pretty story ) , I basically ignored the institution and the issue. After all, I had dealt with it successfully simply by leaving the Church. The important issues to me were those involving institutions that we couldn't escape—the police and the courts, the schools, the licensed professions like medicine and psychiatry, the media, the law. Those were the areas that I paid attention to, the demonstrations I went on, the campaigns I participated in.
There was nothing wrong with those choices. After all, there was plenty to do in the 1970s and not enough of us to do it all. Religion rarely, if ever, entered my consciousness. Oh, I think I was aware that someone named Troy Perry had started a gay church out in California, and I knew and admired Bill Johnson, a gay man of my generation who pushed, successfully, for the right to be an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Beyond that, I never gave God or church a thought.
But there would be something wrong if I let my personal history with religion limit what I'm able to see as a historian. It's one thing not to involve myself in religious matters or campaigns for justice within a particular denomination. It's quite another if I let my own disinterest spill over into my research and interpretations.
Given how far off my own radar screen religion was in the 1970s, imagine how amazed I've been at the prominence of religion as I examine the historical record of the 1970s. As I go back to that decade and read Chicago's lesbian and gay press, the visibility of religious issues and of queer spirituality is absolutely inescapable. Not only is there coverage in the press but the content suggests that religious organizing and concerns were a critical factor in the growth of a visible and politicized community in the post-Stonewall decade.
What makes me say that? Let's just take a quick look at only two of the many expressions of queer spirituality in Chicago in the first half of the 1970s: the Dignity chapter for gay and lesbian Catholics, and Good Shepherd MCC.
A mass for gay and lesbian Catholics started being celebrated in the privacy of a home in 1970, just a year after the Stonewall Rebellion. By the fall of 1971, the weekly mass was taking place every Sunday at St. Sebastian's Catholic Church at 824 West Wellington on the north side. The following year, a Dignity chapter formed, and soon upwards of 200 people were attending the service. By the time of Dignity's fifth anniversary, it was holding a celebratory party in the school auditorium at St. Sebastian. Involvement in Dignity and, especially, attendance at these masses didn't just provide personal spiritual comfort to participants. In the words of one lesbian, these collective gatherings generated "the feeling that progress could be made."
Good Shepherd Metropolitan Community Church also got started in 1970. At the time it was only the fourth MCC congregation to be chartered, and the first one outside California, where MCC began. Early services were held at 3342 Broadway; by 1974 it had settled into a space at 615 West Wellington. Its budget in 1974 was $35,000 a year, a truly substantial sum for a queer organization in those days. In fact, that year Arthur Green, the minister at Good Shepherd, became the first full-time employee of any Chicago group [ other than businesses like bars and bathhouses and adult bookstores ] that served the LGBT community. In 1975, MCC filed a law suit against Illinois prison officials, because its minister was denied access to gay inmates. In going to court, the MCC minister declared that it was "time for us to get out of our stained-glass ghetto."
What makes these doings of Dignity and MCC, as well as other queer religious groupings in the 1970s in Chicago, consequential? Obviously they were important to the Catholic and Protestant and Jewish believers who came together in fellowship and worship in settings that respected their sexuality. But reading through the historical record, and putting these things alongside what else I know about what was happening in Chicago in that decade, I think that bigger claims can be made for the importance of this queer religious world. Here are some first thoughts:
The November 1975 issue of The Gay Crusader had a photo of a Dignity mass and an MCC service. The church spaces looked crowded. These weekly services brought substantial numbers of gay men and lesbians together every Sunday, week after week, month after month. When service was over, everyone didn't just disappear and go home. They poured out on to the street, in groups, exhibiting public sociability. They went out to other places in the neighborhood to socialize for dinner or drinks. Through these weekly services they were building community, one that knit lots of people together. And they began to do other things together—picnics in the park, theater parties, fundraising dinners. They were collectively claiming public space, as queer folks.
Interestingly, these services weren't just randomly distributed across the map of the city. They were concentrated on the North Side, near the lake, between Diversey and Addison. In the early 1970s, "Boystown" wasn't yet Boystown. There were more gay bars and clubs in the Near North and Old Town neighborhoods than there were in Lakeview, or "New Town" as it was more commonly called. But now here are these churchgoers, reliably each week, moving about together in this one particular neighborhood. Does this help to give the neighborhood more of a gay flavor? Does going to church in Lakeview encourage these worshippers to think of this neighborhood as their own? In other words, might it have been not just the opening of bars but the worship services each Sunday that helped make Lakeview gay?
The fact that Chicago had well-established queer religious groups so early on meant that others came to the city because of it. The National Task Force on Gay People in the Church held its national meeting in Chicago early in 1975. There was also a gathering in Chicago of Dignity chapters from all over the Midwest. And Integrity, an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Episcopalians, picked Chicago as the site of its first national conference. When Troy Perry came to Chicago in 1974 to promote his autobiography, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay, it became the opportunity for a media blitz. City newspapers and local television stations covered his visit. Again, gay religiosity created public visibility.
Finally, much as the impulse to come together for worship may have grown out of deeply personal spiritual needs, it was pretty hard to put religion and homosexuality together in the 1970s and not have it spill over into activism. Religious denominations are huge institutions with a national reach. All of them, with at most one or two exceptions, were deeply homophobic in these years. To come out for the purpose of worship almost guaranteed that conflict would be generated, so that gay religious folks found themselves campaigning and demonstrating and organizing. How many of them found their activism moving beyond their community of faith into the larger society?
These are just a few examples and speculations. Definitive histories of LGBT folks and religion still need to be written, particularly for the critical decade after Stonewall and before AIDS. Chicago deserves an important place in these histories. My bet would be, as they get written, that many of us will come to see this religious work as more important than we thought.
And, if you participated in LGBT-connected religious activities in Chicago in the 1970s, I hope you'll share your reminiscences with me. You can write me at demilioj@aol.com .
Copyright 2009 John D'Emilio
