Coming Out in the Parish Hall: New York’s Gay Movement and the Church of the Holy Apostles, 1969–70

research article

Heather R. White

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.

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