Unexpected allyship: How a California church became “the midwife of the modern LGBTQ movement”

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Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, San Francisco’s Tenderloin District was changing fast. Gone were the young professionals, replaced instead by growing numbers of homeless queer and trans people, the street queens and hustlers turning tricks to ensure their survival. These communities were treated as disposable; the Tenderloin’s rundown streets were often strewn with trash thrown by yuppie businessmen, who worked just a stone’s throw away from the dilapidated district.

When Reverend Cecil Williams started working at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church in the early 1960s, he made it his mission to serve these communities. The church had always been rooted in philanthropy, but the congregation was largely white and middle class, the help dished out from a distance. Williams – a Black minister with a longstanding focus on social justice – stepped in to give Glide a radical makeover, transforming it into a source of vital and long-standing solidarity for San Francisco’s most marginalized.

It’s no secret that queerness and religion have a thorny relationship. Yet, they…

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