G. Samantha Rosenthal is an independent journalist, historian, and award-winning author. Her most recent book is Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City.
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The Largest Gay Denomination in the US Is Shrinking. Why?
With Southern working-class roots and Pentecostal flair, Metropolitan Community Churches grew in the 1980s and 1990s. But the good times didn’t last.
BEFORE THE PULSE NIGHTCLUB SHOOTING in 2016, the worst act of violence against an LGBTQ gathering in American history unfolded in 1973 at a bar in Louisiana frequented by members of a gay church. The Metropolitan Community Church of New Orleans lost nearly one-third of their congregation in a Sunday night arson attack at the UpStairs Lounge, a working-class drinking hole where the faithful often gathered after church services.
Most Americans have never heard of the UpStairs Lounge—or for that matter, Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC). Yet half a century ago, MCC was the largest gay organization in the United States.
You read that right. By the mid-1970s, the largest gay organization in the United States was a Christian denomination.
Founded in 1968, one year prior to the Stonewall Riots, MCC would find its greatest success in the U.S. South, with congregations sprouting from Florida to Texas to small towns all across the Bible Belt.