This report provides a cursory look into the past and present of LGBTQ+ religious life in Boston. We hope to in the future expand this essay to include more LGBTQ+-friendly religious groups, congregations, and centers. It was last updated in September 2023.[1]
1. Introduction
The Old South Church, an ornate, Gothic Revival building, stands at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth Streets in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The United Church of Christ (UCC) congregation was established in 1669—though it moved into its current building in 1873—and its twelve generations of senior ministers have seen Boston through everything from the American Revolution to Stonewall. Its 350-year history is a Who’s-Who of Boston’s past, claiming Phyllis Wheatley and Ben Franklin as former congregants; the less-discussed history of its historic ties to the Atlantic slave trade has also more recently come to the fore.
But what many modern congregants might remember the Church for is its role in the fight against LGBTQ+[2] discrimination in Boston. Indeed, the Old South Church was an early and vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ initiatives, providing resources and counseling during the AIDS epidemic. Today, it is registered by the UCC as “open and affirming” to queer and trans populations.
While the Old South Church—and another local, historically LGBTQ+ activist congregation, the Old West Church—may be the first (and particularly Christian) entry point for many exploring LGBTQ+ and religion in Boston, there is in fact a plethora of other queer-affirming faith organizations that aim to bring LGBTQ+ and religious identities together.
Much has been written on LGBTQ+ history and religious history in Boston, but little has yet focused exclusively on the intersection of the two.
2. Overview of Report
This report provides a sampling of LGBTQ+ religious life in the greater Boston area.
An attempt at comprehensive history or coherent narrative is all but impossible when covering LGBTQ+ communities, in no small part because of their historical invisibility—whether that be volitional, as such groups sought safety, or because of censorship. It would thus be more fitting to understand LGBTQ+ religious life in Boston as a series of histories instead of one unified history. Hence the title of this report: we aim not to provide a complete (or, for that matter, overly optimistic) Boston LGBTQ+ religious narrative. In line with the Pluralism Project’s focus on multiple and intersecting religious diversity in the United States, it is instead our hope that this work will provide a glimpse of the multifaceted interactions between LGBTQ+ populations and religion in Boston. This is a selective portrait and, hopefully, a starting point for future research. We hope to add more to this list.
We have also aimed to highlight groups that lead, engage, and center LGBTQ+ congregants rather than (and in addition to) simply including and/or representing them. In other words, there is an important difference between the nominal support of LGBTQ+ communities and such communities taking active leadership and other core roles. Given the scope of this report, it is imperative to give space to communities that “go the extra mile,” as it were, with their queer and trans members.
There are also, certainly, less positive LGBTQ+ histories in Boston. But highlighting these groups will hopefully bring into focus a more welcoming strand of LGBTQ+ and religion in the city. Additionally, “LGBTQ+” is an umbrella term, and like many umbrella terms, it loses some of its analytical utility in its breadth. As such, we acknowledge that the term does not fully represent or do justice to all communities, particularly given the term’s at times colonial past.[3] However, it is our hope that a future addition to this report might shed light on, and remedy, this discrepancy.
§3 provides a brief sampling of LGBTQ+ religious events and initiatives currently taking place in the U.S. §4 gives an in-depth look into various manifestations of LGBTQ+ and religion in Boston. §5 concludes the report, offering general findings and re-contextualizing this project within the larger framework of religious pluralism.
3. LGBTQ+ and Religion in the United States
Especially in the wake of what Time controversially labeled the “transgender tipping point,” as well as the recent mobilization of the American religious right against transgender rights, LGBTQ+ and religion have found often themselves brought together in much mainstream American news and culture the past decade or so. Increasing and ongoing hostility against LGBTQ+ populations in the United States, especially on behalf of religious groups, suggests at first glance that LGBTQ+ and religion are to each other at best irrelevant and at worst antithetical. Indeed, a 2020 report from the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that LGBTQ+ Christians are twice as likely to leave their church.
While these reflections are necessarily broad, many national faith-based organizations have aimed to provide religion-specific homes for LGBTQ+ community members, arguing that queerness and faith need not be opposed. For example, Svara, a “traditionally radical yeshiva” runs the “Trans Halakha Project” that works to interpret Jewish religious law for, and about, transgender people. Or “GALVA-108,” an LGBTQ+ resource and support group for Hindus and Vaishnavas. Or Muslims for Progressive Values, which notes loud and clear and on its website that it advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. More broadly, NPR noted that at Pride celebrations in 2023, there were many, perhaps an unprecedented number of, religious groups in attendance. And on a scholarly level, the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network works to preserve documents from—and encourage the study of—LGBTQ+ religiosity around the world.
4. LGBTQ+ and Religion in Boston
Due to the confined scope of this initial report, we will highlight in no particular order one or more explicitly LGBTQ+-focused organizations of a variety of faiths and groups in Boston. A future addition to this report will hopefully feature more traditions. In the meantime, Suffolk University’s Interfaith Center has published a longer yet less in-depth list of LGBTQ+-friendly places of worship in Boston.
Christianity
In 2014, it was approximated by the Pew Research Center that about 57% of Bostonians identify as Christian. Considering the large Christian population as well as the vast number of Christian denominations and congregations in the greater Boston area, here we have highlighted three historic or otherwise popular Christian (including Unitarian Universalist [UU]) groups that take as a founding principle the inclusion, and active engagement, of LGBTQ+ worshippers.
Boston’s Trinity Church, located in Back Bay, has offered a historically welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ Christians. The original parish was founded in 1733 and moved into its current building over a century later. The Church has since 1910 offered a variety of community support programs—in the 1980s, it helped host a residence program, the Trinity Hospice, for community members living with AIDS. Nowadays, especially through its “LGBTQ Fellowship”program, Trinity Church aims to foster LGBTQ+ community involvement.
The Metropolitan Community Church of Boston (MCC Boston), in Boston’s West End neighborhood, is a self-described “Human Rights Church” providing weekly “queer-centric Christian worship.” Founded in 1972 as one of a host of LGBTQ+-friendly mainline Protestant MCC congregations following the original in Los Angeles in 1968, MCC Boston characterizes their work and community as coming “out of the shadows of homophobia and transphobia into a light of love through Jesus Christ.” MCC Boston aims explicitly to include and welcome LGBTQ+ congregants through events, worship, and learning opportunities. (A comprehensive history of the congregation is posted on their website.)
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), based in Boston, offers a “Welcoming Congregation Program,” for which UU congregations across the country can register in order to be added to a registry of other LGBTQ+-welcoming congregations. The Program encourages UU congregations to create and implement education plans, community engagement protocols, and ways to implement LGBTQ+ inclusion in worship services. There are at least 800 congregations currently registered, and in 2015 the UUA introduced a “Welcoming Congregation ‘Renewal’ Program” to allow congregations to review and bolster their LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts. The UUA was also one of the first American religious organizations in the history of the twentieth century to explicitly advocate against LGBTQ+ discrimination.
Judaism
Congregation Am Tikva in Brookline is a key example of LGBTQ+-focused Jewish worship in the greater Boston area. Am Tikva begun in 1976 as a series of informal meetings by local Jews motivated to create more inclusive Jewish spaces. In 2003, organizers decided to work toward formal congregation status. While Am Tikva spent most of its life in the Old West Church in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, it now shares a building in Brookline with the Reform Temple Sinai. Much of Am Tikva’s programming since its founding has worked toward visibility and inclusion of LGBTQ+ Jews, one of its notable initiatives to this end being the creation of LGBTQ+-friendly liturgy. Am Tikva has historically hosted regular, weekly Shabbat services, but it now mostly gathers its members for annual High Holidays worship.
Islam
Queer Muslims of Boston (QMOB), founded in 2013, offers education, outings, programming, and community support for LGBTQ+ Muslims in the greater Boston area. QMOB prides itself on LGBTQ+ inclusion, prioritizing the creation of a safe space for queer and trans Muslims looking to find support in welcoming communities. Some of the more popular events led by QMOB include social gatherings, discussions, and holiday celebrations—including Eid Al-Adha, Eid Al-Fitr, and Ramadan—and, according to their website, the group is also open to celebrating other holidays and events its members deem of importance. The organization is not currently tied to a physical space, and various strands of thought exist within it regarding the future of QMOB: a mosque exclusively for queer and trans Muslims, opening a physical space inclusive to more groups than just LGBTQ+ members, and more.
Buddhism
The LGBTQ Meditation Group within the Shambhala Meditation Center of Boston—according to their website, an organization for “Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Bon and the Shambhala teachings themselves”—offers LGBTQ+ individuals a safe space and consistent opportunity to learn and explore meditation practices. One of Shambhala’s aims is to educate about, and involve people in, meditation. Thus the Shambhala Meditation Center also features other specialized meditation groups, like the BIPOC Meditation Group, or the Heart of Meditation group, which is open to “meditation practitioners of all traditions.”
Paganism
Paganism has a long and storied history in Boston and its various congregations in the area offer welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ worshippers. Indeed, in Boston, many queer and trans people have found comfort in embracing Pagan and earth-based traditions.
The Boston Radical Faeries is a nominally Pagan group that centers queerness, gender fluidity, and acceptance. It organizes events and community communications on its private Facebook page, the “Boston Radical Faerie Circle.” The Boston Radical Faeries are part of a larger, decentralized collection of “Radical Faerie” groups across the United States. (A more expanded list of these groups can be found on the “RADFAE” website.) Such groups, which originated in efforts to provide spiritual and ritual engagement opportunities for LGBTQ+ communities, were organized across the country after the founding of the Radical Faeries in 1979 by gay male activists Harry Hay and Don Kilhefner. Radical Faerie worship often takes place outdoors, and frequently centers environmentally conscious rituals that embrace and welcome gender and sexual fluidity. While certain aspects of the tradition’s worship utilize elements of indigenous spiritualities (especially, and for example, appropriation of Two-Spirit identities), certain religious studies scholars—for example, Scott Lauria Morgensen—have examined and critiqued the Radical Faeries’ relationship (and, one might argue, debts) to indigeneity and indigenous traditions.
South Asian
The Massachusetts Area South Asian LGBTQ Association, or MASALA, is run by, and focused on, LGBTQ+ South Asians regardless of faith tradition, but they describe themselves as open to all. Their events include film screenings, discussions, and activist initiatives. Central to MASALA’s aims is, according to their site, increasing “the awareness of our presence in the social spaces we inhabit and welcome alliances with like-minded individuals and groups regardless of their ethnic/cultural/sexual identities.”
Non-Religious, Spiritual, Humanist, etc.
Many, if not most, non-religious and humanist centers in Boston voice explicit support for LGBTQ+ communities. For example, Kahal B’raira, a Cambridge-based center of nontheistic, “humanistic Judaism,” states as a core principle that they “seek solutions to human conflicts that respect the freedom, dignity, and self-esteem of every human being.”
The Sanctuary Boston takes inclusion—LGBTQ+ or otherwise—as an explicit starting-point for their work. The non-profit organization offers non-denominational and secular worship opportunities, and it began its life in 2012 as a program within Boston’s Unitarian Universalist First Church, but today has a looser affiliation with Unitarian Universalism. Through bi-weekly meetings both in-person and online, The Sanctuary aims to provide community for individuals of any (or no) religious tradition, regardless of demographic background. The Sanctuary Boston, in their own words, “welcomes people, of all beliefs, ages, abilities, classes and ethnicities, sexual orientations and gender identities and expressions.” Beyond worship, the Sanctuary offers small group ministry opportunities, as well as campus ministryoutreach resourcing.
5. Conclusion
Boston offers a range of welcoming LGBTQ+ religious spaces, whether in the form of dedicated congregations or interest groups within larger organizations. This report is, to our knowledge, the only semi-comprehensive list of such spaces, and it is our hope that bringing these into one place might paint a picture of welcoming LGBTQ+ religiosity in the greater Boston area.
In addition to their LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts, many of these spaces are also committed to other kinds of advocacy, such as fighting racism in Boston and making their services and meetings accessible. At this point in the third decade of the twenty-first century, there are now congregations from many religious traditions with either programming or positive messaging surrounding their LGBTQ+ members and broader activism. The Sanctuary Boston, for example, splits what it receives from offerings at every gathering with a charity of their choice; in May and June of 2023, the Sanctuary split the proceeds with several trans rights organizations based in states with harsh anti-trans laws. And in March 2023, Queer Muslims of Boston hosted, along with Men of Melanin Magic, a dance night for queer and trans people of color.
Additionally, and to conclude, it is interesting to note that many of the organizations listed also have the language of religious pluralism intertwined with their discussions of LGBTQ+ inclusion. From MASALA welcoming all LGBTQ+ South Asians regardless of tradition, to the Shambhala Meditation Center having certain meditation groups open to any tradition, and even to the activist efforts of Unitarian Universalist centers in Boston, it seems that many religious organizations in the area see the preservation and protection of LGBTQ+ life in the city as deeply tied to discussions across religious boundaries. Perhaps there is, then, here a larger interreligious conversation to be had about the acceptance of all members of a faith tradition’s congregants—especially in view of increasing hostility against LGBTQ+, and particularly transgender, people across the United States.
[1] This report was written by Pluralism Project Research Associate Nicole Malte Collins.
[2] In this report, "LGBTQ+" and "queer and trans" are sometimes used interchangeably.
[3] b. binaohan’s short book decolonizing trans/gender 101 is a helpful, introductory guide to recognizing whiteness and colonialism as it manifests in some LGBTQ+—and here, specifically transgender—academic and popular discourse.