“Gay Hispano”: Rev. José Mojica and Las Iglesias de la Comunidad Metropolitana in the United States and Mexico

In 1974, Rev. José Mojica founded the first Spanish-speaking church for gays and lesbians in the United States, MCC Hispana, in New York. A native of Santurce, Puerto Rico, and a former evangelist in the Assemblies of God, Mojica became an itinerant preacher in the predominantly gay United Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) in the 1970s, driven by his passion for sharing the “gospel of gay liberation” with Spanish-speaking gays and lesbians. Mojica played a pivotal role in the 1980s in bringing Las Iglesias de la Comunidad Metropolitana (Spanish for MCC) to Mexico and South America as head of the MCC’s Hispanic Americas mission work. Following Mojica’s trajectory as a gay Pentecostal evangelist and missionary, this paper provides a window into early transnational flows of religious and sexual identities between the United States and Latin America. It also centers the often-overlooked contributions of queer Latino/as in LGBTQ religious history.