Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2026

Mapping a Forgotten Infrastructure: Congregations & Stonewall-era Queer Organizing

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which investigates religious organizations' space-sharing relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Movement narratives have long attributed the grassroots insurgency to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, an incident popularly remembered as "the birthplace of pride." This project complicates the remembered history of Stonewall-era organizing with a focus on the local movement spaces that facilitated grassroots LGBTQ+ growth. This analysis builds on queer community histories, which de-center the Stonewall narrative and trace the distinct local conflicts that galvanized local and regional activism. My research, in turn, maps the surprising and largely forgotten role of local congregations and other religiously-connected spaces as an infrastructure for this growth. These religious organizations facilitated LGBTQ+ movement as meeting spaces and movement centers. This grassroots focus on religious infrastructure offers a new framework for mapping--and analyzing-- LGBTQ+ movement emergence.