What Love Requires: Quaker Responses to the HIV/AIDS and Marriage Equality in the 1980s

More than four decades after the AIDS crisis began, the history of Quaker responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis remains largely untold within American religious historiography. Similarly, the history of the first Quaker ceremonies of commitment for same-sex couples and Quaker advocacy for marriage equality is underrepresented in academic work about 20th century Quakerism. This paper responds to this lacuna by sharing highlights from an extensive body of research conducted by two researchers who have examined how Quakers grappled with both AIDS and marriage equality, often simultaneously, showing how these were not parallel crises but deeply intertwined struggles within the same congregations and across the many branches of Quakerism in North America. Additionally, by centering local congregational discernment rather than denominational pronouncements, this paper emphasizes how ordinary people transformed inherited theology through lived experience.