It is Pride season. Marsha P. Johnson, Bayard Rustin, and Maya Angelou are all queer activists who lived out their faith. Check out this post for ideas on how to talk about them in CYF programs.

Faithful Queer Leaders

June is Pride Month, an annual commemoration of LGBTQIA+ movements for social justice and celebration of the queer community. Pride Month honors the Stonewall Riots, which, along with other events like the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, helped spur LGBTQIA+ movements in the United States and abroad. Many queer people of faith saw living out their faith as connected to their queer identities and working for justice and equality for all people. To celebrate Pride, we lift up two queer people, Marsha P. Johnson and Bayard Rustin, as well as ally Maya Angelou, and provide some resources to share their stories with your congregation in your CYF programming.  

It is important to both honor and teach LGBTQIA+ history to children, youth, and families as queer history and its contributions to the church have been and continue to be minimized or erased. By intentionally commemorating Pride Month within the church, the church creates space for families with queer children and youth to feel seen, honored, and welcomed while additionally showing that queer people have always been a part of the church and have found ways to live out their faith in their lives.

Marsha P. Johnson

Marsha P. Johnson, born 1945, was a Black trans woman who, alongside another trans woman Sylvia Rivera, co-founded several activist groups including the Gay Liberation Front and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Johnson participated in the Stonewall Riots and then used them as a launching point to continue her activism. She was sadly found dead at the age of 46, with many of her friends and supporters thinking she was murdered. Johnson was a lifelong Catholic.

There are many books, documentaries, and other media about Johnson. For young children, the picture book Stonewall: A Building, an Uprising, a Revolution by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Jamey Christoph tells the story of the Stonewall Riots and includes photographs at the end of many of the people who participated in the riots and subsequent uprising, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. The book One Day in June by Tourmaline and illustrated by Charlot Kristensen is a contemporary story that features an older woman reflecting to a young child about the life of Marsha and her role in the Stonewall Riots and beyond.

For middle and high school youth, the short film, also by Tourmaline, Happy Birthday, Marsha! is a fictional account of Johnson’s birthday and leadup to the Stonewall Riots while the documentaries The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson and Pay It No Mind—The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson detail her life with footage of her as well as interviews with her friends and chosen family.  

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was born in 1912. He worked closely with Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He was instrumental in planning the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Because Rustin was a gay man, other Civil Rights leaders began to distance themselves from him, leading him to shift to working on humanitarian missions for refugees and the LGBTQIA+ movement. He died at 75 in 1987. Likely because of his sexuality, his achievements and role in the Civil Rights movement have been downplayed, and it is only within the past ten years that there has been renewed interest and acknowledgement of the role Rustin played. Rustin was a Quaker, and the Quaker commitment to non-violence was deeply influential in Rustin’s life and the Civil Rights movement as a whole. 

Rustin was a prolific writer, and many of his books are available through various publishers that may be entry points for teens and young adults into his work. There is a biographical film titled Rustin that came out in 2023. The children’s book Unstoppable: How Bayard Rustin Organized the 1963 March on Washington provides a brief introduction to Rustin and focuses on the story of the March on Washington. 

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born in 1928 and lived until 2014. She is well known for her contributions to literature, including her most well-known work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some speculate that she was a member of the queer community herself. Regardless of her sexuality, she worked tirelessly for Black and LGBTQIA+ social justice movements and is recognized as a queer ally. Angelou was a lifelong Christian, and religious themes appear frequently in her works.

The children’s book Rise! From Caged Bird to Poet of the People by Bethany Hegedus provides a child-friendly overview of her life and work. Her poem “And Still I Rise” can be used as a prayer, reading, devotional in worship, or as part of other programming. 

Additional Resources

These are just three examples of many LGBTQIA+ people who have lived out their faith in deeply influential ways. For more examples of queer people of faith, Kittredge Cherry’s Q Spirit website has an entire section devoted to queer saints. You can also check out a past Spirit & Truth blog post, “Building a Trans-Inclusive Program,” in which I share more resources, particularly about how to create affirming and welcoming programming for trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people and their families. 

Peace and all good,

Dr. Pace C. Warfield

About the Writer

Pace C. Warfield (they/them) is a recent doctoral graduate of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA where their research interests included Reformation history and queer theological anthropology. In addition to their studies, Pace has worked in children, youth, and family ministries for over fifteen years at various congregations throughout the country. Pace has previously written blog posts for We Talk, We Listen, the diversity blog of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, on mental health and the holidays called “Waiting for Snow” and a Lutheran approach to LGBTQIA+ systematic theology called “The Queer Ground.” They have additionally spoken or written about surviving the holidays as a queer person on Horror Nerds at Church “The Queer Holiday Survival Guide” and “Queering Grief” on their personal blog. They live in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, with their partner and two dogs.

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