Visiting The "Gay Gotham" Exhibit

I recently visited the "Gay Gotham" exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. I viewed the exhibit, which was on two separate floors, three times this week. I'm looking forward to doing a blog post on it.

An Interview With Rev. Renee McCoy, Pastor Of A Church In Exile

"Unwilling to separate our lifestyles as lesbians and gay men from our experiences as Blacks in America, we are left to bring about our own liberation without the support and expertise of the larger Black community, and without the strength and guidance of the church."--Rev. Renee McCoy, pastor, Harlem MCC Church ("We are Exiles from Our Own Communities," Insight: A Quarterly of Lesbian/Gay Christian Opinion, Vol. 4, #4, pg. 8).

Harlem Metropolitan Community Church is one of 200 churches worldwide that form the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. These churches serve the lesbian and gay community as an alternative to the traditional churches where much homophobia is present.

Rev. Renee McCoy, a native of Detroit who attended Wayne State University, saw a need for a church that addressed itself to the needs and concerns of black lesbians and gay men. In November of 1981, she founded Harlem MCC.This was a little more than two years after she arrived in New York as a student clergy from the Detroit MCC church. "I wanted to learn New York," she said explaining her move East. "I wanted to leave the Midwest. I'd been there 28 years. I was tired of it. I loved Harlem. I always wanted to work in Harlem. And I came to MCC New York in the Village and I was licensed. I was credentialed out of there. And then I started Harlem MCC right after I was credentialed."

The church began at the Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University where "we averaged 23 in attendance on Sunday which meant that sometimes our attendance went from a low of eight or nine to a high of 46, 50." But the church, said Rev. McCoy in her Morningside Avenue apartment in Harlem, decided "we wanted to be more than a Sunday church. All we had was chapel space at the seminary on Sundays and we used the [MCC] church in the Village for whatever programming we did and we visited people's homes. We wanted to provide more counseling services for the church. We wanted to do regular Bible study in one single space so that people would know we were stationary, that we were part of the Harlem community." The church then moved to Hamilton Place and 143rd Street, in a brownstone owned by a black gay man. But after one week of occupancy, he evicted Harlem MCC because "he couldn't deal with the Sunday meetings and didn't want anybody on the block to know that he was gay. We were a church in exile for two months. We met in the Village at MCC New York until we could secure a place. We found a loft and moved into the loft on November 7, 1982. At that time the attendance was up to 46. Averaging 25 people on Sunday."

More problems continued to plague the church. This time it was the attitude of some of the members of the church toward the neighborhood the church took up residence in. Unlike Morningside Heights or the Village, the neighborhood could not be used as "a hideaway. You could slip into the seminary. No one would see you. It didn't look like Harlem. Nobody knew what you were doing when you came there." Also, said Rev. McCoy, there were congregation members who expressed fear of the neighborhood. "People who were somewhat supporting the church financially could not deal with facing Harlem. They couldn't look at themselves is what it was. 'I can't park my car there,' 'I'm scared of the neighborhood,' "I'm afraid to walk in Harlem.' These are black gay people. Things got rougher at that point. The loft base that we did eventually lease during the winter didn't have heat. We had problems with the toilets. We had problems with the lights. And as a result, attendance dropped. Especially the people who had children. The amount of money lessened."

At present [1983] there are 18 members. It is a church whose members come mostly "from Harlem and the Bronx, Upper West Side of Manhattan, Midtown Manhattan, still some from Brooklyn."

Harlem MCC is now located at 356 West 123rd Street, making this their fourth move in almost two years. The community organization that is subleasing the space to them has done so, said Rev. McCoy, "as a community gesture. We can do things now that we couldn't do, like we had a cookout. It's a small, intimate space." However, she went on, "We"re looking for a permanent space that we can afford. It's rough because every time we move, we lose people. It's almost like building from the ground up." Right now, she said, the church is in need of a piano, preferably a small one.



This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Native in 1983, in its special supplement called "Harlem Rising." It was one of the earliest articles I did for the paper.

The Ups And Downs Of A Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

The New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Films, the culmination of a two-year search and acquisition project, comes at a most timely moment--the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village (in which dozens of gay men, many of them drag queens, fought the police back in a raid on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn) out of which emerged the gay liberation movement.

The festival, an outgrowth of that movement, and the first of its kind in nearly two and a half years, will screen 45 movies, in 77 screenings, during its June 7-20 [1989 ] run at the Biograph Cinema (255 West 57th Street, at Broadway). "We planned it for the month of June," said festival producer Susan Horowitz, the owner of Tower Press, a printing firm that publishes the annual Gay Pride Guide, "to tie into the other cultural emphasis around Stonewall."

While she busied herself with the task of lining up financial backers for the festival within the gay community, her partner John Lewis, who, quipped Horowitz, calls himself "an old movie queen" because of "his passion" for film, "traveled to Berlin and to other film festivals, and was able to see a lot of material."

One of the gems acquired is the 1989 British documentary Desire by Stuart Marshall which discusses through on-camera interviews, stills, and archival footage homosexuality in Germany before and during the Nazi period. (It will be shown opening night for a special screening to benefit the Gay Community Center on 13th Street.)

Said Horowitz: "We had a commitment about a film on Langston Hughes's life by an English filmmaker [Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston] that we were very excited about being able to find on such short notice but it was taken away from us because they decided to hold out for the New York Film Festival which is certainly their prerogative."

The painstaking efforts of Susan Horowitz and John Lewis have paid off in media attention and positive feedback from "the gay community at large," beamed Horowitz. However, there is a downside, too. The New Festival, the sponsors of the event, have sent out via mail, 25,000 copies of the catalogue. Only 32 have been returned requesting that the recipient be removed from the mailing list because they felt that the catalogue--which others have praised for its graphic design--was "disgusting." Horowitz and her cohorts were dismayed to the point of shedding tears, despite the fact that this manifestation of gay self-hatred represented only "a very small percentage."  It became evident to Horowitz that 20 years after Stonewall, there was still "a long way to go" in bolstering gay pride. "That's why a film festival is essential, a community center is essential in every city of every type."


This slightly condensed article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News (June 9, 1989).

Prejudice And Pride In Manhattan

In celebration of June as "Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month," a series of events has been scheduled at various locations on the West Side of Manhattan.

Chief among them is a wonderfully mounted exhibit of photographs and memorabilia called "Prejudice and Pride: The New York City Lesbian and Gay Community, World War II--Present" that runs until June 30 [1988] at the Tweed Gallery*, 52 Chambers Street, behind City Hall.

This exhibit, which is sure to fill its spectators, particularly if they're gay or lesbian, with pride and awe, and at times fear and anger, is divided into 16 categories, ranging from the black-and-white photos of "Circles of Friends" ("Gay Beach at Riis Park, 1955" from the Frank Thompson collection, is one of them) to the glass-enclosed examples of "Homophobia" (newspaper headlines, handwritten hate letters, and weapons used to assault gay men, such as an assortment of knives.)

Two years in the making, and co-sponsored by four gay organizations, under the auspices of the mayor's office, "Prejudice and Pride" shows us a community emerging from the shadows of invisibility; refusing to be persecuted anymore, and announcing, with head held high, that "We are everywhere."

Although the curator, Allen Ellensweig, in the exhibit brochure, freely admits that the show can "make no claim to all-inclusiveness," I still wish there had been more representation of gays and lesbians of color, helping to destroy the myth that homosexuality is a "white disease," a notion quite prevalent in the black community.

Aside from this shortcoming, I see "Prejudice and Pride" as playing an important role in emphasizing the necessity of documenting and preserving gay history.

"If the world defines you," says the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, in an interview in American Poetry Review (March/April 1980), "it will define you to your disadvantage. So either I'm going to be defined by myself or not at all."

*Note: The Tweed Courthouse, where the Tweed Gallery was located, now houses the city's Department of Education.


This article was originally published in the West Side Spirit (June 20, 1988).