Unsung Hero

We have a lot of gay heroes, and heroines. Everyone from Harvey Milk to Frank Kameny, Del Martin to Ellen Degeneres, and on and on, so I was honestly shocked to find a pioneer in the LGBT rights movement that I'd never known.


James Stoll. Yes, I know. Who?

Well, it seems as though James Stoll was hugely responsible for introducing American churchgoers to LGBT rights, and for those of us who continue to work toward LGBT equality, he needs to be remembered as a hero. See, the Reverend James Stoll, a Unitarian Universalist who died in 1994, was one of the first openly gay ministers in America, and, as such, led difficult life, with his demons following him everywhere.

After becoming ordained, Stoll became pastor at a church in Kennewick, Washington from 1962 until 1969. He eventually left that church--official documents indicate that he was asked to resign--Stoll returned to the Bay Area.

Stoll took a flat in the Eureka Valley neighborhood of San Francisco with three men, Leland Bond-Upson, and two others that Bond-Upson remembers as Nick, a cabinet-maker, and Peter, a communist revolutionary. In September 1969, Stoll, and his roommates drove to the La Foret conference center in Colorado to attend a convention of about 100 college-age Unitarians.

To be fair, James Stoll was not the first openly gay minister in America. That honor goes to the Reverend Troy Perry, who, in 1968, founded the Metropolitan Community Churches in Los Angeles. And while MCC has straight members, the church has specialized in ministry to the LGBT community.
Leland Bond-Upson: 

“On the second or third night of the conference, after dinner, Jim got up to speak. He told us that he’d been doing a lot of hard thinking that summer. Jim told us he could no longer live a lie. He’d been hiding his nature--his true self--from everyone except his closest friends. ‘If the revolution we’re in means anything,’ he said, ‘it means we have the right to be ourselves, without shame or fear.’ Then he told us he was gay, and had always been gay, and it wasn’t a choice, and he wasn’t ashamed anymore and that he wasn’t going to hide it anymore, and from now on he was going to be himself in public."

But James Stoll was the first openly gay minister of an established denomination, albeit a denomination deemed an extremely liberal one. As the minister, he brought gay rights to the heterosexual Christian world. Over the course of the next year, Stoll wrote articles about LGBT rights, and delivered guest sermons at several churches. In July 1970, at their general assembly in Seattle, Unitarians passed a resolution condemning discrimination against homosexuals and bisexuals. Other churches soon liberalized, too.

In 1972, for example, the United Church of Christ ordained an openly gay man, and today there are openly gay Episcopal priests and Lutheran ministers. But James Stoll was one of the first, and, as such, he deserves a place in our history. Even with the demons that followed him from the church.

It seems that James Stoll never returned to the ministry, after pioneering such an important change in American Christianity. In fact, he was not allowed to return to the ministry. According to letters kept at Harvard, sent in 1970 between church members and Unitarian officials, James Stoll had been suspected of drug use and of inappropriate sexual advances toward young people in the Kennewick congregation. The circumstances of that departure made it impossible for him to regain the pulpit.

So, James Stroll moved on, working in various fields. He worked as a substance abuse counselor, started a hospice on Maui, and served as secretary of the San Francisco chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU].
Leland Bond-Upson: 

“He died on December 8, 1994, a little short of age 59. He died not of AIDS, but of worn-out heart and lungs. He was never able to lose much weight, nor quit smoking. When it was known he was dying, a stream of friends came to say goodbye. Friends arrived from the ACLU, from inner-city social services, from Hunters Point, from drug abuse treatment centers, from the ministry. Yet despite all this matchmaking, and though his romantic side often found expression, Jim never had for long the all-embracing love he longed for.”

As an article in the New York Times put it, James "Stoll left no descendants, but he had many heirs." Of which, I am one. And so, in fact, are all of us.

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