Through my reporting on the Catholic Church over the past decade, I’ve seen firsthand how LGBT Catholics seek to balance sweeping societal acceptance with membership in an institution that often resists those changes. I’ve interviewed lesbian and gay teachers who have been fired when their marriages go public, a lay church worker who was surveilled and let go for being gay, and university students who have fought for the right to organize campus LGBT groups.

As a journalist, these stories have been fascinating to observe and a privilege to amplify. But as a gay Catholic, they’ve also been personally challenging.

People occasionally ask me how I manage this sometimes complicated identity, being part of an institution that condemns homosexuality. I usually try to change the subject because good answers have been elusive. But that began to change a few years ago when I learned about the Catholic Church’s complex role in the AIDS crisis. I’ve collected many of those stories in a new podcast, “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church.”

I’ve been Catholic my entire life, and gay for as long as I remember, but the Church’s role during the AIDS epidemic was a mystery to me. I didn’t learn any stories about the Catholic Church and AIDS in high school history and they were absent from my religious education classes. And even the six years I spent studying theology in college and graduate school were mostly void of them. But one evening, during dinner with a priest friend who told me about his own ministry in the 1980s, which included starting a support group for people affected by HIV, primarily gay men, I became intrigued. I wanted to learn more. After a few years of research that included dozens of interviews with LGBT Catholics who lived through the height of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the United States, I’ve learned that, in the 1980s and 90s, the Catholic Church was simultaneously a leader in health care for people with AIDS and an opponent to LGBT rights. I’ve met priests and nuns who cared for countless numbers of gay men in their final days, but I’ve also researched now-deceased bishops who fought publicly against basic non-discrimination laws. This paradox played out in inspiring and sometimes infuriating ways, and opinions on the Church’s response are as varied as the people I’ve met while reporting on this project.

Perhaps the most well-known story of AIDS and the Catholic Church is the clash between New York’s politically-powerful archbishop from 1984 to 2000, Cardinal John O’Connor, and members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. O’Connor was the undisputed leader of the U.S. Church who had a direct-access line to Pope John Paul II. Though active in interfaith work, fighting anti-Semitism, and advocating for labor rights, O’Connor was a strong social conservative, leading the Church’s opposition to the movement for gay civil rights and fighting against public health campaigns that advocated for the use of condoms to slow the spread of HIV and AIDS.

By the time ACT UP targeted the Church, the group had already made headlines with protests against Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, and politicians of both parties in order to bring attention to the plight of people with AIDS. Sensing that the Church’s public advocacy against condoms was hurting people of all backgrounds, ACT UP partnered with the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) to carry out a massive protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, held during advent 1989. The name of the action said it all: Stop the Church.

Plans for the action had been controversial even within ACT UP. To many, the protest was personal. 30 percent of ACT UP members in New York, according to religion scholar Anthony Petro in his book After the Wrath of God, had been raised Catholic. There was also fear the action would backfire, that disrupting a religious service was a step too far. After some internal debate, ACT UP decided to proceed with the plan, anticipating a large demonstration outside the cathedral.

The morning of the protest was frigid, but about 4,500 demonstrators braved the elements and made their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They marched down the sidewalks alongside Fifth Avenue, standing out with their colorful costumes and large placards. “Condoms Not Prayers,” read one. “Take One and Save Your Life,” read another, with strips of condoms attached to it. “Cardinal O’Connor won’t teach safe sex,” said another. One ACT UP member, Ray Navarro, dressed as Jesus, complete with white robes and a crown of thorns, shouting into a bullhorn, insisting the Church was not living up to the tradition’s ideals.

Some members of ACT UP thought a protest outside the cathedral would prove ineffective. Others had protested O’Connor regularly, including several gay Catholics who belonged to a group called Dignity, but their protests had not brought much change. So they decided to enter the cathedral for a silent “die in,” which they believed would get their message across more forcefully. When O’Connor began preaching, the protesters threw themselves to the floor, seeking to show that their target was the archbishop, not ordinary worshippers. But some ACT UP members sensed that the demonstration wasn’t getting its point across even though the die in became a spectacle, with police stepping in to arrest some of the demonstrators. ACT UP member Michael Petrellis believed the action was failing. He stood on his pew, blew a whistle, and screamed, “O’Connor, you’re killing us! You’re killing us—just stop it! Stop it!” With the organ playing loudly to drown out the mayhem, O’Connor returned to his chair, put his hand over his face, and let the police do their work. More than 100 people were arrested and taken out of the cathedral.

But the protest wasn’t over.

A few ACT UP members had tried to stay discreet during the mayhem, intent on making their presence known during a later, more sacred part of the Mass: the distribution of Holy Communion. Some of the protesters, former Catholics like Sean Strub, who recalls the protest in his memoir Body Counts, waited in line to receive the Eucharist. But instead of responding to the minister with the standard “amen” upon receiving the host, the activists spoke out in protest. Strub described the death of his partner from AIDS, while others mentioned the Church’s ban on condoms. But one protester pushed further, taking the host, which Catholics consider to be the body of Christ, and crushed it, letting the crumbs fall to the floor. The news of that desecration is what newspapers focused on the next day, causing some in ACT UP to question if the action had gone too far.

Countless AIDS activists were furious at the Catholic Church. Some former ACT UP members told me they targeted Cardinal O’Connor because he fought against safe-sex classes in public schools and lobbied against bills that would protect lesbians and gay men from job and housing discrimination. Many were former Catholics who were angry with the Church for its homophobia. But even gay Catholics who still practiced their faith felt besieged by Church leaders in Rome who issued a letter condemning homosexuality as the epidemic killed thousands of their partners and friends.

The conflict that played out at “Stop the Church” is perhaps emblematic of the most common understanding of how the Catholic Church interacted with the gay community in the early days of the AIDS crisis. It’s certainly the most dramatic.

But as I have discovered, away from the spotlight there are many more stories that buck conventional wisdom. Quietly, many priests and nuns managed to fight the stigma that surrounded HIV, becoming fierce advocates for people with AIDS. Gay and lesbian Catholics took on their Church while fighting for their survival, and demanded to be treated with respect. One such story involves a Midwestern nun who decided to help when others wouldn’t.

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Back in the 1980s, Carol Baltosiewich was a Catholic sister and a registered nurse at a hospital in the small Illinois city of Belleville, located about 30 minutes from St. Louis. As the decade neared its end, Sister Carol noticed an increasing number of young, gay men coming through her department. There wasn’t much she could do medically for these men, many of whom had HIV, some dying from complications related to AIDS. Still she wanted to help, and she sought to be a comforting presence to them at a time when they faced tremendous stigma. Despite her best efforts, she wasn’t able to connect with them. Her patients weren’t opening up to her. She knew she needed to learn more.

Sister Carol and another sister, Mary Ellen Rombach, knew that HIV and AIDS was a major crisis in New York. They reached out to contacts there who helped arrange for the pair to spend six months living and working in the city, far away from the familiarity of small-town Illinois. A former ICU and ER nurse, Sister Carol picked up the medical knowledge quickly. But she realized she knew nothing about the lives of gay men or drug users, the two groups who were most affected by HIV and AIDS. A gay couple she met at an AIDS-care training class offered to show her around and answer her questions. She accepted the offer, not wanting to return home with an incomplete education. Before she knew it, this Midwestern nun was visiting gay bars late into the night, fielding questions about gay sex on an AIDS hotline, and exploring seedy Times Square pickup spots. The goal was simple: if she wanted to connect with the community hit hardest by HIV and AIDS, the first thing she had to do was listen. But the clash of cultures was stark and it wasn’t easy for Sister Carol.

At one point, she considered cutting her immersion experience short and returning home. As she put it to me, she had “had it up to here with sex.” But she stuck it out, and continued to learn how she might be able to help back in Belleville. When she returned home, Carol reached out to gay leaders there and practiced what she had learned in New York – listening. Eventually, Sister Carol opened one of the first AIDS drop-in centers in her part of the country, becoming a hub for people with AIDS. That center, Bethany Place, is still open today.

Sister Carol’s story is compelling, but I learned it’s not entirely unique. Many other Catholics stepped up to help, even if there were bumps along the way.

During another reporting trip, this time to San Francisco, I spoke to a 55-year-old former property manager named Thomas Ellerby. He told me that as a Black, gay man with AIDS in the 1980s, there was “a lot of discrimination to go around.” But fellow Catholics at a small church in the Castro provided community and spiritual sustenance when others turned their backs. He recalled with fondness the drag-filled Christmas parties in the church basement after Mass.

Back in New York, I interviewed Dr. Ramon Torres. Dr. Torres ran the AIDS clinic at St. Vincent’s Hospital from 1990 to 2001, and during our conversation he railed against Church leaders who made his staff hide the condoms they illicitly passed out to patients. But he paused to say how much he admired Catholic clergy for devoting substantial resources to treating people with HIV and AIDS who were homeless and likely would have otherwise remained forgotten.

At that same hospital, which closed in 2010, Father William Hart McNichols worked as a young chaplain at the forefront of AIDS ministry when he decided to come out as gay. He was also an artist and drew images of a crucified Jesus with Kaposi sarcoma lesions covering his body, the words “leper, drug user, and homosexual” scratched onto a cross to draw attention to the plight of those with AIDS. He received reams of hate mail and endured professional setbacks. But he said it was worth it if it meant dying gay men trusted him fully with their deepest questions in their last days.

There is no silver lining to the AIDS crisis. The bigotry, suffering, and discrimination experienced by so many people living with HIV and dying from AIDS is a stain on this country’s history. Even more, the HIV and AIDS crisis in the United States is hardly a thing of the past. About 39,000 people will be diagnosed with HIV this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with people of color and people living in rural communities disproportionately affected. Recalling the history of people who stepped up in the face of intense social stigma to do the right thing is important as we continue to confront this modern plague.

As I talked to people who lived and worked through the early years of the epidemic, however, they helped put in context some of the challenges facing other queer Catholics today. Father McNichols, the gay priest I interviewed, told me that in the Church, even today, “gay people don’t have a green card.” But in reporting this story and meeting these pioneers, I discovered how hard LGBT believers have fought to be included within the Catholic Church. For them, and for countless others, it’s home.

Michael J. O’Loughlin, national correspondent for America Media, is the host of the podcast “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church”.

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Interested in more on this story? Check out episode 3 of the Revealer podcast: “The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, and Catholicism” featuring an interview with Michael J. O’Loughlin.