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The following excerpt comes from William Stell’s Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity (Copyright 2026 by Princeton University Press, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission). The book explores gay evangelical activists, what they set out to achieve, what they accomplished, and how broader evangelical communities responded.

This excerpt comes from the book’s Introduction.

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This is a history of something that a lot of people assume did not exist.

Even trickier, it is a history of something that a lot of people say cannot exist. To them, the title of this book is no mere novelty: it is an affront. Many evangelicals today are offended by the implication that gay activism had a place within their movement. Meanwhile, many LGBTQ people are offended by the implication that some evangelicals might have been something other than absolute enemies.

Even those who are not offended may still be suspicious. I have often seen it in their faces when I have mentioned my research for this book—whether they would call themselves religious or secular, whether they move within or well beyond scholarly circles. Their questions and comments confirmed what their faces already told me. Many assumed that the subjects of this book were celibate. They were not. Many assumed that they were not connected to any well-known evangelical institutions. They were. Many assumed that “these … um … evangelical GAY activists, you said?” could not possibly have made a significant impact on evangelicalism, could not possibly have posed any perceivable threat to evangelical leaders. They did.

My rather simple response to offended evangelicals (including more than a few scholars) is that their own predecessors testify against them: numerous antigay evangelical leaders in the late 1970s anxiously attacked these people who, according to antigay evangelicals today, do not and cannot exist.

Take Kenneth Gangel, for example. Born in a New Jersey slum in 1935, not long after his father had immigrated from Austria and his mother from Switzerland, Kenn would say that he was saved by evangelicalism in more ways than one. After his abusive father left town when Kenn was ten years old, his mother could not provide for him, and so she sent him to Stony Brook School on Long Island. The boarding school’s headmaster, Frank E. Gaebelein, would soon become a titan of evangelicalism. Thanks to Gaebelein’s mentorship, Gangel would go on to study at, teach for, and preside over multiple evangelical schools, including Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago and Dallas Theological Seminary. In his spare time, Gangel authored dozens of books and Bible studies for evangelical presses. In 1977, while working as the president of Miami Christian College, he made room in his schedule to write a book called The Gospel and the Gay.

At the time, just beyond Gangel’s campus in Miami, Anita Bryant was spearheading the Save Our Children campaign. A winner of the Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant, singer with two dozen albums to her name, and author of a half dozen books with an evangelical press, Bryant became one of the most (in)famous people in the nation when, in early 1977, she rallied opposition to Miami’s new gay rights ordinance and sparked similar antigay initiatives outside of Florida. Given Gangel’s religious affiliation and local context, one might assume that The Gospel and the Gay was motivated by and mirrored the Save Our Children campaign. But this was not so. While Gangel generally supported Bryant’s cause, his own concerns about “the gay” were of a different kind. His book did not focus on gay teachers, as Save Our Children did, nor did it pay all that much attention to the queer liberation movement at large. Instead, Gangel aimed his animus at Christian leaders, including and especially a man named Dr. Ralph Blair. According to Gangel, Blair was “more dangerous to the whole matter of the gay problem in Western culture today than the drag queens who march through the streets of San Francisco.” What made this man so dangerous? In part, he was one of “the so-called ‘gay evangelicals.’”

Gangel was not alone. The Gospel and the Gay was one of eight books about homosexuality published by major evangelical presses in 1978 (compared to four such books in 1977 and zero in 1976). All eight of these books named and combatted the efforts of at least one of the evangelical gay activists featured in this book. Moreover, a few of those eight books expressed more concern with gay activism in their authors’ own churches than with gay activism in the wider society. Though small in number, then, these activists had an outsized impact—so much so that some journalists and scholars of religion in the late 1970s wondered how “the so-called ‘gay evangelicals’” might shape the future of evangelicalism.

Who were these evangelical gay activists? Born Again Queer concentrates on four individuals: Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), a largely LGBTQ denomination with nearly 150 congregations in the United States and three dozen congregations in other countries by the early 1980s; Dr. Ralph Blair, founder of a religious organization engaged in gay advocacy called Evangelicals Concerned, with several hundred members spanning the United States; and Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and Letha Dawson Scanzoni, leaders in the evangelical feminist movement and coauthors of the groundbreaking book Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View (1978).

Together, these four individuals shepherded an evangelical gay activist network. Their shared task was to persuade Christians in the United States that gay and lesbian Christians should be welcomed as equal members of their churches, which entailed endorsing their partnerships and allowing them to pursue ordained ministry. Throughout the book, I refer to this view as “gay-affirming” and to the views of its opponents as “antigay.” Evangelical gay activists did not offer an unconditional affirmation of gay sexuality, however. They preferred to argue that homosexuality was morally neutral—that is, like heterosexuality, it could be practiced in virtuous or sinful ways. Like other evangelicals, they elevated lifelong, monogamous unions as the proper context for sexual activity, whatever the genders involved.

All four of these individuals claimed the label “evangelical,” and all four spent ample time in congregations and other communities that claimed that label. All four had in common an evangelical (and more specifically Fundamentalist) college education. All but one had partnered extensively with major evangelical institutions: writing books for evangelical presses and articles for evangelical periodicals, leading a chapter of a nationwide evangelical campus ministry, working on an evangelical Bible translation project, speaking at the Evangelical Theological Society. Because of these experiences, members of this evangelical gay activist network made characteristically evangelical appeals to “the Gospel,” the Bible, sexual ethics, gender norms, and more.

All four individuals were white, and all except Letha Scanzoni identified as gay or lesbian. All four grew up either poor or middle class. Troy Perry grew up in the Florida panhandle and settled in Los Angeles. Ralph Blair grew up in Ohio’s Rust Belt and settled in New York City. Letha Scanzoni grew up in rural Pennsylvania and settled in Bloomington, Indiana. Virginia Mollenkott grew up in Philadelphia and settled in New Jersey. The four of them exchanged letters, visited each other’s homes, collaborated on various projects, endorsed each other’s writings, served on each other’s boards, and delivered speeches at each other’s events. More recently, two of them spoke at another’s funeral.

As these evangelical gay activists were making inroads, prominent antigay evangelicals labored to deny and distort the considerable resemblances they shared with them. In time, those denials and distortions not only buried the history of evangelical gay activism but rendered the term itself, “evangelical gay activism,” illegible. This book recovers that history and analyzes the construction of that illegibility. In the process, Born Again Queer demonstrates that evangelical positions on homosexuality in the 1970s and 1980s were contested and shifting, such that evangelicalism’s antigay majority was much less dominant and much more vulnerable than both academic and popular accounts have acknowledged.

That antigay majority became especially vulnerable as evangelical gay activism peaked in the late 1970s. At the very same time, however, broader developments began to fuel the decline of this activist network’s efforts. Organizations associated with the Christian Right contributed to a much-discussed antigay turn within evangelicalism and throughout the nation. Less discussed is the rise of the ex-gay movement, which emerged in the late 1970s and enjoyed the embrace of many evangelical leaders by the early 1980s (and many more by the 1990s). When touting the ex-gay movement’s purported successes, evangelicals could safely ignore or else easily dismiss the arguments of evangelical gay activists. In addition, the AIDS epidemic began decimating gay communities in the early 1980s, and some evangelical gay activists had little time for anything other than responding to the decimation. Moreover, as evangelical leaders publicly associated AIDS with the sinfulness of homosexuality, evangelical communities became even less receptive to the pleas of evangelical gay activists. Lastly, tensions and divisions among the leaders of evangelical gay activism also fueled the decline. Given these factors, hindsight suggests that their cause stood little chance of thriving beyond the 1970s. And yet, the modest victories they won, and the fears they aroused, have much to teach us.

William Stell is the author of Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity (Princeton University Press, 2026).

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 70 of The Revealer podcast: “Evangelicals and Queer Activism.”