US Archive Project Celebrates 25 Years of Preserving LGBTQ Religious History
The US-based LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN) marked its 25th anniversary on October 18, 2026, with an online gala called Sacred Rebels. The organization recognized religious figures who worked to enable LGBTQ people to participate in faith communities, the Washington Blade reports.
The official program names five principal honorees: the Rev. William Johnson, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, minister and theologian Irene Monroe, interfaith chaplain Chris Paige, and former Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) leader Nancy Wilson.
In 1972, Johnson became the first openly gay person ordained in the United Church of Christ (UCC), according to his biography in the archive. Kleinbaum led New York’s LGBTQ-focused Congregation Beit Simchat Torah for 32 years; she is now its senior rabbi emerita. Wilson led MCC from 2005 to 2016.
Organizers also recognized three members of a newer generation: Adalphie Johnson, pastor of the Community Church of Washington, DC; Samuel Ernest, founder of Homodoxy, a publisher of LGBTQ theology and literature; and Sapna Pandya, a community organizer whose work includes conducting inclusive wedding ceremonies rooted in Hindu rituals.
LGBTQ-RAN began in 2001 as a project of Chicago Theological Seminary. From 2008 to 2020, it operated within the Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion in Berkeley, becoming an independent charitable organization on July 1, 2020. As the project explains, it is a virtual archive: it helps individuals and communities place records in suitable repositories rather than collecting paper holdings in a building of its own.
Its website offers biographies of religious figures, audio interviews and transcripts, online exhibitions, and a catalog of archival collections identifying where they are held. These resources are also described in a review of the digital project published on the City University of New York’s Manifold platform.
The organization has also produced a practical archiving toolkit covering which personal papers to keep, how to prepare digital files and social media records, how to choose a repository, and privacy considerations. It is intended for individuals and groups who want to make their histories available to researchers.
Nancy Wilson celebrating communion at All God’s Children MCC in Minneapolis. Archival photograph from 2008. Photo: Jonathunder / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and resized.
Uránia previously reported on the addition of the GMHC HIV-service organization’s oral history archive to the New York Public Library’s special collections.
