By Greg Hernandez for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Yes! Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
When Lisa Chilton, 65, leaves her studio apartment, she often encounters several young people hanging out near the entrance of the five-story senior housing complex she has called home since 2021. Because Chilton knows most of her young acquaintances’ faces but not all of their names, she’s nicknamed them. There’s the 19-year-old whom she has secretly named “Angry Boy,” and the young teen whom Chilton refers to as “Pretty Girl With Glasses.” And most days, there is the tall transgender youth who likes to talk to Chilton about her hair.
Chilton’s apartment building is located within the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Anita May Rosenstein campus, which is designed to facilitate intergenerational interaction. The bustling 180,000-square-foot Rosenstein campus brings LGBTQ youth, seniors, and housing together in a unified setting. It opened in 2019 to much fanfare and is the only large-scale intergenerational campus in the United States to specifically provide housing, services, and programs for LGBTQ adults aged 50 and older with low incomes, and for LGBTQ youth—primarily aged 18 to 24—experiencing homelessness.
“I look after them and they look after us,” says Chilton, who is a lesbian. “I live in a colorful building in a colorful neighborhood. We have every race, we have everyone across the sexual and gender continuum. It’s almost a microcosm of the world.”
The Campus also serves as the administrative headquarters for the 54-year-old Center, which is the largest LGBTQ organization in the world, with seven locations across the city. “Some of our seniors feel very isolated, and being able to interface with the youth, I think that’s pretty special,” explains Lisa Phillips, the Center’s director of youth services. “We had an intergenerational Thanksgiving event last year, and it was a line out the door. The seniors had a great time; the youth had a great time.”
In March, the Center hosted an opportunity fair for youth and seniors looking for employment; youth residents later performed a drag show during a senior dance hosted at the Ariadne Getty Foundation Senior Housing complex. Kiera Pollock, the Center’s director of senior services, says these facilitated intergenerational interactions help create intentional opportunities for connection between people who may be at vastly different points in their lives. “Our folks have different challenges in the community, and we have to kind of meet them where they are,” Pollock says. “I think many of our youth are trying to just figure out … how to survive, how to get back into school, how to stabilize their lives, how to get clean. So the way in which they interact with the older adults, we found, has to be kind of structured within a program that makes the most sense.”
On any given day, there are more than 4,000 youths (under age 24) living on the streets of Los Angeles, mostly in Hollywood, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority 2020 count. The percentage of unhoused youth who are LGBTQ can be as high as 40%, according to the Center. Before senior housing was available on the Rosenstein campus, the Center opened the doors of the Michaeljohn Horne & Thomas Eugene Jones Youth Housing building in 2021. The 25 apartments in the building are the first micro-units designed for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, according to the Center.
The campus also offers 92 beds available for youths—52 for the Transitional Living Project (TLP), where youths can stay for up to 24 months. Youths housed in the TLP work with Center staff to develop the skills they need to be able to live independently. The remaining 40 beds are for an emergency and crisis shelter. Youth residents have access to the Center’s full range of wraparound services and support, including case management, education, employment training and placement, health and mental health care, food and clothing assistance, counseling and support groups, and activities and events.
Carlos J. Mejia Vijil, 23, moved out of TLP in July, after living there for two years. He first arrived at the Center when he was just 19, after making a harrowing journey through Mexico from Honduras, where he feared for his life because he is gay. An immigrant-rights attorney connected him with the Center’s legal services department, which represents immigration and asylum clients from more than 70 countries—many of whom risk arrest or physical harm if they go back to their home countries because they are LGBTQ. “They helped me out with everything,” Mejia Vijil says of Center staff. “Everything I have, every opportunity is thanks to the Center.”
Mejia Vijil was initially placed in the Center’s emergency overnight shelter, then moved into TLP. He made the most of his opportunities by completing an English as a second language program held at nearby Hollywood High School, then enrolled in the culinary arts program on campus. “The culinary classes are in English, and I was just learning English. I tried real hard,” he says. “The older people were co-workers, and we talked like friends. They really respected who I am.” Mejia Vijil now works as a line cook at Osteria La Buca on trendy Melrose Avenue, and lives in his own apartment in Hollywood.
Connecting Across Age
The Center’s culinary arts and social services training programs are the most prominent examples of success in forging intergenerational connections in the classroom. The 100-hour social services vocational training program teaches younger and older students necessary skills to build a career in social services. Many graduates have since landed jobs at the Center, working in intake, street outreach, and peer support.
The 12-week, 300-hour culinary program focuses on developing basic culinary skills, producing 500 meals a day to be served to Center clients. Students also do a four-week internship at a local restaurant or hotel, and are then offered job placement assistance within the restaurant or hospitality sector. “I think what’s been pretty amazing [is] to be able to have youth and seniors enrolled in a culinary class together,” Phillips says. “Many of these young people have not had adults who are affirming of their identity. To see the seniors and a generation of older queer people, and to be able to support them and to share their experience from a different generation, has been really remarkable.”
Pollock says since the older students usually have career and employment experience, mentoring and an abundance of mutual support occur organically in the campus’s commercial kitchen, where classes and meal production take place. And despite the decades between them, the students’ experiences sometimes mirror each other when it comes to gender identity or sexual orientation.
“We had in our culinary program a youth who was transitioning and a senior who was transitioning,” Pollock recalls. “They just happen to both apply for the program at the same time. They were able to support each other and talk about some of the different issues around that together—how they were dressing and using different pronouns. And they talked together about how that transition is different for a younger person. That was amazing to watch.”
After a career in sales, 64-year-old Annetta Daniel, who is gay, hopes to work with food in a variety of ways, and so jumped at the opportunity to enroll in the culinary program. “They make you very aware that this is going to be the seniors and the youth mixed. I thought, that’s fantastic!” Daniel says. “I know I have a lot to bring to the table for them. I’ve been down the road that they’re headed down. And they’re going to bring a lot to the table for me.”
When Daniel first moved into the Getty building in 2021, “I had nothing but my clothes,” she says. Her partner of 23 years had died in 2017, leading to housing instability. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, which enabled her to secure temporary housing because she was high-risk due to her health, then she moved into her current home in the Getty building, where she has thrived. “I want to grow as tall as I can, I want to know as much as I can, and I want to go as many places as I can,” Daniel says. “I want to have as many friends as I can, and experiences, and this place offers that to me.”
The High Demand for Housing
The Center has a total of 202 units of affordable housing for seniors who are 62 or older. More than half of the units are in the Triangle Square Senior Apartments complex, located at the corner of Selma and Ivar in Hollywood—one mile away from the main campus. Of the estimated 65,000 LGBTQ seniors who call Los Angeles home, a majority (68%) live alone, as LGBTQ seniors nationwide are four times less likely to have children or grandchildren to care for them than their heterosexual counterparts, and are twice as likely to be single, notes Pollock.
Before the doors of the Center’s affordable senior housing units had even opened in late summer 2021, more than 2,000 applications had been submitted. Most of the residents were chosen by a lottery system, but 25 of the units are designated as permanent supportive housing units for seniors experiencing homelessness, whose rents are funded by L.A. county and city grants.
The Triangle Square complex has an outdoor swimming pool and garden while the Getty building has amenities including a community room, communal kitchen, pool table, and a fitness center. Residents have direct access to the Center’s Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Senior Center and its services that include counseling and support groups, case management, home-delivered meals, in-home care, and benefits assistance. Residents can also be connected to health and mental health care, and HIV support.
For Chilton, moving into the building has been “life-changing.” “It is a personal miracle,” she says. “It’s about having my own sanctuary. You don’t really understand that until you don’t have one. I had 10 years without [my] own sanctuary, of couch surfing and trying to make myself small, to not get in the way. Everything in my life has fallen into place, with a constant state of contentment. I don’t know that I ever felt this good emotionally, spiritually, and physically.”
John Maragioglio, an 82-year-old Air Force veteran, has also found community since moving into the Getty building in October 2021. He worked at the Center as an accountant in the 1980s, during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, and returned to the Center in 2021 when he needed a place to live. “I’ve met a lot of gay people in here,” says Maragioglio, who is also gay and attends a veterans social group every Wednesday. “There’s one guy who does a movie night twice a month downstairs. You go to lunch downstairs every day. It’s so nice to have that lunch.”
He has not connected with the youth the way Chilton and others have, but he’s usually happy to see them around. “I can see where some of them have a little attitude,” he says. “But you know, we have to realize all kids have attitudes. They’re just finding themselves.”
Together, Independently
Center leadership has been learning in real time how to best bring the seniors and youth together. Pollock says they’ve had to learn to manage their expectations and be mindful that youth who have recently experienced homelessness may also have suffered any number of traumas in their young lifetimes.
“I think their goals are different in intergenerational connection, and we had to learn that right away,” she says of the youth. “It’s really great that folks get to connect across our programs but can still go back home to live in their units, where maybe they’re hanging out with other 21-year-olds. Our [senior] folks are hanging out with other 70-year-olds, who maybe want it quiet after 9 p.m.”
But when the connections are made, they can be invaluable. “In the LGBT community, often people come out but they don’t have any members of their family who are queer,” Pollock says. “As a younger person, you don’t necessarily have another gay person in your direct life to mentor you. So the opportunity for some of our seniors to kind of mentor and support our youth, it’s really powerful in a community that doesn’t have that.”
Greg Hernandez wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.
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By Sara Youngblood Gregory for Yes! Magazine.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration
In December 2023, Pope Francis announced that Catholic priests may bless same-sex unions-as long as they do not resemble marriage.
Despite headlines heralding a radical shift, the declaration notes Church doctrine "remains firm" on its definition of holy matrimony as the exclusive province of heterosexuals. One month prior, the Vatican also announced that transgender people can be baptized.
Though inclusive steps forward at first glance, both announcements sidestepped any tangible commitment to LGBTQ people. The documents were stereotypically vague: Both blessings and baptisms are permitted only if they carry no risk of public "scandal" or "disorientation" among the faithful, terms that are not defined in the documents.
In short, the Vatican's "progressive" moves perpetuate a long-standing trend within Christianity, where LGBTQ Christians are expected to be grateful for the table scraps of a well-fed faith-or at least feel sated with the rancid "hate the sin, love the sinner" ethos popular across Christian denominations.
"It's no question that religion globally has been used as a weapon, especially against LGBTQIA persons," says teaching pastor and theologian Roberto Che Espinoza, Ph.D. "But religion actually is rooted in the practice of re-connection or binding together. The Latin root for the English word religion is religio," a noun referring to an obligation, bond, or reverence.
And there is no shortage of LGBTQ people of faith. A 2020 study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that nearly half the country's LGBTQ population-5.3 million people-self-identified as a person of faith.
So can queer people still hungry for spiritual connection-especially those who revere Christian traditions-find religious communities that recognize queerness as a blessing, rather than a sin? An emerging group of queer and trans faith leaders, activists, on-the-ground organizers, and people who simply refuse to give up their faith are already answering that call, carving out affirming faith traditions, building tools to remediate religious harm, and proving that it's possible to build a queer church.
Sanctified Discrimination
For many LGBTQ people, disconnection is a defining element of their faith, with a third of religious LGBTQ adults reporting conflicts between their faith and identity in a 2013 Pew Research Center study. Many experience rejection for the first time via their faith communities, or at least learn that their identities are inherently dirty or impure. As of 2018, an estimated 700,000 people have undergone conversion therapy in the United States, a practice involving forcibly "changing" someone's gender or sexual identity. Though widely discredited-and illegal to subject minors to in 22 states-conversion therapy is still used in some religious settings. According to research from the Williams Institute, 81% of people who underwent conversion therapy did so at the hands of a religious leader.
Even for those who escaped the direct impacts of religious trauma, current U.S. politics are deeply intertwined with weaponized Christianity, making it nearly impossible to emerge unharmed as an LGBTQ person-personally, politically, or spiritually. The Republican party, which has long-standing ties to the Religious Right, is increasingly overt in its embrace of Christian nationalism-the belief that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian country. According to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of self-identified Republicans currently sympathize with or explicitly adhere to Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism goes beyond the desire to create a Christian theocracy. It's about creating a country where certain people are privileged and others-LGBTQ people, people of color, and those seeking reproductive freedom-are punished. "When we say Christian nationalism, it's white Christian nationalism," says Maureen O'Leary, director of field and organizing at Interfaith Alliance, a religious freedom and civil rights advocacy network. "It's white Protestant Christians that are being elevated."
That exclusionary ethos can be found throughout the modern Republican party, which is, not coincidentally, the beating heart behind much of the anti-LGBTQ legislation currently circulating. In 2023, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced nationwide, more than any other year on record, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Those bills included the implementation of Florida's high-profile "Don't Say Gay" policy, which restricts classroom discussions about sexuality and gender identity in public schools. Dozens of copycat bills have emerged since the Florida Board of Education approved the initial policy in 2022.
Florida, North Dakota, Missouri, Tennessee, and North Carolina all have restrictions on gender-affirming health care for minors, and at least five states are currently targeting gender-affirming health care for both minors and adults. Meanwhile, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a shadowy, right-wing legal organization, is using its deep pockets, allegiance to Christian nationalism, and wide reach to roll back civil rights in the courts. ADF is the legal powerhouse behind lightning-rod Supreme Court cases such as 303 Creative, Inc v. Elenis, where a self-proclaimed Christian website designer won the right to refuse to serve same-sex couples, in defiance of Colorado's nondiscrimination law, as well as the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Taken together, these attacks target the rights and dignities of queer, and especially trans, people on all fronts: restricting access to health care, public spaces like bathrooms, and education.
This discrimination is often legitimized through the guise of Christian morality and language. In practice, this frequently looks like portraying LGBTQ people, and progressive values more generally, as a threat to a Christian way of life. At the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, former president Donald Trump told the audience: "School prayer is banned, but drag shows are allowed to permeate the whole place. You can't teach the Bible, but you can teach children that America is evil and that men are able to get pregnant."
Meanwhile, Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis used the words of Jesus Christ to woo potential voters and call for a "war on woke"-or more accurately, a war on LGBTQ rights, diversity and equity initiatives, reproductive and voting rights, critical race theory, and education. While speaking to a group of roughly 10,000 evangelical college students in April 2023, DeSantis said, "Yes, the truth will set you free. Because woke represents a war on truth, we must wage a war on woke."
As these right-wing politicians demonstrate, "Christian nationalism is a political ideology," says Interfaith Alliance's O'Leary. "It's not a religious tradition." But the conflation of the two mean that many queer and trans folks feel exiled from their faith. A truly affirming church must do more than skirt extremism or offer conditional shelter for LGBTQ people. It must imagine a God, a faith, and a tradition that engages directly with justice and queerness.
Sacred and Strange
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a Christian minister, movement organizer, and professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and Harvard Divinity School, reasons that a God who disregards the most vulnerable in service of the most powerful is not a God who will inspire a congregation to change a world that already reproduces cycles of dominance and dispossession. "An affirming, radically hospitable, justice-oriented congregation has to reject an idea of God that reinforces the very thing that causes exclusion and non-affirmation and injustice in our world," Rev. Naomi says. "The conceptualization of God in an affirming, justice-seeking space has to be, first of all, radically inclusive."
The Rev. M Jade Kaiser envisions God, and spiritual life more broadly, as something literally of the flesh: bodily, pleasure oriented, and inseparable from material liberation. In 2017, Rev. Kaiser and Rev. Anna Blaedel co-founded enfleshed, a spiritual community that publishes resources for collective liberation, including queer liturgies, a podcast on trans spirituality, and poems and anthologies exploring ritual, blessings, and identity.
"Our greatest gifts to the world will not come through acceptance from dominant systems or those constructions of 'God,' but in recognizing how sacred it is to be strange," says Rev. Kaiser. "There is so much God in how we create chosen family, love queerly, resist compulsory gendering, and collectively organize with pride that counters shame."
Sacred texts and traditions, too, are ripe for reconceptualization. Theologian Espinoza, for instance, believes creating radically inclusive faith practices requires more than just reconciling a faith tradition with sexuality. It also invites us to identify where these traditions are already queer via destabilized, counter-hegemonic, and counter-normative narratives. "Queerness is wild and feral," says Espinoza. "[It] is an undomesticable animal that we have not yet been able to contain or domesticate out of the tradition."
Traditions like communion, for example, have the potential for queerness, Espinoza explains. Christians all over the world consume the actual or symbolic body and blood of Christ, and in so doing, engage with the (trans)formative potential of the body. Recently, one of Espinoza's students risked their clergy credentials by serving communion in drag. "The student embodied God by feeding people bread and wine in drag," Espinoza recounts. "[It was] a wonderful reminder that we are bound by our materiality, but when we imagine another possible world, shit gets real!"
For others, revisiting religious texts also means questioning-and reimagining-what is considered sacred. For Della V. Mosley, a healing arts practitioner and counseling psychologist raised in a Black Baptist church in Illinois, exploring their connection to faith meant finding truth in alternative systems and spiritual homes. "For me, that path led to Black feminism, justice and liberation spaces, and a deep connection with nature," says Mosley. "These spiritual homes resonate more closely with who I am, the realities of the world today, and who I aspire to be." Recently, Mosley used Black feminist writings as sacred texts during a Sunday service at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, North Carolina.
Some spaces imagine spirituality outside of specific religious affiliation or institutions altogether. At The Greenhouse, a grief and healing sanctuary for Black, Indigenous, and other students of color at Harvard, the point isn't to emulate or become a religious institution. Instead, co-founder Frances S. Lee, a pastor's kid who is now an ex-evangelical, says The Greenhouse fosters spiritual leadership and moral boldness for those who are barred from, or simply uninterested in, traditional religious authority.
"The Greenhouse invites us to access emotional safety, wonder, and belonging outside of religious institutions," says Lee. "At the foundational level, it is a refuge of tenderness, laughter, and meaningful silence." The community meets twice monthly and offers dinner, ritualized reflection, grounding exercises, and emotional release. Like Mosley and Espinoza, Lee makes spaces for queer and trans interpretations of Christianity, while also incorporating new sacred texts and traditions. They've taught trans spirituality and shape-shifting bodily presentations in their Christian classes and preached with Audre Lorde's 1978 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power."
Taken together, these three tools-the reconceptualization of God, the queering of sacred texts and traditions, and the incorporation of alternate practices-form a sort of holy trinity on which a queer church may thrive. And much like queerness, this church, this connection with the divine, can happen anywhere: on a subway ride, in the pews, in passionate debate with your pastor. It may happen with music, in the silence of nature, in scripture, in a glance. It can happen while reading radical trans scholarship or Black feminist poetry. Queer church might look like a dance floor, a kiss, good sex. It may be reclaiming a saint or simply imagining Jesus at a gay bar.
New Sacred Spaces
Spiritual organizer Bex Mui's queer church began on Instagram. Raised Roman Catholic by her Polish mother and introduced to Buddhist principles by her Chinese father, Mui left the church at 20, in large part due to her burgeoning queerness and growing critical eye toward religion. To manage her grief, Mui threw herself into LGBTQ activism.
"As a professional speaker and trainer, I delivered 'the Word' of gender terminology and the rituals of creating safe spaces," says Mui, who works as an LGBTQ equity consultant. But by 2020, Mui was burnt out. She knew she needed to reconnect with not only her spirituality but with other queer people as well.
Beginning in January 2021, Mui got on Instagram Live every Monday to share prayers, spells, and astrology readings and use tarot as a tool for reflection, a ritual she called Queer Church. While discussing the power of a lunar eclipse in October 2023, Mui recontextualized interactions between Mary Magdalene and the newly risen Christ. "He's often interpreted as saying, 'Don't touch me,' a slut-shamey interpretation perpetuating the stereotype that [Magdalene] was dirty and unworthy of his love and attention," says Mui. "In reality and the truer Greek translation, he says, 'Don't cling to me.'" From Mui's perspective, in that moment, both the gospel and the eclipse were inviting people to let go of what is ready to leave.
Eventually, Queer Church expanded to become House of Our Queer, a sex-positive and people-of-color-centered community for spiritual exploration and well-being. House of Our Queer offers spaces and tools for spirituality, including workshops, rituals, and in-person community gatherings. And the community has responded. Mui says around 200 people tune in to Queer Church every week, and as many as 500 people attend the monthly Queer Magic Dance Party in Oakland, California.
The focus of both Queer Church and House of Our Queer is to support people who were raised religious, or feel curious about spirituality, and affirm that queerness isn't just part of religion but a blessing all its own. Rather than a set religious doctrine or denomination, Mui uses reclamation techniques-like adapting a Catholic prayer into a queer activist spell or honoring saints like Mary Magdalene-to affirm queerness and incorporate her religious upbringing.
"Whether I like it or not, I was raised Catholic, and that's a part of my culture. Reclaiming [my spirituality] started for me when I realized that I was actually putting a lot of effort into keeping that door shut," says Mui. "Queer Church is needed because queer people are human, and we need, just like everyone else, a place to gather for celebrations, shared ways to mark the passing of time, and places to turn to when we're in pain."
Sara Youngblood Gregory wrote this article for Yes! Magazine.
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