At a time when many African American ministers are still espousing an anti-queer rhetoric that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities are pimping the civil rights movement and history of the 1960’s, at the busy intersection of Ellis and Taylor Streets in San Francisco stands the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church whose ministry intersects faith and theology to the struggles of LGBTQ civil rights.
A longtime straight ally to the queer community, William's is part of a growing number of African American ministers whose church is geared toward inclusion, understanding, acceptance and appreciation of the spiritual gifts and fellowship of LGBTQ people.
“I want the church to be the church. And it seems to me, if it’s going to be the church, it’s got to stop turning its head away from poor folks. It got to stop turning its head away from black folks, brown folks, yellow folks, red folks, poor white folks. It’s got to stop turning its head away from gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender [folks]” William's stated in an interview for the PBS documentary This Far by Faith.
Never a man to turn away from controversy while many African American ministers are still tied in a knot concerning marriage equality for LGBTQ people, William's spoke up in the midst of the wedding frenzy in San Francisco in February 2004 and stated that the struggle reminded him of the civil rights movement during its heyday.
“I felt like I was back in Washington, D.C. at the 1963 March on Washington. I felt I could hear Martin Luther King talk about that dream.”
And King’s dreams was immediately actualized in 1964, just one year after William's arrival at Glide, where William's help create the Council on Religion and Homosexuality. In 1965 William's became the first minster to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies that when the Methodist Church intensified its ban against same-sex union in 1998 ruling that pastors performing them they would be tried and defrocked, Williams along with 150 Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist clergy in Northern California signed a declaration stating, “ I have officiated or would be willing to officiate at the religious marriage of a same-gender couple.”
Being at the forefront of transformation and tragedy in the LGBTQ community, Williams and the Glide community provided comfort and healing for the City of San Francisco in 1978 when gay activist City Supervisor Harvey Milk, nicknamed 'The Mayor of Castro Street' was murdered by fellow Supervisor Dan White in City Hall. During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s Glide was the first church in the U.S. to offer HIV testing after Sunday services, and in 1989 the Glide-Goodlett HIV/AIDS Project was created to offer free testing, education, management care, and counseling.
With a membership of over 11,000, Glide's “world church” opens its doors to all, regardless of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. And with Williams ministry emerging from those people at the bottom and at the fringes of life his theology is about the dispossessed, the disinherited, the disrespected and the damned.
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Williams received from GLAAD the Pioneer Award, an award that is presented to a pioneering individual, group or outlet that has made a significant contribution to the development of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, an inclusive media image award prior to the existence of the GLAAD Media Award.
Williams for well over four decades is a cleric who not only talks the talk but also walks the walk in the face of adversary, and have done it unwaveringly around in his campaign against homophobia.
Williams is one of those ministers who understands that one can be unabashedly Christian, unapologetically black, and also uncompromisingly queer - friendly while standing within the Black Church tradition of the prophetic social gospel of the civil rights movement.
Many still ask how can Williams intersected faith and theology to the struggles of LGBTQ people and stand with integrity within the tradition of the black civil rights movement.
William does it simply by looking at reality from an involved and committed faith that does justice by embracing the varied lived expressions of the lives of all of God's people.
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