Gay Marielitos and the Gay Church: The Metropolitan Community Church and the Resettlement of Gay Cuban Refugees During the Mariel Boatlift

Lynne Gerber, Independent Scholar
Siri Colom, Worcester State University

The 1980 Mariel boatlift saw 125,000 Cubans leave the island for the U.S., including many gays and lesbians who came as refuges. Some were pushed out by Castro in his effort to fill the departing vessels with those deemed undesirable. Others were pulled by the temporary opportunity to leave a repressive state. They arrived to find themselves in overlapping binds. Legally they inhabited a liminal space, unable to qualify for citizenship because of their sexual orientation yet unable to be deported back to a Communist country. Socially they were marginalized within government-sponsored refugee camps, subject to harassment by fellow refugees and by guards. Neither the state nor church-based refugee resettlement programs knew how to address their needs. The Carter administration turned to an unlikely partner for help: the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), a fledging, gay-identified, largely white, Christian denomination. UFMCC had no experience in refugee relief, but it had a congregational network of gay Americans willing to host refugees in gay-affirming contexts. Resettlement gave the church an opportunity to build its relationships with both mainline churches and state institutions while establishing its place in the rapidly developing field of gay national leadership. This paper will tell the story of the UFMCC’s efforts at relocating gay Cuban refugees in cities around the county and how those efforts played out in San Francisco, the largest resettlement site. It will analyze the intersections of religion, sexuality, race, nationalism, and gender at play in this effort and the effects of this unusual collaboration. It will argue that gay Cuban refugee resettlement provided an opportunity for a developing gay civic society to demonstrate its strength through largesse rather than protest. The case, we argue, is an important precursor to the gay community’s response to AIDS and the development of homonationalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 143. Organizing for Change: Ecumenism, Inclusion and Morality