ABSTRACT
This chapter unpacks a theology based on ethnographic research of 102+ primary interviews of gay women who identified gay feelings and acted on them pre-Stonewall. Research shows that gay women's bars pre-Stonewall could be a place of deep community and knowing. There has been however no universal moment when homosexuals became people who deserved civil rights within the church, rather than people who were not only actively sinning but were also, because of the way they lived, sinners; that is, they were nouns instead of verbs. With the author's study, as the 1973 study of psychology ultimately did for homosexuals, the chapter shows that homosexuals were not necessarily irreligious when they congregated in bars, but that the bars themselves became akin to churches for a new urban community, that of the homosexual. Theelogy is the basic relation between the gay woman self and her world, as Keller speaks to in From a Broken Web.
