The Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Collection
In the mid-1970’s, while still closeted personally, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott [1932-2020] began to advocate at church conferences on behalf of lesbian and gay Christians. In 1978, with Letha Dawson Scanzoni, she published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, which became the spearhead volume of Harper San Francisco’s collection of LGBT texts. The book, which won an Integrity award for “extraordinary support of the gay Christian movement,” was revised and vastly expanded in 1994.
Mollenkott served as Board Member for various LGBT-friendly organizations, including Evangelicals Concerned, The Center for Sexuality and Religion, and Kirkridge Retreat Center, where for many years has led several GLBT events annually. She was a founding member of the LGBT-inclusive Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus.
Among her twelve books, the most explicitly lesbian is Sensuous Spirituality: Out From Fundamentalism, although lesbians have also enjoyed The Divine Feminine: Biblical Imagery of God as Female. Her most recent and most radical work, Omnigender: A TransReligious Approach, won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award in the bisexual/transgender category.
CLGS is honored indeed to be the recipient of the archival collection of this pioneering scholar, activist, and religious leader. This collection contains correspondence, manuscripts, published articles, sermons, photographs, diaries, audio tapes, videotapes, and ephemera spanning the years 1963 – 2020.
(Biographical data comes from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network Profile Gallery.)