Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los AngelesMain MenuResearch of the DecadesResearch1960s Illustration DevelopmentIllustration DevelopmentPlaylists of the DecadesPlaylistssparcinla.org185fc5b2219f38c7b63f42d87efaf997127ba4fcGreat Wall Institute - Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC)
1media/First Performed Gay Marriage_thumb.jpeg2022-07-16T00:40:50+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a491966 First public same-sex marriage (by the Metropolitan Community Churches’s Rev. Troy Perry, 1968)2LA's gay history is everywhere, from the endangered former nightclub The Factory to Griffith Park. But in honor of today's landmark Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, why not go and take a look at a particularly special site—this modest Huntington Park house, described by TIME magazine as the house where the first public gay marriage ceremony took place back in 1968. At the time, the house was the location of the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles; the religious organization, founded in October of that year by Reverend Troy D. Perry, was open to LGBT members, as explained on MCC's website. The first MCC service had 12 attendees. In December 1968, the reverend performed the ceremony for two men (it was, of course, not legally binding then). More marriages followed. In March 1969, the reverend oversaw the marriage of two women; their wedding would go on, says an MCC historian, to be "the basis for the world's first lawsuit seeking recognition of same-gender marriage." (Some sources cite this union as the first same-sex marriage, but agree that whichever couple was first, it was Rev. Perry who officiated.)media/First Performed Gay Marriage.jpegplain2022-10-06T21:00:22+00:001966Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49
1media/Reverend Troy Perry_thumb.jpeg2022-07-15T19:42:51+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a491968 LGBTQ-inclusive Metropolitan Community Church founded by Reverend Troy Perry1Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC), in full Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, worldwide Protestant denomination founded in 1968 and focusing its outreach endeavors on persons who identify themselves as homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and queer Christians.media/Reverend Troy Perry.jpegplain2022-07-15T19:42:51+00:001968Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49
1media/Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 1.59.39 PM_thumb.png2023-03-17T21:01:16+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a491972 - Reverend Troy Perry - Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue:1Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: In December 1968, just two months after MCC’s first meeting in his living room, Perry performed what Time magazine declared the first public same-sex wedding in the U.S. “I always believed in marriage. I was one of those strange gay men who talked about marriage,” Perry told me through laughter. “And marriage was just very, very important to me, and so all my life, I fought for that.” Marriage was just one theater of operations for Perry and MCC. “I used to say, years ago,” Perry said, “the one thing I had to fight for, if I was not going to fight for anything else—of course, I fought for everything—was the rights of my members to have a job. People have to work, and that includes my community, too.” That fight took different forms: picketing in 1969 in front of States Steamship Co. offices when it fired a man for coming out, and in 1977, when Perry told reporters from the steps of downtown LA’s Federal Building that he intended to fast there publicly “until death if necessary,” in order to raise $100,000 to fight the Briggs Initiative, a proposed amendment to the state’s education code that would ban gay and lesbian California teachers from working in the state’s public schools.media/Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 1.59.39 PM.pngplain2023-03-17T21:01:16+00:001972Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49
1media/Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 1.43.07 PM_thumb.png2023-03-17T20:59:04+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a491973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church2The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”media/Screen Shot 2023-03-17 at 1.43.07 PM.pngplain2023-03-27T22:49:09+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49