This is the second voice to speak in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to contribute to this series between now and the end of June.

Thank you for your website and work. 

I wanted to share my thoughts. This probably isn’t the type of submission you are looking for, but this is something I’ve wanted to share for a long time and I simply felt moved to write to you after seeing your post about Stonewall. I’m not a professional writer. I’m certainly no theologian. I’m not even much of a deep thinker. I’m a mother who loves my intersex child. I’m Orthodox but struggling to remain in a Church that excludes LGBTQI+ people.  

My child did not go through puberty like other children. When it became clear that my child was not just a “late bloomer” we sought medical advice. Many tests and scans later we discovered that my child has an intersex condition. She has XY chromosomes. Her gonads are part ovary and part testes—ovotestes. She has internal structures that are the size, shape, and position of fallopian tubes but consist of the tissue that forms vas deferens. She has a uterus, and her external genitalia have a typically female appearance. Her body does not produce eggs or sperm. Her body does not make either estrogen or testosterone. Without medical hormone therapy she would have a perpetual pre-pubertal physical appearance.  Read More

This marks the first voice to speak in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge the hierarchs and pastors of the Orthodox Church to listen reflectively and prayerfully to this and the voices that follow in this series.

Within the context of an online discussion on chastity in the lives of gay Christians in the old Homosexuality and Christianity Yahoo! group, Eric Iliff of blessed memory sent this email dated Sunday, December 3, 2006, 6:09 a.m. This is probably his last public statement on same-sex love prior to his death three months later. We publish it with no corrections, exactly as he sent it. 

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Stonewall Inn. Greenwich Village. Summer 1969.

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Widely regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement, more accurately the police raid at the Stonewall Inn and the ensuing protests represent a critical watershed in the homosexual liberation movement which originated a hundred years before, in 1860s Germany, and which even went on to influence Russian Orthodox theology in the early 20th century. Each year around the world, Gay Pride is usually scheduled to coincide as closely as possible with this anniversary. 

Orthodoxy in Dialogue proposes to host a virtual listening tour between now and the end of June. If you, or your child, or your loved one identifies anywhere along the LGBTQ spectrum, now is your chance to have your say and to let the bishops and parish priests of the Orthodox Church hear whatever you would like to tell them. Read More

Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv and President Volodymyr Zelensky. St. Michael’s Gold-Domed Monastery. April 2019.

In my recent contribution to the Kyiv Post’s “Ukrainian Voices from Abroad: Advice for Zelenskiy” series, I urged the new President to support the stability of the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) while also ensuring the legal status of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine headed by Metropolitan Onuphrius—provided that any and all evidence of the latter’s complicity with the Kremlin to undermine Ukraine’s national security and interests be swiftly investigated.

As Halya Coynash reported in February 2018 and scholar Dmitry Adamsky sets forth in his chillingly titled Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy—to cite but two testimonies among many—there can be no doubt that the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate work hand in glove to advance Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical agenda in Ukraine and around the globe. Jonathan Luxmoore has reported that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow went so far as to ridicule the idea of independent Ukrainian nationhood as a Uniate (Greek-Catholic) invention in his remarks to Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople when they met at the Phanar last August. Read More