The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS) was incorporated as a private nonsectarian graduate School in San Francisco in 1976. The president was (and still is) Dr. Ted McIlvenna, a United Methodist pastor. (IASHS was granted full accreditation by the state of California in 1987.) As noted earlier, the IASHS grew out of a cooperative venture of the Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Presbyterian Church, the American Baptist Church, and the Southern Presbyterian Church to study of the nature and needs of persons in early adulthood. Nine people with the National Sex Forum completed the sexological study program created in the early 1970s, and six of them became the core faculty at IASHS (IASHS, 1995; McIlvenna, 1994, p. 310).
The UM Gay Caucus met in Chicago in the spring of 1978 (approximately 100 persons attended the meeting) and renamed itself Affirmation: United Methodists for Lesbian/Gay Concerns. (This caucus will later revise its name two more times to reflect an expanded focus on bisexual and, subsequently, transgendered concerns.) The caucus also hired two staff persons (at a subsistence level) to travel throughout the country and meet with UM churches and groups until the 1980 GC. New local Affirmation chapters were established and new leaders emerged (RCP, 2000b, p. 10; Kristula, 1991, unpublished, p. 7).
In 1978, a fund-raising letter from the Good News Caucus stressed the urgency of preventing attempts by any groups to soften the church’s stance on homosexuality:
Let’s all give! Let’s all pray! Let us unite! . . . to maintain the integrity and unity of Christ’s Church . . . to uphold the moral purity of Christian ministry . . . and to make sure the day will never come when a practicing homosexual will be sent by your bishop to be the pastor of your church. (from a December 1978 Good News fund-raising letter, cited by Kristula, 1991, unpublished, p. 7)
In 1979, the Reverend Leon Smith, an ordained UM clergyperson, sex educator, and sex therapist, spoke to UM sex educators in Houston and challenged them to help the church become a place where human sexuality could be openly discussed. Smith, who was with the UM Board of Discipleship between 1961 and 1980, also helped the denomination produce sex education materials (UMNS, 2001a). Around 1979, shortly before leaving the Board of Discipleship, Smith conducted a education program (Sexual Attitude Reassessment program, or SAR) for Board of Discipleship members and staff at a Board meeting in Nashville.
According to Hoyt Hickman (personal correspondence, September 2, 2002), who, with his wife, participated in this event, Smith’s purpose for doing this was in part to show the Board members what he had been using in sex education workshops for denominational groups and in his work as a sex educator, because there was growing discomfort and controversy about these programs within the denomination. Ted McIlvenna concurred with this, and he speculated that Smith left the Board of Discipleship as a result of the increasing political pressures from some of the more conservative elements within the denomination (personal correspondence, August 28, 2002).
Officially sanctioned church discrimination against GLBT people intensified between the 1976 and 1980 General Conferences.
According to Nancy Carter’s 1986 article in the Reconciling Congregation Program’s multi-denominational publication Open Hands, UM seminaries disciplined and/or expelled and/or refused to admit gay/lesbian students. Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, expelled two gay men because they were "self-avowed homosexuals," Iliff School of Theology, Denver, refused to admit MCC ministerial candidate Lucius Allen Grooms, and St. Paul School of Theology (Kansas City, MO) put five students on probation because they distributed a pamphlet that the school believed could be interpreted as the school’s approval of homosexuality (p. 9).
Support for the UM Council on Youth Ministries declined because unspecified denominational officials saw the Youth Council’s sympathetic response to the early gay UM caucus organizers as subversive (RCP, 2000b, p. 9; Kristula, 1991, unpublished, p. 7). And in 1979, UM Deaconess Joan Clark, employed by the agency for seven years, was fired by the Women’s Division of the Board of Global Ministries because she affirmed that she was lesbian (RCP, 2000b, p. 9).
Among the projects of Affirmation members prior to the 1980 General Conference were the following: creation of petitions to change the wording of the Social Principles and to eliminate the funding restrictions; encouragement of local churches and Annual Conferences to create and submit similar petitions to the General Conference; an increased focus on the election of General and Jurisdictional Conference delegates; and preparations for anticipated attacks on their group and on individuals who were openly gay/lesbian and on their non-gay supporters (Kristula, 1991, unpublished, pp. 7-8).
1976-1980