Natalie Salive
As the Processing and Instruction Archivist at the University of Richmond, Natalie Salive is committed to fostering inclusive, accessible archives through reparative description practices and a focus on underrepresented narratives. Her research interests include queer archives, cultural heritage, and the intersections of sound and violence, as explored in her Master’s thesis on the sonic regimes of violence in Modern Iraq. With experience processing collections like those of Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, a pivotal figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she works to connect students with the power of primary sources while challenging dominant narratives. She is especially passionate about creating space for marginalized voices in the historical record.
Sacred Mischief: Queerness, Hagiography, and the Unorthodox Life of Saint Mikhail Itkin
“The prophets and Jesus taught that government ought not be allowed to remain in the hands of tyrants (Isa. 9:6). They worked to turn the world system right side up (Luke 1:52), to correct the extremes of sexual division and racial antagonism (Gal. 3:28), of wealth and poverty, by making the first last and the last first (Matt. 19:30).” – Dr. Mikhail-Francis Itkin, The Radical Jesus and Gay Consciousness[1]
Introduction
Anarcho-pacifist, AIDS Martyr, father to an estranged daughter (from what would now possibly be known as a Lavender Marriage), sadist, leather boy, and bishop, Mikhail Itkin claimed many labels and roles throughout his notable life. The upcoming hagiography will briefly explore them, while playing with biography and history, and subverting traditional ideals of Saints, Bishops, and the early Gay Liberation Movement. Buoyed by an introduction that meanders from literature about Itkin to the intersection of Saints, Hagiography and Queer Studies, the tone of this Hagiography of Saint Mikhail of the Moorish Orthodox Church recalls the archaic phrasings and customs of Early Christian hagiography, to draw attention to the contradictions of Itkin’s life, and some of the tensions between Christianity, Anarchism, and the long arc of Queer Liberation.
The incredible life of Saint Mikhail Itkin has already warranted the publishing of a book in 2014: The Radical Bishop and Gay Consciousness: The Passion of Mikhail Itkin. Editors Mark A. Sullivan and Ian Young compiled personal remembrance essays, and republished some of Itkin’s own work, in what Sullivan called “at best a first attempt to resurrect an all but forgotten figure.”[2]
In The Radical Bishop, Sullivan, Young, and other authors provide recollections of friendship with Itkin, and reproduce archives of his in their possession. However, the largest portion of The Radical Bishop is a re-print of Itkin’s own work, “The Radical Jesus and Gay Consciousness: Notes for a Theology of Liberation,” filled with Itkin’s thoughts, and quotes from theologians and secular theorists alike. This article constitutes a second attempt of resurrection, to keep Itkin relevant, especially as his strategies and experience fighting fascists and homophobes alongside his radical queer comrades are increasingly relevant under the current American president. Additionally, the role of religion in the early Homophile movement (as it was then called) is not often talked about due to the perceived tension between being gay and Christian.
This tension underpins a number of contradictions evident in Itkin’s life: he lived at the intersection of queer kinship and individualism—leading a chosen family while often standing naked, literally and spiritually, before the world. Although Itkin generally remained on the fringe of the more mainstream liberal or gay-accepting Christian denominations, he was involved with Gay religious organizations that were more popular than his own frequently-renamed sect (known at one time as the Brotherhood of the Love of Christ), such as the Berkeley Free Church, and the now-international Metropolitan Community Church.
The biography that follows uses the method of hagiography, inspired by works of Christians of Classical Antiquity like the Life of Antony, although the form has now become synonymous with inaccurate and laudatory biography. Hagiography leaves room for creative elaboration, as there are details about Itkin that are simply unprovable. This current project joins others like Jamie Mullennix’s “Ethel Cain: A Que(e)rying Saint,” and Virginia Burrus’ The Sex Lives of Saints in attempting to grapple with hagiography in the modern era, and the evolving role of religion and spirituality in queer spaces. Rather than crafting a hagiography, Mullennix frames a portion of Cain’s body of work as a hagiography, while Burrus emphasizes that saints have been sexual beings since their advent.
Traditionally saints are consecrated based on martyrdom or miraculous acts that were generally posthumous. In Jesus’ time, Christianity was a persecuted minority, hence the importance of martyrdom. As the form of Hagiography emerged in the 4th and 5th centuries, some holy men resisted it, asking biographers to destroy their notes in some cases. The most common form of hagiography, the vita, or life of the saint, is episodic, and includes rich sensory detail and the clear intercession of the author. Hagiography was a communal form, often read aloud at church or used as part of cultic worship of the saint in question.
According to the Jesuit Brother John A. Coleman, the intense individualism of the modern era has made sainthood and the communities that upheld it passé.[3] Hagiography as a genre is also now viewed as “sterile and incredible, lacking in the celebration of individuality, moral ambiguity, and psychological texture prized in modern biography.”[4] Hagiography persists in the modern popular discourse as a word describing a biography that is too laudatory. And although the process of consecrating saints continues in Catholic and Orthodox churches, even the so-called Millennial Saint Carlos Acutis has not succeeded in bringing saints and sainthood back into the mainstream. Brother Coleman asserted in 1987 that “Since saints no longer answer to a cultural expectation, their cultural work must of necessity be countercultural. Their lives must embody something at the limits, something paradoxical.”[5] From this assertion the importance of putting queerness in conversation with sainthood emerges.
Mullennix’ Ethel Cain article introduces a burgeoning discourse around queer hagiography with which this article hopes to engage. Ethel Cain and Mikhail Itkin are and were respectively at the limits. In “Ethel Cain: A Que(e)rying Saint,” Jaime Mullennix argues that Ethel Cain’s album Preacher’s Daughter and the interview that artist Hayden Anhedonia performed as Ethel constitute a hagiography outside of the confines of religion. Mullennix cites Anhedonia’s religious trauma as inspiration for the album, and as a common bonding for Ethel Cain’s fans. In describing the process of ‘queering hagiography, Mullennix writes:
“The blurring between Ethel and Anhedönia is an example of queering hagiography; when Anhedönia sought a creative path to explore religious trauma and its complexity, it created an alternative space for fans outside of religious institutions. In the larger subfield of trans and queer studies in religion, queering hagiography contributes to complicating the established division between transness and queerness as secular and religion as traditional and conformist.”
In her iconic work The Sex Lives of Saints, Virginia Burrus places hagiography in conversation with modern theoreticians of sexuality and feminism like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Burrus also locates hagiography as part of the history of the desiring subject, disrupting conventional readings of generic hagiographies.
It is Itkin’s own focus on the rites of Old Catholics which drives the choice of hagiography as form and method. Using archival materials and books like Sullivan and Young’s The Radical Bishop as well as imagination, Itkin’s hagiography reconstructs his saintly life with a nod to the ancient hagiographical form, and a focus on his activist life at the radical margins of various human rights movements, including the Peace Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement, emphasizing him as the activist he conceptualized himself.
This research is indebted to the archival work of Jim Kepner, who founded the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, where Itkin’s papers are currently held, and who was a friend of Itkin until Itkin’s death in 1989. Although Itkin’s own collection remains a future avenue for investigation, the Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender database contains large swaths of other ONE collections including that of Raymond Broshears, a gay Orthodox priest who crossed paths with Itkin. In addition, the papers of Rev. Marcia Herndon, an ethnomusicologist and professor, who donated Itkin’s personal collection of newspaper clippings with her academic papers, were instrumental to this work as well. Dr. Herndon inherited Itkin’s bishopric, and her collection is currently stewarded by the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in Performing Arts, where this author first encountered it while investigating the extent of queer collections housed in that repository.
A full account of Mikhail Itkin’s theology remains unwritten. His spiritual perspective was improvisational, evolving across time and often expressed more through action than formal doctrine. The surviving material, particularly the nearly five hundred pages of documents collected by his sometime adversary and occasional ally Raymond Broshears, offers ample ground for future theological study. Much of it remains theologically dense, eccentric, and revealing.
What is clear from even the more pragmatic and pastoral records is that Itkin envisioned a God unconstrained by institutional respectability. His was a divinity who embraced those cast out by mainstream Catholic and Evangelical sects: queer people, the spiritually nonconforming, sex workers, those who used psychedelics and medicinal plants. He held that tools like LSD could open spiritual insight, and that marijuana could serve both bodily healing and sacramental function. Rather than a theology codified in systems, Itkin lived a theology of contradiction: fusing sacrament and protest, liturgy and liberation, holiness and excess.
Indeed the Moorish Orthodox Church, the institution that sainted Bishop Itkin, is an anarchist, Eastern-inspired religion that came up in New York alongside the psychedelic movement, an appropriate sect to revere Itkin. And although his direct involvement in that specific church is not clear, Itkin was heavily involved in the early days of Timothy Leary’s drive to popularize LSD, and even sent testimony into Congress on the topic. Parts of this testimony are referenced in the hagiographical section.
Saint of Contradictions
Mikhail Itkin occupied a complex and often contradictory position within the overlapping worlds of queer activism, alternative religious movements, and independent episcopal networks in the United States during the mid-to-late twentieth century. His life defies easy categorization: a gay bishop ordained outside traditional apostolic structures; a political agitator committed to the cause of sexual and spiritual liberation; a father legally severed from his child; and a mystic engaged in ritual experimentation, psychedelics, and improvised liturgies. Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, this hagiography takes them as a structuring principle.
What follows is not a conventional biography, but a thematic reconstruction shaped by the fragmented and often eccentric archive Itkin left behind. Drawing on personal correspondence, ephemeral publications, court records, and materials preserved by contemporaries and occasional antagonists, this article approaches Itkin’s life as a kind of modern hagiography: not to canonize him, but to examine how sanctity, activism, and marginality converged in a single figure. Rather than offering a complete or chronological biography, the aim here is to read Itkin’s life as a queer hagiography—a set of episodes that reveal the sacred contradictions of a man whose ministry was as political as it was spiritual, and whose legacy resists institutional capture.
The hagiography is organized into three sections. The first, Kinship and Estrangement, examines Itkin’s navigation of familial relationships and alternative forms of queer kinship, including the legal and social frameworks that marked him as unfit for fatherhood and the networks of belonging he cultivated in response. The second, Priest and Provocateur, explores his clerical identity and liturgical practice, highlighting his use of religious authority in contexts of protest, parody, and ritual performance. The third, Activist and Mystic, considers the more interior dimensions of Itkin’s life, tracing his engagement with altered states, ritual improvisation, and spiritual inquiry that exceeded political frameworks.
Together, these sections argue that Itkin’s life is best understood not in spite of its contradictions, but through them. His commitments to liberation, spiritual authority, and queer community were often at odds with one another, yet it was precisely through these tensions that his historical and religious significance emerged.
Much of Itkin’s religious practice, particularly his adoption of liturgical traditions and vestments outside his cultural background, raises important questions when viewed through contemporary frameworks of cultural appropriation and critical race theory. While Itkin operated within a mid-20th century context that did not widely interrogate such dynamics, his embrace of the Eastern Catholic Rites of the Syro-Chaldean Church, headquartered in India, invites scrutiny. What claim, if any, did a white Euro-American man have to these traditions? And what were the implications of his identification with their symbolic and ritual forms?
These appropriations were not merely theological or ecclesiastical gestures—they were highly visible, often theatrical performances of sacred authority. In one op-ed exchange concerning the controversial public presence of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a writer referred to Itkin’s elaborate vestments and self-styling as “Clerical drag.”[6] The characterization, while intended as a critique, may not have been inaccurate. Descriptions and surviving photographs of Itkin confirm a liturgical aesthetic that was ornate and performative.
What if Saint Mikhail had not been lost to AIDS in 1989? What further good could he have done into the turn of the millennium? What more good trouble would he have caused as queerness gained mainstream acceptance?
Hagiography
Although the Activist-Saint Mikhail was ultimately martyred by the ‘Gay Plague,’ his life broke free from the limits of the body. He lived a life shaped by deep conviction and a refusal to be tied down by the expectations of the world. When someone’s path includes radical ministry, tireless activism, and even moments that feel almost miraculous, it points to a truly unique calling—something rare, something just out of reach for most.
That is the kind of life we see unfold in the story of Mikhail Itkin. On one hand, he was there—maybe on the second or third night—at Stonewall. On the other, he was known across the country in the Homophile movement as a bit of a troublemaker, always writing up new resolutions and showing up at all kinds of pro-gay events. He kind of steered his own spiritual ship, guided by the shifting winds of his ever-growing, often anarchic, understanding of the world.
Why and how he managed to balance his role as a priest with his deep involvement in the Gay Liberation movement is something I am still trying to fully understand. But what was clear to everyone was that his fight for the freedom of all oppressed people came from a mix of divine purpose and personal drive.
Kinship and Estrangement: Saint Mikhail’s early religion and driving forces
Born in 1936 to Moses and Mildred, followers of Christ’s original religion, Saint Mikhail’s holiness and centrality in early liberatory and homophile advocacy became apparent by the 1950s. Not much is known of Saint Mikhail’s early life, his various endeavors in higher education which led to his membership in the American Sociological Association. In his own words, “at the age of 14 he was the youngest Dianetics auditor in America ([breaking] with the organization when it became Scientology).”[7] From his own biography, this quote highlights Saint Mikhail’s long history with religion and spirituality.
Written records attest to his baptism as Episcopalian having taken place in the mid to late 1950s, at the hands of one Father George Hyde, who myths say was the first to hold a gay church service in a hotel bar outside Atlanta.[8] Saint Mikhail was ordained as a Bishop in 1960 by Father Christopher Maria Stanley, part of a lineage of the Syro-Chaldean Church which traces back to England and the Most Rev. Ulric Vernon Hereford.[9]
Mikhail’s daughter, who was raised by her lesbian mother’s parents, is so seldom mentioned in the historical record, it is easy to miss the mention of her in The Radical Bishop and Gay Consciousness. Mikhail’s friend and confidante Rosamonde Miller writes of his pain and suffering, “not the least [of which] was a daughter he lost due to his being gay. His wife was a lesbian, and her parents—I don’t know if his parents were involved in this as well—had a court declare them unfit to be parents. In later years he tried to contact her, but she didn’t want anything to do with her father.”[10]
This was not a symbolic or abstract loss, it was an open wound, the kind that reshapes a person’s sense of self. To be judged unfit to love, to raise, to parent simply because of who you are constitutes a form of violence rarely acknowledged in the way it sears the soul. It is not hard to imagine that for Saint Mikhail, who never stopped reaching toward his daughter even after doors were closed in his face, this loss would echo in his work, his theology, and his relentless search for sacred connection beyond the nuclear family. The search for connection is evident in Mikhail’s membership in countless religious and secular groups, and even in his attempt to get married.
In the year 1977, Mikhail Itkin and his beloved, Larry L. Lawrence, were joined in holy union before the eyes of their merciful and loving Lord. Though their vows were sacramentally sealed, the state refused to recognize the marriage, citing incomplete paperwork. News of their union reached the mainstream press, where their marriage was framed less as a covenant than as a provocation. In one article, there appears a fleeting mention of Saint Mikhail’s daughter, alongside Lawrence’s two children, none of whom, the piece noted, would reside with the couple.[11] Such an inclusion serves less to inform than to indict: it positions their union as a break not only from legal convention but from familial order itself. The children’s absence becomes a quiet moral censure, rendering visible the cost of their love in the currency of estrangement. Yet even here, one sees the shape of Mikhail’s vocation: to form kinship not by blood or law, but by grace, resistance, and the sacramental bonds of chosen love.
There was, in Los Angeles, a similarly-inclined man of God by the name of Reverend Raymond Broshears. He was an Eastern Orthodox priest whose politics leaned as leftist as Saint Mikhail’s, although they at times agreed politically, for the most part they competed for the few members of the gay liberation community interested in orthodoxy and thereby exchanged acrimonious letters. The relationship between Raymond and Mikhail went through ups and downs, as they swore off each other, united their churches, each other enemies.
In the second year after the bicentennial, Mikhail came to understand that the air in the city of the Angels was harming him, and he sought help from his community to make a permanent sojourn north to San Francisco. By visiting Saint Francis’ city many times Mikhail had come to know that he could breathe easier there, that he required fewer potions such as Sudafed to do so.[12] It also came about that Mikhail would be able to complete some studies in San Francisco.
Nonetheless, he continued to travel to Los Angeles, spreading the word of gay liberation, and in 1978 Saint Mikhail gave opening remarks at a panel there concerning “Gays and the Holocaust,” describing how fascism was coming to America accompanying a wave of homophobia. Mikhail called upon the audience to see the similarities between America and the fall of the Weimar Republic and the advent of the Nazis and their genocide. His fellow academics and activists Jim Kepner, Michael Lombardi, and Joe Gilgamesh also appeared on the panel.[13]
Mikhail’s search for community reached back into the 19th century, as he read, researched, and wrote about early gay figures. For example, he sang the praises of the legendary 19th century gay liberationist Edward Carpenter in 1977 in a conference presentation and article titled “Edward Carpenter: Prophet of Gay Freedom.” Born in the 19th century, Carpenter was an English polymath and early advocate for Gay rights.
But the bonds of love and kinship, fragile and fugitive as they were, did not mark the limits of Saint Mikhail’s calling. From the ashes of estrangement and the blessings of chosen family, he emerged not only as a witness to love’s endurance, but as a vessel of divine unrest. The pain that shaped his private life became fuel for a public ministry: unruly, ecstatic, and ever unfinished. Drawn to the thresholds of church and state alike, Itkin began to enact a vocation that defied separation—between the sacred and the profane, the political and the mystical. He did not merely live out his beliefs; he staged them, wrote them into being, and carried them like relics into the world.
Activism and Mysticism:
As a teen, Saint Mikhail helped the New York chapter of ONE find a location for its first meeting in 1954.[14] The chronicler Jim Kepner describes how letters were sent across the land, coordinating a first meeting of a New York chapter. Young Mikhail searched across the islands of New York city for an appropriate space, and lo he found the Amato theatre. As infighting plagued ONE (Saint Mikhail seems to have been more involved with its splinter group, the League), Mikhail devoted himself to God, godly duties, and substances like Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), spending time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary.
Rev. Troy Perry of the queer community behemoth Metropolitan Community Church officiated the first public gay wedding in 1969. Prior to this, religious figures like Saint Mikhail performed and bore witness to these ceremonies in private. In Mikhail’s collected clippings, he indicates that he was present at same-sex weddings in the 1950s which Jess Stearn fictionalized in the work The Sixth Man (1961). He typed onto the book pages that it dealt “(inaccurately) with the gay male and lesbian weddings that were my first (1956).”[15]
In the 1960s, as Mikhail’s ministry evolved, he undertook the most blessed of all advocacy paths, pacifism. Photos and blurbs in his own collections of clippings chronicle his participation in protests against weapons that seemed to be the devil incarnate—nuclear. Saint Mikhail, alongside many of his fellow religious brothers, sent his Military Draft Card up in flames. The Anarchist weekly paper Freedom documented his brutal beating at the hands of the police during the Washington Action Project in August 1965. Various biographies (and autobiographies) report his presence at other well-known protest actions of the era, including the March on Washington and on Birmingham, as well as at the second and third nights of the Stonewall rebellion.[16]
Frank Bartley, a gay Black man, was martyred at the hands of the Vice Department of the Berkeley Police in April 1969. For years Saint Mikhail was dedicated to his memory, along with fellow activists, demonstrating with the Committee for Homosexual Freedom in the immediate wake of the martyring, and speaking at at least one service for Bartley in the 1970s.[17]
Whether miraculously influenced or simply evidence of humanity’s great kindness, Saint Mikhail affected a number of powerful conversions into the faith and engendered groundbreaking support for Homophile rights. The first, and indeed a most important societal first, was when Saint Mikhail’s resolutions in support of homosexuals were passed at the 1969 meeting of the American Sociologists’ Association, and so it was that the ASA became the first academic association to come out in support of gay people.
Saint Mikhail was called to spread the word of his missions both religious and homosexual in several ways in 1975. He volunteered to minister to gay prisoners at a most notorious prisons, Rikers, long associated with systemic violence, overcrowding, and state neglect. Historical records note his intention to expand this ministry across the state. That same year, he also founded Maverick, a newspaper dedicated to New York City’s gay community. In an editorial in Maverick’s inaugural edition, he explicitly rejected the inclusion of gay people in the military—a position that underscored his radical pacifism.
Priest-Provacateur:
Mikhail continued to lead radical socialist sects of various homophile organizations, occasionally walking out with comrades or performing his own outlandish acts in solidarity and spirit. There was a notable example at the National Conference of Homophile Organization meeting in 1970. Dorr Legg documented how “During dinner, a non-unattractive young ‘radical’ took off all his clothes. Not to be outdone, the pudgy, strangely-built ‘Bishop’ Michael Itkin took off HIS clothes. Everyone pretended not to notice.”[18]
The local authorities in Berkeley were dressing as Gay men to entrap them in UC Berkeley’s Harmon Gymnasium, which was holy ground for “cruising” (the practice of gay men meeting other gay men clandestinely in public). University Administrators put up signs in Harmon banning people not associated with the University. Mikhail carried out a two day long “Living Theatre”-inspired activist effort. On the final day of their late January 1970 protest blast, Saint Mikhail, Bishop James Rankin, and the UC Berkeley Students for Gay Power performed exorcism and consecration ceremonies at Harmon Gymnasium, some say, in the bathrooms there in which the cruising took place.
It was at a festival at the end of the year 1970 when Saint Mikhail and his comrades, Brother Jim Rankin and Sister Leanne Naumann worked with their community to defuse a tense situation brought on by the threatening presence of heterosexuals. Noted newspaper the Berkeley Barb documented the “Sad Vibes at Gay Dance,” describing how “Six straight black brothers broke up the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front dance at the Free University Saturday Night.” The hand of God appeared in the form of ‘two black gay brothers [who] came on the scene” and engaged in a “heavy consciousness raising rap [which] averted a physical confrontation.’[19] Racial tension compounded homophobia, yet Mikhail knew when to ask for and accept help. This confrontation and the dance ended when someone called the police. Leanne commented that the homophobic violence began to diffuse “when the gay people began to rap about how the brothers ‘were acting like the same oppressive pigs that have been putting them down all these years.’”
In the year of our Lord 1972, Saint Mikhael’s congregation was attacked by a demonic presence, in the form of some so-called “Jesus Freaks,” including Harvey/Bobby Baldwin, members of the Jesus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Stricken with the belief that homosexuals could not also worship or be accepted by their vengeful God, these men took it upon themselves to enforce this belief, and began a spate of violence across Southern California and the entire United States (at one point they were spotted in Miami).[20]
After seeing Saint Mikhail’s advertisements for his church services for Radical Gay Christians, Baldwin and one of his co-conspirators attacked Mikhail’s Church for the Brotherly Love of Christ in Los Angeles for the first time in the month of May, screaming epithets like “You can’t be queer and Christian” and threatening violence if the church continued to advertise.[21]
In the month of July their demonic presence continued to sully Los Angeles and darken the door of Saint Mikhail’s refuge. Once again, Jesus movement people invaded the chapel of the Radical Gay Christians, smearing excrement on the walls, breaking the seventy-pound altar for a second time, and stabbing a Midwestern teen who was taking refuge in the church as he tried to defend Saint Mikhail. As the Jesus Freaks’ rampage continued unchecked by the authorities (the Los Angeles Police Department, for example), Saint Mikhail and the queer community published the information they knew about Baldwin in newspapers like the LA Advocate as a measure of community protection, building on efforts like the Lavender Panthers, in which Rev. Broshears and Saint Mikhail had both been involved.[22]
Conclusion
Like many of his brethren in the gay community, Saint Mikhail was martyred in the 1980s, lost to “AIDS Related Complex (ARC)” after nearly a decade of illness. Jim Kepner, Keeper of Gay History, kept daily diaries which documented some of Saint Mikhail’s journey with the disease we now know as AIDS, describing how Mikhail called him “sounding distraught” about his ARC diagnosis.[23] Itkin also published several articles about his illness.
The revolutionary life of Saint Mikhail is certainly worthy of our study and veneration in these tenuous times, as demonic forces seem to be infiltrating our government. His courage to stand up for what was right and what he believed in, his hunger for knowledge and humility in changing his opinion are things to be emulated. May the strategies of our early comrades not be as necessary as they seem. May we stand in solidarity with oppressed populations at home and abroad to the best of our ability.
I turn now to Saint Mikhail’s own words of reflection on his AIDS diagnosis:
“Let me drink in the present moment with each draught of air, and as I process it through my body, let me know that the place on which I stand is a place, the bed on which I lay is a bed, and I am what and who I am—no more, no less.
Through the love of Christ, may every person diagnosed with AIDS or ARC become self-surrendered and remember the true self in the new life.”
-The Rt. Rev. Mikhael Itkin, ‘Keeping Aids at bay’ The National Catholic Reporter, January 17, 1986. [24]
Let all us who hear this story try to embody Saint Mikhail’s ever-urgent quest for knowledge. But now that you’ve read it, live like Saint Mikhail: write resolutions, dance naked on tables, cause trouble standing up for what is right. It’s what Jesus would have done too.
And above all, love fiercely: the kind of love that builds churches out of broken families, that chooses people again and again even when the world says not to. The kind of love that outlives martyrdom. That, too, is holy work.
[1] Mark Aelred Sullivan and Ian Young, eds., The Radical Bishop & Gay Consciousness: The Passion of Mikhail Itkin (Autonomedia, 2014), 120.
[2] Sullivan and Young, The Radical Bishop & Gay Consciousness : The Passion of Mikhail Itkin, 10.
[3] John A. Coleman, “Conclusion: After Sainthood?,” in Saints and Virtues, with John Stratton Hawley (University of California Press, 1988), https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520908543-015.
[4] Yarrow, 7. Writing the Saints, vol. 1.
[5] Coleman, “Conclusion: After Sainthood?,” 223.
[6] Kissling, Bert, ‘you are your drag,’ Gay Community News, April 24, 1982. 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 13, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[7] About Mikhail, 1972. Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[8] LA Advocate, November 6, 1974, 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[9] Anson, Bishops at Large, 433.
[10] Sullivan and Young, The Radical Bishop & Gay Consciousness : The Passion of Mikhail Itkin, 39.
[11] “Gay Couple Can’t Wed,” Los Angeles Times, March 16 1977. Articles and Clippings, 1976-1979, 1976-1979, © Reproduced with permission from PFLAG Los Angeles. Material sourced from the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries. Pg 64.
[12] Los Angeles, Folder 8. 1978. MS Imperial Courts Collection Box 1, Folder 8. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Archives of Sexuality and Gender, link.gale.com/apps/doc/WHFZUH292858059/AHSI?u=umd_um&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=8a6d07d4&pg=77. Accessed 11 May 2025. pg 77.
[13] Itkin et al., Panel Discussion on Gays and the Holocaust.
[14] “Writings on Gay and Lesbian History Series 3. 1940-1997. Manuscripts Subseries 3.4. 1940-1997: ‘A Brief Chronology of Gay/Lesbian History’ No Date, 2,” 45. Jim Kepner Papers.
[15] Pages from The Sixth Man. 1961. 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 8, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park. The parenthetical asides are Itkin’s.
[16] About Mikhail, 1972. Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[17] Frank Bartley. 1969-1971. MS Box 11 Folder 6, Raymond Broshears Papers, 1965-1984: Series 8: Subject Files, 1965-1981. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society. Archives of Sexuality and Gender (accessed May 22, 2025). https://link-gale-com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/apps/doc/BFNJAO975287649/AHSI?u=umd_um&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=8b89895b&pg=1.
[18] Gay Scene. Vol. 1. n.d. GLBT Historical Society. Archives Unbound (accessed May 13, 2025). https://link-gale-com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/apps/doc/SC5108734366/GDSC?u=umd_um&sid=bookmark-GDSC&xid=47ff0164&pg=99.
[19] Benton, “Sad Vibes at Gay Dance.”
[20] Gays locate alleged L.A. church raider in Miami, Keyes Douglas, Angela, LA Free Press, September 1, 1972, 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[21] ‘Services disrupted,’ LA Advocate, June 7 1972. 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[22] ‘Stabbing suspect seen again, escapes again,’ Blumoff, Walt, LA Advocate, December 20, 1972, 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 11, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.
[23] Writings on Gay and Lesbian History Series 3 1940-1997. Manuscripts Subseries 3.4. 1940-1997: ‘The AIDS Record: A Chronological Account’ 1993, 1. 1993. MS Jim Kepner Papers: Writings on Gay and Lesbian History Series 3. 1940-1997 Box 23, Folder 3. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Archives of Sexuality and Gender, link.gale.com/apps/doc/KKAPTH198641193/AHSI?u=umd_um&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=a94c7408&pg=64. Accessed 11 May 2025. PAGE 64.
[24] 0158-SCPA, Box 11, Folder 14, Marcia Herndon papers, Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park.