The chairs are arranged in a circle. Seventy-five members of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco (MCCSF) sit on one side with a sixteen-person choir and full band on the other. Inside the circle is Reverend Lea Brown, wearing glasses, her short black hair in spikes. She is the newly appointed pastor of the “home for queer spirituality” that has thrived in San Francisco for over thirty-five years. Brown tells her congregation about the origin of communion.

“Tonight we share this meal, as we do every week together, to commemorate, to celebrate how God has led us out of our bondage of shame and fear.” Brown endured this bondage as she struggled to gain acceptance in the Baptist Church. She was denied her Southern Baptist Chaplainry and forced to steer away from nearly all sectors of ministry because she is a lesbian. Discrimination left Brown with haunting emotional scars but gave her the drive to lead people like herself.

“She really relates to people that are coming from churches that flat out asked them to leave because of who they are,” says Stephanie Smith, music director for MCCSF. “She has a really unique perspective because it’s her own story.”

Brown was born into a conservative, Bible Baptist family in Phoenix, Arizona. She was discouraged from pursuing leadership in the church. “In the religious tradition in which I was raised, it was not allowed for women to speak in public and they weren’t allowed to be ministers,” she says. Brown’s loyalty to the church forced her to hide her feelings towards women. Brown was called to ministry during her junior year at Oklahoma Baptist University upon learning that Southern Baptist churches, unlike Bible Baptist churches, allow women to become Military Chaplains. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco to attend the 19th Avenue Baptist Church, one of two churches in the country that ordains women. In 1989, after two years of schooling, Brown made the decision to come out.

“I was just so torn between this career that I felt deeply called to and my need to be myself,” Brown says. “I knew one of the two had to go.” The church cancelled her ordination two weeks from its completion and withdrew her approval from the Baptist denomination. Brown felt crushed. “There’s a wound in my heart that will never heal because I didn’t get to be a Chaplain,” she says. She transferred to the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, which accepts LGBT members, to complete her final year of Seminary School and earn her Master of Divinity. Brown then started interning at MCCSF to work toward her ordination in the MCC.

After a year of interning for MCC, despite a new sense of freedom, Brown still felt distraught over losing her chaplainry. “I was so thrilled I didn’t have to hide anymore, and I was getting to know the queer culture and myself. But it was very different from the world I came from,” she says. “I was just so angry at God.” Brown earned her ordination and became a voluntary clergy member in 1996. She held the position for ten years and served for two years as the acting executive director of the MCCSF foundation, which heads the church’s social justice programs. She then took a position as senior pastor at an MCC church in Wichita Falls, Texas. After experiencing the acceptance of San Francisco, Brown felt scared to hold hands with her girlfriend in the infamously conservative state. She preached there for two years and returned last year to SF to take the position at MCCSF.

Today as she walks her dog through Golden Gate Park, Brown notices gay couples holding hands and feels freed from the discrimination of Texas. “I was just so starving for that image because I hadn’t seen it there,” she says. “You just don’t do it in Texas, except maybe at the Dallas Gay Pride Parade. Unless we show our affection with someone of the same gender, we’re not visible.”