Article published in Spectrum 48(2), March 2021
The Adventist Church and its LBGT Members
Posted in Homosexuality, Sexuality
Published by ronaldllawson
Retired professor of history and sociology who has spent 30 years studying especially the changes in the Seventh-day Adventist Church as a result of it becoming global, with a clear majority of its members from the Developing world. I visited 60 countries for interviews in the process. I here make available to non-sociologists the papers I have published and presented at academic meetings on Adventism and also comparing Adventism's growth and spread with that of two other groups born in the US in the same century--Mormons (Latter-day Saints) and Jehovah's Witnesses. View all posts by ronaldllawson
Ronald L. Lawson Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Queens College, CUNY 
If you don’t know, Andrews university in on the list of the worst universities/colleges for LGBTQ people in United States.Actually is the only Advendist university in the list of the worst colleges for LGBTQ people in United States https://www.campuspride.org/worstlist/
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Thanks for your comment. I understand, from several interviews, that that rating was given just after the banning of the fundraising for the Chicago cause had drawn very strong comments from The Guardian newspaper. It sounded to me as if AU really showed off their traditional bias at that time, and that the leader of the unofficial LGBTQ group did a superb job in making the most of the opportunity.
However, a chagrinned AU administration then gradually changed its tone, giving the LGBTQ folk opportunities to get campus-wide publicity, and eventually approving an official group on campus, while still leaving the original group as unofficial and insisting, in the rules, on celibacy.
I do not see this as creating a perfect situation there–far from it!–but I saw it as a fairly important step in progress. At present AU lags considerably behind Loma Linda U in this progress, but I was impressed at the extent to which this closely-watched (by the church leadership and many others) General Conference institution has become more open concerning its LGBTQ students since the earlier catastrophe.
I believe, as a researcher who is himself openly gay, that in order to have credibility in what I write I must be careful to give balanced assessments rooted in all the information I have available to me.
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