When Andrea Shorter accepted the job of coalition coordinator for Equality California in March, her task was to bring together communities of color and faith, working for one of the organizations that was roundly criticized during the Proposition 8 campaign for doing neither.
Now, some three months later, Shorter, 43, will be a community grand marshal in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade and she has started making real inroads with religious leaders and congregants in houses of worship both here and around the state.
An African American who came out as a lesbian in college during the 1980s, Shorter previously served on the board of San Francisco City College. A longtime resident of the city – she moved here in 1991 – she is also serving as president on the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women; she has been a member of the panel for about nine years.
While Shorter said that marriage equality proponents have long had a "core of very progressive" religious faiths as supporters, the passage of Prop 8 last November has made them realize that reaching out to other denominations is critical to winning back marriage.
"I think it's important to make connections with our brothers and sisters who are Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and Mormon," Shorter said in a recent interview.
The Yes on 8 campaign last year galvanized many ministers, priests, and members of more conservative faith traditions, especially Catholics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose leaders put aside their differences to band together to pass the same-sex marriage ban.
Asked how that outreach effort was progressing, particularly with Catholics and Mormons and enlisting the public support of those who are supportive of same-sex marriage, she said, "We're getting there. It's not as simple – you can't just pick up the phone and say, 'Can you speak out now?'"
Shorter is working with groups such as California Faith for Equality, based in southern California, and the Berkeley-based Bay Area Coalition of Welcoming Congregations, housed in the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion.
"What I'm doing is making connections and having conversations with faith leaders and congregants from San Diego to Sacramento and getting their input" and seeing what their needs are.
"What we can do is help build capacity," she said of EQCA's efforts, "and reach beyond our comfort zones."
Part of reaching out, Shorter said, is explaining that LGBT people are people of faith and having them become much more visible.
"We need to give a voice that challenges the notion that LGBT people are not people of faith. That's one thing the right likes to do in subtle and not to subtle ways – you're either LGBT or a God-fearing Christian. We need to start obliterating that idea," she said. "Not so much to shout down the other side, but in our own community, feel more affirmed."
Geoff Kors, EQCA executive director, said that Shorter's work is important.
"Her efforts in reaching out to the faith community and building relationships with faith leaders is especially important given polls that show a strong correlation between regular church attendance and opposition to LGBT equality."
Kors added that efforts to decrease the attacks on LGBT people by non-supportive clergy, and increasing the visibility of pro-supportive clergy "are essential to the struggle for equality and to the well-being of LGBT people, especially youth whose families are members of non-supportive congregations."
Added Kerry Chaplin, interfaith organizing director for California Faith for Equality, "As the leading statewide coalition of faith-based activists in California's LGBT movement, we at California Faith for Equality are honored to claim Andrea Shorter as one of our partners in justice."
Shorter's extended family comes from a fundamentalist background, she said. "I'm having those conversations, too," she noted.
But Shorter said that she's fortunate that she has "never felt unloved by my family."
"It was very important for me to live my life authentically and openly," Shorter said of her decision to come out. "To speak up, not only in the fight against HIV/AIDS, but the reality that the rainbow of diversity be made more visible."
She came out around the AIDS activism of ACT UP in the 1980s. She attended Whittier College in southern California – she grew up in Riverside County, part of the Inland Empire that voted for Prop 8 last fall – and she and a couple friends started the first LGBT organization at the school.
"I recently went back to Whittier to deliver a presentation and talk about the aftermath of Prop 8, but in the context of the life and legacy of Bayard Rustin," she said, adding that Rustin was a Quaker and Whittier got its start as a Quaker institution (it separated from the Quaker Church in the 1930s, according to the college's Web site).
Shorter will continue her outreach work as she marches in Sunday's parade. June is a month that provides the LGBT community with an opportunity to "use that as a platform to talk about why it's important to continue to fight for marriage equality in California."