Kevin E. Taylor found a passion for church almost as early as he discovered an attraction to boys. Baptized at 10-years-old at a small Baptist Church in the Southwest section of Washington D.C., he fondly remembers the congregation’s blind, piano-playing pastor, who preached about God’s love with the fervor of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He said it never crossed his young mind that his sexual orientation and his Christian faith would one day come into conflict.

But when Taylor turned 17, his beloved pastor died, and a new reverend–with a new message–took the pulpit. “It was the first time I heard God and hate in the same sentence,” Taylor said about the new pastor’s fiery rants. “I could not wrap my young mind around why the same God who created and loved everybody now hated so many people.”

Taylor stuck it out until the situation finally came to a head. “One Sunday, he turned the rifle on me — on gay people,” he said. “I remember when he started up, I looked at my mother. She turned to me and knowingly said, ‘Bye, baby.’ And I walked out of the church.”

Taylor would eventually return — but this time as a pastor at his own congregation, where he teaches a radically different message about sexuality. He represents a growing number of black LGBT Christians who, turned off by the anti-gay messages of conservative pastors like Bishop Eddie Long, have walked out of mainstream black churches and into the pews of progressive black congregations that accept them as they are.

Today, Taylor is the founding pastor of the progressive, predominantly black Unity Fellowship Church of New Brunswick. Beginning as a seven-person bible study in a friend’s Teaneck, NJ living room, the congregation now has its own sanctuary in New Brunswick and lists 150 people on its rolls. The primarily LGBT parishioners come to take part in a culture that not only accepts their homosexuality, but celebrates it as part of God’s design.

Taylor’s institution is far from an anomaly. Just up the turnpike in Newark, openly lesbian Rev. Janyce L. Jackson presides over Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church. Across the Hudson, a similar gay-friendly sanctuary stands in Brooklyn.

All of them belong to the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, a nondenominational collection of 17 black churches spanning from Buffalo to San Diego. Joining them is The Fellowship, founded by Bishop Yvette Flunder and comprised of more than 50 primarily African-American churches. These progressive institutions — referred to as “affirming” — have blossomed throughout the country, spreading a gospel of social justice and “radical inclusion.”

According to Josef Sorett, Assistant Professor of African-American Studies and Religion at Columbia University, many openly gay parishioners seek affirming churches as a refuge from the hostility they face at mainstream places of worship. “These are nontraditional churches that have established themselves out of oppression and exclusion,” he said.

For Brandon Cordy, 28, the oppression was so suffocating five years ago that he attempted suicide and subsequently spent three days in a psychiatric hospital. “I couldn’t juxtapose what I was taught with what I felt and what I knew to be true,” he said. “It was literally driving me crazy.”

While the stereotype of a pastor railing against homosexuality to the congregation’s delight holds true at many churches nationwide, according to Sorett, the heterosexist culture in these sanctuaries is often a more subtle and systematic. “Even if a church isn’t vocally preaching against homosexuality, there are other ways that it reinforces the idea that heterosexual relationships are the only acceptable model,” he said.

Warren (he gives only his first name for fear of repercussions), 29, learned the hard way that gossip is one of these subtle methods. By age 17, he had come out of the closet in the secular world, but remained private about his sexual orientation at his Baptist church in San Diego. But that didn’t stop him from getting harassed by two middle-aged women in his Bible study.

“I was going through a period where I hoped I could pray the gay away,” he said. “I remember they were questioning me about my faith, about who I was. They said they knew something was going on with me.”

Warren said that the final straw came when his grandmother, a conservative Christian, questioned him about his sexuality based on church gossip. He said that the mean-spirited whispering across the pews “ruined my relationship with her and with God. It took me a long time to find my way back to trusting people of faith.”

While anti-gay messages push some like Cordy and Warren to lose faith temporarily, or perhaps forever, others seek out the comfort of a theology that speaks to them. Many of the affirming churches they attend embrace verse John 3:16, which states that Jesus died so that “whosoever” believes in him will find heaven. They highlight “whosoever” as a mandate for LGBT inclusion in Christian life. They say that the Jesus they know is the divine creator of all human beings, loves all of God’s children, and never directly spoke a word about homosexuality in the Bible.

Affirming churches, many of which campaign for marriage equality and other LGBT issues, see their marriage of scripture with social justice as in keeping with the black tradition of black church activism. After all, the black church was an instrumental force in the Civil Rights Movement.