Daayie Abdullah is the first openly gay imam in the United States. He's been profiled by Al Jazeera and The Daily Beast. Abdullah was raised as a Baptist in Detroit and converted to Islam while studying in China. The depth of his study of the religion earned him the title of Imam, as reported by Metro Weekly:
MW: When did people start calling you ”Imam”?
ABDULLAH: I can’t really say when that started. I presume it would have been sometime in 2000. When I joined [the online group, Muslim Gay Men], there were [online] discussions and some of the people who came in claimed that they were gay, but their purpose was to try to change people, versus understanding people for who they are. They would resort to ”ancient scholar so-and-so who such-and-such.” I would always challenge them because our belief is Koran first, then Sunna [the Hadith] of the Prophet. If we don’t find anything there, we go to what they refer to as the Sahaba [companions of Muhammad]. There’s nothing in the Koran that speaks against homosexuality. The Lut [a.k.a. Lot] story speaks about heterosexual men who use homosexual sexual acts as a form of punishment. When you read it literally, it says, ”men who turn away from their wives or mates.” Gay [men] don’t tend to have [female] mates unless it’s a cultural situation they’re forced into, by family or culture. During this same time, they had something they refer to as the mukhannathun — something like the hijras in India, sort of a male-female, cross-dressing types. They existed. And they also lived or worked in the household of the Prophet. Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives, indicated that there were men who worked in the household. They were mukhannathun. That generally meant that they were not necessarily castrated, but not having an interest in women. If the Prophet had mukhannathun in his household who served him and his wives, it seems that he wouldn’t have had an aversion to these people.
The LGBT site Towleroad reports on Abdullah’s efforts to open an online school:
Basing his arguments on reading the earliest Chinese and Arabic translations of Islam’s central religious text, he says “the idea that same-sex-oriented people can’t be as faithful or pious as heterosexuals is not something that is found in the Quran.”
Following criticism from the Shura Council of America and others, he has been inspired to establish the MECCA Institute, an online school and think tank that aims to offer classes in modern-day explication of Islamic philosophy and tenets. With both male and female teachers, classes will include Comparative Qur’an and Gender and Sexual Variance in Islamic Texts and Contexts.
The founding of the school follows a report on the status of LGBT Muslims by Intersections International.
The methodology in the report included two dozen one-on-one conversations with Muslim theologians, religious practitioners, academics and lay people around LGBT issues; the commissioning of three articles by respected scholars in the fields of Islamic studies; hosting six intimate conversations in “safe spaces” around the country where individuals of widely diverse views on this topic could gather to express those views; and conducting a survey to quantify opinions on this matter.During these conversations, an initial point of discussion was the impact mosques have on individuals and whether the mosque should be a locus for work on this issue. In five of the six settings, majorities indicated that the mosque had little direct impact on their lives. There was considerable discussion about how the mosque structure worked against openness and was counter-productive to a transparent conversation. One participant used the phrase, “the tyranny of the mosque.” While some disagreed, consensus was that the mosque is not the most advantageous setting for this conversation...
Still, there was the underlying thread that, eventually, religious language and imagery would need to enter the discourse. To do so, there would need to be a re-framing of traditional interpretations of homosexuality in the Qur’an. The call from many in our groups was that the emphasis should be on Allah the merciful, and the basis for behavior towards gay and lesbian Muslims (and LGBT folks of other faiths) should be rooted in compassion instead of judgment, as the Prophet was compassionate.