The "continuing Anglican" movement as we know it dates to the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, where the issues were The Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women as priests and the upcoming adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Over the next 20 years, interest in breakaway Anglicanism slowly subsided until Bishop John Spong's unorthodox theology became prominent, along with his willingness to ordain openly gay priests. This was followed by the election of openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson in 2003, which eventually prompted several Episcopal dioceses to leave The Episcopal Church and form the second Anglican Church of North America in 2009. (The first ACNA emerged from the St Louis Affirmation of 1977 but subsequently broke up.)
The ordination of women is, theologically, a bigger issue than gay priests or bishops -- no clergy is without sin, after all, and the steps that were taken to ordain openly gay and lesbian priests in the 1980s, or the election of openly gay and lesbian bishops in the 2000s is a matter more of emphasis than revolutionary change. On top of that, since at least the 19th century, The Episcopal Church has always been -- and elements of it have always more or less prided themselves as being -- part of the sexual avant-garde.
The financier J.P.Morgan was an active Episcopalian who eagerly attended the denomination's triennial conventions and closely followed the development of the 1894 Book of Common Prayer. Although he was married, he had several mistresses, with whom he traveled openly (to Episcopal conventions and elsewhere) -- in fact, he would charter railroad cars so that bishops could accompany him to the conventions, in what his biographer strongly implies was an intense party atmosphere.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead's first husband, Luther Cressman, was an Episcopal priest. Coming of Age in Samoa, written during that marriage and revered almost universally in the last century by liberal arts majors, has been accused of fabricating its field work and misrepresenting the sex lives of Samoans. During Mead's marriage to Cressman, their views on fidelity appear to have been other than conventional, despite Cressman's status as a priest -- this strikes me as entirely consistent with the elitist-avant garde strain of Episcopalianism.
1960s LSD guru Alan Watts became an Episcopal priest and served from 1944 to 1950 as Episcopal chaplain to Northwestern University. By his own account he was deposed as a priest due to his numerous sexual relationships. (Once I mentioned this to an Episcopal priest, whose answer was, "Boy, that would have had to have been a lot. A lot.")
Laud Humphreys was a sociologist best known for his book Tearoom Trade (1970), an ethnographic study of anonymous male-male sexual encounters in public toilets. He was an Episcopal priest before he became a sociologist, and served in largely gay urban Anglo-Catholic parishes (his ashes are immured at St Thomas Episcopal Church Hollywood, another such parish). He later came out as gay, despite a marriage.
Interestingly, the latter-day controversies over Bishops John Spong and Eugene Robinson have tended to de-emphasize the earlier controversies over alcoholic and sexually promiscuous Bishop James Pike, who eventually resigned as Bishop of California under the threat of a heresy trial. Yet another bishop, Paul Moore Jr, was, according to his daughter (one of nine children), a closeted gay man all his life and forced into retirement under the threat of a sexual harassment complaint from a male priest.
In brief, The Episcopal Church has long tolerated unconventional sexual behavior, sometimes openly, frequently tacitly, and sometimes combined with highly unorthodox theology. The scandals surrounding gay bishops over the past decade have often made me think of Captain Renault in Casablanca, who is shocked, shocked to learn that this is going on. It's been going on for more than a hundred years. That breakaway denominations would seize on one or another episode as some sort of last straw is puzzling to say the least.
