Introduction

The Art of Queer(ing) Religion

The last section, The Art of Queer(ing) Religion, explores efforts at reclaiming, reconfiguring and re-imagining queer roles in religious history through visual art, film, and parody in queer culture, poking and stretching the religious/conservative and liberal/secular configuration.

Given the recent explosion of concern around sexuality, particularly homosexuality and religion, in Christian/electoral gay marriage debates in the United States, as well as its use as a justification for imperial adventures abroad, not to mention the censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video at the Smithsonian, what is one to make of the oft-troubled historical relationship between queers and religion? The troubled status of LGBT people in relation to religion is inarguably one of the standard relationships undergirding the typical association of the religious with the conservative and the progressive with the secular. But then again, the history of secularism is not exactly synonymous with gay rights; only recently have sodomy laws in some states in the United States, for example, been ruled unconstitutional. And certain religious groups, such as Christian groups like the Metropolitan Community Church, the United Church of Christ, the Catholic gay group Dignity, the Episcopal group Integrity, Lutherans Concerned, etc., have often been at the forefront of LGBT rights. While arguably more space has been made for the recognition of queers and their relationships in some secular and religious spaces, more often than not this has fallen along the lines of “tolerance” rather than true acceptance (as Jakobsen and Pellegrini point out in Love the Sin ¹).

Paradoxically, why is it that queers historically perform so many roles for the church yet have often been so singularly maligned by it? Bill Maxwell, a long-time civil rights activist and journalist, in a critical response to the recent homophobic outburst by black comedian Tracy Morgan in a Nashville auditorium that he would “pull out a knife and stab” his son to death if the boy spoke to him “in a gay voice,” quotes Michael Dyson insightfully at length:

One of the most painful scenarios of black church life is repeated Sunday after Sunday with little notice or collective outrage. A black minister will preach a sermon railing against sexual ills, especially homosexuality. At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sign his theological death sentence. His presence at the end of such a sermon symbolizes a silent endorsement of the preacher’s message. Ironically, the presence of his gay Christian body at the highest moment of worship also negates the preacher’s attempt to censure his presence, to erase his body, to deny his legitimacy as a child of God. ²

Performing crucial ministering work as often (historically at least) closeted ministers or leading the congregation in song, from the back as choir director and organist or the front as cantor or soloist, queers have played a central role in religious history, even as they have often been ostracized, shunned, and demonized by the institutional church.

Why have queers so often put up with this abuse? How to reconcile this injustice? What form would queer “liberation” take here? Should queers reject religion—what previous gay liberation groups often advocated in the 1960s or 70s? ³ Yet repudiation, a path often taken historically, does not necessarily heal these wounds: queers have their own historical, familial, cultural memory to reconcile—their own “loss” of practices, such as musical ones, and the social networks of their historical communities, to mourn. ⁴ Or perhaps queers should integrate into religion, as today’s gay marriage movement argues, and change from within? Yet, as many queer radicals and feminists argue, this risks cultural loss in another way through absorption by sexually normative and patriarchal culture; one of the distinctive assets of queer culture has always been its status, practices and viewpoint as an “outsider” culture. ⁵ Or might there be other options, such as reconfiguring and re-appropriating queer religious historical memory and practices? I say “re-appropriate” rather than just “appropriate,” because there must always already have been copious amounts of “queers” amongst all those “single, celibate” priests, nuns, martyrs, and saints through the centuries, whether realized or not. To this end, the issue’s last section reclaims, reconfigures, and reimagines queer roles in religious history through visual art, video, and parody—whether through queering religion, as Kaucyila Brooke’s censored “Madame and Eve in the Garden” does, or constituting something new, as the Radical Faerie movement, the queer cousin to ecofeminism, arguably does with its blend of neo-paganism, Native American/eco-spirituality and eco-anarchism, or playing with genre- and gender-bending, as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do.

Visual images from various artists reviewed in this issue play with the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, religion, and bodies. For instance, as I discuss in “HIV Positive: Saints, Sinners, and AIDS Protest Movements in Fig Trees’ Queer Religion,” John Greyson’s experimental docu-opera, Fig Trees, experiments with (re)-appropriating religious imagery and reconfiguring saints and sinners within AIDS protest struggles, set to a revamped score of (queer artists) Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s avant-garde opera Four Saints in Three Acts. It examines the struggles of several prominent AIDS activist “saints,”—notably Zachie Achmat of South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, who famously went on an AIDS drug strike until all South Africans had access to drugs—against various AIDS “sinners”: AIDS denialists and pharmaceutical industry and governmental agents more concerned with protecting profits and intellectual property rights than saving lives. Its agility in weaving desire and the imaginary into the interstices of its blend of avant-garde opera, pop culture and documentary, I argue, performs crucial work of queer cultural memory that transcends generational and geographical boundaries, without memorializing or mythologizing away its import. At a time when the “It Gets Better” campaign flirts with advocating a passive waiting of the lapse of time for things “to get better,” Greyson’s Fig Trees underscores the necessity of struggle for social progress. At the same time, the film’s playful and transgressive appropriation of traditional religious imagery and interweaving with queer secular struggles induces its viewers to rethink and re-appropriate concepts of community, belonging, ritual and the healing—even political—power of music.

Also included are images from “The Skull Project” by Paul Wirhun, also known as “Rosi the eggman,” a radical fairie and former Ukrainian orthodox monk, who keeps alive the Ukrainian heritage of psyanky, a “religious” tradition with pre-Christian roots, banned during the Soviet era and learned from his mother. Originally developed out of the symbolism and ritual of birth and life, Wirhun plays with the tradition in clever and politically transgressive ways. In the widely popular “Skull Project,” a participatory installation at St. Mark’s in Tompkins Square in 2004, Wirhun invited participants to paint as many eggs with skulls on them as people killed in the Iraq War—a “queer” tribute to the thousands of lives lost in misguided and misplaced imperial aggression. Explaining the motivation behind the art of psyanky, Wirhun argues, “This tradition uses the inherent life-force in eggs as the power behind the designs seen on the shell. The symbolism in the design conveys the intention of how the egg—as a power object—is to be used. In ‘The Skull Project,’ eggs become uniquely powerful talismans, as they join together the life-force symbolized by the egg and death as symbolized by the skull.”

Wirhun’s “Skull Project,” and use of psyanky generally, can be seen as a political, but spiritual attempt—transgressing typical boundaries of the religious and secular—to expand the “secular” cultural and political imaginary. In fact, efforts like his arguably keep alive an artistic form that could easily have gone the way of the “secular”—in the sense of being “secularized” and put out of practice—as a lost art. Pysanky also highlights the paradoxical way in which art has often been preserved in religious traditions—such as choral or organ music. While there likely will always be a few “secular” choirs to keep the tradition alive, clearly the choral/gospel tradition is fueled by churches in producing the singers themselves, a paradox for those of a more “secular” persuasion who appreciate the tradition.

Included in this section as well are images and selections from the young queer Peruvian-American artist Carlo Quispe’s anarchic life-size comics. Distributed for free in zines in his queer community in New York City, or displayed in “World War III Illustrated,” an anarchist collective of comic book artists of which he is a member, Quispe’s images evoke a carnivalesque cornucopia of the queer utopic imaginary that plays with notions of desire, the public, radical politics, convention, and the queering of religious imagery. Quispe’s evocative imagery transgresses typical notions of public and private, secular and religious in ways that open up a gleeful, inclusive, and radically collective future. As such, the polyphonic yet cacaphonic images of these artists sound the ending notes for this issue, even as they might also serve as the beginning or orchestral tuning notes for new imaginaries. ⁶

The aim of this special issue has been to open up new areas of research and provoke interest in alternate and more liberating intersections and resonances between religions, secularisms and bodies, and by extension, races, sexualities, genders, nationhood, art, and musicality. It is hoped that this wide-ranging collection of essays and artwork, by traversing binaries and challenging the dominant configuration of religious/conservative and liberal/secular across the “civilizational” divides of the Protestant Secular West, the “Islamic” East, and queer culture—while delving into the possibilities and playfulness of appropriating or re-appropriating the historical memory of bodies and religion/religiosity within the idea of queering religion—will be a small step in overcoming rigid fundamentalisms of religion, science, liberalism, and secularism for a more radically open, playful and inclusive future.

1. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: NYU Press, 2003).[↑]
2. Bill Maxwell, “Homophobia: It’s a Black Thing,”, St. Petersburg Times 19 June 2011.[↑]
3. Tommy Avicolli Mecca, ed. Smash the Church! Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009).[↑]
4. David L. Eng, David Kazanjian, and Judith Butler, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [↑]
5. Leo Bersani, Homos (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999).[↑]
6. See Issue 8.3 of S&F Online: “Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert.”[↑]