God Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Gay Bars and the Growing Divide Between Sexuality and Spirituality

I'm always honored to be able to mix the various lives I lead together during my monthly contribution to the Feminism and Religion Project.  I hope you enjoy this month's post and continue to check out the project! 

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My good friend and fellow Feminism and Religion Contributor Marie Cartier’s forthcoming book, Baby You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20^th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space.  Specifically, gay bars served as both communal and spiritual gathering spaces where butch-femme women were able to discover and explore not only their sexuality but also their spirituality.  An opus of an academic accomplishment based off of the amount of in-depth interviews she conducted, Professor Cartier explores lived religion in an area that has become all too common within the LGBTQ community: the bar

The Palms, the last local and only lesbian bar to be found in city of West Hollywood, CA is closing its doors and I can’t help but wonder where its patrons or parishioners will now go?

With its closing, specifically at the end of L.A. Pride weekend, where thousands of LGBTQ individuals flock to West Hollywood to celebrate what makes our community truly unique, one has to begin to wonder where, if Professor Cartier’s thesis holds true, God has gone? 

Does God exist within the LGBTQ community anymore or has the community itself abandoned God for all-night raves, dance clubs, alcohol, and hypersexualized and over commoditized fetishized forms of femininity and masculinity?  Oftentimes, I find myself answering yes to the above questions.  After surviving hate crime after hate crime and endless batches of newly elected conservative politicians hell bent on ignoring medical and social epidemic plaguing the very country they were elected to serve and protect, why would a community, oftentimes linked to sin itself, believe in a holy entity?

The overarching question at hand in regards to the closing of the Palms is not whether or not there is a space for God in the LGBTQ community anymore but rather what role does misogyny play within the very community sworn to respect and take pride in the very differences that makes itself truly unique?  Scholar Ann D. Braude credits the success of religion to the active and oftentimes overwhelming support of women.  With 40% of West Hollywood’s 35,000 residents identifying as gay but only 3% identifying as lesbians one can deduce that the closing of the Palms signifies the growing divide between the LGBTQ community and spirituality as more women leave the proverbial "church spaces" that they have created.  

The success of the LGBTQ community cannot be tied exclusively to gay men but also the struggles and successes of the lesbian community.  Similar to the various ways in which women helped religious communities boom throughout the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries in America, the lesbian community, as a whole, is integral to not only the successes of the LGBTQ community and the very cities and spaces they have helped to found.  

With the exodus of women, so comes the migration of spirituality itself and one can only wonder, whether or not, there will ever be any room or spaces left for women where more individual are becoming continually transfixed by Adonises and abdominal muscles. 

If Professor Cartier’s thesis does hold true, we have to begin to wonder if women are fleeing and God is following them, where might they be looking for a new lease?

Why Men (and Women) Still Can't Have It All

I oftentimes finding inspiration for my latest blog at the last moment.  Today, it came via a phone call with Dr. Gina Messina-Dysert about topics.  Inspiration, much like a muse, hit me.  In honor of my blog's topic I have to admit that without Gina's help, I wouldn't have been able to write this post.  Did I use Gina?  Maybe.  Did we work together on a project that best served both of our interests? Yes.
We used each other and we continue to day in and day out.  In doing so, we have created some great posts.  Thanks Gina, for all the help and constant inspiration you always give me.  Also to my faithful and dutiful best friend Anjeanette for reading it in the late night as I frantically read it over afraid of what people might have to say.  We all use each other and when we admit to it, we create beautiful end products as a result.

                                                                         -John

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Growing up, my favorite movie was The Associate staring Whoppi Goldberg as a woman at a Wall Street firm attempting to climb her way up the corporate ladder through hard work and dedication.  Her character Laurel Ayres does all the work and comes up with the ideas that clients eventually invest in, her partner Frank takes all the credit and eventually surpasses her at work by getting the promotion she had been vying for.  In a prodigious scene that I still vividly remember from my childhood, Laurel quits her job and starts an investment firm on her own; betting every cent and piece of property she has on the eventual success of her new business adventure.

In an attempt to break through the proverbial glass ceiling and play with the big boys of Wall Street, Laurel eventually discovers that although she can be (and is) the genius behind many of the great ideas that would save companies millions, she still needs to have her ideas expelled by a man she creates in order to win over clients, which eventually leads her to become successful.  However, while Laurel is reaping in the benefits of having Mr. Cutty, her made up business partner, by her side, she eventually learns that no matter what she does she will always be secondary to her male business partner.

Although the movie ends with a good feminist one-two punch to the proverbial patriarchal face, it taught me an important lesson about the politics and sacrifices each gender consciously or subconsciously make while trying to succeed in life’s adventures.  Why were perfectly good ideas by a female second fiddle?  Why were men the only ones capable of coming up with ideas?  And more importantly, why did women and men use each other in the same manner in order to succeed and further themselves in the world?

I’m sure many of the readers of Feminism and Religion have read the painstakingly long and brutally honest piece titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter and others might have read Gina Messina-Dysert’s blog in response to it.  While we all took to the blogosphere to find and discuss our answers to the age old feminist question that many have been afraid to publically ask like Anne-Marie Slaughter and few have actually dared to answer in great detail, I’m here to tell you that both men and women still can’t have it all regardless of how many eye rolls you just had after reading this last sentence.

Yes, men use women and yes, when you look at the political, social, sexual, and religious landscapes of the world, white, Angelo-Saxon men blot out the terrain like an ever-growing forest in a land of capitalistic enterprise hell-bent on earthly and gendered domination.  However, what we fail to realize is that women also use men in many of the same gainful enterprises.  While I live in the world of academic, I also live in the real world.  I go out to clubs with friends, I listen to the stories from both men and women from highly respected careers discuss their crazy Saturday night, and hear from each of them about how they skillfully and successfully manipulated the opposite gender (or those of the same gender for my LGBTQ brothers and sisters) out of the club and back to their apartment or into some other compromising position that placed one at a disadvantage and the other in a seat of power.  

While my friends bragged about the escapades over coffee at brunch or in a text message, I often felt that many people are afraid to admit to their misusing because they are worried about how it will make them look rather than admitting it is something that we all have and still continue to do.   The point and problem about using each other is, that it serves as a catalyst to many of the world’s problems and successes.  Academics, many like Anne-Marie Slaughter and others would like to sit back and write about the inequalities in gendered politics and the advantages and disadvantages to women and men without truly engaging in the matter that they too once did the exact same thing that they are now writing about.

Can women have it all?  Possibly.  Can men ever have it all? Maybe.  Regardless of however we put it, the are ills to every good deed in the world and we need to get back to understanding how and why we use each other in order to fully understand that behind every good man might be a good woman but also behind every good women there might also be a good man.

We all use each other to get ahead in the world and there is nothing wrong with that.  It is the matter in which how we use each other that we need to question and deconstruct in order to fully realize and understand Slaughter’s final point about understanding our own power and in the process making the world better for all women and in the process men as well if we truly are attempting to create a world based on gender equality rather than inequality.

Much like the ending of The Associate, we all create and use people in our lives to succeed and fail in our endeavors.  Although Mr. Cutty was a fictional character, he eventually became the physical manifestation of everything the Laurel Ayres attempted to escape at her old job and recreate in her new, female owned and operated one.  She eventually had to literally become the actual manifestation of Mr. Cutty at an all-male New York City club to reveal that behind every good man may be a good woman but behind good women may still be the predestined and already defined actions of men that feminists have been trying to fight against for years.  Men and women may be able to have it all but they won’t get anywhere near achieving the goals of Slaughter’s article without acknowledging how we got there in the first place.

Consuming Women: Meat Eating and Female Identity

I've been meaning to write this blog entry for a long time and create this short video. Ever since I attended a LGBTQIA Conference at Berkeley the thought of meat eating and women's studies has intrigued my curiosity. What are the intersections of masculinity and meat eating? To be considered a man, do you have to eat meat?

I attended a panel on the intersectionality of meat eating, masculinity, and the ramifications this had on women. Essentially the panel suggested that because meat eating came from such a masculine discourse, the more meat you eat, the more of a man you are. However, with the recent sexualization of food (as you will see in the video before) with female imagery, eating meat ultimately meant consuming women.

Because food is sexualized and presented to men in ways that have big breasted, hyper-sexual women devouring greasy burgers and licking their fingers, women have become synonymous with meat consumption. Ultimately, "eating out" takes on a whole new range of meaning and the ways in which men "eat" food is directly related to the way they eat actual food and the way they sexually "eat" women.

Society needs to reexamine the ways in which we present "meat eating" to younger culture. Instead of recapitulating the idea that to eat meat is to be more manly, we need to explore other options of food consumptions that does not come with women's identities attached to the price tag. Although I do eat meat, vegetarians, vegans, and meat-eaters need to explore the ways in which we present different eating options to larger culture in order to change dominate social discourse that links meat and women together.

Manly Man, Manly Man, Where are You?

To All the "Manly" Men,

How many guy's holding guns are in this video? How many fast, expensive cars weave in and out of streets or flip over and crash? How many women are used as objects? Where is masculinity in this video?

Let the Masculine Mystique Begin:

Pure from Jacob Bricca on Vimeo.

The progression of this video presents the problem with masculine culture today: It's been hijacked by the patriarchal ideal of how men NEED to act and not HOW to act. The idea behind this video is to depict the POWER and the VISIBILITY that comes with that POWER in Visual Culture and then how it is interpreted and LIVED by men who long to be "manly men."

Is there such a thing as the "manly man" in visual culture or is it all just a glimmer of the ideal that androcentrism and patriarchy want me to become. The men, in these videos, are to run around with guns, blow things up, bleed, possess women and progress the ideal that MEN need to do all these things in order to embody the idea of the "manly man." If they don't, they visual culture and society in general depict a very different type of man; one that can never possess these "qualities" of masculinity but rather someone who can only look in from the outside.

Sex, Power and Dominance, three ingredients that shouldn't mix but seemingly do across not just visual culture but culture in general.