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?

Second Class Rape Victims: Rape Hierarchy and Gender Conflict

While most of my life has been dedicated to studying for my qualifying exams, finishing up a few book chapters, and working for the City of West Hollywood, I am constantly thrilled for the opportunity to step away from it all and engage in these thought provoking conversations.  I hope you enjoy this blog and visit the Feminism and Religion Project to view the new conversation occurring in the field.  

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The most disturbing part of the 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil isn’t that fact that Father Oliver O’Grady is rewarded by the Catholic church with a new congregation in Ireland after his short stint in prison for the rape of dozens of children in the 1970s but rather the hierarchy of gendered victimization which is often created throughout the various rape cases that both are reported and unreported throughout history.  

Deliver us from Evil

I am often troubled by the ways in which rape cases are discussed and even deconstructed via the mediums such as blogs, online communities, social media networks, the news, and popular culture.  No series of events troubled me more than the Jerry Sandusky trial but more importantly, the ways in which the young boys and adult men who were subjected to Sandusky’s abuse quickly overshadowed the other rape cases that are reported on a daily basis, specifically those involving young girls and women. 

Our country needs to have a serious conversation about the ways in which masculinity is not only constructed but also deconstructed through the acts of rape, incest, sexual assault, domestic violence, and virility.  How do these horrific actions pinpoint and break apart the depiction of the hegemonic and virile man who is impenetrable.  How do these acts, which have historically occurred throughout time, gain greater significance in our 24hr news cycle, tech obsessed culture? 

Although the rape of a women on a bus in India by six men didn’t go unnoticed by the world, I have to wonder what would have happened if her story would have occurred on November 4^th, 2011, the date when a grand jury, who had convened in 2008, indicted him on 40 counts of sex crimes against young boys.  Would it have gotten the same amount of attention it did when it came across U.S. news screens on December 16^th, 2012?  Would the outcry from women across the world silence those of both Penn State as well as various other sports fans and individuals from across the United States? 

What these events and society’s obsession with them for the weeks and months and even year after signify isn’t that more attention is being given to violent sexual crimes against all types of bodies but rather a resignification of the hierarchy that is already all too present within our culture today: stories about men in all forms get top billing. 

Upon asking a small groups of friends whether or not they have heard about the rape case involving the Indian woman on December 16^th, 2012 or even the rape of an elderly bird-watching woman in Central Park in September 2012 the resounding silence pinpointed the reasons why, when asked whether or not they had heard about Jerry Sandusky, their answers were an unequivocal yes.

While the activist in me wanted to cry out and scream “Are you serious!” the scholar in me knew to take a step back and examine the situation from various angles.   

Why are violent crimes against women cast aside in light of new stories that involve men sexually or violently abusing young boys or other men?  What about masculinity makes it seem both impenetrable and innately hegemonic? 

While we could reduce the actions down to the violent response men have when any form of their power and social/sexual status is threatened, we have to step back and examine the issue about the innate power that men are endowed with not only through social institutions but also religious ones as well.

Men are seen as “on top” both figuratively and literally throughout the various images that bombard both young girls and boys immediately from the expulsion of their mother’s womb (and some would argue even before their expulsion).  From early on, young boys are taught that they are #1 and that “the other,” i.e., the young girl, is not only below them but also an object that they must possess, whether through violent action or the eternal dance of courting.   However, when there is a disruption to this innate system of power structures, the response that we often see is one of violence.  While men are taught that they should not show emotion or deviate from the heteronormative society acted out in front of them on a daily basis, their crisis of masculinity often comes with the inability to negotiate what their identities as men actually mean to themselves personally.  Giving men the ability and space to discuss what their masculinity means to them creates the opportunity to change the narrative of “men on top.”  From small ripples of change that eventually overtake the mainstream current, deconstructing masculinity during times when violent actions are inflicted upon male bodies creates a new chance for scholars and activists to draw attention to not away from the victims at hand but rather into the larger narrative of social, sexual, and domestic violence that occurs all around the world every day to all types of bodies. 

Deconstructing masculinity isn’t the key to solving social, sexual, and domestic violence across the world but it is a step worth taking when attempting to engage men in affecting change to stop these violent actions since men, statistically are the perpetrators of such crimes that both cause such outcry as well as perpetual silence. 

(I was fortunate enough to get to spend some time this month talking with Dr. Gina Messina-Dysert at lengths about our lives, our careers, and like with most scholar/activists eventually about the topics we are passionate about.  Always a source of inspiration, Gina frequently helps me hash out the many topics I’m interested in writing about and pointing me in the right direction. This post (and the blog it is housed on) would not be possible without her continual presence as a force for change and progress within Feminist and Religious communities.)

“Vaginas are Everywhere!”: The Power of the Female Reproductive System

Having the ability to share my thoughts and my ideas with the Feminism and Religion Project is a continual honor.  I hope you enjoy this latest piece. 

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I have a beautiful picture of vagina hanging on my wall.  However, for the longest time it was in the back of my closet, with a plastic bag covering it.  I wasn’t ashamed of it but my ex-boyfriend, like most gay men, refused to have it on the wall where he could see it.  He is now long gone, the vagina is now out and proud. 

I bid on the picture one fall during a showing of the Vagina Monologues at Claremont School of Theology.  One of my best friends was in the show and I had always loved its powerful message.  I walked out of the theatre, waiting for my friend, and there it was: the picture of the vagina.  I found myself caught up in its beauty.  Its gaze had mesmerized me.  The outlying layers of red, the contours of its shape, they all began to mold into a figure before my eyes.  While I have never thought of myself as a religious person, I realized that at that moment I was no longer looking the old photo but rather I was staring at the outline of the Virgin Mary.  At that moment, I realized that I had to have the picture.

My ex boyfriend was ashamed of the photo.  I let him shame me into putting it in the back of my closet and cast it away like it was nothing.  Like the experience, call it religious or not, had never happened.  When we ended our relationship, I found myself inconsolable and pacing up and down my stairs in a never-ending cycle of sadness and downheartedness.   As I was pilfering through our items, I came about the picture.  I saw it and for a split second, I was no longer sad.  I placed it in a position on the wall that used to hold a picture of my ex and I and proudly stood back and felt a sense of calm take over me.  Slowly but surely, I began to box up the rest of the stuff I had hidden away from my friend during the mass exodus of memories and replaced them with images that helped me begin to heel. 

That’s the power of the vagina: its births new life into the world, even when one does not think life is possible.  It is not just an organ but a vessel that proudly and respectfully births and re-births us all back into a world that has shunned and cast us away.  Vaginas are powerful not in the classic sense but in the uniting and ecstatic transformative bliss that they bring into the world. 

While they are a sense of beauty to some, they also serve as a symbol that needs to be controlled by others.   While some shove vaginas into the back of closets, covered in a plastic bag, others like to legislate against them.  Unlike traditional phallic sources of power, vaginas are an inward expression of beauty and power that take place within a woman’s body unlike external sources of power and size that men like to claim their penis’ represent. 

Nice girls don’t say the word vagina.  Rep. Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield, Michigan) learned this lesson the hard way after announcing on the floor that she “was flattered that [all the men were] so interested in [her] vagina, but no means no.”  She was subsequently barred from speaking the day and the controversial abortion bill, which makes it practically impossible for women to obtain abortion services in Michigan, cleared the House with a seamless majority of male support.

While men like to say that they respect women, I find it hard (specifically as of late) to believe anything a Republican (or a Democrat in some cases) says.  They would rather have women sit in a corner and wait silently with a dunce cap on their heads as men dictate what they should do with their bodies and how they should behave.  As of late, conservative men like to think of women and vaginas as two separate entities without realizing that without one you cannot have the other.  These men are afraid of women and more importantly their vaginas not because they signify difference but due to the sheer power they represent.  The ability to create, harbor, and in some cases, if the woman chooses to do so, take away life, is a gift and it is a gift, that as of late, is scaring men half to death. 

Wherever we look, there are vaginas.  From the birthing room to the floor of the Michigan House of Representatives, vaginas are everywhere and they serve an important part in shaping and empowering our everyday lives.  Regardless of whether or not these conservative men, not only from Michigan but also from all over the United States, agree is a matter worth fighting for and in some cases worth dying for. While Rep. Mike Callton (R-Nashville, Michigan) or Ari Adler, Press Secretary for House Speaker Jase Bolger (R-Marshall, Michigan) were outraged over Rep. Brown’s statements, they did not take the time to realize that they were only adding fuel to an already blazing fire within each and every woman who is sick and tired of having both her vagina as much as herself talked for and by men who believe they “know best.”

Well, to all those men, I, along with every other vagina wielding women and allies say, we’ll see you next Tuesday.  Vaginas are everywhere and well men, you’re just going to have to get used to it.