Book Reading, "Introducing Excerpt from 'Baby, You Are My Religion'", Dr. Marie Cartier, June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, 2011/11/03
[caption: Marie Cartier @ Mazer Lesbian Archives; Her new book Baby, You Are My Religion; an excerpt from introductory chapter]
Cartier: The Ordinarily Sacred, and that’s the title of a religion book, a book on how to look at religion differently, about seeing the sacred and the ordinary.
The Ordinarily Sacred, and this ends the introduction chapter:
A place can define you because you take up space in that place. Philip Sheldrake’s Spaces for the Sacred insisted à la Martin Heidegger that “place is the house of being.” He is also quoted from Walter Brueggemann’s The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith that “place is space, in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny, vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. Place is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom. A yearning for place is a decision to enter history with an identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage.”
Sheldrake suggests that place and the sacred are also just as likely to cause division as provoke consensus and harmony. For example, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, is a place in which three major groups and several sub-groups contest the meaning of sacred sites.
The same arguments swirl around the gay women’s/butch-femme gay bar and its habitués. While I could have called this volume “the only place” because it was the phrase that almost all of my informants used on their own at some point in the interviews, the idea that this “only place” could somehow be a sacred place to some of these inhabitants is hotly contested. Butch-femme culture has appeared marginal to some rather than as a place where a group of people decided to, à la Sheldrake, “enter history with an identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage.” However, that is exactly what the butches and femmes and other bar attendees of the period were doing.
We cannot, and we here, we all of us, and we the community that discourses religion, we cannot as investigators and articulators of religious thought decide that “place” is different from “space” and then ignore the words from a diverse and large group of people who claim a particular space was the only place and then say that place had no theological significance. If in fact, the city has a particular theological resonance à la Augustine’s The City of God then the urban mid-century gay women’s bars created environments where we “cannot separate functional, ethical, and spiritual questions.” For a place to be sacred, places must “affirm the sacredness of people, community, and the human capacity for transcendance.” For the gay bar with its Mafia owners and police raids, its prostitutes and drug runners, its butches and femmes role playing, its bad neighborhoods, working class inhabitants, alcoholics, mix of straight people going to gawk at gay women in the back room, its cross-dressing men–drag queens and queer youth without the money for full drag who David Carter credits for the majority of street activism in StoneWall–what could possibly be sacred about that? If place is sacred, then it cannot be this place, correct? However, if this place is the “only place,” what kind of place is it?
The only place at which most of my informants could feel things that place is supposed to give community, affirmation of people’s sacredness, and human capacity for transcendance was at the gay women’s bar. So we must examine that for them, this place was sacred space. As we who discourse have agreed that space and place are religiously categorized. It is a given that the gay bar was the only space where a place was established for gay community. Within the four walls of the gay bar was the only secure space where gay women could know for sure that they had encountered other gay women, thereby creating a place where they could meet someone like themselves. This latter statement affirms the sacredness of the people within the walls because there was no other place where gay people could even be acknowledged.
People sometimes question the existence of god by asking “where was God in the Holocaust?” or other traumatic incident. A process thinker might say “God was in those that fought back.” Where was god in the gay women’s bar of the mid-century? God was in those who established community, who looked at a newcomer and made her feel, as many informants told me, “at home” for the first time or “seen.” Augustine City “was a community of believers, the city of God. Within the human city, this community could be seen as set apart from the stream of the everyday the church–it was hidden entirely given that the human church contained those who might not make it into the kingdom and that many people would by God’s grace make it into the kingdom without the benefit of clergy.” If in fact the gay bar was the only place and it fulfilled the conditions of place as opposed to space by giving a group of people community and affirming their sacredness by first affirming their identity, then we must reconsider the function of the gay women’s bar prior to the event Stonewall as religious.
And I’m just going to read the last pages of the conclusion and open it up. Chapter 12: Conclusion *Cartier chuckles* and this chapter is called Last Call. And I have three lines at the top of this chapter that probably cost me a lot, cost us a lot of money to get:
Last dance. Last change for love. Yes it’s my last chance for romance tonight.
And then I have a quote from Tony Kushner who wrote Angels in America: “I’m not religious but I like God and He likes me.”
The research for this volume ends approximately with the 1990s. This is primarily because the illegal identity the gay women’s bar culture that predominated the female gay landscape and experience from 1945-1975 did not, for the most part, survive past the 1980s. For some, this experience ended in the early ‘70s; for some bar attendees the bar remained the only place. However, for gay women coming out in the mid ‘70s and beyond, the lesbian bar was no longer the only place; nor was butch-femme the primary organizing principle for gay women. This work is the beginning history of butch-femme culture, its primary meeting and organizing space the gay women’s bar and its meaning. And here’s a quote, song lyrics from “Dear Mr. President” that Pink recorded: “How do you sleep when the rest of us cry? What kind of father would take his own daughter’s rights away? And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay? I can only imagine what the first lady has to say, you’ve come a long way from whiskey and cocaine.”
The fact that in 2008 a major label female singer Pink prominently made clear that she was playing with a female band in which one of the members was a lesbian, and well known as such, was not unusual. And that was the point. The Indigo Girls happened to be a sister act one and out proud lesbian Amy Ray. They then joined together to critique the then president of the US. That shows just how far the gay culture had come since the inquisition and Lavender Scare of the 1950s.
The gay bar was for many a space between a rock and a hard place that eased after the advent of lesbian feminism. The feminist movement itself also ensured that women, however not necessarily butch or femme identified women, had more spaces they could enter other than a bar. Lesbian feminism and women-only spaces ensured that women had spaces they could transform to places for religion, health, news, and more, that were inconceivable to the women prior to Stonewall, who in order to just be around other women socially, had to go to a bar, as informant Linda Lack reported. And that’s a story earlier in the book.
The gay women’s bar was rich in community and ritual: a home for many, and for most, their only sense of a “home” place where they could develop a queer self identity. There are concepts of place that we attribute often to religious places and religious experience. The 1980s birthed a different culture for gay people. The bar culture did contribute to its birth even though it was replaced by something else. Baby You Are My Religion, this book, brings a lens to this culture that created something else but also was notable in and of itself, and which operated in almost every urban area from the 1940s through the 1970s. This then supports a reframed gaze of that culture. There was something meaningful, and historic, and religious, going on for many of the bar attendees of mid 20th century gay women’s America. The fact that this type of experience became more articulated and more publically lived after Stonewall does not mean that that prior secret bar culture did not birth the latter.
The catacombs of Rome were underground burial places near Rome, Italy. The burials began in the 2nd century due to a shortage of land as well as a need for persecuted Christians to bury their dead. Although they are most well-known for Christian burials, it is also true that Pagans and Jews buried their dead in the Catacombs as well. Therefore, these very first Christian communities were persecuted, and were diverse, and included those who were not exactly like them, and who were not accepted by the ruling society, and had customs considered barbaric by the ruling society, and did not have accurate records written about them at the time in which they were forming their belief system and community. Some of those who attended these rituals were believers and some were responding to a land shortage.
The most well-known source about the Christian community was of course the Bible. The earliest printed edition of the Greek New Testament appeared in 1516 from the Froben press by Desiderius Erasmus, who reconstructed this text from several recent manuscripts of the Byzantine text type. The fact that written accounts of the early Christian gatherings did not come into existence for probably a century after their occurrence and not in any general sense for over a thousands years, does not make the catacombs and their history of Christian civil disobedience any less significant. The fact that once more stable, comfortable places such as churches were created to house the once deviant and underground Christian populous, and the fact that the new populous went to those above ground respected places for Christians once they existed, does not mean that the underground group was less respected.
[applause]
The butch-femme bar culture was in a sense that catacomb culture of gay and lesbian civil rights history. Butch-femme culture maintained meeting spaces for the gay women’s populous throughout the mid 20th century. Out of these places, spaces would arise the activism, the religious movement such as Metropolitan Community Church, and also the politicizing and the love that would sustain the coming generations of gay women that would become lesbians.
“Baby you are my religion,” a woman once said to me, a butch woman, her ability to articulate that in 1997 had roots in a historical lineage that stretches back through a history of butch-femme women, their culture, and environments, primarily the gay women’s bar culture, “the only place.” We as lesbians, come from a place, and we must return to that place and know it, perhaps for the first time. We as a queer culture deserve to celebrate and take pride in the gay women’s bar culture, which is our lineage, our members, and our accomplishments, our historical place. It is time to be proud of our history, rather than search for a history we can be proud of. As Tony Kushner said, “I’m not religious, but I like God and he likes me” and so too the gay women of the mid 20th century. They weren’t practicing religion the way we have come to expect religion to be practiced. Most of them had given up on the idea of religion. And some of them were not doing anything religious at all. But for some of them, there was something more, “Baby you are my religion.” Perhaps they too liked God, and I believed she liked them back. Thank you.
[applause]
[END OF VIDEO]
June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, November 3, 2013, West Hollywood, California
Dr. Cartier talks about what vital place these bars have been to the Lesbian community over the years as she introduces her new book, Baby You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall
Interviewee: Marie Cartier
Interviewer: None
Transcriber: Rachel W.
Transcriber: Dave P.
Formatter: Serena R.
Recording Date: November 3, 2013
Release Date: November 4, 2013
Location: June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, California
Interview Length: 00:14:00