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Pride Month: Celebrating Our History |
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June 22, 2003By Mark Jordan First, always, thanks to Penny and to the rest of you for inviting me. This church holds a special place in my vision of queer Christian community, and it is both an honor and a source of anxiety to be asked to preach here. Indeed, the anxiety led me to quiz Kent Brintnall on what exactly you expect from visiting preachers. Kent preached here last week, but before that worshipped and lived in this community, as most of you know, for many years. He gave me two pieces of advice. First, most visiting preachers tell at least one dirty joke. He said they’ve wanted to for a long time and they think they can get away with it. The other thing Kent said was “never be insincere.” Actually these are very good rules for Christian preaching (generally). I translate them as “don’t be afraid of body parts,” and “don’t lie deliberately.” I add ‘deliberately’ as a reminder that whenever we talk about the Divine, or indeed about our own desires, we stumble around in pieces of the truth. So, here’s the effort at sincerity, within the boundaries of our beautiful and frail languages. We find ourselves a week before the big parade, a week before the commemoration of a series of street disturbances in New York, now almost thirty-five years ago. Can I confess that I have mixed feelings about the anniversary? And, no, I am not going to whine about how commercial the big celebrations have become, although in Atlanta, we have considered renaming the parade “Gratitude to Local Multi-Nationals” or “GLAM” for short. But my mixed feelings come from the choice of Stonewall itself as the emblem of queer liberation, as the icon for our struggle for full rights. I love the icon and I regret what it leaves out. Tonight I want to see if we can open up the icon to repaint it a little bit after we take it out of its gilded frame. As an icon, Stonewall is supposed to represent the moment at which lesbians and gay men started fighting back. Like all events covered in legend, like the life of Jesus himself, we have competing versions of what happened. And we are now about as far from Stonewall as the first Gospels were from Jesus’ death. Here’s one version of what happened: The Stonewall bar was the haunt of Puerto Rican drag queens and some butch lesbians, and one of them threw something—a rock or a bottle or coins—when the police came to raid one too many times. Why that night and not before? Because Judy had died? Or because women’s consciousness raising had taken hold? Or because of the inspiration of black liberation and anti-Vietman protests? Here’s a more recent version: It wasn’t the patrons of the bar who began to fight; it was a group of hustlers who used to hang out in the square; street kids, who hated the police, and who had nothing to lose by launching an attack. Either way, Stonewall, the icon, means you come to a point where you grasp that you have nothing to lose by fighting back and maybe everything to gain. Which of us here would quarrel with that message? The dispossessed rise up for justice. It is written on every page of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. But if the message is undeniable, the choice of Stonewall as a unique icon for it can still raise questions. There were other events, earlier events. One of the most famous happened here in San Francisco. Why Stonewall in June 1969 and not San Francisco’s New Year Mardi Gras several years earlier. The question has many good answers. I’ll focus only on one because I haven’t heard it often, and because it should matter to this congregation. Stonewall was preferred because on its surface, Stonewall has nothing to do with religion, whereas the Mardi Gras was sponsored by an organization known as the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. Born out of a coalition of liberal clergy and representatives of San Francisco homophile organizations, the Council was typical of a number of church-related groups that worked during the 1960’s on behalf of queer people. When we think of the choice of the icon that way, we can begin to notice certain gaps in the official versions even of Stonewall. Secular gay liberation started one summer night with Puerto Rican drag queens and butch lesbians and hustlers. Mightn’t some of the drag queens have been wearing crosses around their necks? And couldn’t the butch lesbians have attended a consciousness raising session in a church basement? And isn’t it possible that the hustlers were helped by storefront ministries to the homeless? In large, the Stonewall icon, by filling back in the omitted religion, not for the petty pleasure of pointing out other people’s historical mistakes (that occupies a great deal of academic time, but it really is silly). The point of repainting the icon, of filling in what’s missing from it is for the sake of honesty to our own lives. We need a bigger icon, an icon without a tidy frame because an icon without religion is an icon without people like us, and I think also without people like them. All honor to the divas, the dykes and the hustlers that night. Let’s not dishonor them by assuming that they were all secular revolutionaries purified by marks of every dependence on religion. All honor to the divas, the dykes and the hustlers and to their religions too. We’ve taken the frame off the icon to make it bigger, richer, and more truthful. Alongside other religions, Christianity has played a central role, not only in preparing and helping the queer movement of the last thirty-five years, but in nurturing queer lives over a much longer span. That’s true, but you can’t paint an abstraction on an icon. You can only paint particular faces, gestures, holy places. So as we enlarge the icon of Stonewall to get the religion back in, we need to find a little corner of it for our own street fights, our own moments at the limit. Here’s one little corner of my repainting. When I was thirteen, my mother moved into a house not far from the Basilica of our Lady of Zapopan outside Guadalajara in Central Mexico. Next door there was a missionary seminary for an order of men. The high walls of the seminary contained what looked to me like a charmed world. A garden where young men studied, practiced music, laughed over meals and performed a liturgy alternately solemn and buoyant. It sounds like a cabaret singer’s boot camp. One brother befriended me after he stopped to ask my mother for a donation. He wore an old-style habit with a long rosary tied at the waste. Some months later, when I was already a regular visitor to the seminary, he and some of his friends dressed me up in that habit. Then as my mother was about to move us from that house, he gave me the rosary from around his waste. I still have it. In the present moment of church history, I must make clear immediately that nothing happened between the seminarian and myself. Or everything happened, but it required no genital contact. My little icon is not a story of sexual abuse, broken vows or even sins of the flesh, and yet I learned from it so much about the space hollowed out for male-male desire within Catholic clerical institutions, and so about my own desire. And then I realized that this wasn’t the only place I had felt space for queer lives in the various Christian churches I knew. Call to memory, oh, the church camp counselors (‘camp’ indeed); the flaming organists and youth music ministers; the single sisters who were, in truth, pillars of the church; the spirit-filled prophets, exhorters, rebukers, who never had time to marry or the inclination. Recall the fervor of your adolescent prayers in which love for Jesus or Jesus’ God received everything that you couldn’t express for someone nearer at hand who was forbidden. “He walks with me and He talks with me, and She tells me that I am Her own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” Bring into this, our present this evening, all the queer people who found in the churches ways of connecting with each other that were denied them outside. Have the Christian churches been great persecutors of queer people? Yes the have. And we must do everything in our power to heal those crimes in ourselves and in those around us. More than anyone else we should be able to name how churches wound queer bodies and destroy queer desires. Have Christian churches also been havens and helpers for queer people? Yes they have. And long before Stonewall. We should remember the second affirmation and reply with it to any “either/or”—to anyone who wants us to be either queer or religious. No. Queer and religious. For some of us, queer because religious. Because our worship opens up a space of vulnerability and truth making that we find nowhere else. So don’t let the icon of Stonewall be defined against us. Let the street actions around that bar seem to you not a unique and unprecedented event that inaugurated a new epic of human history. Let is seem rather one of a hundred sparks that flickered on that particular night; the one that happened to get noticed, that happened to be useful as an icon, but then view the icon without any frame around it. Not just for the moment of liberation on it, but for all the simultaneous moments of liberation that couldn’t fit on it. Next weekend remember that one incident of our liberation, that one we share with so many other people, recall it, begin with it, but then remember the many other moments, perhaps especially those undertaken by our queer forerunners in the churches. Think back to that bar, with its divas, dykes and hustlers. Think then of all the other queer revolutions that same night at a camp meeting near Austin, Texas; at a monastery outside Louisville; at a vacation bible school on Lake Michigan. Remember with pride the divas, dykes and hustlers, but remember just as vividly the cassocks, camp shorts, breathy hymns, moist glances across the pews, and the endless possibilities of tent revivals. Let the people under the tent say “Amen.” |
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