New book explores religious role of gay bars

Baby, You Are My Religion:
Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall
by Marie Cartier

Reviewed by Audrey Lockwood

When a woman enters her first gay bar, the moment is similar to baptism, says scholar-activist Marie Cartier in her new book “Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall.”

Her argument is that in the pre-Stonewall period or mid-century America, gay women, as they were known back then, constituted a community, and that the bars served as the only place gay women could come out and meet each other. Gay bars were not just meeting places, but they also provided sacred space for non-traditional weddings and funerals, sometimes conducted by bar staff. Religious institutions such as Metropolitan Community Churches got their start in gay bars as well. MCC held Christian services in bars in the beginning, for example.

I could not put this book down; I found the voices of average lesbians stunning, and the book takes you back in time so you can actually feel what those women felt. The police raids, the designation of gay people as mentally ill, the McCarthy witch hunts -- all of it is there in great detail.

I thought it sounded absurd when I first heard bars compared to churches or religion, but Dr. Cartier made a compelling case for it. She quotes theologians to anchor the experience of gay women’s coming home to self as a religious experience. Her book covers everything from dildos to Dignity, the LGBT Catholic group.

Dr. Marie Cartier did extensive research, interviewing 93 women, eight men, and one transgender person in this groundbreaking book on butch-femme lesbian relationships from the 1940s through the 1980s.

It was originally a dissertation for her Ph.D in religion from Claremont Graduate University. Then it became a book that documents the voices of many generations of gay women and lesbians, mostly in California. She personally interviewed all 102 people; women and men from all walks of life.

She argues quite persuasively that butch-femme culture laid the groundwork for the radical feminism of the 1970s, and also that the bar scene of that time constituted church for these women.

This book should be essential reading for all lesbians, gay men, and our allies. This brings to life the history of our movement, the development of our sexuality, and a connection between all the generations of women who have gone before us.

Dr. Cartier makes it clear that butch-femme was a cultural glue, that it was a form of resistance to the dominant culture, and that this legacy later was rejected and reviled as “role playing” by radical women who followed.

All the lesbians that she interviewed said that gay bars were “the only place” where they could meet each other. The phrase appears again and again in this compelling story. We have these women to thank for creating the space for lesbians to form communities across the land -- and all of this organizing was before Stonewall.

What makes this book special is that working-class women are heard into being, a term invented by theologian Nelle Morton. Women told their stories, sometimes for the very first time, and the effect is electrifying, terrifying and noble. Dr. Cartier documents the transition of vocabulary words through each decade, with the term “lesbian” becoming popular in the 1970s.

The movement in its desire for respectability often gave short shrift to butch-femme women. I found it fascinating that several femme women participated in the March on Selma, and helped found the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, in an effort to preserve butch-femme bar culture, which a new generation was hell-bent on erasing.

The book does have shortcomings. The portrait of relations between gay men and lesbians was a little too romanticized. For example, by the time lesbian feminism came of age, there was an epic battle within Metropolitan Community Churches over women’s equality and inclusive language, but this conflict was not mentioned.

The author interviewed Rev. Troy Perry, who founded MCC, but she apparently didn’t talk to any women in the clergy. This is a huge omission for a book that claims that the bars were religion. Who would know more about this than women who were MCC clergy in the early days of the denomination? Some of these women made the transition from being bar-dykes to ordained clergy, for heaven’s sake! It seemed like a missed opportunity to hear from pioneering MCC clergywomen such as Revs. Freda Smith and Nancy Wilson.

The book also neglects to discuss the 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire that killed 32 people at a gay bar that had housed an MCC church in New Orleans. It was the biggest gay atrocity in U.S. history. The pastor was among the martyrs who died in a crime that is still unsolved. The arson of a bar that was an early gay church fits nicely with her thesis that gay people were so oppressed that they couldn’t find a place to gather for worship. This important history belongs in a book that documents the connection between religion and the gay bars of that era.

Spelling and grammar errors mar the text. There should have been more historical fact checking; Senator Joseph McCarthy, for example, did not head the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he was a Senator. Dr. Cartier gets the name of this committee wrong, and the lack of attention to detail I hope will be attended to in the second edition. The Summer of Love in San Francisco happened in 1967, not 1968.

By the time I came of age in the 1970s, gayness was no longer considered a mental illness, and I don’t think I even entered a gay bar until I lived overseas in my 20s. Then I found community in a lesbian feminist group that met in the basement of a straight church. When I moved to San Francisco in 1985, my defining moment was the first time my partner and I stepped into Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, to hear Rev. Nancy Wilson preach, in October, 1985. By then the bars were no longer church, and gay folks had a real church of their own. I was a proud member of the lesbian feminist tribe, and my religion had become feminism. It’s funny how things evolve.

Readers will enjoy this book and be deeply moved by it, and every lesbian and gay woman will find her place in herstory there. You will feel heard, honored and loved reading this precious book; it is a sacred text of our times.

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Audrey Lockwood is a lesbian poet based in Los Angeles. Her poetry has been published in Lesbian News and was Poem of the Month at Writers at Work. Her previous articles for the Jesus in Love Blog include LGBT authors laugh, cry and get honored at Lambda Literary Awards and Meeting Alma Lopez: Painter of queer saints, mermaids, revolutionaries and goddesses.

Marie Cartier, left, with Audrey Lockwood

Baby, You Are My Religion:
Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall
By Marie Cartier
Acumen Publishing Ltd.
Paperback, $24.44, 256 pp.
ISBN: 978-1844658947
May 2014
Book website: babyyouaremyreligion.com