Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic

Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with

Religion, Art, and Education

Mindi Rhoades¹

Kimberly Cosier

The Ohio State University

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

rhoades.89@osu.edu

kcosier@uwm.edu

James H. Sanders III

Courtnie Wolfgang

The Ohio State University

Virginia Commonwealth University

sanders-iii.1@osu.edu

ctownallstar@gmail.com

Melanie G. Davenport

Georgia State University

meldavenport@gmail.com

Abstract

This article is divided into two parts. The first part provides a detailed description designed to

demonstrate and evoke the sense of Big Gay Church, an annual session at the National Art

Education Association’s convention for seven years. Big Gay Church involves a troupe of art

educators using a collaborative participatory and performance-based approach to presenting

research on LGBTQ issues in arts, education, visual culture, and society. Combining a generic

Protestant church service template, the standard academic conference presentation components,

queer theory, and an arts-based approach, Big Gay Church engages and connects art educators

with research, knowledge, and one another more meaningfully. The second part presents a

theoretical framing and analysis of this ongoing project, including its context, conception,

enactment, and reflection. Comments from session attendees (or “parishioners”) reinforce the

impact of a non-traditional and queer intervention into academia’s over-determined spaces,

disrupting the appearance of propriety and exclusion of emotional and interpersonal connection.

Big Gay Church offers an alternative version of advocacy for social justice through the disruption

of academia and its dominant norms and practices.

Keywords: LGBTQ; performance-based presentation; queer; LGBTQ allies; religion and

homosexuality; academic advocacy

Biographical Statement: Big Gay Church refers both to the collective of academics working in the field of Art

Education and to their annual conference presentation/ performance delivered as a critique, re-vision, and re-

territorializing of religion as open to and inclusive of LGBTQ people and their allies. Entering its seventh year in 2016,

Big Gay Church continually aims to disrupt traditional thoughts, theories, scholarship, and conference presentations to

enact new possibilities for acceptance, coalitions, and positive cultural change for LGBTQ people and their supporters

in alliance with other marginalized and oppressed populations. Big Gay Church accepts members of any, all, and no

denominations.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Introduction

Part I of this manuscript offers a narrative version of Big Gay Church, an

annual session at the U.S. National Art Education Association’s conference for

six years. A group of five to six art educators in higher education form the core

performance troupe of Big Gay Church. A dedicated group of congregants attend

each year’s service/performance religiously, as well as a rotating assembly of

enthusiasts, supporters, curious bystanders, and newcomers. Part II of this

manuscript focuses more directly on presenting theoretical framing and analysis

of major components of Big Gay Church, from context to conception to

convention enactment to analysis and reflection. It also contains comments from

“congregants” reflecting on their own experiences of Big Gay Church.

Part I: Big Gay Church

Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” unexpectedly fills a dim, cavernous,

near-empty conference room early Sunday morning on the last day of the U.S.

National Art Education Association's annual conference - a typical staid

academic setting. The small troupe of inconspicuous academics scheduled to

present enter and simultaneously transform themselves. One, Sister Sanders,

taking inspiration from San Francisco's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, dons a

nun habit, and masks his face in clown white, his cornette tenuously gripping his

shaved head, his silver beard accented by makeup ostensibly intended for its

campy concealment (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Becoming Sister Sanders, a nun in the tradition of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art,

and Education

Another member, Miss Jeanette, channels her childhood evangelical Sunday

School teachers in a heavy-knit, shapeless, barely-blue polyester jumper, grey

horn-rimmed glasses, a wig possibly stolen from The Golden Girls, and her

mostly hidden combat boots (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Miss Jeanette and Sister Sanders share center stage

A third, Brother Love, strums and tunes her ukulele, humming to warm her voice

(see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Brother Love: Our musical minstrel

The Right Reverend dons black robes, places a Bible on the lectern, and

prepares for the service and sermon (see Fig. 4).

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Fig. 6 Big Gay Church supplies (wings, kazoos, shiny bead necklaces)

The Big Gay Church service²

As people find seats and the music begins to fade, the Right Reverend

steps to the podium to formally begin the service. She starts with the reading of

Biblical scripture and an opening prayer.

Scripture reading

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not

proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered; it keeps

no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the

truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where

there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will

pass away.

And these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is

love.

(The Holy Bible, 1 Cor. 13.4-8; 13)

² This section follows a standard format for many weekly Christian church services in the U.S. where

congregants each receive a copy of the agenda to follow along throughout the service.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Opening prayer

The higher principle of love

Grant that the resources that we have will be used to do good - the great

resources of education, the resources of wealth - and that we will be able

to move into this new world, a world in which people will live together

lovingly. A world in which people no longer take necessities from the

masses to give luxuries to the classes. A world in which we throw down

the sword and live by the higher principle of love. At this time we shall be

able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity

to man into the bright and glittering daylight of freedom and justice. There

will be a time we will be able to stand before the universe and celebrate

this love with joy.

(King “The Birth of a New Age” 346)

Welcome

The Reverend Rhoades then encourages the congregants to stand and

take a moment to greet and welcome those nearby. As people rise, the noise

level and warmth of the room rise also. People smile, shake hands, say hello,

some even embrace. After a few moments, Brother Love begins strumming the

ukulele, which signals the crowd to sit.

Hymn

Brother Love motions to the lyrics of a song projected behind her, inviting

everyone to sing along as she enthusiastically launches into the hymn. Many

audience members find it familiar and join immediately. Others listen for a

moment, get the tune and rhythm, and quickly join, too. Again the room swells

with choral sound and communal connection.

All God's children got a place in the choir (chorus)

All God's creatures got a place in the choir

Some sing low

Some sing higher

Some sing out on the telephone wire

Some clap their hands or paws or anything they've got now!

(Staines)

We sing several verses, each louder than before. As the hymn ends, Brother

Love softens her song, strumming fading, ceding center stage to Sister Sanders.

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art,

and Education

A (queer) reading from the Old Testament (for art + art education)

Sister Sanders, holding tightly to her still slippery cornette, signals for the

PowerPoint projection that accompanies her current segment of the service. The

Sister begins by sharing video clips from The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a

legendary San Francisco drag troupe. In the video Sister Merry Peter declares,

Why is everyone so afraid of humor or laughter? This [performance] is

not mocking someone but it’s [aimed at] opening you up. It's the idea of

the holy fool—that ancient idea that there’s someone who stands looking

completely absurd and gives you permission to say things that are

completely true and honest without misperception, covering, avoidance or

hypocrisy. (Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence)

Sister Reign of Terror leads a recitation of the pledge of the Sisters of

Indulgence:

I, Sister [insert name here], as a member of the Order of the Sisters of

Perpetual Indulgence, dedicate myself to public service, social activism,

and spiritual enlightenment. (Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence)

Sister Sanders, after reinforcing her spiritual and ideological connection

with these kindred sisters, delivers the most traditional academic component of

this session - a PowerPoint presentation and lecture. However, Sister Sanders

does this cross-dressed as a nun caught in an awkward, constant, and doomed

struggle to maintain her headgear against the laws of physics and friction. Slide-

by-slide, our Sister insistently recognizes queer artists and their contributions to

religious art and cultural production; queers serving the Church, often closeted,

as clergy and congregants; and queer theory as a valid framework for critically

exploring the intersections of (visual) culture, religion, art, art history, and art

education. Sister Sanders’ slides and lecture also present historically successful

queer acts of outrage as arts-based methods of political and social critique that

create interventions, such as the Stonewall Riot (1968), the carnivalesque San

Francisco Cockettes (late 1960s/early 1970s), the AIDS Coalition to Unleash

Power (ACT-UP) (early 1990s), Pride Parades, and significant queer arts and

pop culture representations (see Fig. 7).

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Fig. 7 Sister Sanders showing slides

Sister Sanders ends, as always, suggesting ways to disrupt dominant

oppressive discourses, using queer theory in performative, productive, and

pragmatic ways (Sanders). The campy drag theme continues into the next

segment of the service.

Children's Sunday school lesson with Miss Jeanette

Miss Jeanette shuffles onto stage to a cascade of laughter from the

congregation, adjusting her grandma glasses, smoothing the bluish dress, and

fluffing her white-gray wig. She begins her lesson with a traditional Sunday

School teacher greeting: “Now boys and girls, today we are going to learn about

special people, kind of like angels who walk among us. These people help

support awareness and acceptance for our queer brothers and sisters.” The first

“gay angel” Miss Jeanette anoints is Rachel Maddow, for her openly queer

presence in mainstream media and her work around LGBTQ people, issues, and

rights. After Miss Jeanette discusses Rachel Maddow’s qualifications as a “gay

angel,” she distributes original Rachel Maddow gay angel trading cards to the

congregation³.

Testimony

³ Subsequent years’ cards have included Van Clyburn, Vito Russo, Elizabeth Taylor, and others.

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art,

and Education

As Miss Jeanette’s gay angel cards circulate, Deacon Davenport assumes

leadership for the Testimonial section of the service (see Fig. 8).

Fig. 8 Deacon Davenport spreads the love

Deacon Davenport opens this section by sharing a video testimonial interview

with a lesbian who grew up and participated wholeheartedly in her family’s

evangelical church congregation. After she came out, she was explicitly

condemned and summarily excommunicated. Her story is a familiar one, or at

least resonates with a familiar fear, for many LGBTQ folks in similar religious

contexts.

Deacon Davenport then invites other congregants to bear witness or share

their own stories. One congregant describes belonging to a congregation very

open and welcoming toward LGBTQ people and how that impacted her decision

to join. A gay man talks about working in his Catholic school in a constant state

of fear of being exposed and fired. Another notes the need for progressive and

liberal Christians to counter the constant conservative Christian condemnations

of homosexuality, to make sure intolerant people cannot casually claim the

mantle of “Christian,” and its presumed moral heft, while expressing such hate.

As the testimonials end, the Right Reverend moves to the lectern to begin the

sermon.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Sermon

The Right Reverend wears a shiny black robe and carries her childhood

Bible; her mild-mannered preaching betraying multi-layered subversion. Her

Southern Christian upbringing’s conflict with her homosexuality and gender non-

conformity catalyzed a personal crisis and rejection of organized religion.

Ordained online, she circumvented the patriarchal, heterosexist system, avoiding

years of seminary and official denominational affiliation. As a female minister,

she disrupts fundamentalist religions’ misogynistic gender hierarchy; as a fairly

androgynous lesbian, she breaks traditional gender and sexuality church

boundaries too. She moves easily between Bible verses, religious texts, and

popular culture. She reads, asking questions, seeking multiple possibilities,

crafting productive tensions, and opening sacred and scholarly spaces for

inclusion and love:

As art educators grappling with issues of representation, interpretation,

translation, and identity, this discrepancy between the thing itself and

multiple contradictory or complicated interpretations and enactments of it

may sound a familiar chord. Why, when we look for diverse interpretations

and associations as a form of richness, in art-making, art criticism, and

writing as and about art, do we continue to insist on singular

interpretations of Biblical texts and a pure, unadulterated holy truth? Why

would everyone interpret a text the same exact way? Don’t we see the

impossibility of complete consensus? Don’t we recognize, when returning

to texts, religious or otherwise, that they mean different things to us in

each encounter or remembrance or enactment?

Reverend Dr. King believed it is people like us who can make a difference.

He insisted, “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what

kind of extremists we will be...The nation and the world are in dire need of

creative extremists.” He adds, “Almost always, the creative dedicated

minority has made the world better” (King “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

para. 24). Not only can we do this, he believes we should do this.

This stands in such direct contradiction to many of the messages we

receive socially and culturally about being LGBTQ, particularly as people

continue to vote for our rights as complete citizens.

(Rhoades “iDo” sermon excerpts)

As congregants contemplate the messages presented, our Deacon

Davenport and volunteer ushers prepare to pass the Big Gay Church plates.

Offering

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art,

and Education

The Big Gay Church offering is queer. Different. Instead of congregants

offering us, Big Gay Church, some kind of gift or compensation, Big Gay Church

distributes offerings to them. These range from small handcrafted artworks, to

Saint Cards, to paired sets of officially blessed and sanctioned “Loved” and

“Forgiven” cards, to paper fans with outlined Sister Sanders for coloring (see

Figs. 9 and 10).

Fig. 9 Sister Sanders fan line drawing (blank)

Open prayer and meditation: Holding up to the light

Miss Jeanette returns and opens our communal call to prayer, inviting the

congregation to name people they want us collectively to “hold up to the light.”

Sister Sanders starts, requesting positive thoughts for a brother-in-law after

recent transplant surgery. Other congregants follow, mentioning mostly family

members and some friends for congregants’ consideration. Finally, a prominent

art education scholar asks us to do this for another in the room - her best friend

of many years who is struggling with an aneurysm requiring brain surgery. She

voices a silent shared concern, a collective fear we try to overcome with

collective tears, try to wash away with love. The communal connectedness of

caring is explicit and electric.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal/Volume 1, Issue 1

Fig. 10 Sister Sanders fan (hand-colored)

Communion

From prayer and meditation, we progress to official communion, the

essential component and intent of Big Gay Church. During the first service

ushers opened leftover bottles of wine, distributed plastic cups, and offered

assorted baked goods with club music soft in the background. Congregants ate,

drank, and chatted. Another year, communion involved a Pancake Supper, with

troupe members shifting into line cooks, serving up warm pancakes and syrup

(see Fig. 11).

At another service, aligned with the conference theme “Sparkle and

Shine,” communion involved creating colorful paper hats congregants then wore

for a surprise Pride parade, led by pole puppets, winding through the convention

center and the vendors’ area, then culminating in a wedding vow renewal

ceremony outside overlooking San Diego Bay (see Fig. 12).

Brother Love follows the communion by building on our sense of

connection, leading congregants in a final hymn of possibility, emphasizing art

education’s strength: imagination.

Finding Big Gay Church: An Academic Congregation Exploring LGBTQ Intersections with Religion, Art,

and Education

Closing hymn

For the closing hymn, we play a version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” with

the words projected for people to sing along with the song. We include Lady

Gaga’s added verse in support of marriage equality because we share her belief

that real democracy - real equality - does mean letting people be who they are

and love who they love.

Benediction

After imbibing the soft quietness and stillness that follows, The Right

Reverend returns to the podium with final thoughts for the congregation:

Like Lady Gaga, John Lennon, Jesus, and many, many others urge, we

must learn to accept and love ourselves and each other. Listen to their

repetition of the three most important Biblical beliefs: faith, hope, and love.

Remember the longstanding ability of the LGBTQ community to dance in

the face of oppression, to sing over shouts of condemnation, to love

regardless. Love each other and know that we love you.

Amen.

As we bring closure to the service, we invite the congregation to continue

their fellowship in our Big Gay Sanctuary until the next session. The sanctuary

transforms back into the nondescript, intentionally standardized traditional

conference room. Our pews fade into seats locked in lines, our wine replaced by

sweaty silver pitchers and half glasses for water. Our altar, a stage again. Our

alter-egos disappear, pulled off and packed away in suitcases for travel home

with the homos, to be stored and ready for our next service. We hug, shoving

final items into our bags, saying goodbyes, speaking of later meetings, of future

plans. We walk out the church doors and into the convention center halls, out of

the temple and into the marketplace.

Part II: Conservative Christianity, Education, Arts, + Activism

American Christianity and queerness

Aren’t you beginning to at least get a glimpse of why God commands

governments to put homosexuals to death (Lev. 20:13)? Or are you still

foolishly closing your eyes, ears and hearts to the truth? (Lee)⁴

⁴ Lee runs an organization called The Society for the Practical Establishment and Perpetuation of the Ten

Commandments. It primarily consists of a website (tencommandments.org) of hate-filled rants against

heathens, homosexuals, abortionists, democracy, America, and science. They advocate for replacing the

U.S. Constitution with the Ten Commandments.

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We begin this section with the context for the development of Big Gay

Church, starting with the struggle for LGBT/Queer rights in relationship to efforts

by conservative Christians to curtail these rights and condemn “queers.”⁵ Great

strides are being made in the United States with regard to certain aspects of

queer life. As the tencommandments.org quotation above suggests, however, a

backlash in the name of God is also afoot. There is much to be learned through

the study of this contradiction. Although there are many controversies and

problems with the Bible and its translation across languages over millennia and

around the globe, it remains a primary sacred text globally. Therefore, even

though the concept of homosexuality did not exist in biblical times (Foucault),

interpretations of what the Bible ostensibly says greatly influence the treatment of

LGBTQ people in Judeo-Christian societies. Troublingly, these interpretations are

based not in divine dictate, as so many believe to be true, but insinuated in

Biblical translations during Europe’s cultural shift against homosexuality.

Consequently, early European colonists to the U.S. imported this punitive,

condemnatory attitude toward queers.

Many U.S. fundamentalist and conservative Christian churches continue

to adhere to anti-homosexual beliefs and practices. This contemporary crusade

began in earnest in the late 1970s as conservative Christians entered the political

arena with a vengeance. In 1978, religious leaders unsuccessfully supported

California’s Proposition 6 to legalize discrimination and force the firing of all

homosexual teachers (Wolff and Himes)

After founding notoriously conservative Liberty University in 1971, the

famous Southern Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell co-founded the Moral

Majority in 1979 as a political action organization aimed at consolidating the

political and cultural power of conservative Christian congregations,

organizations, and individuals. Falwell was known for blaming “gays” for many

crises and disasters, including calling HIV/AIDS God’s punishment for gays and

blaming homosexuals and their allies and supporters for 9/11 (Press). The 1986

Helms Amendment, named for rabid homophobe Senator Jesse Helms of North

Carolina, banned federal taxes for AIDS research and prevention efforts in

schools. The Moral Majority supported 1986’s California Proposition 64 to

quarantine HIV-positive gay men as a threat to society (Wolff and Himes). Focus

on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson supported the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay scout

leaders, calling gay men dangerous pedophiles (Wolff and Himes). In 2008,

California’s Proposition 8 to prevent (LGBTQ) marriage equality was “primarily

funded by Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical churches” (Wolff and Himes; see

Throughout this section, we will use the abbreviated term “LGBTQ” (for lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender, and queer/questioning) to be inclusive of all forms of queerness.

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also 8: The Mormon Proposition). Big Gay Church asserts a different idea of

God and faith, one that sees hateful acts against the moral minority as a grave

sin.

Catholicism’s anti-homosexual doctrine was formally codified in a 1975

official pronouncement that “incurable homosexuals should be treated kindly” but

“homosexual behavior can never be justified” (qtd. in Lynch 387-388), what

became colloquially “love the sinner, hate the sin” (Callaghan 85). Cardinal

Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) shifted this tone, condemning

homosexuals as inherently evil, disordered people who provoke and deserve

punishment with their wicked ways (Buchanan et al.; Callaghan), advocating

discrimination against allowing homosexuals as foster/adoptive parents,

teachers, coaches, or soldiers. In 2002, U.S. Vatican spokesperson Joaquin

Navarro-Vails attempted to blame gay priests for the exploding clerical child

sexual abuse scandal (Lynch).

Currently, the Catholic Church struggles to balance historically nurtured

attitudes of disgust and condemnation with contemporary impulses toward

respect, sensitivity, and love (Candreva). Pope Francis, who was called a “global

spiritual rockstar” in the Huffington Post, rocked many with his simple yet

powerful question “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good

will, who am I to judge?” (Donadio). Even before this groundbreaking query,

some American bishops sought to help parents/families of LGBTQ people

negotiate the church directive to condemn homosexual behavior with the Biblical

directive to love your children as gifts from God. Other more conservative

bishops and Vatican officials countered, insisting Christian morality justifies

religious condemnation and legalized discrimination against homosexuals

(Lynch).

Many U.S. protestant denominations have followed a similar trajectory.

Some U.S. denominations and congregations have made progress toward

LGBTQ tolerance; others continue their crusade against queer people.

Conservative Christianity still retains great cultural, political, and legal influence in

the U.S., perhaps most visibly in what H. L. Mencken termed the “Bible Belt” of

Southern States (Mencken). Several fundamentalist Christian denominations with

large congregations and outsized influence - including Southern Baptists,

Pentecostals, and newer denominations like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons,

maintain very hardline positions against homosexuals, lobbying for continued

legal oppression and penalization (Sharlet). In Big Gay Church, we seek to out

contradictions and hypocrisy and expose them, without wholesale condemnation

of other churches. We understand that faith is a complex, fluid, and mysterious

thing. One might even call it queer (Sanders; Zacko-Smith and Smith).

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Becoming Big Gay Church

Because [homosexuality] is such a great curse to humanity, the God who

created humans says put homosexuals to death (Leviticus 20:13)! They

ought not to be allowed to live! (Lee)

Big Gay Church operates against this complicated, conflicted backdrop of

religions’ relationships with queer people. More specifically, Big Gay Church’s

core members have extensive experience growing up and living in conservative

and religious cities, small towns, and communities across the Bible Belt. As

queer youth, and now as adults, we are sensitive to the power of Christian-

influenced discourses around sexuality, gender identity, and morality in family

and civic life.

Most Americans (including we queers) grew up in families subscribing to

some religious faith (LeVay and Nonas; Schuck and Liddle). In many of these

situations, queers face a “pervasive and potentially annihilating Christian

discourse” (Schuck and Liddle 310) that precipitates near-constant fear of being

outcast, harassed, or even physically injured. These fears can create or

exacerbate self-loathing and general low self-esteem (Schwartz). Many queers

express a desperate desire for congregational acceptance, to “go to church

sometimes, and not be afraid of just being told what a horrible person you are”

(Barton 466). It is an understanding of this desire that led us to create Big Gay

Church. It is this situation that leads some people to our sessions, like those who

find themselves closeted and working in religious schools or even deeply

religious communities. They come to Big Gay Church to confess their

circumstances, to seek solace, to find fellowship.

Some queers from conservative faiths undertake a futile struggle to

overcome or cure their non-normative sexual identity, and when this fails, they

believe they have forfeited their “faith, God, their church, or their fellow believers”

(Ganzevoort, van der Laan, and Olsman 218). In some cases, queers (and their

congregations) believe that if they are unable to change their sexuality, accepting

it comes at “the price of abandoning God,” that “apostasy then may not be a

choice, but an unavoidable conclusion” (Ganzevoort, van der Laan, and Olsman

220). In Big Gay Church services we confront conservative Christianity’s

condemnation of queers and examine how their prevalence and power can

create oppressive living conditions for queer people, undergirding homophobic

laws, tolerating discrimination and harassment, and even promoting violence

(Brooke; Cianciatto and Cahill; Dennis; Williams). We have shed light on the

ways some conservative Christian congregations, pastoral leaders, and parents

or guardians literally force queer minors into “conversion therapies” aimed at

fixing a person’s sexuality that more likely “result in psychological harm and are

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not effective” (Wolff and Himes 443). Our congregants, many of whom are not

queer themselves, learn of these damaging therapies as well as the hopeful

message that California and New Jersey have outlawed the medically-debunked

practice and several others are following suit.

It is against the backdrop of this lingering conservative, religion-based

persecution that members of the Big Gay Church troupe coalesced, bonding over

mutual firsthand experiences in conservative churches and so-called “God-

fearing” communities. We shared ways church still impacted our lives and how it

shaped us as artists, educators, citizens, and activists. For us, every discussion

of injustice against queers eventually conjured the church, implicating it as the

prime source of friction around sexuality - in society and in education. We

acknowledge the chilling impact this has on teachers, students, and schools.

We considered ways this chill creeps up in higher education - impacting

our research, publication options, teaching, professional standing, job options,

and tenure. While good Christian grandmothers from the Freewill Baptist Church

have not prowled the halls of academe, for some of us pervasive conservative

values dictate our marginalization and contribute to a resistance to queer ideas in

our scholarship and teaching.

Each of us experienced some shock in realizing that the field of art

education, which we had presumed to be more liberal, was every bit as apt to

present challenges, from minor restrictions and self-censoring, to penalizing

unauthorized perspectives in higher education. Collectively, we wondered what

our lives - and those of our students, colleagues, and community members,

would be like if religion didn’t demonize queer people. What if instead of rejecting

all things queer, churches embraced and celebrated queers in all our

complicated, contradictory, and convoluted glory? What if we created an

alternative universe where queer people ran a church in which everyone was

welcome and loved? We longed for a church that was fun and welcomed camp.

Big Gay Church was born (see Fig. 13).

We began considering ways to productively and queerly explore these

possibilities by asking how we could queer church [as a mis-service]? We wanted

to do more than merely emulate and discuss gay-friendly and welcoming

examples, such as the Metropolitan Community Church, Unitarian Universalists,

and more tolerant congregations within larger denominations like the Dignity

Roman Catholic congregations or the Baptist Peace Fellowship. We sought to

create a religious community that explicitly embraces all sexualities, celebrates

and theorizes transgression of gender binaries, and perhaps even embraces our

own contradictions. As an example, in latter years, Sister Sanders complicated

her character, evolving from a campy drag nun to Hermana Harry, a more

gender-disruptive and ambiguously fluid persona (see Fig. 14).

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Fig. 13 Sister Sanders, Brother Love, Miss Jeanette, and the Right Reverend

Fig. 14 Hermana Harry appearing as a digital ghost from a fictional place/time

We wanted to disrupt the normative constraints around LGBTQ issues in

art education by disrupting the conventional staid expectations for the standard

conference presentations in terms of form and content. Instead of a symposium,

we imagined a service; instead of a cathedral, we imagined transforming a

conference room; instead of condemning, we imagined communing. We

proposed inserting queers into religion to create a “gay church,” inserting these

queers with their “gay church” into academic contexts, and using this disruption

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to coalesce as a group, then question, challenge, and hopefully provoke change

in participants’ thinking, teaching, and daily lives.

Art + activism = Artivism

At no point in American history have there been proper laws against the

existence of gays. If any society foolishly allows them to live, they will

gradually endeavor to shape society in such a fashion to legitimize their

evil and extend to themselves the same rights that society should only

extend to worthy citizens. If allowed to live, they will seek to be educated.

If allowed to be educated, they will seek employment in key fields of

society and positions of public trust so as to enable them to promote their

evil and nasty agenda. They will become doctors, psychologists,

scientists, senators, congressmen, judges, etc. (Lee)

Our troupe is currently combining and deploying what youth development

scholars Ginwright and Cammarota call critical civic praxis and Sandoval and

Latorre call artivism. Such strategies provide productive ways for us to analyze,

share, and apply arts-based educational research and pedagogies. For

Ginwright, Cammarota, and Noguera critical civic praxis prompts marginalized

populations to collective action. Critical civic praxis combines: recognizing current

and potential political activism; awareness of socio-cultural inequities; a strong

sense of community; collective action; transformation of learners to educators;

and opportunities to imagine, design, and implement creative social justice-

oriented responses/interventions, into a strong roadmap for guiding collaborative

learning and activist work (Ginwright, Cammarota and Noguera). Big Gay Church

manifested, as we noted, the injustices perpetuated and the lingering

homophobic overtones in dominant cultural discourses that continued to

marginalize and oppress queers, and decided to try to do something about this.

Beginning with a small group, we envisioned a collective action within the

constraints of our academic field that could allow us to educate others using

creative arts-based methods for cultivating a more equitable educational and

cultural environment.

Sandoval and Latorre’s concept of artivism moves critical civic praxis into

the world of arts and visual culture. Sandoval and Latorre define artivism as a

hybrid of artistic production and activism that harnesses their potential symbiosis

for transformational purposes. Artivism offers what California Chicana artist, and

out lesbian, Judy Baca stresses are “unprecedented means” for marginalized

populations - youth, minorities, to represent themselves and tell their own stories

outside of mainstream and adult control (Sandoval and Latorre 86). Like critical

civic praxis, artivism enacts pedagogy that recognizes the “persisting exclusions”

of the arts and visual culture, yet builds on their “liberatory potential” and

collective cultural capital, emphasizing ways “creativity can be channeled,

augmented, and empowered” through “real-world and on-the-ground” arts-based

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strategies (Sandoval and Latorre 84). In a sense, artivism is creative critical civic

praxis (Rhoades “LGBTQ youth + video artivism”).

For Big Gay Church, critical civic praxis allows us to interrogate

oppressive stereotypical institutional and interpersonal power dynamics. By

proposing Big Gay Church as a formal conference session through authorized

channels, we are challenging and circumventing traditional institutional and

disciplinary barriers to conversations and progress related to queer issues and

concerns in (art) education. We are attempting to work within the professional

organization in our field to disrupt the discriminatory dominant discourses and

silences we observe and encounter. We are attempting to do this through the use

of arts-based interactive methods. Artivism provides a framework for us to

present critical issues more creatively, through works of the imagination, to open

negative aspects of dominant queer cultural discourses to possibilities of change,

and to help others transform from marginalized victims into agents (Ginwright

and Cammarota; Sandoval and Latorre).

With Big Gay Church, we take an artivist approach on several fronts

simultaneously. Since schools and education often derail non-heterosexual

and/or gender queer identities and discourses, we make space for queer people

and voices in our professional organization for considering, and experiencing,

alternative perspectives, figuratively by being out and visible under the

institutional approval of the national association; literally by providing a time

during each service for congregants to speak - to tell their stories or just

announce their existence as queers (and/or allies). The subversive, queer, and

performative aspects of Big Gay Church position it as a collaborative experience

of artivism, where by merely attending with an open spirit, art educators are

participating in a creative intervention for activist aims; we want people to rethink

the predominantly negative relationships and interactions between conservative

Christianity and queers (see Figs. 15-17).

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Fig. 17 Invitation to the Fourth Annual Big Gay Church in Fort Worth

Simple creative collaborations, such as making colorful paper hats and

angel wings and banners for the impromptu Pride parade, sharing homemade

jams, and kazoo-filled processionals, foster fellowship through interaction,

communication, and collaboration, (see Fig. 18). Displaying these artifacts in

public conference spaces afterwards is a signal and record of our presence.

Where many churches make efforts to condemn, exclude, or “repair” queer folks,

we find ways to reimagine Big Gay Church as a place that recognizes the power

of diverse sexualities and gender identities, among multiple other differences.

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Fig. 18 Big Gay Church attendees making banners for parade and display

In Big Gay Church, we do this in multiple ways. Sister Sanders’ slideshow

lectures provide documentation and critical consideration of the contributions of

queer artists to religion and culture and of religion on queer artists, arts, and

culture. In early years, Sister Sanders acknowledged classic queer masters of

religious (and homoerotic) art including Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Caravaggio

up through more modern artists like Andy Warhol. Sister Sanders also provided

an in-depth exploration of the Catholic League’s ability to bully the U.S. National

Portrait Gallery into censoring the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in

American Portraiture,” the first to “examine homosexual identity in 19th and 20th-

century American art” under the imprimatur and blessing of the Smithsonian

Institution (Knight). The Catholic League specifically objected to David

Wojnarowicz’s video condemning the lack of institutional and governmental

responses in the early years of the AIDS crisis, ostensibly because it uses the

crucifix covered in ants as a symbol for Christian apathy (Knight).

Knight argues that the successful censorship campaign is simply anti-gay

bullying under the guise of religious doctrine. Sister Sanders was able to

augment an academic lecture based on extensive research with personal

anecdotes and observations from attending the exhibit. Parishioners leave with a

more informed perspective of the current intersections and tensions between

queerness, dominant cultural discourses, the contemporary art world, and the

influence of conservative religious dogma.

Another way we consistently foreground queerness in Big Gay Church is

through troupe members performing gender and sexuality as more fluid and

queer than fixed and binary. Miss Jeanette has appeared alternatively in a suit

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and tie to tell personal stories about gender, sexuality, and an evangelical

Christian upbringing. Sister Sanders is a campy drag persona; Hermana Harry a

more ghostly and ephemeral being. Brother Love presents as visibly female. The

Reverend and Deacon exist in an ambiguous gender space, professionally and

performatively. Nothing fits traditional expectations in any neat and tidy ways.

Collectively, we recognize and value those possibilities and multiplicities in

ourselves and in one another, honoring the vitality these differences, and this

fluidity, can bring. As some churches continue to make efforts to condemn,

exclude, or “repair” queer folks, we strive to find ways to turn Big Gay Church into

a place that recognizes and celebrates diverse sexualities and gender identities.

Since these conservative religious discourses also impact public policy and the

civil rights of queer people, we must find ways to use our pulpit to move queer

people and allies to interrupt the status quo and work toward a more just world

outside the walls of a convention center.

Big Gay Church and performance pedagogy/studies

Once [gays] attain key positions, they will seek to remove all stigma

against homosexuality and seek to redefine, reeducate (deceive) and

reshape society to accept their depravity. (Lee)

Big Gay Church is both performance and pedagogy. During services, we

become what McLaren calls the “researcher-as-performer,” engaging fully in the

political, kinetic, destructive, and transcendental aspects of presenting/

performing/creating. Our Right Reverend is really a reverend, our “nun” is our

sister, Miss Jeanette is teaching us moral lessons and providing us with shining

LGBTQ angels and saints to watch over and lead us.

We interrupt the regularly scheduled program, using performance and its

liminal spaces for encountering culture, politics, and education (Garoain and

Gaudelius). We are queering and re-purposing the academy as a vital site for

resistance and autonomy, a place for collective participatory action by critical

citizens acting in concert. Through the performative, we hope to facilitate

connections that participants make between the personal and the pedagogical

(Giroux). What can we learn from ourselves?

We have some evidence this is happening. Comments submitted by one

of our Big Gay Church parishioners explains:

Big Gay Church is a rare instance of genuine community in our home

discipline of art education. In attending these sessions . . .OK! Services . .

. We are no longer colleagues. We are people who come together to

speak, listen, learn and commune with one another toward a higher

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cause. We are there to remind ourselves of the true meaning of social

justice, of care and belonging as bell hooks defines it, which is palpable in

the narratives that suffuse the air. I feel relieved and relaxed in the “pews”

of Big Gay Church. When my eyes meet those of other “parishioners,” I

sense what it means to be a part of a genuine community pushing for

something bigger and better than ourselves. (Cate, parishioner)

Embracing critical performance pedagogies as research, teaching, and learning

paradigms emphasizes their potential educational, political, cultural, and societal

benefits (Denzin “Critical Performance”). For Conquergood, “[p]erformance is a

way of knowing, a way of showing, a way of interpreting and a method for

building shared understanding. Performance is immediate, partial, always

incomplete and always processual” (qtd. in Denzin “Critical Performance” 29).

Big Gay Church is not a place, it is a collective and co-constructed experience

and fellowship that happens in the present - in the immediate moment, during an

annual conference. But it does not end there. It extends beyond that moment.

People continue to process their experience(s), sometimes using our offerings,

the trading cards or other talismans from Big Gay Church services, as

touchstones for personal remembering and reflecting.

For us as the leaders, Big Gay Church requires rigorous individual and

collaborative research and preparation for the academic portions of each service

and to contextualize and theorize this work. It also requires us, as presenters/

performers, to model “a communitarian dialogical ethic of care and responsibility”

where everyone treats “persons and their cares and concerns with dignity and

respect” (Denzin “Politics” 133). We invite people to share their own stories and

concerns, to seek and offer support, much as we share our stories and concerns

and support one another throughout the year. We provide possibilities for

connection.

We also deliberately use performance-based pedagogies to construct

what Denzin calls a “civic, participatory and collaborative project” where

“members of the community, as cultural workers and co-performers in theatres of

resistance, create empowering performance texts and performance events”

(“Critical Performance” 263). We want Big Gay Church to be an example of a

“radical democratic pedagogy [that] requires [people] committed to taking risks;

persons willing to act in situations where the outcome cannot be predicted in

advance” and who recognize that “in these pedagogical spaces there are not

leaders and followers; there are only co-participants, persons jointly working

together to develop new lines of action, new stories, new narratives in a

collaborative effort” (Bishop 207). Again, feedback from parishioners provides

some assurances this is happening:

Big Gay Church is about encountering, exploring, and celebrating the vast

spectrum of subjectivities that comprise our human species. It’s so

important to have spaces in this world where people can encounter

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complexity - especially those differences, complexities, and contradictions

that make up any one person. Big Gay Church is about showing up and

being present in the world, in all its splendor and heartbreak. Big Gay

Church is where you witness the fragility and strength of people and learn

that art education can be so much more than we currently

imagine/experience it to be. I go to Big Gay Church to be inspired,

energized, and fortified by love and acceptance. (Violet, parishioner)

According to Conquergood (“Moral Act”) such critical, risk-taking citizen-

scholars must also possess the “energy, imagination, courage, and commitment

to create” new, more liberating texts and discourses (10). Big Gay Church takes

risks by inviting the personal and emotional and relational into a place primarily

designated as rational, academic, and reserved. Critical performance pedagogies

require criticism and action. We are modeling this. We are enacting this

intervention; we are writing and publishing about it. Our congregation members

are experiencing our scholarship directly, not reading about it. We offer a more

loving approach to creating these new discourses. A regular Big Gay Church

congregant remarks:

What sticks with me is the love fest it feels like, and such kinds of

occurrences feel few and far between at conferences so I am most

grateful for [Big Gay Church]. Although you make a direct plea/action call

for social change through creating a new church construct, the feeling at

the meetings is joyful and celebratory, liberating. (Kiki, parishioner)

Big Gay Church, following Denzin’s advice, uses performative pedagogies

to embrace queer studies, transforming a traditional academic conference

session into a “sacred aesthetic place” and time (“Politics” 133). It provides “a

way of acting on the world in order to change it” (Denzin “Critical Performance”

267). Big Gay Church is a site of intervention, struggle, and “transgressive

achievement” (Conquergood “Beyond the Text” 32). It is a “concrete situation …

being transformed through acts of resistance” (Denzin “Politics” 135). This

resistance occurs simultaneously in multiple ways (as in Brechtian theatre):

The performance becomes the vehicle for moving persons, subjects,

performers and audience members, into new, critical, political spaces. The

performance gives the audience, and the performers, “equipment for [this]

journey: empathy and intellect, passion and critique.” (Denzin “Critical

Performance” 265)

The relative absence of spaces and times for these kinds of experiences in

professional academic settings is profound. Accordingly, providing one has led to

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profound outcomes for a conference session, too. A classroom art teacher and

annual Big Gay Church attendee confesses:

I feel confident in saying [the Seattle service] was life changing for me.

[The] sermon on Forgiveness really hit home…I wasn’t expecting to be

touched so deeply, but [the] sermon and the “FORGIVEN” cards [the

Reverend] passed out made me think about my life and how self-

empowering it is to forgive. I have kept one in my wallet and one on the

fridge since that day to constantly remind myself (although not easy) to

FORGIVE. (Tasha, parishioner)

Big Gay Church exists in a hyperactive, open-ended intersection of

performance as imagination and action. As performers, we embody characters

who traditionally experience exclusion and punishment as queer people with

regards to conservative religions. In our performance, we not only imagine what it

might be like if these stereotypes were false, but we become these characters

rendering, albeit temporarily, an embodied re-vision. The audience becomes a

supportive congregation, co-participatory members in a collaborative

performance (Denzin “Politics”). We reclaim concepts like church, family, love,

and Christianity from hate-based religious doctrines and practices. Where “the

performative and the political intersect on the terrain of a praxis-based ethic,” we

use performance pedagogy to “embody love, hope, care, and compassion,”

portraying a more progressive possibility, attempting to use Big Gay Church “to

change the world” (Denzin “Politics” 129) by starting in the field we already

inhabit. A regularly attending member of the congregation suggests we are

already doing this:

The performative nature of Big Gay Church means that content and form

of the service will interact to spark new ways of thinking about the issues.

And, after a service, I’ve experienced thought-provoking dialogues and

realizations that linger long after the conference. Big Gay Church is

socially engaged arts practice at its finest. (Violet, parishioner)

We want this conference session to be meaningful in terms of its content, its

emotional impact, and its use of the arts to deliver both.

We are the change

Big Gay Church stakes a territory within the academy, in art education, in

our national organization and annual conference, and now in the scholarly

record. We have laid a counter-claim to church and religion, challenging its

overwhelming negative history with respect to queer people, forming our own

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flock. We seek to critically confront conservative Christian church doctrines, their

positioning and treatment of LGBTQ people, and the overwhelming influence

their beliefs have on cultural beliefs, acceptable behavior, and public policy. We

force a confrontation between our learned beliefs and identities, our occupations

and our culture. We confront tough questions, asking: How has church shaped

us? How can we (re)shape it? How does/can recognizing, accepting, and

supporting queer people, culture, values, presence, and contributions to the

church change church? Change queer people? Change our political, educational,

and sociocultural climate? We interrogate the ways conservative Christian

churches and queer people impact each other and aim to explore analyses and

possible revisions to these relationships. We have the power to redraw the

boundaries, make contact, build bridges, connect. Big Gay Church shows there

are ways to hold such seeming contradictions in tension, to forgo resolution for

exploration, rejection for consideration of possibilities, of what was and what

might be.

Fig. 19 Big Gay Church group photo with congregants wearing handmade hats

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