Gay Religion (review)

Visitors who arrive at the Faerie community's Zuni Mountain Sanctuary in New Mexico for a spiritual retreat are greeted by community stewards with the phrase, "welcome home" (248). The bond of kinship that this greeting fosters is discussed in Jay Hasbrouck's article in the volume Gay Religion where he gives the details of his fieldwork with white, middle-aged, gay men who are part of the Faeries. They are a group with fluctuating membership but an unwavering commitment to utopian, sex/gender boundary blurring, religious practice. "Welcome home," that is, a sense of welcome in one's own religious home, can be seen as the overarching theme explored in the twenty-one articles in this exciting collection edited by Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray. The authors of the articles provide ethnographies of gay, lesbian, and transgendered (and to a lesser extent bisexual) individuals celebrating, maintaining, and seeking a sense of welcome and affirmation through a wide range of religious expressions. The editors coherently arrange this sampling of (mainly) U.S. religion, displaying a spectrum of traditional as well as nontraditional religious "homes" claimed by the subjects of the studies. The volume offers a nicely complex depiction of how religion is a thoroughly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered cultural phenomenon in the United States.

Early essays in the book locate welcoming spaces within established religious "homes" that have aggressively heterosexist doctrines, such as LGBT support groups within the Church of the Latter Day Saints (R. H. Crapo), self-designated welcoming congregations comprised of both gay and straight members within the United Methodist Church (W. Cadge), a vital, national Seventh Day Adventist LGBT support network (R. Drumm), and a lesbian and gay Roman Catholic parish in Philadelphia (W. Cadge). In other established traditions, religious "homes" with a sense of welcome that is more intrinsic to the overall structuring of the faith community can be found among practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria, where "gay Santeros have been pillars" (S. Vidal-Otiz: 129), in a gay synagogue in New York City where reintegration and merging of gay and Jewish identities is successfully achieved by its members (M. Shokeid), and within gay Buddhist Fellowships (W. Cadge). Some essays also helpfully attend to how contentious the terrain and ambivalent the journey can be emotionally and spiritually when seeking a welcoming place within one's religious "home." One article describes such struggles for lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women even within predominantly gay synagogues and churches (M. Wilcox), and in another article, for the faith and hopes of lesbians who join ex-gay ministries (C. Ponticelli). Perhaps surprisingly, the damaging and distorting impact for LGBT spirituality of hostile religious messages about them is minimally discussed throughout the volume.

If one has doubts about it, these strongly argued essays provide considerable evidence of the numerous concentrations of people who openly claim queer identities and enthusiastically embrace their religious traditions, with varying degrees of cohesive self-acceptance. Some of the articles do include negative responses such as Seventh Day Adventists who "felt the church had rejected them and, in return, they rejected the church" (R. Drumm: 61) or gay Catholics who disliked the gathering for mass offered by their local Dignity chapter (LGBT affirming Catholics) and characterized the social hour afterwards as "nothing but a 'meat market' " (L. N. Primiano: 14). In the latter chapters of this volume, however, the emphasis shifts away from this kind of documenting mode, with material that more substantively captures the content of gay religion.

In articles about the liberationist characteristics of the music ministry in MCC churches (W. B. Lukenbill), about gay male Italian Catholic worship of a male Catholic saint (P. Savastano), and the Faerie communal practices, mentioned above, (J. Hasbrouck), the authors make a case for recognizing the ways in which the content of religious expression is shaped by marginalized sexual orientations and gender identities. The majority of these articles are primarily concerned with white, gay men. This homogeneity is interrupted by a few studies of religious beliefs and practices...