Trouble at the "Crossroads": Divisions over the Use of Religious Symbols as AIDS Memorials in Houston, 1991

By 1991 the city of Houston, Texas, was the location of both several major organized gay and lesbian groups and a serious AIDS epidemic that showed no signs of stopping. Over the preceding decade, the city's gays and lesbians and their allies had thrown themselves into fundraising and activism while at the same time doing their best to mitigate the heavy communal emotional toll of so many tragic and terrifying losses.¹ One particular attempt to memorialize those lost to AIDS was Crossroads '91, a public display and fundraising effort by AIDS Foundation Houston intended to represent some of the many Houstonians who had died in the epidemic. However, this display turned into a fight that set factions of Houston's gay community against one another. The particulars of the disagreement revealed several underlying fractures in a population already under great stress from the ongoing epidemic. On the one side of the controversy were gay-affiliated organizations and individuals who wanted to make a visible display of mourning using symbols they associated with death and burial. On the other side were other gay-affiliated organizations and individuals who objected to all religious influences on their activities, especially when grieving those lost to a plague that certain prominent Christian voices had described as deserved divine punishment.

Though this incident was relatively minor and has been nearly forgotten now even by the people who were there at the time, examining it brings to light a number of issues regarding the nature of gay AIDS activism and its complex relationship to Christianity as the American cultural default. Christianity in the United States functions not only as religion but as the source of a series of semivisible assumptions that underlie much of American thought and tradition to the point of appearing neutrally secular to many.² What qualifies as neutral, of course, is dependent upon geography and the particular historical moment, and it generally describes views that are so common that they can be taken for granted to the point of invisibility.³ When objections to these invisibly Christian elements of an argument arise, they are read not as legitimate challenges to imposing religion on the unwilling but as baseless attacks on inoffensive secular traditions that just happen to have sacred roots. In this way, Christianity silently reaffirms its default place in American society, maintaining power without ever troubling the country's ability to tell a story about itself as a champion of religious liberty.

In this piece, I examine a 1991 fundraising effort by AIDS Foundation Houston that became an unexpected site of controversy when its members used crosses as a visual means of memorializing those they had lost to the epidemic. Scholars of American religion such as Heather White and Kathleen Talvacchia have deconstructed the culture-war myth of the twentieth century that has cast (progressive, queer) secularism against (conservative, heteronormative) Christianity in a perfect oppositional binary, exploring instead the fluidity of these concepts, often through the lens of the AIDS epidemic.⁴ Others, particularly Melissa Wilcox, Hillary Kaell, and Anthony Petro, have pointed out the persistent weight of Christian iconography and tradition even in the increasingly nonreligious United States and Canada and how intentional (mis)use of religious symbolism can both critique and sacralize the secular.⁵ Less attention, however, has been paid to cultural critiques posed by dedicated atheists, who not only oppose vocally antigay Christian voices but argue that religion in all its manifestations hinders human liberation. Queer spaces can expand the boundaries of what is considered religious by appropriating and democratizing identifiably Christian iconography. This is, however, not a one-way process; language and symbols that begin as religious can also begin to lose that valence as they become mundane within the larger culture. This article therefore examines a single incident as it was seen at the time by its participants, few of whom would have considered themselves religious but all of whom were influenced by the Christian-default American culture in which they operated. This close reading...