Baby, You are My Religion

Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall

Marie Cartier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317544708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Baby, You Are My Religion argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall—when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill—these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all. Baby, You are My Religion explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and that religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. Baby, You are My Religion examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.

1. IT WAS THE ONLY PLACE

God does not live in a dogmatic scripture … but instead abides very close to us indeed … breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned … with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love.¹

Baby … you … are my religion …²

INTRODUCTION

Pre-Stonewall gay bars functioned as centers of communities, in the way that churches, as structures, function as the centers of many communities. For while many people do not go to church per se, if they belong to the religion the church symbolizes and houses, the structure of the church will also provide a structure to their own lives—for the occasional visit, for the identification it provides, for the knowledge of a community they could enter into—however they choose to do that, as well as for the list of attributes that we might assume religion provides—identity formation, community involvement, exploration of meaning, and a sense of something bigger than self. Religion is “the desire for depth … the experience … of the world imagined.”³ In religious studies we often call that “desire for depth,” a sense of the sacred.

I began writing this in a gay coffee shop in a gay neighborhood of California’s fifth largest city, Long Beach. A city that has arguably one of the best Pride parades and festivals in the nation, maybe the world—at least that is what everyone says. The striking contrast between where I sat and the over one hundred stories I gathered haunts me. This feeling of being shadowed by a past I owe my present to and yet one I did not fully understand propelled this work.

Rae is an 84-year-old woman, with a great laugh. When I go to interview her, she has a picture for me of a dashing man in a suit with a brilliant smile, smoking a pipe. It is her at eighteen, the happiest years of her life, she says, when she was living in drag “24/7” and headlining as the star singer at Tess’s Continental—a club in the 1940s on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood managed by two gay women—Tess and Sylvia. She worked there one year and fell in love with a beautiful woman, a femme fatale, who didn’t want to be with someone who dressed as a man. Rae showed me a picture with the dashing man on one side of the frame and on the other “his twin,” Kay, a stunning blonde with polished nails in an evening dress.

“At first I thought I was in drag, until I got the hang of the make-up.” Rae was never able to get another professional singing job and her girlfriend left after two years to be with a man and then came back to Rae, but not romantically.⁴ Rae recorded an album of songs on vinyl when she was young in Hollywood during the time when you could walk in and press your record right there.⁵ “Crazy About You,” is about why Rae took back the girl who initially left her for a man. Rae says she was stupid in love; I say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, that if she had one year that was the happiest of all her life, then that is more than many people have. She says K. D. Lang made it as a butch drag singer and implies she should have done that. I say K. D. Lang made it on the backs of people like you and she slowly nods. She’s never considered this. She lives alone and her community is the friends she made in an older lesbian group—OLOC, Older Lesbians Organizing for Change. Before she connected with this group, she was alone for nine years. I want her to know that the success of butch drag communities is a historical evolution that became possible only through the struggles of previous butch drag communities.

This book is mainly about that previous culture, the bar culture that thrived for women between the years 1940–75. I call the period “pre-Stonewall” (even though Stonewall happened in 1969); this study covers those who were in the bars through the 1970s, because the effects of Stonewall did not reverberate through America until late into the 70s. For instance in Orange County, southern California, there was a popular butch-femme bar called The Happy Hour that was regularly patrolled by police into the 1980s; and there was also police abuse in the bars of West Hollywood documented into the 1990s.⁶

This culture that provided four walls for people to have the happiest times of their lives, in some cases, and the worst times in others, was more than a bar. These bars served as cultural community centers or institutional foundations for gay women and were organized primarily by butch-femme individuals.

I am not the first to write about a bar as being more than a bar. Certainly many cultures have used the bar as a space for community. As an Irish citizen, I am very familiar with the use of the bar as a space for connection. The Tender Bar⁷ and other publications are memoirs that explore this. The House of Blues, a popular blues bar, advertises, “If this is your religion, this is your church.” So while my idea is not completely new, it is new to think of the bar as an actual church. And more unusual is to think of the gay women’s bar and pre-Stonewall butch-femme community as religious.

One of my informants asked, “Marie, what is religious about this?” This has been the question asked more than any other. Sometimes the most vocal opponents have been the women themselves. For example, the famous memoirist and archivist, Joan Nestle, said to me, “I am nothing if not profane.”⁸ Religion has done very little for these women. They were kicked out of all traditional religions, and non-traditional religions would not gain prominence until “the dawning of the New Age” in the mid-1970s. The psychiatric community considered these women mentally ill. The police considered them sex offenders and felons; and the government considered them the nation’s highest security risk. All of my pre-Stonewall informants were aware that they could be put into a mental institution where they might be subjected to electric shock, severe drugging and worse if they were not careful. All of them knew they could lose their jobs, especially if the job was a government one. All of them knew that they were considered criminals, and the spaces where they gathered were regularly raided and the participants arrested, and their names published. Often the only way to clear their names if this happened was to pay off unscrupulous lawyers. Many of them were arrested in the bars, and outside the bars. Many were harassed and raped by those same police and by straight men. Some of them were put in mental institutions, or in jail, or lost their jobs; many of them were in the military and were dishonorably discharged. In this environment there was one space that was accepting—the gay bar, and over and over again I heard the words, “That was the only space.”

The bar was the only space in which these women could actually be, in the most literal sense. For many of these women these four walls were the space in which they could actually have an identity that felt natural to them. This is interesting because so often they are accused of “role-playing,” being masculine or feminine in the extreme (i.e., “butch” and “femme”), whereas they themselves would often say that the “roles” they were suspected of playing felt completely natural. In that rarified smoky air of the illicit bar, they were able to claim the roles or inhabit these identities for the first, and sometimes, the only time. In this space they were able to meet lovers, or rather find someone to love, have community, find themselves, have a sense of belonging, and, in general, find a structure in which they could create meaning for their lives. Isn’t that what many of us credit religion with helping us to do?

What did these spaces mean? Even though they were regularly raided and their participants ridiculed, the women continued to go there, often at great risk. Joan Nestle told me about someone urinating through the door slot by the table she was sitting at, that suddenly a rain of urine fell on the floor next to the table where she was having a drink with a date.⁹ Although the bar itself may have felt somewhat protected, people on the outside knew who was gathered inside, and felt free to comment on that, as did this person on the outside of the bar. For many women inside, their lives were secret from their biological families, their work partners, their friends outside “the life,” often even husbands and boyfriends—but the women still came to the bar. Does this sound—religious? The early Christians felt this kind of ridicule and were not considered religious by the religion at large of the time.¹⁰ Religions by definition have not provided safe or easy harbors for many of their participants. The difference between the gay women’s bar/butch-femme communities and the early Christians is that we believe today that the early Christians were probably aware that they were practicing “religion” and the butch-femme community was not aware that they were practicing what could be called religion.¹¹ Religion has provided a space where you could find out who you are, what you are made of, how you wish to live, and for what or for whom you might die. This is what the butch-femme bars and surrounding communities gave to their participants.

In my one-woman show, Ballistic Femme,¹² I explored the butch-femme community of the late 1990s and I wrote, “I love this community—I would die for it.”

And I also wrote, “I hate this community … sometimes it is just really hard to sleep next to a soldier.”¹³

The great lost and found department

Robert Short wrote that “The church is the great lost and found department.”¹⁴ A reason to live and a reason to die … Isn’t that what we think religion might be? To find a place where we can have a home inside of ourselves and with others? The names of these bars were instrumental—The Lost and Found (Chicago),¹⁵ Tess’s Continental, The Star Room, The If Club, The Oxwood Inn, The Happy Hour (Southern California), The Sea Colony (New York), and many others. Their names were spoken of wistfully, lovingly, angrily, or dismissively, but overall spoken with a deep longing for the community that existed there. All of these pre-Stonewall bars, like the infamous Chicago bar, The Lost and Found, were places where someone could be lost and then found. I see them as churches amid our mid-century landscape where a particular populace was able to often find solace, develop meaning, create home, and perhaps find someone to love. In many cases that person they found to love was themselves.

This community was a community with history and identity. However identity is not a static thing. There were numerous forces that contributed to identity formation such as oppression, individual and social repression, and social exclusion. The bar scene, despite its dangers, was often the safest place to question and form identity, and, I argue, was a religious community institution. The questions and desires of this gay women’s/butch-femme community¹⁶ were representative of perennial religious questions.

BABY, YOU ARE MY RELIGION …

In 1995, I was dating a butch woman who at one point said to me, “Baby, you are my religion,” in response to my wanting her to go to Catholic Mass at Easter—being a “C. and E.” (Christmas and Easter) Catholic myself.

In 1997, I premiered Ballistic Femme, about contemporary butch-femme communities at that time.¹⁷ The comment went into a scene in which I washed off orange juice I had dripped over myself and then cut up more oranges, offering them to the audience in Communion. When I was washing off this “sacrament,” I licked a cross I had around my neck and said, “I’ve had lovers say, ‘Baby, you are my church; you are my religion.’”¹⁸

I came out in the lesbian feminist revolution of the late 1970s and 80s. As fervent me...