Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid

Introduction

LISA ISHERWOOD

It is of course with the greatest sadness that we have worked on this book, and many tears have accompanied the words on the pages. However, there has also been laughter shared with the friends gathered here as we remember many happy times and wicked moments with Marcella. For the two editors, the sound of dancing feet in fetish boots has never been far away as we have attempted to create a fitting tribute for our dear friend. The impact of Marcella’s work can be seen in the range of chapters collected here; the high esteem in which she was held was shown to us by the immediate positive responses we received (some by return of email and all within 24 hours) when we asked friends to contribute to this book.

The woman who is honoured in these pages was a very complex theologian, a Quaker who carried more than one rosary on her person at all times and, when in London, often visited the British Museum to offer a gift to Bast, the cat goddess of the night; and also regularly attended the Church of Scotland. She was a theological materialist who resisted talk of metaphysics, hearing even talk of radical incarnation to be too vanilla for her tastes. She distrusted Mariology but had medals of Mary and saints around her neck along with a medal of Frieda Kahlo. Marcella was a theologian who liked to ask the difficult questions and she certainly required that liberation theologies and feminist theologies look at themselves and face some harsh realities. Male liberation theologians were asked to look at their repetitions and sanitizations. She asked them to move their thinking away from the clean, male, shining and worthy Christs of the poor and to focus instead on lemon sellers, Xena and drag queens as the places where Christic realities may be lived out. With these as redemptive starting points she asked that they rework their theology in a more grounded and real way, a way that could not dodge political/economic and gendered questions all rolled into one. Her challenge to feminists was to move off the relatively safe ground of gender and to start understanding women’s bodies as sexual as well. As she said, even the poorest and the most downtrodden of women has a sexual story to tell that may not be as straight as we think – not all are passive victims of power-based but vanilla stories.

However, Marcella went further. Just as feminist theologians began to ask the sexual questions and create sexual theology, she herself began to question the orthodoxy of sexuality. It was this questioning of sex in the dark alleys that led her into a creative partnership with me and to the creation of the Queer Series (T & T Clark), a series that was always going to find it hard to stay alive as the realities to which it wished to give space were sometimes difficult for theology to hear. Marcella believed that theology had to be built on earthquakes and that its job was not to heal the ruptures that such seismic shifts create but rather to engage with and encourage the discontinuity – it is here that what may be considered to be of true worth continually unfolds. No static doctrines and fossilized theology would do in a world that changes and dances with inexpressible delights and unspeakable sorrows. No easy ride then for the theologian, but rather a requirement to be always on the edges, in the disruptions – and to be dressed for the occasion! For Marcella, who believed all theology was sexual, this was also an act of love. It had to be engaged from a loving heart as well as a critical head, which takes courage as the heart carries far more than the head has the capacity for or will ever allow itself to. The theological legacy we have is one of complexity, challenge, instability, performativity and courageous love – we have much to be thankful for and much work yet to do.

Presente Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid.

1

Dis/Grace-full Incarnation and the Dis/Grace-full Church:

Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Vision of Radical Inclusivity

ROBERT SHORE-GOSS

Born in a dialectic of secrecy and occupying a place of dis/grace, a Queer God may be calling for Queer theology to remain prophetic and transgressive, episodic and deviant, vague and non definitive. Queer theologies do redemption in reverse: the beginning of a theology outside origins without firm final destinations. As Queer theology cancels the sexual identity of totalitarian forms of theology, we too should dress up in full leather (or carry bird masks) as part of the prophetic task of the church.[1]

The above were the last words of Marcella Althaus-Reid that I heard, as Mark D. Jordan read her paper at a conference ‘Queering the Church’ at Boston University School of Theology in April 2007. Marcella was too ill to attend the conference in person. But her presence was vividly challenging, and her words were prophetic, as she articulated the notion of Hard Core Hermeneutic as ‘dis/grace’ out of the heterosexual ideological notions of grace: ‘A hard Queer theological core, no matter what, must remain disgraceful, that is, outside a Grace which presupposes an original gift of identities from God.’[2] Grace has been inscribed in a heterosexual matrix that dis/graces the queer other, and for Marcella ‘disgrace is the Hard Core of Queer’.[3] In her paper, Marcella argues that the incarnated queer God remains outside the economy of heterosexual grace and that the queer church consists of dis-authorized, disgraceful outsiders. I will later present a dis/grace-full queer church with which Marcella would have naturally been at home.

I characterize Marcella Althaus-Reid as a nomadic theologian who grew up among the poor in Argentina, and she wrote as a feminist and queer theologian in diaspora. She wrote as a theologian in exile, as an outsider in Scotland and an outsider from Argentina. Her description of an indecent theologian, I believe, is an autobiographical description of herself though she would humbly dismiss that possibility:

An Indecent theologian is a theologian who has learned to survive with several passports. She is a Christian and a Queer theologian or a minister and a Queer lover who cannot be shown in public and she is a woman and a worker: the list of the game of multiple representations extends. A Queer theologian has many passports because she is a theologian in diaspora, that is, a theologian who explores at the crossroads of Christianity issues of self-identity and the identity of her community, which are related to sexuality, race, culture, and poverty.[4]

Nomadic prophets and religious outsiders have impacted my life personally and theologically. I can think of diaspora writers such as the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, Troy Perry and John McNeill, feminist and queer theologians. I have been attracted spiritually and theologically to outside religious figures such as Jesus the Christ, the Buddha, Francis of Assisi, and Milarepa – a famous yogin saint from Tibet.[5]

I place Marcella at the intersection of South American liberation, feminist, postcolonial and queer theologies, and she has pushed the boundaries of liberation, postcolonial and feminist theologies as she did with queer theologies. Her theological voice was always ‘the other’, calling attention to the excluded, the poor, indigenous folks, the queer Latino/a transvestite, and a myriad of indecent people excluded by orthodox Christianity or its liberal expressions. She pushed the sanitized theological boundaries of her divinity students, the theological academy, her male liberation theology colleagues in South America, the queer churches, and even her publisher. In a conversation at a queer conference, she expressed her dismay that Routledge had excised a section entitled ‘Jesus in the Dungeon of the Marquis de Sade’ from The Queer God. It was read from the heteronormative closet with its subtle bonds that screamed, ‘It is too queer, it is too indecent for publication.’

For Marcella, sexual stories are incarnational stories, reflective of a nomadic Christology and her notions of the dis/graced church. These theological notions are interwoven brilliantly into a trajectory of queer theology and practice. I want briefly to address her nomadic incarnational theology and then how it is enfleshed in sexual stories. Finally, I want to speak of a church of dis/grace and its mission of radical inclusive love.

Marcella writes about herself as a bisexual theologian:

The bisexual theologian (or the theologian who thinks critically bi- or polyamorously) is in the unique position of acting and reflecting in a theological praxis based on two basic elements: first, the relation to the closet, and second, the way of transcendence via the instability of God, sexual identity and humanity.[6]

Bisexuality introduces a fluidity into fixed heterocentric, theological thinking and at the same time incorporates ‘unsuitable’ or ‘indecent’ stories of the excluded as new partners in theology.[7] A critically bisexual theologian engages the theological dialogue of different communities reflecting plurality:

That may also involve the theological dialogue of different communities reflecting plurality more than homogeneity, for example leather S/M people with gay leather men who are not SMers; lesbian women of the sexual radicals inspired by people such as Pat Califa, Susie Bright and Tamsin Wilton with lesbians against pornography; or the work of the Roman Catholic liberationist Mary Grey with the Body Theology of Lisa Isherwood and the radical Sexual Theology of Jeremy Carrette.[8]

Her theological method naturally tries to bring opposites into theological dialogue.

God’s indecent Christ

Yet, in the incarnation of God in Jesus, we may consider that Christ’s crucifixion happened outside the ethical space of Grace. Moreover, Golgotha is in itself a place of disgrace, more related to the space of sects (cut off from transcendence) than of an economy of Grace.[9]

Marcella’s queer incarnational theology counters the fixed categories of Christologies from above that begin their discussion of Jesus from the perspective of Trinity and/or God. Such Christologies generate exclusive and hierarchical notions of church and economies of grace, while Christologies from below start with the human, historical Jesus and discuss his relationship with the divine and generate generally less exclusive practices of church and more permeable economies of grace.[10] Fixed notions of the incarnated God in Christ limit ecclesial boundaries of churches, resulting in deliberate exclusions, but reinforce theological patterns of male church hierarchies and theological heteronormativity. Thus, Marcella writes: ‘He [Jesus] has been dressed theologically as a heterosexually oriented (celibate) man. Jesus with erased genitalia; Jesus minus erotic body.’[11]

Marcella’s notion of an ‘indecent Christ’ revolves around a kenotic Christology where God has emptied God’s self in Jesus and God embodied God’s self in Christ and human sexuality.[12] She thus constructs a Bi/Christ within the category of bisexuality. Bisexuality is a deconstructive category that confuses the categories of heterosexual/gay or lesbian; it does not employ ‘either/or thinking’ but a ‘both/and thinking’ that shatters heterosexual/homosexual categories. It further stands against heteronormative ideological and theological obsessions for creating decent and indecent boundaries.

For Marcella, Jesus has been dressed as a heterosexually celibate male, and his genitals have been effaced and his body de-eroticized. Thus, vanilla systematic theologies have limited Christ to idealized masculine and non-sexual templates. So Marcella observes that Jesus has been transformed into a ‘a celibate batman, batteries included to supply his head with that halo of light’.[13] By bringing the instability of bisexuality into the construction of Christology, Althaus-Reid disrupts the hetero/Christ and places the Bi/Christ outside of binary structures of theological heteronormativity.

Since bisexuality represents a nomadic and permeable template outside of the fixed category of heteronormativity, Marcella Althaus-Reid employs bisexuality to create an inclusive notion of the incarnation. One of her elegant pieces of theological insight is her use of the wordplay with the translation of John 1.14, ‘pitching of tent’:

Bi/Christology walks like a nomad in lands of opposition and exclusive identities, and does not pitch its tent forever in the same place. If we considered that in the Gospel of John 1:14, the Verb is said to have ‘dwelt among us’ as a tabernacle (a tent) or ‘put his tent amongst us’, the image conveys Christ’s high mobility and lack of fixed spaces or definitive frontiers. Tents are easily dismantled overnight and do not become ruins or monuments; they are rather folded and stored or reused for another purpose when old. Tents change shape in strong winds, and their adaptability rather than their stubbornness is one of their greatest assets.[14]

Althaus-Reid correlates the nomadic category of pitching a tent with bisexuality to construct the Bi/Christ, for such a correlation provides new ways to look outside gender/sexual binarism and hierarchy and value God’s kenosis into human sexuality: ‘God’s divinity depends on God’s own presence amidst the sexual turbulences of human beings’ intimate relationships, whose knowledge is the knowledge of the excluded queerness in Christianity.’[15] This has vast hermeneutical consequences for seeking out the sources for revelatory understanding of God and the method of incorporating the messiness of excluded human sexualities and gender diversity. Althaus-Reid and Isherwood write in their introduction to The Sexual Theologian: ‘Theology that has incarnation at its heart is queer indeed. What else so fundamentally challenges the nature of human and divine identity? That the divine immersed itself in flesh, and that flesh is now divine, is queer theology at its peak.’[16] The Christian God/human has far more permeability than the fixed ontological categories of many high and low Christologies. Marcella’s incarnational theology is involved in the messiness of human sexuality, for God has been plunged into human flesh, not a constructed Christ stripped of his humanity but a Christ whose queer disruption of idealized and heterosexual constructions of Christ makes accessible the incarnated God in desires at the bottom of the sexual pyramid.

Earlier in Indecent Theology, Althaus-Reid explores Mary the Drag Queen and Jesus as a cross-dresser (in the transvestite figure of Santa Librada). Santa Librada is a divine cross-dresser, displayed as statues and stamps by the Santerías of Buenos Aires. Althaus-Reid acknowledges that the popular image of Santa Librada during carnivals is an unstable cross-dressing of Mary and Jesus. She writes:

we do not know who is who and that instability is part of a transvestite epistemology, which by doubting the binary pair in religious opposition (Mary/woman and Jesus/man) succeeds in doubting the stability of the whole theological gender system . . . [Librada] makes of Christ a Christ dressed as Mary, and of Mary, a woman occupying the male divine space of the cross.[17]

Librada as an ambiguous drag queen or drag king blurs the gender boundaries which patriarchal culture and Christianity need to fix: ontological, naturalized and divinely bestowed categories. Poor migrant workers worship Santa Librada, and during the dictatorial times in Argentina, it stood as a critique of the repressive politics of dress, sexuality and conformity. The transvestite Santa Librada expresses liberative potential of sexual and political transgressions as she is carried through the streets while the celebrating poor sing songs of political criticism.

Althaus-Reid writes: ‘Jesus’ sexuality belongs to something intuitively recognized in him by Queer people: a dis-order; a Christ painted in the permanent exposure outside the normative borders, and a Jesus of a corruptible nature.’[18] Queer people outside of heterosexuality provide the seeds for a larger Christ outside of binary categories; queer constructions of Christ question the heterosexual economy that has dressed Jesus as a ‘heterosexually oriented (celibate) man’.[19] Marcella Althaus-Reid wants to undress Christ from heterosexuality and redress Christ in postmodern sexualities, genders and economic locations:

Christ can be represented very movingly as a young woman holding another woman tightly, as they stand at the closed door of a church amidst voices from within the church shouting ‘stay out’ to the young lesbian . . . Or we can envisage a transgendered Christ, taking on the Christself the oppression and injustice that a person suffers when gender and sexuality are bodily dislocated.[20]

Marcella Althaus-Reid is committed to a larger Christ, those excommunicated from a heterosexually violent God, those suffering from economic deprivation and social marginalization:[21]

the figure of Christ gives way to the figure of the Queer God as the stranger at the gate of churches and theology. This is a Queer God who is found in the transversal encounter between the sexually excluded transvestites in Buenos Aires and the excluded God, whose divinity is made redundant in the cruci/fiction scene of the gospel. An unloved messiah, marginalized and diminished ends his life as a rejected, unnecessary God. That Queer God starts to appear in the many deaths and resurrections of Jesus during his lifetime and in the continuing struggle of the Queer Christ to bring resurrection to our lives in times of deadly exclusion.[22]

Sexual stories as incarnational stories

At the bottom line of Queer theologies, there are biographies of sexual migrants, testimonies of real lives in rebellions made of love, pleasure and suffering.[23]

While feminist and liberation theologies have stressed the need of ‘lived experience’ as dialogue partner, both theologies have generally closeted or restricted reflection on ‘human sexuality’. Some feminist theologies have consciously recovered ‘eros’ as a fundamental category for theological reflection to free themselves from the patriarchal sex/gender system, but they seldom look outside the heterosexual epistemological foundations of theology or examine sufficiently how the sex/gender system impacts the poor. Marcella writes: ‘Liberation Theology has never cared to develop a Christian ethic of sexuality. It has used a progressive Marxist analysis to understand the ideological formation processes related to class issues.’[24] Liberation theology failed to look at the sex/gender codes prior to Christian conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Althaus-Reid builds on feminist theologies grounded in eros but incorporates explicit queer, sexual theologies to develop her own nomadic queer theology. I would suggest that one of her main achievements is her epistemological grounding of incarnation (and God) into human erotic longings and passionate intimacies while queering the sex/gender system and the methodological exclusions of non-heterosexuality in liberation theologies from their analyses of economic and political ideologies that oppress the poor. There are few queer, liberation and feminist theologians with her theological breadth that construct a sexual theology with passion for the excluded, the marginalized and the poor. Queer sexual theologies are different from idealistic processes because they start from people’s sexual actions, and she notes that sexual theology is doing theology from their own experiences and from their sexual stories. Such a contextual queer location reveals the falsity of constructions between the material and divine dimension of human lives.[25] Thus, Marcella builds on the Marxist suspicion of political and economic ideologies by bringing a queer suspicion of the ideological basis of the sex/gender system of poverty and oppression. In the process, she pushes the limits of liberation, feminist and queer theologies into new theological trajectories of interconnected lived experiences.

She calls her method by various names, ‘indecent’ and ‘queer’, for it transgresses the boundaries of decent theologies that ignore the sex/gender structures of poverty while inviting feminist and queer theologies to explore the economic and ideological structures of poverty from an embodied, albeit sexual, perspective. Her method is intrusive, grounded in sexual epistemologies that introduce diverse sexual stories of the poor and the marginalized into theological reflection:

revelation reveals (unveils, undresses) God in our historical circumstances, and assumes a materialist twist in our understanding. That is the point of doing theology from people’s experiences and from their sexual stories, because they reveal the falsity of the border limits between the material and divine dimension of our lives.[26]

Marcella interrogates theology in an epistemology derived from the poor and those sexually excluded circles. Her epistemology of sexual stories of the poor and the sexual outcast disrupts the idealistic and decent boundaries of decent theology. Kwok Pui-lan notes, ‘Seldom have we written or imagined sexual stories as sources to think about Christ, as Althaus-Reid suggested.’[27] Marcella Althaus-Reid refocuses our attention to discover ‘God’s face in loving relationships outside the borders of decent theology, and in the context of the Other as the poor and the excluded’.[28] Thus, queer theology is ‘first person theology: diasporic, self-disclosing, autobiographical and responsible for its own words’.[29] The sexual stories are frequently the narratives of sexual migrants, outside the boundaries of respectability – middle-class theologies, churches and society. They are the stories of the sexually excluded or marginalized, whose rebellions of pleasure, love and human suffering become the starting points for an incarnational queer theology. Biographical sexual stories of the poor and the excluded disrupt the heterosexual and vanilla theologies of Christianity.

Althaus-Reid notes:

Sexual stories of fetishism are in proximity to Christian theology; there is a familiarity and conviviality between them, but also a criss-crossing and dissent which unveils and produces a revelation of theological camouflage. The neighbourhood fences between fetishism and Christianity do not separate them but point towards a common flow between them.[30]

The border between Christianity and fetishism is arbitrary, but actually it is a blurred boundary. Stories of sexual fetishism carry theological elements for challenging reflection, especially stories from the bottom disrupting the hierarchical binaries of the sexual pyramid. Sexual stories confront churches and theologies because they have elided the memory of the bodily aspects of God’s incarnation in the messiness of queer sexualities.

As co-editor of the Second Testament section of The Queer Bible Commentary, I invited Marcella to write the chapter on Mark’s Gospel.[31] Mark’s Gospel reflects so much the Palestinian Jesus tradition, a prime resource from her liberation and postcolonial perspective. I thought that she was perfect, and her theological reflections – titled ‘Scenes from Cruci/Fictions: Matan a una Marica (‘They killed a faggot’)’ – were dedicated to ‘RG’ in the original, electronic version.[32] I was oblivious to ‘RG’– supposing that these were the initials of an oppressed author in Latin America.

At the 2003 conference of the American Academy of Religion, when I asked about the identity of ‘RG’, she said, ‘No, I envision you as the unemployed Jesus. I wrote about the figure of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel with you and the tenure battle at Webster in mind.’ I reread the chapter and was moved to tears as I read the subsection: ‘A gay man lost his job: the killings of a Queer man in Mark’s Gospel.’ Even the other co-editors were unaware of Marcella’s dedication; it was struck out by the SCM copy-editor. Her chapter on Mark has polyvalent levels of meaning and wove a couple of life stories simultaneously, but actually re-signifies the lives of many queers.

A dis/grace-full church

I would like to finish with a story which has to some extent inspired this paper. I was told that Rev. Nancy Wilson, the Metropolitan Community Church moderator, once went to preach dressed in leather. She did it as an exemplary way to remember who she was, but I suspect it also acted as a collective call to the congregation to Queerly remember themselves. That act of Queer identity remembering may have been intended to work as a discontinuation of ritualized transgressions in the church: an acting up (or dressing up) done in order to produce an awareness and therefore rupture with the heterosexual matrix of Christianity and Queer theologies. Therefore, a moderator dressed in full leather would function as a reminder, as a call to disjunction in the performance of Grace. It is to say, in other words, that it is even undesirable to join a space of decency in theology.[33]

When I became pastor at MCC church in North Hollywood, it was a church in decline. It had ghettoized itself through a number of church-life experiences – living as church disconnected from LA queer communities. Nearly a decade earlier, the MCC invitation of open commensality at the communion table had impacted me to transfer my ‘disgraced’ or ‘unlaicized’ Catholic clergy credentials to MCC. I intuited that a praxis of open commensality had potential to reach non-church queer folks and create a unique church of excluded queer bodies. Open commensality was the inverse process of ghettoizing and isolating from the queer community; open commensality meant for me an open outreach to the queer community and the heterosexual community to build a radically inclusive community of faith, not threatened by human, cultural and religious diversity.

In a private moment at the Queer Theological Summit at Emory University, Marcella shared with me how MCC Edinburgh brought her back to Christian communion. She found communion so alienating and such an exclusive experience in many Christian churches but found the MCC’s open invitation at table and the blessing personally meaningful. It was the potential of radical inclusive love embedded in the invitation to an open communion table that moved Marcella and touched the depths of theological enterprise. The invitation to an open table was a ‘queeruption’ at its best, for it broke with heterosexual economies of grace that many Christian denominations used to deny queer and poor people access to God’s table for a variety of decent political and theological reasons.

Marcella writes, ‘queer theologians are facilitators of the sexual traffic of the Church’s praxis. They facilitate an encounter amongst strangers which is much more radical than gender-talk.’[34] This is not only reflective of queer theologians but queer pastors as well. As an MCC pastor and queer theologian, I believe that open commensality is the central core grace of MCC practice at table and as a church. Each Sunday, I proclaim with a number of variations open commensality, but the core of the invitation is as follows: ‘You neither need to be a member of MCC or any Church or even a Christian to come to God’s table. All are welcome to table.’ We preach radical, inclusive love and hospitality as our core mission. The practice of open commensality enables a queer church to invite the sexual stories of disparate queers into a matrix of dis/grace.

I want to discuss church as a matrix of dis/grace, and its impact upon the queer community. A queer church at its best is a matrix of dis/grace, and by its mission of radical love it can listen to the sexual stories of queer love, suffering and alienation – perceiving economies of hard queer grace that even LGBT-affirming churches cannot since they frequently function with residual economies of heterocentric grace. I want to discuss how queer church can open itself to include existing economies of ‘hard-core queer grace’. I will concentrate on three economies of dis/grace: (1) innovative indigenous queer rituals; (2) some outside queer stakeholders in the church; and (3) missionary efforts to tell our queer passion narrative. These trajectories do not exhaust what we do as a community of hospitality and radical, inclusive love; they are only suggestive of the fertile, creative dislocations of grace within the queer community perceived as locations of grace by a queer church dedicated to Jesus’ practice of open commensality. In other words, the sexual stories of queer folks are naturally part of our incarnational theologies and practice of church.

In her epigram that opened this section of this paper, Marcella contrasts the Revd Elder Nancy Wilson preaching in leather to the LGBT community to Pope Benedict XVI’s drag. Wilson’s leather attire signified her willingness to enter into dis/graced space. It became not only a disjunctive signifier of grace between decent economies of grace and dis/grace-full space; it was also a prophetic rejection of decent grace for the wilderness of dis/grace to preach to those leather folks outside the heterocentric economy. The first Christmas at MCC in the Valley, a dominatrix on my board had designed a leather slave clergy collar with an eye-bolt hook. I wore it with pride and came to understand Christ’s call to be a servant/slave to others.[35] Marcella aptly writes, ‘God is top (master, Lord) while Jesus is bottom (slave, Suffering Servant).’[36] Leather men and women asked, ‘Who collared you?’ and I answered that God had collared me, and that I was a slave to my Christian community and the greater LGBT community. I have intentionally evolved into a chaplain to the LA leather community. My church hosts the monthly meetings of Avatar, a gay LA B/D/S/M club. I have attended most of their meetings for the last five years as an observer, engaged in multiple conversations, and even gave a presentation on the role of the use of voluntary pain in ascetic practices to achieve altered states of consciousness in the world’s religions. That led to a profound discussion of the spirituality of top/bottom and the loss of ego in what traditionally religion has termed ‘mystical states’. Some members openly spoke that evening about what it meant to surrender to another human through the B/D/S/M ritual and also experience a profound connection to God.

Last year, Avatar inducted me as a member into the club (and I might add that I am perhaps one of the most vanilla members, but I love the leather tribal sense of community). As I and my clergy husband have become chaplains to large segments of the LA leather and biker clubs, we had designed leather liturgical stoles with the MCC denominational logo, the leather flag, the bear emblem, and several logos of leather and motorcycle clubs. We have incorporated into non-denominational leather funerals an indigenous leather ritual such as the fallen leather person with the Brotherhood of Leather honour guard. The leather cap, boots and jacket are placed on a chair by leather comrades with ceremonial reverence. It remains a linking memorial object that simultaneously evokes memorial presence yet signifies physical absence. At the end of the memorial service, leather cap, boots and jacket are removed with ceremonial silence and reverence – clearly communicating the absence of the fallen member of the community.

The leather community is not only creating indigenous leather spiritual rituals but also queering existent rituals. MCC in the Valley has hosted for the last three years a leather Jewish seder service, attended by Jewish, Muslim, Christian and spiritual leather folks. One section of the seder service is the beating of one another with leeks as negative words such as ‘Pharaoh’ are narrated. Another is the inclusion of what leather means to one as slave or master/mistress. The leather community has queered the Passover seder and adapted it to the leather community. We have hosted a number of alternative queer rituals, such as giving sanctuary to a group of gay Muslims for prayer and LGBT Druids for ritual space, because of our mission as a Christian community to radical inclusivity and compassionate care.

Let me list other stakeholders in a queer church that many churches would consider disgraceful within their economies of grace. We are a transgendered inclusive church with a transgender seminarian and a number of other transgendered folks and their families, and we give sanctuary and literally ‘safe space’ to Tri-Ess, the oldest trangendered group in the US. Tri-Ess has evolved into a predominantly heterosexual cross-dressing group of men. We host several California Marriage Equality groups, Silverlake Lesbians, LA Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Rise and Shout LGBT youth mentoring group, a Druid group, and other community groups. We also have a growing heterosexual membership because they felt alienated with the toxic forms of denominational Christianity that targeted LGBT folks. A number of the gay and lesbian bars have bonded with the mission of compassionate care of MCC in the Valley.

This year our church has launched the fourth annual toy drive for HIV+ children and those affected by HIV in LA. It is chaired by my married husband – who is an MCC clergy/chaplain and a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence (aka Sister Attila D’Nun). The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and MCC in the Valley have partnered with a leather-levi bar, a lesbian bar, a country-western dance bar, a gay bowling league, and Mistress Cyan and her polysexual dungeon group. Mistress Cyan’s dungeon Sanctuary was turned down for various toy drives as organizations realized that it was an open fetish community. MCC in the Valley functions as a moral entrepreneur in leading and building a coalition within the LGBT community to return to the greater community.

The third trajectory of our dis/grace-full church that I want to address is the creation and spinning off of queer missionaries to retell the story of Jesus the queer Christ and homophobic violence. MCC in the Valley produced under the direction of one of its members Terrence McNally’s gay passion play, Corpus Christi. The original cast consisted of thirteen men, but our church commitment to radical inclusion led our director to cast six out of the thirteen parts with women – truly queering the play with men playing female roles and women taking on male roles. The cast consists of LGB and queer-friendly heterosexual folks. Terrence McNally’s play is a gay passion play that takes place in the 1950s in Corpus Christi, Texas, around Joshua, a gay Jesus figure who is sexually intimate with his male disciples. This rhetorical re-enactment of incarnation exposes the lethal aspect of homophobic prejudice and the power of love in the life and message of Joshua/Jesus. In his preface, McNally writes: ‘Jesus Christ did not die in vain because his disciples lived to spread his story. It is this generation’s duty to make certain Matthew Shepard did not die in vain. We forget the story at the peril of our very lives.’[37] In a letter to the director Nic Arnzen, McNally writes:

The play was meant to enlarge people’s understanding of the divinity in each of us and, at the same time, to include gay men and women in the story of Christ’s life and encourage a return to spirituality . . . The play is my attempt to lessen that feeling of alienation and create a space in which gay men and women are recognized as spiritual heroes as well.[38]

As the queer and queer-friendly cast began to perform the play, they found themselves touched by its message. Their lives were exposed in the humour and drama of the play. Many of the cast are non-practising Christians or Jews who self-identify as spiritual rather than institutionally religiously affiliated. One evening, I came upon them praying together as a group before their performance. They have continued this practice over the last several years as they have taken the show on the road to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival – winning best performance – to off-Broadway. They have decided to tell Terrence McNally’s story of the lethal ravages of homophobic exclusion by society and church and the re-enactment of the crucifixion of queer people in our society through the story of a gay Joshua.[39]

The Corpus Christi cast ritually prepares itself with prayer before the performance. At the beginning each of the performers are baptized into a character in the play, including Joshua/Jesus. They live the performance, and the dramatic power of the play is a fusion of sacred ritual and ritual performance of the gospel story. But the play has also transformed the lives of the cast as they are. One cast member observes: ‘The (catholic) church taught me very early that I was going to hell for my homosexuality . . . so I shut myself off to a higher power and left my faith in the dust.’ He continues to speak about the personal transformation and impact that the show has had on him: ‘Every single time we do the show from opening hugs and baptisms, to our tears at the Crucifixion, I’m reminded how unafraid I now am. No matter what it is that we believe in, we just need to remember it loves us all equally