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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Summer Camp and American Jews.”

Happy listening!

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(Pride flag. Image source: Shutterstock)

Stories about LGBTQ people and religion are not simple. Many, unfortunately, are about trauma, or about how rightwing politicians galvanized conservative religious communities to oppose LGBTQ equality. But those are not the only stories about LGBTQ people and religion. For decades, LGBTQ people have refused to cede authority to those who deny their legitimacy and have transformed religious communities and traditions in the process.

What follows is a sample of some of what The Revealer has published in the past few years about LGBTQ people and religion. Several are inspiring. Most are complicated. Many show queer possibilities and queer potential. We hope they serve as a useful and powerful resource this Pride month.

1) Special Issue: “Trans Lives and Religion”
Eight Contributing Authors
Our 2022 special issue, “Trans Lives and Religion” contains articles on transgender and nonbinary Muslims, transgender Buddhist teachers, nonbinary and trans Sikhs, Two-Spirit Indigenous Americans, gender diversity in the Talmud, how Christians can support transgender adolescents, and how today’s anti-trans legislation mirrors earlier anti-queer and anti-reproductive choice efforts.

2) Meet Father Bryan Massingale: A Black, Gay, Priest Fighting for an Inclusive Catholic Church
Olga Segura
A profile of a progressive leader in the Catholic Church working for racial and LGBTQ justice

3) AIDS and the Blessings of Staying: The Ministry of Reverend Jim Mitulski
Lynne Gerber
How the minister of a predominantly gay congregation responded to the AIDS epidemic

4) Queer Nuns and Digital Dragtavism in the Age of Covid-19
Lauren Pond
The Sisters of Perpetual Joy are spreading happiness and pushing boundaries during the pandemic

5) Evangelical Women Leaders as LGBTQ Allies
Mihee Kim-Kort
The ramifications of evangelical women leaders publicly supporting LGBTQ Christians

6) Ramy Season Two: Let’s Talk about Sex, Habibi
Mehammed Amadeus Mack
A review of the show’s portrayal of American Muslims and queer identities

7) Seeing Through Stained Glass: Gay, Catholic, and Conflicted
Mark Jason Williams
His father’s funeral forced him to confront the Catholic community that once condemned him

8) Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics
Kali Handelman and Brett Krutzsch
A conversation between Kali Handelman and Brett Krutzsch about Krutzsch’s book and the place of religion and the media within LGBTQ politics

Happy Pride!

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(Summer camp. Image source: Ourkids.net)

The following excerpt comes from the book The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America by Sandra Fox (Stanford University Press, ©2023 by Sandra Felicia Fox. All Rights Reserved.) The book explores the role summer camps played among American Jews in the second half of the twentieth century.

This excerpt explores how Jewish summer camps used games to instill a positive sense of Jewish identity

***

In summer 1964, Camp Habonim Midwest, a socialist-Zionist camp in Michigan, held “four days and nites [sic] of special days,” each full of “enough excitement and drama” for an entire summer. After recounting a few challenging hikes, a counselor named Jackie described one special day, “Yom Hityashvut,” an elaborate, twenty-four-hour activity that turned a moment in Zionism’s history into an action-packed role-play. “The usual ruse,” wrote Jackie in her camp’s newspaper, began with a mock illegal immigration game, in which campers played “poor defenseless Jews trying to get to Israel” during the British Mandate. Counselors had roles too, playing the “British soldiers and dense Arab rabble-rousers” blocking the campers from their goal. Despite their originally “poor” position, the “Jews” made it “home, proceeding to build their kibbutz,” and after listening to “a wonderfully told tale of Israeli heroism,” the campers went to bed, waking up in the morning for more “building and carousing.” The game ultimately ended when the Jewish group won, “as they always do out here,” wrote Jackie. “A good time was had by all.”

Starting in the 1960s, games centered on the history of Jewish migration to and settlement in Palestine emerged as common in Zionist camps. Thanks to educational guides for camping leaders, renditions of Hityashvut and similar games surrounding Jewish migration to Palestine also became widely circulated, with versions appearing in the programs of Reform, Conservative, and some communal camps growing in the decades after. Passed down from generation to generation, such games evolved into long-lasting traditions. Like Habonim, the camp of my childhood was a place where Zionism permeated nearly every element of daily life, even the precious time we got to spend cooling off at the pool. One day in summer 2002, counselors and lifeguards led my peers and me through a similar game, tasking us with “migrating to Palestine” by swimming to the other side of the pool. Only when we managed to swim past the counselors, representing “Arabs” and “British soldiers,” did we successfully reach our “homeland.” The pool was a different setting, and the focus was only on the act of immigration to Palestine rather than the settling of land that came afterward. And yet the nuts and bolts of the activity and its messaging were largely the same.

What explains the wide appeal and durability of games like Hityashvut and Aliyah Bet? The answer, on the one hand, stems from the trajectory of Israeli politics in aftermath of the Six Day-War. By having campers play as “poor defenseless Jews” of the Yishuv and identifying Palestinians as “rabble-rousers,” educators hoped to encourage identification with Zionism, especially as Israel’s new occupation of the West Bank brought about more scrutiny to the new state and its supporters. Elevating the story of Jewish settlement while overlooking Palestinian dispossession perpetuated an oversimplified notion of pre-1948 Zionism as a story of “good guys” and “bad guys,” with Jews always inhabiting the “good” side of the conflict. Games like Hityashvut became popular and widespread over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s because educators believed in their power to strengthen campers’ identification with Israel, particularly before they reached college campuses where the countercultural and youth-powered New Left might challenge their stances. By the time I played Aliyah Bet, the occupation’s continuation and the Second Intifada had only fueled more conflict on campuses over Israel, placing many Jewish students in the early 2000s in the position of needing to reevaluate, defend, or justify their relationships to Israel and Zionism. Part of what has helped these games endure, then, has been their utility as promoters of Zionist narratives. In a geopolitical conflict in which every term or designation is a potential land mine, role-playing communicates political messages almost wordlessly.

In this sense, these games’ lasting appeal has had less to do with the specific message they propagated than the broader power their creators and implementers believed they contained. Renditions of Hityashvut and Aliyah Bet were some of the earliest gamified historical scenarios that camps generated, but they were just two of the dozens of role-playing activities that Jewish camp counselors and educators created in the postwar period. Centering games on their visions of Jews from other times and places—primarily settlers of British Mandate Palestine, citizens and soldiers of Israel, or the Jews of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe—camp leaders embraced play as a transformational source of Jewish authenticity, pride, and identity. Educators even infused color war competitions and all-camp festivals, the recreational highlights of the season, in comparable ways, inserting and imbuing their activities with their values, goals, and similar forms of creative dramatics. In all of these cases, play served goals far beyond educating campers with political or historical information. In fact, games like Hityashvut did not pass on data or detail very well at all, the physicality and dynamism of these activities often eclipsing the educational discussions or lectures that set them up beforehand. The former campers I spoke with often could not remember the historical particulars of the games they played: Were they role-playing migration to Palestine or the War of Independence? Were they simulating pogroms, the Holocaust, or an ahistorical conflation of the two? And yet perhaps in their very eschewing of nuance, these games produced emotions, mood, and feeling in spades, from excitement and joy to fear and distress. Through play, educators crucially hoped campers would come to feel more like the Jews they embodied and, in some crucial way, become more like them, assuming their values, passions, dreams, struggles, and even their pain.

In his 1961 book Man, Play, and Games, philosopher Roger Caillois wrote that “it is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there,” that “to a certain degree, a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games.” The concerns that motivated camp educators were in many ways unique to the Jewish postwar moment. Anxieties Jewish leaders held over growing affluence, suburbanization, and assimilation made themselves apparent in their camps’ language programs, Holocaust memorialization, and even their romantic and sexual cultures. The rise of educational Jewish camping occurred in a moment of pronounced concern over the future of Jewishness, over a perceived cultural decline in the face of postwar comfort. But considering how camps approached play helps reveals the hopes camp educators held about their work with youth and the kinds of Jews they held up as models of authenticity, with profound specificity. Following Caillois, this chapter analyzes the games camps played as a mode of “diagnosing” the anxieties that postwar American Jewish adults held about their present and toward identifying the fantasies they held about the Jewish future they could build within their summer camps.

Sandra Fox is the author of The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Listen to episode 36 of the Revealer podcast: “Summer Camp and American Jews.”

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(Illustration of Beef’s main characters. Image source: Netflix)

Driving can be dangerous, and driving can be rage-inducing. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you may allow your imagination to run wild, possibly to violent places. That’s the premise of the new Netflix series Beef, which spirals from a driver honking and giving the finger into an incident of road rage so severe it becomes an operatic tale of revenge.

Beef creator Lee Sung Jin told Forbes that the series was inspired by his own road rage episode, when he started to follow a driver who cursed at him. But Lee quickly changed his mind and drove off, unlike Beef character Danny, played by Stephen Yeun. Danny’s fragile mental health snaps after Ali Wong’s Amy pisses him off in a parking lot, inciting a car chase and bitter fallout, unfolding over ten episodes that depict elaborate and violent paths of revenge that few of us will ever follow.

Beef has sucked in so many viewers because it allows us to live out the fantasy that we can extract justice from our enemies and maybe even get away with it. Like many other revenge stories, Beef has a religious subplot that delves into the complex ties between race and religion in Los Angeles’s Korean Christian communities. If revenge is the opposite of religious teachings about forgiveness, it’s also something we’re culturally and socially discouraged from pursuing. What revenge movies and TV shows do is to provide an outlet for our desire to get even or settle the score with people who’ve done us harm. The longing for revenge is deeply human, but we constantly suppress it so that our lives don’t turn into chaos. Because religion so often focuses on revenge as a moral wrong, revenge stories also give us a guilt-free way to imagine what our own acts of revenge might be like. While we might not escalate our own revenge fantasies to the scale that Beef does, movies and shows that depict someone getting even can provide a socially acceptable way for us to imagine our own acts of revenge.

(A scene from Beef. Source: Netflix)

Psychologists who study revenge fantasies have discovered that children who experience trauma frequently imagine revenge as a way of coping. Because children feel a lack of control over their circumstances, revenge fantasies can help them to regain agency and give them an outlet for their anger and confusion. As adults, revenge fantasies can similarly provide an outlet for people who’ve experienced trauma, particularly for adults dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Because trauma can make us feel humiliated, imagining revenge is a way of protecting ourselves from further harm. Psychologists Craig Hain and Anna Weber argue that visualizing revenge can “regulate feelings of injustice and loss of control,” which in turn can help a person regain stability after a traumatic experience.

On the other hand, the danger of revenge fantasies is that repetitive escapes into them can exacerbate feelings of distress. Researchers who work with people who actually enact revenge have found that they don’t rid themselves of post-traumatic symptoms. Many psychologists argue that revenge fantasies should be contained to an occasional occurrence, guided by a therapist, making them just one pathway a person might briefly travel on their way toward healing. This idea of revenge fantasies as a pathway would also help explain why revenge movies and TV shows are so enjoyable. They allow us to imagine what it would be like to act on our imaginations, but only for a couple of hours at a time, and always with an exit ramp back into a more comfortable reality.

Revenge fantasies have a long history in art and culture, but in the Renaissance they became an obsession for writers and audiences alike. The revenge plays of Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Middleton, among others, became so popular they turned into an entire theatrical sub-genre of the tragedies audiences greatly enjoyed. The English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon’s influential writing on revenge, along with the violent religious conflicts that surged as Protestant kings and queens sought to purge England of Catholics, meant that revenge was much on the minds of theatrical audiences. Bacon described revenge as “a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out,” and warned that “a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.” Revenge plays were a way to show audiences how revenge could have catastrophic outcomes, as it does in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but they were also bloody, murderous, candlelit fun.

Renaissance revenge tragedies mostly follow a similar structure, one that’s still imitated in revenge movies and TV shows today. A person is driven mad by the murder of someone close to them. They then discover the identity of the murderer, either through a visit by a ghost (in both Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet) or via their own sleuthing. In turn, they plot revenge on their enemies, which sometimes escalates to gruesome proportions. This may have peaked in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, when Titus murders his enemy Lavinia’s sons, bakes their remains into a pie, and serves it to her at a banquet. I once saw a production of Titus where the entire cast pretended to vomit during this scene, but the audience’s groans mixed with fits of uneasy laughter at the over-the-topness of it all showed that hundreds of years later, Shakespeare’s revenge fantasies still resonate.

A cursory scroll through any listicle of revenge films shows that most of these movies still follow a fairly comparable plot pattern to their Renaissance ancestors. Gone Girl, Memento, Gladiator, Old Boy, Promising Young Woman, Midsommar and pretty much the entire Quentin Tarantino catalog follow similar story arcs to Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and The Spanish Tragedy. A person is wronged, sets out to correct that wrong, and vengeance is theirs. These movies are often violent to uncomfortable degrees, depending on your tolerance for onscreen violence, but the death and fighting is often cartoonishly epic in scale, with hundreds of extras being mowed down in epically scaled explosions, sword fights, or gun battles.

Many of these movies also have religious themes or subplots, which allows them to offer escapism from moralistic real life. Midsommar is about a death obsessed pagan cult that the grief-stricken protagonist is slowly sucked into. The writer of Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennel, described the main character as an “avenging angel” and told an interviewer she hoped the film would act like a Biblical parable about revenge. Oldboy director Park Chan-wook grew up Catholic in Korea, where he was aware of “a sense of guilt that is unique to Catholics.” As a film’s depiction of retribution escalates, viewers can use the character’s pursuit of revenge as a substitute for their own with far less dramatic moral consequences.

The John Wick franchise has made revenge into its entire modus operandi. Played by Keanu Reeves, the films’ titular retired assassin is given a puppy by his dying wife in the first film, and when baddies break into his home and kill the puppy, it leads to an escalating series of revenge acts that quickly reach absurdist degrees. The John Wick movies are also loaded with Catholic symbolism, including a pope-like character called “the elder,” adding some religious balance to all the carnage. The formula has proven so popular that there are now four John Wick movies for people to binge if they’re having a particularly bad week.

But that propensity to take revenge to the most outrageously violent endpoint is where many of these films and shows can lose their audiences. Even for people like myself who think and write frequently about social and religious pressures to be forgiving, the excessive scale of revenge depicted in these productions can be overwhelming, the equivalent of being stuck inside a first person shooter video game for hours on end. And that can be fun, but it can also be exhausting.

(Beef poster. Source: Netflix)

I loved streaming Beef, but as it went on, I found myself thinking that I wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. Watching the two main characters decimate their lives and hurt the people around them for the sake of revenge became queasily challenging as things tipped out of control. I lost interest in Tarantino’s movies years ago, depressed by his overuse of racial slurs and casual misogyny, but also because I don’t have the stomach for hours and hours of people being shot and stabbed for the sake of revenge. For some of us, revenge fantasies, as it turns out, have their limits.

How much revenge is too much? Just as psychologists argue that our own revenge fantasies can be a healthy means of coping if we contain them to the world of the imagination and use them to move through a trauma, the same might be said for revenge movies and shows. If there were multiple seasons of Beef, would we really want to watch them back-to-back? I’m sure there are people who’ve had a John Wick weekend, but that might be too much revenge for most people. Some Shakespeare theater companies won’t even touch Titus Andronicus, worried it will turn off audiences looking for escapism via the cozy familiarity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night.

The real tragedy is that today, revenge can escalate into horrifying real-world incidents of mass shootings as acts of revenge, something so common that it is difficult to think of a week that has gone by this year without one. In the face of that scale of tragedy, depictions of revenge on screen might seem dangerous or like a form of temptation. However, we already know that violent video games do not, despite arguments to the contrary, have a strong connection to America’s gun violence epidemic. There is some evidence that after the release of a popular, violent video game, violent crime rates go down rather than up, suggesting these games, and perhaps these films and shows, offer people an outlet for revenge fantasies, and are not the source of gun violence in the United States. That’s more the result of unfettered access to guns and an obsessive attachment to the Second Amendment.

Like any media depicting violence, if we consume it with some degree of awareness, revenge movies and shows can be a way of processing our pain so we can avoid acting out a desire for revenge. These productions can theoretically help us avoid tragedy by depicting revenge’s worst possible outcomes. The fact that many of them end with the main characters regretting their revenge isn’t a coincidence. Shakespeare was a deeply religious moralist, and his revenge plays end with a message about the danger of revenge when it goes too far. Beef also ends with a depiction of revenge’s danger, becoming a modern fable for our age. If forgiveness needs to have limits because some things are unforgivable, perhaps we need to put limits around our revenge fantasies too.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post It’s a Beef: How Revenge Movies and TV Shows Help Us Cope appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Emily Leshner for the Associated Press)

On the afternoon of August 2, 2021, Afia Kua, 22, finished cleaning her apartment in Accra, Ghana. Feeling exhausted, she walked to her bedroom. Lying down, she took out her phone and got on Twitter. While scrolling, she stumbled on a tweet about Ghana’s new anti-LGBTQ bill. For a moment, she was shocked. While reading through the online comments, she felt a growing sense of pain.

“I was very disappointed, less so surprised, and more so discouraged when I realized how [cisgender heteorsexual] Christian communities coalesced around in support of the bill,” Kua says.

Known as the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, the act was introduced into Ghana’s Parliament in August 2021 and was marked as an “urgent” plan by the Parliament’s Speaker who described the bill as a means to “nip the activities of [LGBTQ] groups in the bud.”

The bill seeks to punish, with up to five years in prison, anyone who identifies as part of the LGBTQ community, anyone in a same-gender relationship, and anyone who engages in consensual intercourse with a person of the same gender. The bill also criminalizes any act of LGBTQ rights advocacy with up to ten years in prison. And it would outlaw gender affirmation surgeries and anyone who identifies with a gender not assigned to them at birth. In matters of intersexuality, the bill will enforce doctors to perform cruel surgical procedures on intersex children. And, teachers will face jail time if they do not report LGBTQ students to authorities.

By passing this bill, Ghana would join the list of countries in Africa to criminalize LGBTQ people. 32 nations on the African continent already have harsh anti-LGBTQ laws, with punishments including imprisonment and death by stoning, as is the case in the northern region of Nigeria.

According to a 2021 report by the Ghana Statistical Service, Ghana has a population of 30.8 million – of which 71.3% are Christian: 31.6% of those are Pentecostal and 17.4% are Catholic. While conservative religious views help explain why so many Ghanaians support the new anti-LGBTQ law, many in the country also see homosexuality as un-African and a Western import. Others believe that queer people are possessed by demons. Taken together, countless people within these various groups are in favor of eliminating LGBTQ Ghanaians from the country.

Growing up, Afia Kua, who identifies as both queer and Christian, looked forward to Sundays and going to church with her family. In her first year in university, she joined a Catholic Bible study group. But after two years, she developed an interest in the Anglican Church and became a member. Kua knew she shared a faith with Christians who were either ambivalent or antagonistic about her sexuality. But she never imagined they would seek to criminalize her existence.

For several years, the Anglican church in Ghana has wrestled with its position on LGBTQ issues. Now, the church fully backs the anti-LGBTQ bill.

Over the past couple of decades, Anglican churches across Africa have been breaking away from their mother church in England after it affirmed same-sex marriages and LGBTQ identities. In Ghana, the Anglican Church joined forces with Catholic and other Protestant churches to support the anti-LGBTQ bill, to promote conversion therapy, and to encourage the incarceration of “unrepentant” LGBTQ people.

(Image source: Phill Magakoe for Getty Images)

In September 2021, The Christian Council of Ghana, which includes Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and others, issued a joint statement that partly read, “We uphold the Bible as our Principal guide and consider the LGBTQI+ in all its forms as unacceptable behavior that our God frowns upon.” After that, more Christian leaders openly expressed their support for the bill. The Catholic Archbishop Philip Naameh told the Associated Press, “We don’t accept murderers. Why should we accept somebody who is doing sex in a sinful way?”

For queer Christians in Ghana, such statements have been traumatizing. While Kua says she didn’t always feel that her faith and sexuality could be aligned when she was younger, she had started to believe that her sexuality and her Christianity were compatible. “I thought being a faithful Christian meant not being affirming of gender and sexual diversity,” she recalls. But, she says, “I began meeting queer, gender expansive, and transgender Christians who have faith I admire, which challenged the stereotypes I had.”

Kua worries that her church’s support for the anti-LGBTQ bill will push her to abandon her faith. But she isn’t willing to renounce religion yet. “I find Jesus compelling, as do many queer, gender expansive, and transgender Ghanaians,” she said. “And I think it’s important not to concede my faith to interpretations of the Bible that are informed by patriarchy and dualism.”

For other queer Ghanaians though, Christian homophobia has led them out of the church. Dariun Sena, who identifies as queer and describes himself as agnostic, only attends church when asked by his parents.

“Before I became agnostic, I was in denial of my sexuality,” he reflects. “I thought it was a phase, though I knew I was different but I convinced myself that everybody experiences same-sex attraction and those feelings go away as we grow.”

By the time Sena turned 16, he knew he wasn’t going through a phase. As his attractions to men persisted, he prayed to change. When nothing changed, he developed suicidal thoughts and resentments against God.

“I asked myself why God created me in the first place as a homosexual if he was opposed to homosexuality and would send us to hell,” he said. “Why wasn’t God taking my homosexual feelings away if he really exists? It didn’t make sense to me. I started questioning a lot of things in the Bible and about Christianity; they didn’t make sense to me so I started looking up to science,” he said.

When he came to terms with his sexuality, Sena detached himself from religion. “The constant hate of my personhood by Christians pushed me away from Christianity,” he said. “Non-religious people were kind, accepting, and tolerant of me.” He now only attends church to prevent his religious parents from learning that he is agnostic.

Sena’s experiences mirror the agony of many LGBTQ Ghanaians in religious homes. He has never come out as gay to his parents, maintaining that he will live happily as long as they have no knowledge of his sexuality.

In October 2021, the Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury, the symbolic head of the global Anglican communion, released a statement saying he was “gravely concerned about queer lives in Ghana.” That statement enraged countless Ghanaians. Many decried how the West was still invested in the affairs of Africans and had no place in Ghana’s politics.

Meanwhile, the Catholic church in Ghana voiced support for the anti-LGBTQ bill. Just a few days after the Pope said Catholics should respect LGBTQ people, the Ghanaian Catholic Bishops publicly expressed their support for the anti-LGBTQ bill.

Mark Kwame, who is an Anglo Catholic, was dismissed from his church because of his sexuality. “As if denying me wasn’t enough, my church dismissed me and led a smear campaign against me,” he said.

In 2020, a church member came across a Facebook post Kwame had made about reconciling his sexuality with Christianity. Kwame was active in his church’s choir and the church member reported him to the choir leader, who immediately stripped him of his membership. Kwame, though, continued to attend rehearsals. In response, the choir leader reported him to the priest who publicly humiliated him. “They told me they didn’t want me influencing children,” he said. “They forgot how devoted I was to the church, my service, and every other contribution and [called] me an abomination.”

Kwame remains hopeful that one day the Catholic church will be accepting. “I believe with time the church will change its views and will be more welcoming, though it’s currently living in denial,” he said. “It’s a matter of not shutting the door on dialogue and listening.”

Though Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ bill has been on hold for some time, it has been undergoing recent debate in Ghana’s parliament because the president has not yet voiced his full support. Members of the parliament have given the president a deadline to change his decision. If he does not, the bill will be brought back to the parliament. If two-thirds of the members vote to approve it, the anti-LGBTQ bill will become law.

In late March, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris visited Ghana. In a joint press conference with President Akufo-Addo, Harris said the anti-LGBTQ bill would be a violation of human rights. In response, Akufo-Addo mentioned that the legislation was not introduced by his government and said that the Attorney General has intervened to amend the bill. But details about any changes to the bill have not been made public.

As Ghanaians wait to see how the bill will change, or if it will become law, queer Christians in Ghana continue to find ways to try to reconcile their sexuality and their faith within families and communities that reject them.

For Emmanuel Vincent, one of his greatest struggles is helping his family understand his sexuality. “When my father first heard of my being queer, he quickly disowned me without holding back,” he said. “I still wonder what they should have done to me had I still been a child, how they would take me to the church and try to pray the gay away without knowing they would be exposing me to harm.”

Speaking on the state of the community, the director of the organization LGBT+ Rights Ghana, Alex Kofi Donkor, said, “LGBT+ Rights Ghana and other civil society organizations advocating for LGBT+ Rights in Ghana are currently maximizing internal capacities and developing strategies to legally and socially cover community members and activists should the bill be passed, while utilizing available resources (social media campaigns, programs and projects) to create a formidable force of opposition against the bill within the various institutions in Ghana.”

For Kua, faith and hope are what she holds onto most lately. “I can’t advocate, nor can I openly criticize the church for erasing queer lives and supporting our doom,” she said. “The little I can do is hope that the bill isn’t passed.”

While the bill is said to be undergoing a series of modifications, no legislators have said anything official about such changes. But what remains is a constant fear for LGBTQ people in Ghana: the fear of people discovering their sexuality and physically assaulting them for it, the fear of conversion therapies from biased religious institutions, the fear of their families rejecting them, and the fear of their country imprisoning them rather than allowing them to express their love and identities.

Ugonna-Ora Owoh is a journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. His writing on politics, art, fashion, gender, and sexuality has appeared in the New York Times, VOGUE, Architectural Digest, TeenVOGUE, LGBTQ Nation, VICE, and others.

The post What Ghana’s Anti-LGBTQ Bill Means for Queer Christians appeared first on The Revealer.

(The Stonewall Inn. Image source: National Park Service)

It’s Pride month, when we commemorate the historic Stonewall Uprising by taking over our local streets in festivals, marches, and parades. Like salmon returning to a natal spawning ground, LGBTQ folks in New York City complete the annual pilgrimage to the iconic site of the 1969 riots, which took place in front of the Stonewall Inn, a queer bar in Greenwich Village. Most of the mile and a half route is an interminable traffic jam on foot, but in the last few blocks the meaning of the march becomes visceral. The barge-like floats peel off and marchers enter a chute of rainbows that extend to the sky, with cheering onlookers waving from apartment windows, fire escapes, and rooftops. Our bodies encrusted in sunscreen and glitter, with sore knees and now-urgent bladders, we tread through the same narrow streets where pride was born.

Along with the rainbows and glitter, there’s also a reliable role in this annual ritual for the killjoy historian. Our role is to comment on the incident being commemorated, the June 28, 1969 protests, when queens, dykes, and fairies resisted what was customary harassment by the New York Police Department. A riot, and a movement, followed. Inevitably, historians responding to the Pride prompt recite a litany of corrections, which establish that all the “firsts” attributed to Stonewall happened earlier and somewhere else: this event was not the first gay riot; not the first resistance to a police raid on a gay bar; not the debut of radical activism; not the moment when the LGBTQ movement burst into public view, and not even close to the wholesale beginning of queer political action.

This airing of historical grievances is more than an annual social ritual; it is the foundation to an entire field of study. According to historian Terence Kissack, “almost the entire corpus of gay and lesbian history can be read as an attempt to deconstruct the Stonewall narrative.” And yet, the intellectual ferment to correct the popular narrative’s inaccuracies have made little dent. Indeed, the appetite for incorrect history seems only to grow more voracious with the conglomerate multinational expansion of Pride. It is in response to this conundrum that queer cultural critic Jasmin Nair counters the rush to remember and commemorate Stonewall with a simple refusal: the energy to remember this one event, she argues, has created a “juggernaut” that has crushed other significant events—from the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966 and the raid on Chicago’s Trip bar in 1968, to the more than six hundred other queer protests that took place in the United States around the time of Stonewall. To make space for other memories, Nair argues, we should “forget Stonewall.”

As if we could. The pleasure of bad history is hardly limited to Stonewall. Indeed, historical inaccuracy is arguably a qualification for public recognition as a significant holiday. Commemorative status increases in proportion to historical overstatement.

Take, for instance, the most well-known plot point in the popular narrativization of the Stonewall riots: the notorious brick. A key theme in these stories addresses the question of who started it all, distilled into the query, “Who threw the first brick?” The symbolic importance of Stonewall as the place “Where Pride was Born” (as put by the heavily criticized 2015 film Stonewall) means that the instigator of the riots is at the same time a symbolic progenitor of the whole LGBTQ movement: our queer spiritual parent.

Empirically speaking, this quest is at best futile. Riots are by definition chaotic, driven by a collective fury. “Who threw the first brick?” narrows that chaos to the pitching velocity of a single bicep; as if with one well-aimed toss we could, in Dr. King’s phrasing, bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

The absurdity of the question serves up history as parody. Social media users have turned it into a comic riff with a fill-in Mad Lib formula: “Name verbed the first noun at Stonewall.” “Jamie Lee Curtis threw the first Activia at Stonewall.” “Lil Nas X threw the first butt plug.” And so on.

No amount of mocking the nonsense of this question, however, will cease its emphatic answers. The names put forward as historic first brick-throwers make an ethical and political point, by spotlighting activists whose identities represent those in the margins of the movement, most frequently key leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Each was historically significant for reasons independent from the riots: Johnson and Rivera, both participants in gay liberation and gay activist organizations founded after the riots, co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and persisted in the political struggle for and by trans people, people of color, and sex workers.

(Marsha P. Johnson. Image source: USA Today)

Neither of them threw the first brick. Indeed, neither credibly claimed this role for themselves. (Rivera, perhaps jokingly, at one point said she threw the second Molotov cocktail; Johnson persistently reminded her friend that neither of them was actually at the scene when the riot began.)

Why are these activists, as transgender people of color, so persistently conscripted into this fictive role of brick-thrower? Addressing this puzzle takes up a different question than what happened at Stonewall: why have queer communities become so passionately invested in fictional answers to a counterfactual question? Perhaps an investigation into how this question came to be asked will illuminate what is so fiercely at stake in its answer.

Among the puzzles of Stonewall’s popular narrativization is how a brick came to replace the historically documented projectiles. Documenting “firsts” in a riot is difficult under any circumstances, but this riot was better documented than many others. Two Village Voice reporters, Lucian Truscott and Howard Smith, witnessed the unrest in real time and published side-by side accounts the following week. Truscott reported from the streets outside the bar. Smith, whose beat that night was to follow the officers of the First Division, retreated for safety into the bar along with the cops. Both accounts are riddled with homophobic slurs. In the eyes of the reporters, as well as the police, the scene was full of ordinarily dismissible “limp wristed faeries” suddenly turned implausibly terrifying. Despite their failure to recognize the humanity of the protestors, the two authors quite convincingly document the objects being thrown at them.

It began with small coins: pennies and dimes, which then escalated to nickels and quarters. The question never asked about Stonewall is “who threw the first penny?” A penny is an unimpressive weapon on its own, but imagine fistfuls of spare change spewed from an angry crowd. Like buckshot, it forced the arresting officers to retreat into the bar for cover.

Reporter Smith, barricaded in the bar, could not see what was being lobbed at the windows and door. Truscott, perched on a trashcan outside, kept a close log. Coins spent, the rioters scrabbled for heavier objects: beer cans, bottles, and cobblestones. Eventually, Truscott’s trashcan was commandeered, as was an uprooted parking meter, which became a battering ram against the door—the cause of the frightening sounds heard from inside the bar. No bricks. Also, no Molotov cocktails. Smith witnessed how the bar caught fire. An arm reached through the shattered front window to squirt a stream of lighter fluid into the room, followed by a lit match.

Truscott and Smith’s accounts of the riot were, in the early 1970s, a routine part of gay newspapers’ June special editions for what was then called Christopher Street Liberation Day. Nobody asked in those days who threw the first brick, but the accounts were often framed with an acknowledgement that “drag queens” and “street kids”—always nameless—were the vanguard in that night of struggle.

The first named projectile thrower at Stonewall came not from memory but from fiction. Patricia Nell Warren’s novel Front Runner, published in 1974, scripts in this role a hunky white athlete: Harlan, a former college athletic director who was fired after being outed as gay, is now a high-end hustler in the Village. Warren narrates the importance of the riots through Harlan’s eyes: “An amazing thing happened. I had a rock in my hand and I threw it […] Something cracked in my head that night, and in the heads of the gays. That night saw the coming of the militant gay.”

Warren’s book was surely not the only source for the unanswerable question about the first projectile. But when asked, in the decade following, it was usually in the form of “who threw the first rock?” The typical response to the question was to insist on its impossibility while also insisting that “youth and drag queens” led the way—not the Harlans of the world. And yet, it was often the Harlans of the world, in the form of prominent white cisgender gay men, whose reminiscences most formatively shaped narratives about Stonewall. Vito Russo, film writer and gay activist from New York, echoed a familiar refrain in his reminiscences about Stonewall in Army of Lovers: “Drag queens,” he insisted, started the Stonewall riots “because they really had nothing to lose. They threw the first rock.”

By the 1990s, a brick had come to replace the rock in the stories about Stonewall. Gay academic Martin Duberman’s book on Stonewall helped to cement in place the existence of a brick-thrower (even if that person remained unknown and unnamed). Duberman’s interview with Sylvia Rivera also lifted her up as a participant in the riots, who recalled throwing “bricks and rocks and things” after the riot was already in full swing.

(Sylvia Rivera. Image source: Kay Lahusen)

What should be clear in this account is what today’s social media users already know: the question about the first rock-cum-brick is part of a formula. The answer follows an established pattern. Calling out the formulaic nature of this exchange might seem derogatory in ways similar to naming parts of Stonewall a “myth.” This is what the historical corrections miss: it is precisely as a myth, and one that is ritually enacted, that the Stonewall narrative holds power. Its mythical quality is a problem only if accuracy is the only test for truth.

To distinguish between truth and accuracy is to acknowledge that a story’s power to move can be separated from the factual information it conveys. Myths ground us in a glorious past with brave forbearers who we can call upon when we are beleaguered. They offer more than historical information; they envelop the listener into the frame as participants in the action.

Stonewall has continued to hold power for LGBTQ communities facing violence and marginalization, with the first brick-thrower standing in as a symbol of a movement against injustice led by those who were most stigmatized and rejected. American national mythology has many such figures—from Tisquantum (known as Squanto) to Rosa Parks—whose roles are narrated through a combination of social marginalization and heroic exceptionalism. Taken as history, these stories offer discrete points of information that erase the collective struggles and continuing oppression of the communities these figures represent.

Correcting the facts of these histories may be a futile effort. But perhaps we can refocus and expand the way these narratives work as mythology. If our myths invite symbolic identification with the most marginalized, they should compel all of us into the struggle with these communities.

Factually speaking, “who threw the first brick” has one answer. Myth has no such constraints: the truth of this question is not to inform you. The truth of this question is to recruit you to the fight for all trans and queer lives.

Heather White is the author of Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights.

The post The First Brick at Stonewall appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Late last month, on the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, Florida governor Ron DeSantis visited a Christian school and signed several anti-LGBTQ bills into law. Florida will now only recognize a person’s gender assigned at birth. Consequently, a transgender woman cannot change her gender on state-issued documents and has no protections if a hospital insists on treating her as a man. On that point, DeSantis had already signed a bill into law that allows medical providers to refuse care to anyone who they find morally objectionable, such as an EMT who refuses to treat a battered transgender patient because he believes God only ordained two genders. DeSantis also signed a bill into law that prohibits gender-affirming care for minors. Nonbinary and transgender adolescents who want to take puberty blockers are no longer permitted to access them in Florida (and, for that matter, in several other states). And DeSantis made it illegal for performance venues to allow minors to see drag performances, including, I kid you not, stage productions of Tootsie. And all of this comes on the heels of the Florida Department of Education investigating a fifth-grade teacher because she showed an animated Disney movie that had a gay character.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

We are witnessing a full assault on LGBTQ people. We must not dismiss these actions as political theater to advance rightwing politicians (although it is also that). These laws make life for transgender people in several states difficult, if not impossible. In a country riddled with gun violence, poverty, and rampant child abuse within heterosexual households, transgender Americans have become scapegoats who are responsible for none of those things. We must all ask ourselves what we are doing to resist this movement so that we can keep trans people, and all LGBTQ people, safe.

With the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation throughout the country, the June issue of The Revealer begins with two articles that explore LGBTQ politics. In “The First Brick at Stonewall,” Heather White investigates the origin stories of the Stonewall riots, the mythic birth of the LGBTQ movement, and considers why the queer community has latched onto stories about hero-saviors. Then, our issue moves beyond the United States since anti-LGBTQ legislation is rising around the globe. In “What Ghana’s Anti-LGBTQ Bill Means for Queer Christians,” Ugonnaora Owoh explores how queer religious Ghanaians are reacting to a new bill that criminalizes LGBTQ people.

Given how frustrating these laws are and how frightening their popularity is in various religious communities, our next article considers how people react to all sorts of injustices. Our June issue broadens out beyond LGBTQ topics with “It’s a Beef: How Revenge Movies and TV Shows Help Us Cope,” where Kaya Oakes reflects on revenge fantasies and what they offer people under various systems of oppression.

Since June is the start of summer, the issue also features an excerpt from Sandra Fox’s new book The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America, where she explores role-playing games at Jewish sleepaway camps and how they have been used to promote a positive sense of Jewish identity.

For those wanting even more summer camp nostalgia, our June issue includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Summer Camp and American Jews.” Sandra Fox joins us to discuss how summer camps became such an important aspect of the American Jewish experience. We explore why Jewish communities invested so heavily in sleepaway camps, the camps’ goals, and why Jewish leaders saw summer camps as key places to protect the future of Jewish life in the United States. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Finally, for anyone looking for robust articles about LGBTQ people and religion, our June issue includes a roundup of eight pieces from The Revealer that are valuable resources this Pride month, from our special issue on “Trans Lives and Religion,” to a profile of an openly-gay, Black Catholic priest.

As we watch what is unfolding in Florida, where organizers in some cities have canceled Pride events because they fear for their safety, we should remember that the anti-LGBTQ, anti-reproductive freedom, anti-Black laws that the Florida government is enacting can, in a short time, enfold all of us. Our country is in a precarious situation. Following the 2024 election, Florida could become the model for the United States. Let’s make sure we don’t get to that. Let’s do what we can to prevent that. Let’s support the people in states and cities who find themselves under legislative assault. And let’s remember that Pride commemorates a protest against an unjust society that did not want queer people to exist. We are there again. The time for protest is now.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post On Pride, Protests, and the Summer appeared first on The Revealer.