A Theology of Corporeality Embodied in the Butch Femme Bar Culture of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

It is my intention in this brief study to extend the argument that Nestle begins with her seminal article,' Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Cour age in the 1950s', and that Henking and Comstock continue by including it in the critical anthology of writings on'being queer' and 'being religious', Qu(e)erying Religion. I want to do this by making 'an overt claim' that the butch-femme community of the 1950s (actually this community is active from the 40s through the early 60s) created its own spirituality—in the content of a corporeal theology between couples and individually, and that these couples/individuals were also part of this larger 'bar community' that created a space for the community to refine this theology in terms of self-defining community. I want to argue that this self-defined community served to function for its members in many of the same ways any religious community functions that is held together by a common faith and/ or theology. ...I praise those hands, with scars she's proud of, on gender fuck forearms. They steady my pulse, settle down, settle down, curve on my cheek in the dark like a prayer. ...Her hands say yield and make it sound safe. They enter me like something holy. It takes time to interpret the tongue of her hands, the whispering of 'come here', or the bunch and knot of 'back off', as they churn cement, hoist bricks, sludge mortar into cracks, knife off the excess, until she's built Jericho and I have no trumpet... ...I am in the sweet, inquisitive poultice of her hands, proudly helpless, wanted, given. She makes loaves and fishes of me.2