Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology before StonewallMarieCartier. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Press, 2013.

Abstract

Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology before Stonewall Marie Cartier. Stocks field, UK: Acumen Press, 2013.American butch-femme bar culture, nurtured by gay women from 1940s to 1980s, has attracted quite a range of valuations: from a scorned population to an ideological battle front between lesbians, then to reclamation, and even queer appropriation. Scholarship from participants in that culture-Lillian Fader man, Joan Nestle, Judy Grahn, Madeline Davis, and Elizabeth Kennedy-gives historians of lesbian experience a rich base from which to discern its significance. Marie Cartier's Baby, You Are My Religion is an impressively multi-faceted meditation on lesbian bar culture. She interviews over one hundred participants (including most of scholars named above), hearing her informants with empathy and grace. Cartier theorizes ethical and communal role of bars, articulating parallels with community formation of religious institutions. Combining this ambitious agenda with an insightful neologism-thee logy-Cartier honors women whose lives she records and makes a valuable contribution to study of American religion.The book pursues two intersecting paths. first stems from interviews that Cartier conducted from 2005 to 2009. She notes important patterns: an insistence that bar was the only place for meeting other gay women and more specific discovery that (o)ne hundred percent of [her] informants prior to 1973 knew that homosexuals were considered mentally ill. None of them felt that they were in need of mental health assistance for being gay, and none of them believed that they themselves were mentally ill (84).The second pathway through Baby, You Are My Religion focuses on interpreting lives of pre-Stonewall women theologically, using theoretical tools as disparate as postmodern deviant historiography (24), Mary Daly's Radical Lesbian-Feminism (199-200), and Gordon Kaufman's theological structures (189-193). Cartier's eclectic methodology is more cumulative than meticulous. But she teases out how butch-femme bar culture generated a spirituality based in relational self-de finition: women found themselves in each other. Cartier recognizes two religious constraints on working-class women of bars: they were living in a world where no institutional religions accepted homosexuals (189) and where creating one's own spirituality independently of religious institutions was not yet possible (40-41): The women who entered bar were not necessarily without religion. They all came from religions that had kicked them out by signaling they were sinners (189, emphasis Cartier).Recognizing these structural limitations, Cartier reads theology back into situation, knowing that doing so might even strike her informants as odd (115). …