The Queer God: Sexuality and Liberation Theology

By Marcella Althaus-Reid

INTRODUCTION

Theology in Other contexts: on gay bars and a Queer God

The body does not lie, but the truths it tells us may seem strange …

(Califia and Campbell 1997:113)

Where are my Latin sisters

Still praying to Virgin Mary
Rosarios, Novenas, Promesas, despojos
¡Ave María purísima!
Forgive me for loving you
The way I do.
(Vega 1994:240)

Salsa and theology

Where is the salsa in Contextual Theology? Suppose that, as in the poem from Brunilda
Vega, someone tells you that Latinas go to the same bar that has been recommended to
you. Suppose that you are feeling lonely and think that the world is not a loving place
anymore. Then you decide to go to the bar after praying your novena to your saint, or to
the Virgin Mary. Perhaps you are asking San Antonio for a lover and you know that at
the door of the bar nobody checks for rosaries or religious stamps in your pocket. The
same can be said when you are at the door of the church. They don't ask you for that old
love letter that you still keep in your bag neither do they realise whose hands your
loving hands like to hold. Now suppose that in your mind the church and the Latina bar
somehow get mixed up with fragments of memories of the Nicene Creed and of a Christ
who died of love for you some time ago contesting the fact that nobody else seems to be
dying of love for you anymore. You are thinking about a religion of courage and you go
to the salsa bar where a Latina may be friendly with you. But then, torn between love
and rosaries, you may wonder what life would be if you were to love her. Remembering
the poem from Vega, you know that in the end, you may pray for God's forgiveness:
'Forgive me for loving you the way I do'. But we need also forgiveness for loving God
too.

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What goodness and righteousness would prevail if you were now in love again, and in
love with one whom you are (ecclesiastically) not supposed to love? Where would God
be in a salsa bar? Where would the church stand on all this? And where would your
Latina sisters be anyway doing their Contextual Theologies? Are they not loving each
other on Sunday evenings, between the novenas? Why not?

There are many sexual dissenters whose theological community is made up of the
gathering of those who go to gay bars with rosaries in their pockets, or who make camp
chapels of their living rooms simply because there is a cry in their lives, and a
theological cry, which refuses to fit life into different compartments. The question is
¿Va a haber amor? (Will love prevail?). The search for love and for truth is a bodily
one. Bodies in love add many theological insights to the quest for God and truth, but
doing theology from other contexts needs to consider the experiences and reflection of
Others too.

Many years ago, Liberation Theologies started to become suspicious of ideologically

determined definitions such as what theology is, or who is a theologian. It was the time
when liberationists would say that the theologian was a factory worker, or a miner
trying to discern the presence of God in a politically and economically oppressed
community. It did not occur to them at that time that it was necessary to dismantle the
sexual ideology of theology, and for theologians to come out from their closets and
ground their theology in a praxis of intellectual, living honesty. God, meanwhile, was
also kept hidden in God's own closet. Nobody thought about doing theology in gay bars,
although gay bars are full of theologians. Women theologians recorded reflections
amongst the poor, heterosexual women of Latin America but never went to salsa bars.
The point is that the understanding that arose in Liberation Theology of the possibility
of doing a theology for social transformation should also lead us on the journey of re-
discovering (or unveiling) the true face of God as part of the Queer theological quest.
Far from leading people towards nihilism, Queer Theology has taken Contextual
Theologies to new limits and thinking of alternatives which are sexual and political too.

The Queer God

The Queer God is a book about this re-discovery of God outside the heterosexual
ideology which has been prevalent in the history of Christianity and theology. In order
to do that, it is necessary to facilitate the coming out of the closet of God by a process of
theological queering. By theological queering, we mean the deliberate questioning of
heterosexual experience and thinking which has shaped our understanding of theology,
the role of the theologian and hermeneutics. That process requires from us not only
honesty and courage, but also a critical engagement with Queer Theory, non-
heterosexual and critical Heterosexual Theology. It also requires us to come clean about
our experiences, which in some way or other always seem destined to fall outside the
normative sexual ideology of theology. Further than this, it requires us to read a
contramano (against the grain) issues of heterosexual institutions such as marriage and
the subversiveness of popular

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spirituality in many non-Western cultures. It is from there that not only do we
rediscover the face of the Queer God, but also find our relationship with God challenged
and see emerging new reflections on holiness and on Christianity.
This book is divided into two parts. The first part, 'Queering theology', is about issues of
identity in Queer Theology. It is necessary to reflect on the vocation and also the task of
Queer Theology and its sources. This involves exploring what can broadly be called the
libertine hermeneutical circle which comes from the Marquis de Sade and Georges
Bataille. This libertine hermeneutical circle will help us to understand and unravel a
Christian God who comes to us in drag, in the form of the Trinity. It is in the Trinity
that gods and people, and also spirits of theologically dubious sexual orientation such as
the Holy Spirit (claimed both by men and women), can interrelate meaningfully outside
the restrictiveness of the heterosexual parental imaginary.
'Queering Hermeneutics' continues with the use of the libertine hermeneutical circle in
an intertextual reading. The proposal is to read the Scriptures together with the work of
Pierre Klossowski as well as fiction writers such as Kathy Acker from the United States,
Hilda Hilst from Brazil and Alejandra Pizarnick and Federico Andahazi from Argentina.
Searching for a way to read the Bible which will displace its heterosexual core in a
deconstructionist fashion, the hermeneutical proposal is a libertine one. That is to say, it
displaces the reader of the Bible to bedrooms, dungeons and other unusual locations
which will enable her to have different and embodied points of view and perspectives. I
have been inspired in this by the work of the late Kathy Acker, who in her writing has
used displacement techniques which also involve intertextuality. In that way, she has
been able to create new meanings through putting into dialogue more than one already
existing text - reading, for instance, Charles Dickens and a writer on the Algerian war,
or juxtaposing Pier Paolo Passolini's account of his own death with Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet and the works of the Brontë sisters. 1 Therefore, I have been using
Acker's approach as a way to read the Bible from the dungeons of Sade's novels, and
from the dislocation that writers such as Andahazi (the controversial Argentinian author
of The Anatomist) and Hilda Hirst, the Queer writer from Brazil, can bring to our
perspectives. The question to be pursued in Queer hermeneutics is one of transcendence.
Can we displace transcendental heterosexual ways of reading the Scriptures by sexually
disconcerting the bodily logic of positioning the reader in the Scriptures?
Part I ends with a chapter reflecting on queering the economy of God's exchange rate
mechanism, where through reading Bataille's novel Madame Edwarda and Andahazi's
The Anatomist, we explore issues of God's transcendence and the question of
prostitution such as in God the Whore. The biblical text of the story of Rahab (Joshua 2)
brings us to a final discussion on queering sexuality, in the context of colonialism,
divine transcendence and bisexual identity.
The second part of the book, 'Queer promiscuities', follows the outlined strategy of
sexually disconcerting theology by exploring the category of promiscuity by grounding
it in the context of Latin American cultures. If God is

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manifested in history, and more specifically in the events of liberation in human history,
then we need to find God's face in loving relationships outside the borders of decent
theology, and in the context of the Other as the poor and excluded. Promiscuity as a
Queer theological category makes us think about love and also economics.
Promiscuities show the strength of love amongst the different patterns of loving
relationships in different cultures in Latin America, but also the reality of the excluded.
They also help us to understand that popular spiritualities are not only sexually
dissenting, but sometimes they elaborate a complex symbology intended to help people
to cope with the aberrancies of heterosexual systems. Such is the reality of Moya, a
Peruvian 'bisexual town', or the subversive and promiscuous understandings of the Holy
Spirit amongst women who have extramarital love affairs in La Puna.

Finally, we reflect on demonologies, as the art of being rebellious loving spirits, and the
consequences of such transgressions for the understanding of 'Queer Holiness' in the
context of globalisation. The reflection on concrete, Queer experience as the starting
point for examining holiness needs to be part of a project of community-based and
political holiness. By theologically de-colonising categories such as limbo and hell, and
finding their potential subversiveness, spaces of holiness can also be claimed as Queer.

The Queer God will then create a new space for a theological dialogue for and from
heterosexual dissenters. Queering theology, the theological task and God is all part of a
coming out of the closet for Christianity which is no longer simply one option among
others, nor is it a sidetrack outside what has been regarded as the highroad of classical
theology. Queering theology is the path of God's own liberation, apart from ours, and as
such it constitutes a critique to what Heterosexual Theology has done with God by
closeting the divine. In theology, as in love, this quest is a spiritual one, which requires
continuing to the Other side of theology, and the Other side of God. That is the side to
which I and many of my compatriots have been consigned for centuries, condemned to
be permanent aliens for Christianity, for our countries, and for our families.

The Other side is in reality a pervasive space made up of innumerable Queer religious
and political diasporas, and a space to be considered when doing contextual Queer
Theology. The Good News is that at that edge, still talking about the thousands of
symbolic Nicaraguas present in every anti-capitalist demonstration, or the voices of
people who stand up to claim the right to live in an alternative economic and spiritual
system to the totalitarian globalisation which has pervaded our lives, there is God. Also,
claiming against the destruction of nations and individual lives, including the
environment, are people still talking about gay or bisexual rights and orgasms and God.
The God who has come out, tired perhaps of being pushed to the edge by hegemonic
sexual systems in theology, has made God's sanctuary on the Other side. Our task and
our joy is to find or simply recognise God sitting amongst us, at any time, in any gay
bar or in the home of a camp friend who decorates her living room as a chapel and
doesn't leave her rosary at home when going to a salsa bar.
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