Take Me to Queer Church

If religious institutions get financial incentives, why not LGBTQIA+ sacred space?

Original artwork, December 2020.

He called her The Butterfly because she never stopped moving, fluttering on delicate wings from flower to flower. She would pause just long enough for you to catch a glimpse, leaving you wondering if you’d really seen her at all. Our time was brief, but it was enough to change my life—not because of her so much as what she helped me realize, and the sacred space that held us safe, sealed, and sovereign, allowing it all to unfold. 

It happened at R Place, the four-story temple where Seattle’s queers came to testify on three floors of differently themed clubs; where your struggle was reclaimed in another’s glittering ascent to the stage, your soul redeemed by their liturgical lip-sync. It was here, one cold, November night, that I felt the spirit move within me. 

Years before, I had gone through a terrible divorce, and my former marital home was a few blocks from R Place. One dark afternoon, I was dragging a suitcase full of salvaged belongings past the club. As I did, a gorgeous drag queen on her cigarette break looked me right in my mascara-smeared eyes and told me I was beautiful. I smiled for the first time that week, and told her she was, too. I never forgot that moment, and now, that very queen stood before me, allowing the three of us to cut the line in exchange for buying her a drink. I could think of no clearer sign that I was on the right path. 

Inside, I breathlessly recounted the story of that day to the queen; how it had reminded me, if only for a moment, that there was love in the world. She thanked me, dabbing the corners of her dazzling eyes with a cocktail napkin. Her family didn’t accept who she was, she said, and sometimes it got so hard that she considered hanging up the costume. Knowing it made a difference to lost souls like me inspired her to keep going, she said. After all, saints often suffer to keep the faith.

Her witness gave me strength, and the queen saw our holy trinity off to the third-story dance floor. There, under the serene gaze of the go-go dancers, the Butterfly fluttered close, and I kissed her in front of God and the queen and her boyfriend and everybody, and my life was never the same again. These are the moments that happen at queer bars, because they’re more than just a place to get a drink and dance. They are sanctuaries where, amidst the communion of souls, we awaken to greater truths. 

The first gay-owned cabaret in Seattle was called The Garden of Allah, where the LGBTQIA+ community made their pilgrimage. In 1946, the new owners converted the tavern-turned-speakeasy into a paradise for drag and vaudeville performers, and for the next decade, it was the center of queer social life in Seattle. Located in the original gayborhood of Pioneer Square, The Garden offered sanctuary at a time when even dancing with someone of the same gender was illegal. 

Pat Freeman discovered this place as a teen, when “there were no support groups for gay teenagers, let alone for gay adults,” she told the HistoryLink project. “We met gay people. ... We were accepted, and they became our family. It was our refuge from society's homophobia and we could be ourselves. … To be with our own kind: This was butterfly time!”

Butterfly time exists outside of mortal measure, ineffable and unbound by the laws of physics. It is a portal to greater truth: the very definition of a mystical experience.While the Garden fell victim to the McCarthy era and rising rents, Seattle’s queer community found a home just a few miles from downtown, where its legacy lives on. 

Today, the gayborhood is Capitol Hill: the semi-dormant epicenter of the city’s counterculture. It was the place where I always felt at home, before I even knew why. Growing up, I never fit in, drifting aimlessly between groups of friends whose identities seemed clearer than mine, or sitting alone in the computer lab writing plays—but every chance I got, I took the bus downtown just to wander these streets, smoking cloves and breathing easy. 

In high school, I found another holy trinity in my two gay best friends, and I didn’t have to wander those streets alone anymore. Only one of us knew we were queer at the time, proudly and bravely blazing the trail as the only out kid at our school (he remains one of my dearest friends today). The two of us who weren’t driving would fill water bottles with booze lifted a lot less discreetly than we thought from our parents’ cupboards and walk up and down Broadway, soaking it all in. We were regulars for dinner at the now-shuttered Broadway Grill; we smoked cigarettes and ate late-night fries and ice cream in the parking lot of Dick’s. We’d drift into Castle Megastore, whispering reverently as we perused the paddles and rope, dildos and bongs. Wonderful and weird, it was where we belonged.

Then we got older, and finally, we were granted admission to the holiest of places, the queer bars. There was The Chapel Bar, the converted former home of the Butterworth Mortuary. It was a deliciously vampiric lair, all Southern Gothic death-chic, with tucked-away tables and upper-level alcoves bathed in a faint red glow. A drop-lit, circular bar stood where bodies once drained, peddling potions that took us just close enough to death to have a revelation. There was Neighbours, the oldest continuously operating gay club in Seattle; Purr, whose space later became Queer/Bar; and Pony, where we kept a low profile, hugging the porn-plastered walls. But our favorite was R Place, where under the strobing glow, we found our flock. 

Yet darker forces were at work, and in the early 2010s, gentrification began creeping in as Big Tech built city-states unto itself. On the Hill, bizarrely bohemian nightspots, fetish shops, and vintage stores housed in three-story historic buildings began to be replaced by lurking behemoths that packed hundreds of young professionals into minimalist, laminate-floored lofts, spawning high-contrast-lit bistros with culturally appropriated menus and cocktail bars featuring artisanal shrubs. People began wandering into the Hill’s remaining queer spaces ignorant, at best, and aggressive, at worst. Leading up to 2020, residents and businesses alike had begun migrating south, where rents were cheaper and new gayborhoods were taking root. And then the pandemic hit. 

Chapel was an early victim, closing in 2011. Now, many of the Hill’s queer bars have been shuttered for over a year. And R Place recently lost its lease on the iconic building that was so central to its identity (I’m writing a piece for another publication that will delve into all of this further.) The LGBTQIA+ have been left adrift, amplifying the isolation, loneliness, and depression that already plagues our communities, to say nothing of the economic consequences.

While 5% of churches have closed in the COVID-19 crisis, that’s nothing compared to the impact on the bar and nightlife industry, which experienced twicethat many closures in one month alone, between Yelp’s July and August 2020 impact reports. Over 100,000 establishments have closed to date. But they don’t have members’ tithes to draw from, and they still have to pay taxes. What’s more, they have received no relief from the insurance premiums and unpaid claims piling amidst deferred rents in the past year of pandemic closures. 

Yet queer bars serve the LGBTQIA+ community in many of the same ways as houses of worship. The LGBT movement that today has evolved to add a few letters was born in a New York City bar, the Stonewall Inn, where the community found safe space and a place to organize. In Seattle, places such as Neighbours hosted rallies, fundraisers, and community events from the 1980s onward. Everywhere, queer bars have provided meals and health services through two pandemics.

Some churches have banded together to support one another in the crisis, like the Lesbian Bar Project has done to save the last 15 lesbian bars left in America—one of which, the Wildrose, is in Capitol Hill (more on this in my upcoming piece). But there are many more churches than queer bars in this country, and far more powerful interests with a stake in keeping the religious-industrial complex alive than there are advocates for saving queer spaces. For example, the Trump administration used the pandemic as an excuse to further obscure the lines between church and state they had already been blurring under the guise of disaster relief. The Paycheck Protection Program gave houses of worship access to the same SBA loans as secular businesses; given that 75% of these loans were required to be spent on payroll, this equates to the federal government funding the salaries of religious leaders and their staff.

As a nation, we’ve long subsidized religious organizations, despite the fact that those who claim no religion are the fastest-growing group—not to mention the fact that the 5.6% of Americans who self-identify as LGBT, a vastly underreported number that doesn’t even attempt to capture the rainbow’s other demographics, have often been actively harmed by the teachings and members of these institutions. Worldwide, Pew Research finds that “those who are affiliated with a religious group tend to be less accepting of homosexuality than those who are unaffiliated.” In the U.S., 88% of the no-religion congregation say homosexuality should be acepted by society, versus 66% of the religiously affiliated. 

While it’s encouraging that more than a majority of Americans now at least give lip service to equality, this 20-point spread is telling. Besides, just this month, the Vatican was still refusing to acknowledge same-sex unions, saying “God cannot bless sin”; in January, it affirmed that while women can now read at Mass, they still can’t be priests, even though the real origins of Christianity are decidedly female. Meanwhile, anti-LGBTQIA+ violence has risen across America in recent years, including on Capitol Hill, and our trans family suffers the worst. 

Now, none of this is to knock the concept of religion, or even to categorically disavow Christianity. I believe that all of the world’s major faiths stem from the same fundamental truth: that we are all one, not only equal but made of exactly the same stuff, and that we must die to our small selves through a mystical experience in order to be reborn in the light. 

However, I do believe that the organized institutions of these faiths have drifted so far from this truth as to have become nearly unrecognizable, disavowing the message of unity for the very separateness and hierarchical structures their founders lived and died to decry. Today’s religious fathers have commoditized and constrained traditional spiritual practices in order to control the flock, and I believe these should be re-democratized, the faiths returned to their mystical origins, and that this freedom is available to us now in a number of metaphysical and psychedelic ways—but that’s another newsletter.

For now, why not at least give queer houses of worship the same benefits as given to these other institutions? After all, ecstatic dance, chanting, and singing are among the earliest spiritual practices, predating religion and even language. What makes the venues that enshrine queer dance parties, drag performances, and karaoke nights less deserving of public support than those that host purity balls, liturgical performances, and Christian rock shows? 

In the end, it’s all ritual: the performance of rites and sharing of sacraments to achieve transcendent states. And many elements of organized religion are themselves rather queer, with resplendent costumes and exaggerated theatrics; decadently designed performance halls bedecked in ornate decor; and communal consumption of the bodily fluids of gender-bending beings. If we provide federal assistance to houses of worship in the form of tax exemption, why can’t we relieve our queer churches of their own onerous tax burdens? At the very least, why not grant city-wide rent forgiveness or require insurance companies to pay out COVID-19 insurance claims, as every bar owner I’ve spoken to is desperate to receive? 

We claim church and state are separate in America, yet we continue to publicly fund religious institutions in the face of international sexual abuse scandals and continued discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people and women. Queer bars have their own problems, including intercommunity aggression, but by and large, these places are more welcoming than your average Sunday service, happily housing not only the entire LGBTQIA+ community, but straight allies, as well. 

There is such a thing as sacred geography, and America needs its gayborhoods. Within their bars, we enter Butterfly Time, metamorphosing into our eternal selves. It happened to me at R Place, where for a moment, we were three; then they were two; and now we are none, yet I have never felt more one with everything. Take me to queer church, where under the strobing lights, baptized in glitter and foam, we can be born again.