TY - JOUR
AU1 - Petro, Anthony, M
AB - Abstract This essay examines the 1990 documentary Like a Prayer, emphasizing performances by Chicano AIDS activist Ray Navarro, to reassess two prevailing narratives in religion and politics. First, it challenges the culture wars distinction between secular progressivism and religious conservatism that haunts histories of religion and sexuality. It locates American AIDS activism at the center of religious and sexual narratives to question the range of subjects that become visible as “religious.” Second, reading Like a Prayer as part of the archive of modern Catholicism exposes scholarly assumptions about the relationships between religion and politics, sincerity and performance, religion and secularism. This essay expands the archive of the culture wars—and of queer and Catholic history—to include another form of religious engagement: the use of camp. Thinking with an analytics of camp suggests how AIDS activists employed religious imagery in ways that confound the very division between Catholic and anti-Catholic, religious and secular. Camp is the condition of queer critique—and of Christian liturgy. Every serious theology laughs at itself. —Mark D. Jordan, Blessing Same-Sex Unions You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. —Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening “THIS IS JESUS CHRIST! I’m in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday,” reports a man with long, dark brown hair, a stringy beard, and a crown of thorns. He holds a microphone and speaks directly to the camera. Jesus was out on the street that day to cover a major demonstration planned by two activist groups, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Woman’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!). He was played by AIDS activist and video artist Ray Navarro, a member of the ACT UP affinity group DIVA TV, a video artist collective that recorded footage at all of ACT UP/NY’s major demonstrations. On December 10, 1989, about 4,500 lesbian and gay, feminist, and AIDS activists marched along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion rights, safe sex education, and gay rights. They targeted the Catholic bishops, especially Cardinal John O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York, who promoted conservative Catholic positions on several sexual and public health issues in local and national political battles. Footage from the demonstration, which activists called “Stop the Church,” would appear in DIVA TV’s 1990 documentary Like a Prayer. Outside St. Patrick’s, activists carried signs with phrases like “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries” and “Keep Your Church Out of My Crotch.” Some dressed in clerical drag, mocking the authority (and headgear) of the bishops. Others carried racy pictures, like one of a particularly well-muscled Jesus sporting a large erection and promoting condom use. Inside the cathedral, activists blended in with regular Sunday parishioners. When O’Connor started his homily, several protestors began dropping to the floor of the aisles. Through this action, called a “mass die in,” they represented the many lives lost, they contended, because of the Church’s positions on abortion and sexuality. During the service, at least one activist took a communion wafer and crumbled it. All the while, Jesus remained out on the streets, surrounded by demonstrators marching and chanting. In his scene from Like a Prayer, the sounds of protest blend into the daily discord of midtown Manhattan. The jolting and shaking of the handheld camera used to shoot the scene creates a sense of urgency. “Inside,” Jesus strains to speak over the noise, “Cardinal O’Connor is busy spreading his lies and rumors about the position of lesbians and gays. We’re here to say, we want to go to heaven, too!”1 AIDS video activists sought to document the demonstration for the historical record, anticipating that mainstream news coverage would not do the activists justice. They knew this protest could spark controversy, as taking on the Catholic Church in New York City was no small matter. They also used the documentary itself to further AIDS activist and feminist political causes. In Like a Prayer, members of DIVA TV interlaced footage from the protest at St. Patrick’s with interviews with a number of Catholic (or formerly Catholic) activists. They explain why they were at the protest, offering perspectives that were largely excluded from the mainstream news. By emphasizing the voices of activists connected to the Church, Like a Prayer pushed against depictions in the mainstream and Catholic press that reduced “Stop the Church” to a secularist attack upon religion. Despite such efforts, mainstream broadcast and print coverage of the protest—in addition to most Catholic media and even some lesbian and gay press—quickly slotted “Stop the Church” into the binary terms of the culture wars, which pitted ostensibly secular progressives against a conservative religious orthodoxy.2 New York’s daily papers painted an image of “militant homosexuals” who were “Storming St. Pat’s” and desecrating the Catholic Church. Broadcast news described how activists turned “holy mass into a holy mess” (Kerrison 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d). This impression would not quickly fade. In 2003, historian Philip Jenkins described the protest at St. Patrick’s as one of the “notorious examples” of a “new anti-Catholicism” (Jenkins 2003, 3, 101–4). Since the 1960s, he argues, anti-Catholic sentiment has shifted from older tensions between Protestants and Catholics toward new fights over issues of gender and sexuality. Feminists and gay activists have become the major purveyors of new prejudices against the Catholic Church, faulting its “traditional” stances on contraception, abortion, and gay rights. Catholic writers George Weigel (1992) and Mark Massa (2005) have likewise argued that activist protests such as “Stop the Church” represent new forms of anti-Catholic bias. Even more, they suggest that battles for gender and sexual rights have advanced a politics of secularism that seeks to limit the role of religion in the public sphere.3 In this narrative, “Stop the Church” proved one of the most obvious instances of secular activists pushing not only an agenda for sexual and reproductive rights, but a movement to eliminate religion itself from public sight. In this article, I examine DIVA TV’s activist video Like a Prayer, emphasizing performances by the gay Chicano AIDS activist and artist Ray Navarro, as a way to reassess two prevailing, but related narratives in the history of American religion and politics. At its broadest, this article challenges that enduring culture wars distinction between secular progressivism and religious conservatism that has animated criticisms of feminist and queer activism and that continues to cast a shadow over debates about gay marriage, reproductive rights, and religious freedom in today’s political climate. Scholars of American religion have amply documented the history of the culture wars, and historians are beginning to narrate the history of religious LGBT Americans (e.g., White 2015; Jordan 2011; Lofton 2008; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2003; Petro 2015; Wilcox 2003; Moon 2004). This article locates the history of the AIDS crisis and the work of AIDS activists at the center of these narratives in order to question the range of subjects that become visible as “religious.” Reading Like a Prayer as part of the archive of American Catholicism also exposes a set of assumptions about the relationship between religion and politics, sincerity and performance, and Catholicism and authority that undergirds scholarship on the “new” anti-Catholicism. Foregrounding AIDS activist media allows us to consider how feminists and queer activists employed religious (and often explicitly Catholic) imagery in a variety of ways that confound the very division between Catholic and anti-Catholic. This article thus expands the archive of the culture wars—and of queer and Catholic history—to include new forms of media, specifically video, as well as another style of political engagement, one that subverts dominant understandings about authenticity and performance, sincerity and parody, sacred and profane. What is interesting about this case is not simply that it challenges culture wars distinctions but how it does so: through the use of camp. Camp is usually defined as a sensibility or style, one often attributed to gay male culture in the US since the 1950s. Its scope is broad, potentially endless. Its richest sites range from theater and film, especially classics from the mid-twentieth century or plays on the classics—few could forget Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford screaming, “No wire hangers, ever!” in 1981’s Mommie Dearest—to drag performances staged nightly at gay clubs and on hit TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race. In her classic statement on the subject, Susan Sontag explains how camp “sees everything in quotation marks: It’s not a lamp but a ‘lamp’; not a woman but a ‘woman.’” ([1966] 1990, 280).4 Anthropologist Esther Newton offers three defining characteristics: “Incongruity is the subject matter of camp, theatricality its style, and humor its strategy” ([1979] 1993, 46). Recent work has emphasized the often-unrecognized political dimension of camp. In an essay on Sontag, Ann Pellegrini (2007) reasserts both the political and queer dimensions of camp, alongside its attachments to religion (in this case to Jewish camp). A number of writers describe camp as a tool of marginalized communities—a “strategy for a situation” (Newton [1979] 1993, 46) or “a means of giving gay people a larger space in which to move, loosed from the restraints of dominant society” (Bergman [1991] 1993, 92).5 Performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz broadens discussions of camp, usually attributed to middle-class, white, gay male culture to include lesbian and Latinx performance. Camp, in his telling, becomes a site for the work of “disidentification”: it can be “understood not only as a strategy of representation, but also a mode of enacting self against the pressures of a dominant culture’s identity-denying protocols” (Muñoz 1999, 120). The AIDS crisis, and the flourishing of queer activism that it sparked, brought camp back into style in the 1980s and 1990s. Groups like ACT UP connected camp performance to queer politics in several powerful ways, one of which was to take up the Catholic Church itself as an object of camp engagement. Like a Prayer exemplifies this rejuvenation of camp politics. It joins other videos made by ACT UP activists, including Robert Hilferty’s Stop the Church, another campy documentary about the AIDS protest at St. Patrick’s. It sparked national attention in 1991 when the PBS series POV planned to air it. These plans drew a number of criticisms from leaders within the Catholic Church, who considered the documentary anti-Catholic (Bullert 1997; Hilferty 1991). While Hilferty’s video has received scholarly attention (see, e.g., Petro 2015, 137–85; Hallas 2009, 77–113), very few scholars of AIDS history or religious studies have examined the religious life of Like a Prayer and the religious and political purchase of Ray Navarro’s Jesus drag. DIVA TV footage, including much that went into Like a Prayer, has received a broader audience in recent years, as it continues to circulate in mainstream AIDS documentaries. Two such documentaries were released in 2012: David France’s How to Survive a Plague, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman’s United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. As the early history of the AIDS crisis in the United States gains more attention, this article argues for us to take up this episode in queer history as a critical moment of religious politics. Examining the visual and camp history of AIDS activist performance in Like a Prayer pushes scholars to think in new ways about the intersections among media, social protest, and public religion in the modern United States. AIDS AND THE NEW ANTI-CATHOLICISM: FROM OLD NATIVISTS TO NEW SECULARISTS Writing for Commentary in 1992, neoconservative Catholic George Weigel set out an ambitious agenda for cataloging and understanding “new forms of an old bigotry,” or what he called instances of the “new anti-Catholicism,” that were “befouling American life” (Weigel 1992, 25).6 He opens the essay with ten instances that occurred in the years leading up to his piece. They start in 1989 with an art exhibit partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Weigel does not name the particular show but was likely referring to “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” which featured New York artists responding to their personal experiences with the AIDS crisis (see Russell 1989; Artist Space 2016). An essay by David Wojnarowicz, included in the exhibition catalogue, attacked conservative politicians like Senator Jesse Helms and Representative William Dannemeyer for opposing AIDS funding and for stalling sex education efforts (see Carr 2012, 442–61). Wojnarowicz also targeted Cardinal O’Connor, which Weigel picks up in his list. “The catalogue for the show,” he writes, “described Cardinal O’Connor of New York as a ‘fat cannibal’ and ‘a creep in black skirts,’ and referred to St. Patrick’s Cathedral as ‘that house of walking swastikas on Fifth Avenue’” (Weigel 1992, 25; also see Massa 2005, 43–44). The list of examples of the new anti-Catholicism concludes with a 1992 demonstration by the activist group Queer Nation during a prayer service featuring Cardinal O’Connor at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. According to Weigel, the protest included a “scantily clad lesbian” who was crucified on a “mock cross.” A sign affixed to the cross explained, “Christ Loves Women and Queers/Why Does O’Connor Hate Us?” (Weigel 1992, 26).7 Of Weigel’s (1992) ten examples, three explicitly mention the AIDS crisis and the work of AIDS activists, while others imply a connection, such as the example about Queer Nation, a group that grew out of AIDS activism (see Berlant and Freeman 1993). One of the examples included “Stop the Church.” Weigel refers to the demonstration as part of a “pattern” among ACT UP activities, which regularly disrupt Catholic services and mock Christians (Weigel 1992, 25).8 His examples suggest the oversized role that queer protestors—and ACT UP in particular—played in casting the new anti-Catholicism. Scholars have thoroughly documented the history of anti-Catholic sentiment in colonial America and the United States (Franchot 1994; Curran 2014; McGreevey 2003; Prothero 2016). That rhetoric soared in the nineteenth century, when Irish Catholics came under threat from nativist Protestants.9 Weigel (1992, 28) rightly points to the religious and racial dimensions of what he calls “classic” anti-Catholicism in this period, which built upon centuries of Protestant criticism that Catholics were unfit for democracy. By and large, anti-Catholicism receded over the course of the twentieth century, as Irish and later Italian Catholics were welcomed not only into the religious mainstream, but also into American categories of whiteness (see, e.g., Herberg 1955). White Americans turned their suspicions in new directions by the 1940s and 50s—to Japanese-Americans, to communists, and to homosexuals, all threatening American democracy anew. According to Weigel (1992), however, Protestant anti-Catholicism did not simply evaporate: it transformed into secularism. Older forms of anti-Catholicism, no matter how intense, never “dreamed of advocating a secularist polity in which religion would be ruled out of the public debate” (Weigel 1992, 28).10 But newer forms of anti-Catholicism did precisely this. Signaled by the publication of Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949), they posited not Protestant against Catholic, but secularist against religion. This move even included “new Catholic Catholic-bashing” (Weigel 1992, 30) among Catholic dissidents, like Father Richard McBrien, who compared Pope John Paull II to Mikhail Gorbachev (italics in the original). There are subtler instances. During a campaign speech in Houston, Texas, John F. Kennedy pledged never to allow his Catholic faith to impinge upon his political beliefs. He envisioned an America “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials” (Kennedy 1960, quoted in Weigel 1992, 29, italics mine). In Weigel’s estimation, Kennedy adopted “the theory of the secular nativists: that moral arguments whose roots were to be found in religious conviction had no business in American public life” (Weigel 1992, 30). The new anti-Catholicism, even when it may seem benign, thus serves “as a crucial component in a more radical and comprehensive campaign to establish secularism—the naked public square—as the official doctrine of the United States” (Weigel 1992, 30). It arises most often in the national press (especially the New York Times), the academy, the entertainment industry, and, perhaps most importantly, among feminist and LGBT activists.11 Weigel joins Philip Jenkins in setting the sexual revolution of the 1960s as “the centerpiece of the secularists’ agenda (and of the secularists’ attack on Catholicism)” (Weigel 1992, 30). Feminists and gays (conservative writers often prefer the more clinical-sounding “homosexuals”) in this telling have found themselves at the vanguard of anti-Catholicism—indeed, they attack religion in general, the story goes, when they march to secure legal access to abortion and antidiscrimination protections.12 AIDS activists rank high on this list of offenders. Jenkins (2003, 93, 100–2) charges that “gay activists have been among the leading contemporary critics of Catholicism and the Church” and that no voice within the gay movement has been louder than that of ACT UP. It would seem from these works that ACT UP’s “Stop the Church” protest should evince clearly secularist rhetoric, including some of the most obvious instances of attack on the Catholic Church, if not on religion as a whole. One can easily find such rhetoric in the demonstration, but to reduce the protest to secularist attack requires overlooking much of what was going on. Examining Like a Prayer offers a powerful counterpoint to the anti-Catholic thesis. But it does so in ways that are more complicated than merely disproving it. My goal here is expressly not to show that “Stop the Church” was absent of anti-Catholic sentiment. No doubt, many activists hated the Church, took pride in mocking it, and would have been happy to see its doors closed. But they cannot stand in for the protest as a whole. The charge of secularism limits analysis of the work of Ray Navarro’s Jesus drag and DIVA TV’s documentary featuring Catholic and ex-Catholic protestors speaking back against the Church. The documentary shows one of the things that Weigel finds most frustrating about—and most indicative of—the secularist enterprise: the shift from affirming “the classic Jewish and Christian notion of an objective moral order” to denying “on epistemological grounds that there is any such thing as an ‘objective moral norm’” (Weigel 1992, 31; also see Schaeffer [1981] 2005). The fear of secularism turns on the resistance to what conservatives often call relativism, but what activists would more likely call diversity and pluralism—or religious and sexual freedom.13Like a Prayer does not uniformly denounce “religion” or “Catholicism”—nor does it call for a naked public sphere. Much the opposite, it enacts a form of Catholicism, a Catholic camp, that positions Jesus on the side of AIDS activists. Before jumping into the analysis of Like a Prayer, I offer a brief sketch of ACT UP, the “Stop the Church” demonstration, and the broader history of video activism of which the documentary is a part. ACT UP/NY AND THE “STOP THE CHURCH” DEMONSTRATION Founded in 1987, ACT UP/NY is a direct-action AIDS activist group that garnered mainstream media attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s for its often ostentatious protests. ACT UP employed a variety of methods, from behind-the-scenes conversations with medical professionals and pharmaceutical representatives to agitprop and street theater techniques that drew attention to issues that mainstream media outlets neglected. Their targets included government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and even the home of conservative Senator Jesse Helms, over which activists draped an enormous condom. But the protest at St. Patrick’s brought the most mainstream notice to ACT UP—even if the attention was largely negative (Petro 2015, 140–46).14 “Stop the Church” targeted the public role that Catholic bishops played in political debates about abortion, safe sex education, and gay rights. Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York City, proved one of the most vocal members of the growing conservative wing of the Catholic hierarchy. In 1987, the administrative board of the US bishops released a statement called “The Many Faces of AIDS: A Gospel Response” that allowed for Catholic health workers and hospitals to instruct patients about the use of contraception to prevent the spread of HIV under very specific circumstances (USCC Administrative Board 1987). Mainstream media misrepresented the statement as a major shift in the Church’s teaching about condoms, and conservative bishops, following the Vatican’s lead, quickly sought to clear up any confusion. In 1989, the full board of US bishops released “Called to Compassion and Responsibility: A Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis.” This new statement clarified both the Church’s position as an authority on matters of sexuality and its unqualified opposition to any teaching that allowed for the use of contraceptives (National Conference of Catholic Bishops 1989). The following month, O’Connor opened the Vatican’s first conference on AIDS. “The truth is not in condoms or clean needles,” he explained: “These are lies, lies perpetrated often for political reasons on the part of public officials.” For O’Connor, who also served on Reagan’s Presidential Commission on HIV, the solution to ending AIDS was simple: “Good morality is good medicine” (Associated Press 1989a). O’Connor’s comments and leadership in the Church made him a clear target for AIDS activists. Not everyone in ACT UP/NY was convinced that organizing against the Catholic Church should be a priority. Some worried that activists would be viewed as stepping over a symbolic line and infringing on the rights of lay Catholics. Activists tried to emphasize that their protest targeted O’Connor and the Church hierarchy, not lay Catholics or religion more generally. They printed their own pamphlets for parishioners of St. Patrick’s to explain the reasons for the action, which included the bishops’ insistence that Catholics follow traditional teaching with regard to abortion and sexuality—a point, activists asserted, that infringed on the rights of all Catholics. They cited, for instance, recent comments that O’Connor had made denouncing Catholic Governor of New York Mario Cuomo’s support for women’s legal right to have an abortion, a position on which the Cardinal declared there was no room for interpretation (Barrett 1984, 12; Cuomo [1984] 1988; Briggs 1984). ACT UP/NY members attempted to shape media responses to the protest, emphasizing the political authority the Church had gained in New York. Despite such efforts, mainstream coverage proved overwhelmingly negative, even characterizing the protest as an attack on religious freedom and lay Catholics in general. Beyond emphasizing the militancy of activists, most coverage seized upon a single action—the crumbling of a consecrated Host—that came to represent the demonstration as a whole: an unwarranted attack by radical activists on sacred religious belief, even Christ himself, embodied in the wafer. Members of ACT UP and WHAM! issued press releases and interviews during and after the demonstration to communicate the political reasons for their protest, even as they knew stories in the mainstream news would largely overlook their claims. In fact, AIDS activists had long been critical of news coverage of the epidemic. When the Centers for Disease Control first reported the cases of homosexual men with rare forms of Pneumocystic carinii pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma in the summer of 1981, medical scientists theorized a common source of infection. It seemed to mostly affect sexually active gay men, though early cases were also reported among intravenous drug users, male and female sex workers, and Haitians. They would call the disease Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) until renaming it Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) late in 1982. Because these groups were marginalized from mainstream America, AIDS initially received very little attention in broadcast or print news. The coverage that did exist tended to cast gay men as morally responsible for the illness. Mainstream coverage accelerated rapidly by 1983, when reports began to show that blood transfusions were another vehicle that transmitted the virus that causes AIDS (Kinsella 1992). Media coverage began to vacillate between stories of blameworthy gay men and drug users versus the innocent victims of the disease, who included children with hemophilia such as Ryan White (Treichler 1999; Winston 2012; Juhasz 1995, 31–74). As AIDS became national news in the mid-1980s, mainstream networks featured medical and public health experts often alongside conservative political and religious ideologues who saw the epidemic as a sign of divine or natural judgment (Winston 2012, 377–84). The Reagan White House was largely silent on AIDS until US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was finally tapped in 1986 to provide a report and to begin speaking to the American public. During these early years, a number of AIDS activists resisted mainstream representations of the crisis. In 1983, for instance, activists organized a new movement to refer to “people with AIDS” rather than AIDS “victims” as an effort to resist medical stigmatization and to insist that they could continue to live valuable lives even after an AIDS diagnosis (Advisory Committee for People with AIDS 1983). The emphasis in mainstream news on “AIDS experts” (see Epstein 1996; Patton 1990) also sidelined community-based health workers and lesbian and gay activists who had been combatting the epidemic on the frontlines from the beginning. When activists formed ACT UP in 1987, they were responding in part to years of anger over mainstream media and government neglect of the AIDS crisis. As part of their movement, they also created new forms of AIDS media. The video activist collective DIVA TV was part of that effort. DIVA TV AND ALTERNATIVE AIDS MEDIA DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activist Television, is the name of the collective that made Like a Prayer. It was founded in 1989 by nine members of ACT UP: Ray Navarro, Jean Carlomusto, Gregg Bordowitz, Bob Beck, Costa Pappas, Ellen Spiro, George Plagianos, Rob Kurilla, and Catherine Saalfield (now Gund). AIDS video activists saw their role as one of providing “countersurveillance” and even witnessing (Saalfield 1993). Film and media studies scholar Roger Hallas (2009) describes two senses in which video activists became witnesses. They stood in witness during demonstrations, capturing on video instances of police brutality and documenting the actions of activists that often went unremarked upon in mainstream news. But, he insists, they also provided witness, or testimony, to activist causes. They recorded events at AIDS demonstrations but also produced their own creative projects that testified to the need for better political interventions into the AIDS crisis (see, e.g., Juhasz 1995; Saalfield and Navarro 1991). DIVA TV emerged from within a longer history of alternative forms of media intervention. In AIDS TV, Alexandra Juhasz (1995, 34–44) traces the roots of activist AIDS media back to the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 60s, when activists engaged in new forms of antiimperial representation, especially through the production of film; the “New American” and underground cinema movements, which challenged the norm of Hollywood movies by privileging low-budget, community-based work; and radical protest cinema of the civil rights movement and sexual revolution, which gave voice to the political and identity-based movements of the 1960s and 70s. Advances in film and video technology also shaped later AIDS activist projects. Chief among these changes was the release of the portapack in the late 1960s, a fairly inexpensive, easy-to-use, and portable device that allowed for instant playback. It was a precursor to the “camcorder revolution” of the 80s and 90s, which led to an explosion of consumer video and allowed professional and amateur video artists alike to participate in AIDS activist video work (Juhasz 1995, 42; Hallas 2009, 86–87). DIVA TV was founded two years after Testing the Limits, another video collective associated with ACT UP/NY that shared a number of the same members and political goals. They differed in their desired audiences. Testing the Limits sought to make documentaries for broader, mainstream audiences, targeting PBS as one goal. In contrast, Catherine Saalfield explains, DIVA TV “targets ACT UP members as its primary audience and makes videos by, about, and, most importantly, for the movement” (Saalfield 1993, 26; italics in the original). As Testing the Limits moved in the direction of professionalization, DIVA TV remained a grassroots, collective organization. As a result, Saalfield admitted, their approach led to a “limited audience, inconsistent participation by collective members, and more process than product” (Saalfield 1993, 31). DIVA TV’s videos were screened in local bars and nightclubs, at activist meetings, and in members’ homes. Like a Prayer was DIVA TV’s third movie and the last that the collective would make in its first incarnation.15 The death of two members, Pappas and Navarro, contributed to AIDS fatigue in the group and prompted them to pursue new directions after 1990.16 DOCUMENTING “STOP THE CHURCH” IN LIKE A PRAYER Like a Prayer is a camp testament to “Stop the Church.” The 28-minute video begins with an extended preface composed of a series of quickly shifting scenes—all initiated by the upbeat chorus of Madonna’s hit 1989 song, its title displayed against a pale orange background. The first scene features Jesus, played by Ray Navarro, interviewing demonstrators on the street. Turning to the camera, he explains, “We’re here to say, we want to go to heaven, too!” before the video cuts to a darkened image of the front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The words “Stop the Church” appear in red letters over the cathedral, as Madonna’s chorus strikes up once again. It is followed by an image of the protest taking place inside St. Patrick’s. The sounds of chanting protestors mix with the voice of Cardinal O’Connor reciting the Gloria Patri: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning…” A sequence of white text appears over the image. It reads: For centuries the church leadership has tried to govern individual morality and to limit everyone’s right to choose for themselves. These men (and they have always been men) must be told that / they cannot impose their morality on people who do not share their doctrine. This violates freedom of religion. Church leadership must be recognized / for what it is: a powerful, wealthy corporation lobbying to turn morality into medicine, and religion into political policy.17 (DIVA TV 1990) Reading the script draws the viewer’s gaze downward to a part of the image that shows two men kissing amidst the chaotic protest inside the cathedral. Then Madonna’s voice crescendos, “Let the choir sing!” This quickly moving series of images, along with Navarro’s scene, contextualizes the “Stop the Church” protest and positions the demonstrators on the side of religious freedom—indeed of religion itself: Jesus walks among them, and they are the choir that sings. Like a Prayer then announces “The 7 Deadly Sins of Cardinal O’Connor and Church Politicians,” in white script placed over a now lightened version of the same image of the front of St. Patrick’s. The body of the documentary moves sequentially through seven segments, one for each sin (Ignorant Denial, Endangering Women’s Lives, No Safe Sex Education, No Condoms, No Clean Needles, Bias, and Assault of Lesbians and Gay Men). Stretching back to early Christian writings, the Seven Deadly Sins have informed Christian education and morality—not to mention painting, sculpture, literature, song, and film—for centuries. Like a Prayer rewrites these sins, positing them as sins of the Catholic Church. The documentary also plays with the Catholic practice of confession, during which the observant admit their sins and seek absolution. The segments of Deadly Sins include interviews with Catholic and ex-Catholic protestors describing their views on the Catholic Church and the ACT UP/WHAM! protest. Here, Like a Prayer turns confession into a vehicle for public testimony: activists speak outward about the Church, by way of documentary video, rather than inward about their own sins, through the private box of the confessional.18 Footage from the “Stop the Church” protest accompanies several of the sin segments and functions as documentary evidence. Under the sin of “Endangering Women’s Lives,” for instance, an activist explains how a priest told his mom she was sinning because she used birth control—he was shocked that his mother was put in this position. Like a Prayer then cuts to a shot of activists dressing up as clowns. Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” plays over the video, raising its energy and underscoring how much fun activists seem to be having. We learn that activists from ACT UP and WHAM! have formed “Operation Ridiculous,” a troupe tasked to “boldly go where no clown has gone before.” Operation Ridiculous is a camp send up of the militant pro-life group Operation Rescue, which was founded by Randall Terry, an evangelical Protestant who would eventually convert to Roman Catholicism.19 Leading up to “Stop the Church,” Cardinal O’Connor was quoted in several newspapers expressing his desire to join a mission with Operation Rescue (“Cardinal Hails Protesters” 1989, Associated Press 1989b). The members of Operation Ridiculous were committed to fighting things they considered absurd, including the notion that fetuses have more rights than women, that the prolife movement ignores the need for broader healthcare, that conversations about reproductive rights have been limited to abortion, and that the Church opposes condoms. The scene ends with protesters chanting, “Safe sex is good morality/Cardinal O’Connor face reality.” Other narrative devices organize and interrupt the serial progression of the Seven Deadly Sins and, in doing so, invite readings of the documentary and the “Stop the Church” demonstration that reveal far more than secular or anti-Catholic protest. I highlight three: story-telling, media commentary, and Jesus vignettes featuring Navarro. In addition to these, the use of popular music might be considered another, one that punctuates many of the documentary’s messages but that also gives form to the camp aesthetic through which it speaks.20 The appeal to storytelling comes at the end of the first segment on sin. After an activist explains her frustrations with the Church’s positions on sex and abortion, the documentary introduces the telling of a parable. DIVA TV member Catherine Saalfield (1993, 32) calls it a fable, but given the emphasis on people, rather than animals, “parable” may fit better. A third-person narrator, a woman, begins to speak. Her voice mimics the drawn out and stylized sound of a parent reading a fairytale to a child. She describes an “evil sorcerer” who wanted everyone in his land to be unhappy. He spoke to his people, “filling them with ignorance and blinding them with lies.” He wanted women to become slaves to their bodies and refused to speak about a cure for an awful plague, even though the cure itself was readily available. But if the sorcerer would not speak, she continues, a brave few would, and “they laid their bodies at the feet of the evil sorcerer.” The narration unfolds against scenes of Cardinal O’Connor and St. Patrick’s, images of protestors (both conservative ones and members of ACT UP and WHAM!), and footage of the demonstration inside. The activists are the heroes of the story, finally entering the lair of the evil sorcerer and speaking the cure. The story is a parable about good and evil and about overcoming silence—a ubiquitous theme in AIDS activism in this period, emblemized by the famous Silence=Death motto created by the artist group Gran Fury and adopted by AIDS activists. It is also a story of epiphany, a come-to- Jesus moment, so to speak, when activists discover the power of their voices, after which, “they were never silent again.” The use of the parable offers a new frame for understanding the “Stop the Church” protest. It mimics the binary terms of good and evil common to fairytales and places AIDS activism into this fictional narrative. But, like all parables, the truth is found not in the content of the story but in the moral lesson that it teaches through an appeal to analogy and comparison. It is a simple narrative form that indicates a larger ethical truth. This parable of the activists and the evil sorcerer suggests a camp reading. Its exaggerations—the forces of good and evil, the play of silence and speech, even the rising and falling voice of the narrator—puts the entire “Stop the Church” demonstration in quotation marks, as Sontag might say, and asks that viewers decode what precisely stopping the Church might mean. It subverts the supposed protagonists and antagonists, casting AIDS activists as Disney heroes. A second narrative device in Like a Prayer recasts the authority of broadcast news journalism. Hallas (2009, 35–76, 78, 84) describes common techniques that broadcast news has used to script the authority of the journalist, such as the use of the “talking head.” Popular news shows in this period often featured a news anchor (usually a white man in a suit—think Ted Koppel, Dan Rather) seated behind a desk in a quiet studio. He speaks from a position of reason, separated off from the actual news by the authority of distance. Hallas explains how direct-action AIDS video toyed with this form in order to undermine and expose broadcast news techniques as techniques. This form of address functioned as a “structure of power” that positioned viewers in intimate relation to the talking head, while separating both from AIDS activists, who were scripted as “out there,” on the streets, and unable to speak from the position of reasoned authority available to the news anchor (Hallas 2009, 81). Members of DIVA TV played with this form of media authority in several ways. One approach positioned activists themselves as journalists and put them on the streets talking with other activists. We see this device in Ray Navarro’s opening scene. In additional DIVA TV footage from the protest, Navarro-as-Jesus introduces himself to an activist carrying a large balloon inflated to look like a condom. Their brief conversation unfolds: Navarro: “JC here with the fire and brimstone network with members of Wave 3 Affinity group and we’d like to ask you a little bit about this large [pause] vision you’ve visited upon us.” Activist: “Well we decided to rename the Cardinal, he’s now Cardinal.” O’Condom. “This is our message to him that condoms are safe. It’s no sin.” Navarro: “Isn’t this a little bit late for the Macy’s parade?” Activist: “Well we thought of that but we’ll get a jump on next year. We’ll start a new tradition.”21 Such vignettes reposition the role of the AIDS activist. In this case, we see a double drag. Navarro plays both Jesus and journalist and takes these roles directly to the people. In addition to dragging the role of the reporter, Like a Prayer documents the very misrepresentations of AIDS activism in mainstream media outlets that it seeks to counter. In one scene, an activist describes how Channel 11 News asked for some of her footage of the demonstration from inside the cathedral, which she shared. But then the news station used the footage simply to demonstrate acts of “sacrilege” and to turn the protest into a joke, announcing that activists “turned the holy mass into a holy mess.”22 Mainstream coverage also emphasized protestors clashing with the police in order to represent activists as law-breakers. Like a Prayer stages these (mis)representations by including a montage of negative coverage. As one activist explains, mainstream media reduced the protest to questions of “right or wrong” and focused on the activists’ tactics rather than the political reasons for the demonstration. One segment includes a young Matt Lauer hosting a show for the television station 9BP. Turning to a panel of AIDS activists, he says, “now there are a lot of people who sympathize and agree with the protestors, but other people have been left asking the question ‘is nothing sacred anymore?’ Some are going to say: ‘Those homosexuals, here they go again.’” The documentary captures how resistant such coverage was to understanding why activists protested to begin with. “I think it’s important here to refrain from a particular discussion of safe sex or AIDS or abortion,” Lauer continues: “and discuss more the church’s role or responsibility or right to discuss these issues and your right to protest these issues.” By staging mainstream news coverage, Like a Prayer reveals its positionality and refuses to let it speak with a neutral voice. As one activist interviewed for the documentary explains, “it’s as if they can’t imagine an audience that includes lesbians or gay men or more specifically women seeking reproductive rights or people with AIDS.” Like a Prayer suggests that activists, armed with their own cameras and editing tools, can create their own forms of representation. Indeed, it insists that they should: the media segment ends with a song by the hip hop trio Salt-N-Pepa imploring activists (and viewers) to “Express yourself!” Short vignettes featuring Ray Navarro dressed as Jesus constitute a third narrative device that interrupts the list of sins. We see Navarro in footage on the day of the protest standing in the street, but Like a Prayer also includes short clips of Navarro that were used in public television ads leading up to the “Stop the Church” demonstration. These vignettes interrupt the sense of urgency seen in interviews with (ex)Catholic protestors, the frenzy of the live footage from the protest, and the playful energy of the pop songs that intervene throughout the documentary. They are quiet, calm even. The sonic shift indicates a separation from the rest of the documentary, which is complemented by the emphasis on a singular figure: Jesus seated against a plain wall. The scene evokes reverence. One of the vignettes begins with a close-up of Navarro’s face. The camera then pans wider, as Jesus instructs, “Make sure your second coming is a safe one. Use condoms.” Navarro reaches for an opened condom and a Bible, both of which he holds up for the viewer to see. Another vignette, shot in a similar style, starts again with a close-up of Navarro’s face. Jesus turns, deliberately, to address the viewer: “You may have been wondering where I’ve been the last couple thousand years. Me and my friends at the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power have been busy opposing the Church’s bastardization of my teachings.” At this point, the camera pulls back to reveal Navarro’s body. He wears a white robe draped over one shoulder, leaving the other exposed along with part of his chest. He holds up a Bible as well as a bookmark-sized ad for the “Stop the Church” protest. “Have you seen a lot of these around town late lately?” Jesus asks, in a serious but welcoming voice: “Have you wondered how they could have gone up in such a short space of time? Kind of a miracle, hmm? My hand’s been in it.” The shot focuses in on the ad, before panning back to Jesus’s face. “Personally, I oppose the Church’s position on abortion,” he insists: “and I’m busy fighting its murderous AIDS policy.” What should we make of Ray Navarro’s Jesus vignettes? Is this performance merely an instance of mocking or of parody? Is he making fun of the Catholic Church? How does this performance, and Like a Prayer more generally, confirm or challenge charges of queer anti-Catholicism? This documentary, and Navarro’s performance of Jesus within it, challenges the interpretive possibilities for thinking about queer politics and religion, especially by troubling any clear line between the secular and the religious and between habitation and refusal. Here I want to emphasize the particular strategy of camp at work in Like a Prayer and to suggest how camping Catholicism mocks the Catholic Church while at the same time it reveals a variety of engagements with Catholic symbols and practice, and indeed with the Catholic imagination, that challenge conventional oppositions between Catholic and anti-Catholic. CAMPING CATHOLICS IN LIKE A PRAYER One does not have to look too hard to see camp performance in the work of DIVA TV. The very name recalls a longer history of gay sensibility. As Mark Jordan (2005, 155) reminds us, “‘Diva’ entered gay slang with the opera queens, who knew that it meant divine.” We see the flare for camp—that is, for exaggeration, for style over content, especially when it secures the joys of playing effeminate—in the colorful wigs and bright red noses of the clowns in Operation Ridiculous. We see it in juxtapositions of the serious and humorous—the litany of Deadly Sins cut by the baptizing of “Cardinal O’Condom” or his recasting as an evil sorcerer. We see it in the repurposing of things that are already camp. The most obvious example is the use of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” Already a gay icon and, for many, an anti-Catholic idolater, Madonna reached new heights with this music video, which became an anthem for queer celebration, one of those songs that, when it came on at a party or nightclub, would stop gay men in their tracks and move them to lip-synch to the words of the Queen of Pop. Madonna Louise Ciccone already took on Catholic drag when she dropped her middle and last names. Her status as a queer icon layered camp over camp. Like much AIDS activist and queer work, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” drew accusations of blasphemy. Madonna was accused of making fun of Christianity, at best, if not actually denigrating religious tradition by sexualizing a man whom some viewers of her music video saw as a black Jesus figure—as though there is not a long history of Christians eroticizing Jesus (see, e.g., Steinberg 1997; Rambuss 1998).23 Using her song as the thread for the documentary was surely not coincidental—it was an homage as much as it was an indication that, whatever this video was doing with Catholicism, it would be controversial. There are different registers of camp. Much of Like a Prayer plays with the more ostentatious forms: the ridiculousness of dressing up as a clown, the thrilling sexual innuendo of the queen of pop, the translation of St. Patrick’s into the castle of an evil sorcerer. But camp can also emerge from subtlety, from intimacy, and from a seriousness that borders on solemnity. This camp can sometimes take a little more work to decode, but it is often more biting, precisely because of how close one has to get to figure it out. Ray Navarro is the camp superstar of Like a Prayer. RAY NAVARRO’S JESUS CAMP Navarro (1964–1990) moved to New York City in 1988 to join the Whitney Museum’s independent study program and soon after became a member of ACT UP/NY. An artist, filmmaker, and writer, he grew up in Simi Valley, California, and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (after first attending the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design). Navarro was one of the founders of DIVA TV and also a leader in ACT UP’s outreach to racial and ethnic minorities. Navarro identified as Mexican American and as a Chicano activist, championing political commitments to which his mother Patricia Navarro introduced him when he was growing up (P. Navarro 2007; also see R. Navarro 1993). Ray Navarro’s boyfriend, Anthony Ledesma, became sick during the summer of 1988 or 1989 and was diagnosed with AIDS (P. Navarro 2007; Levine 2005).24 Navarro was not tested for HIV until some time later but knew he likely carried the virus as well. He was diagnosed with AIDS in January of 1990, the month after the “Stop the Church” demonstration. Navarro would eventually lose most of his vision and hearing from AIDS complications before he passed away in November of 1990. In his final months, he collaborated with Zoe Leonard on a triptych of photographs called Equipped (Navarro and Leonard 1990) which, Debra Levine writes, “tantalizingly engages issues of sexual fetishism and desirability in disability” (Levine 2005, 4). I introduce Navarro’s biography here to gesture to the range of readings that become available for understanding what Saalfield calls “his favorite role of Jesus with a crown of thorns, toga, and jimmy hat” (Saalfield 1993, 33). Fellow DIVA TV member Jean Carlomusto describes Navarro’s role in the “Stop the Church” demonstration: Let me just say, it was also really powerful because Ray, whose own illness was progressing very quickly, dressed as Jesus Christ that day outside was sort of leading chants outside of St. Pat’s. And in his own way, as someone who had grown up Catholic, too, was sort of reclaiming this Christ figure as a revolutionary—use of Christ as someone saying, “Use condoms.” (Carlomusto 2002) Carlomusto characterizes Navarro’s Jesus drag both as a political performance and as a source of spiritual empowerment. She continues: As he grew closer to death, he became more and more religious. So for him, that action was a very empowering action for getting him closer to his own spirituality. And for me, it was powerful for that reason, too, to just get in the face of the Catholic Church and go up against this monolithic behemoth that has grown beyond all proportions from its original inception. (Carlomusto 2002) It might seem odd, especially from the perspective of conservative writers like Weigel or Jenkins, for a gay Chicano man with AIDS to dress as Jesus, to call for safe sex education, and to criticize the Catholic Church—and to do so in a way that was both parodic and deadly serious. But read against centuries of Christian history, it is not so unusual. There is quite a long and diverse tradition of Jesus drag within Christianity. Jesus has been Middle Eastern, white, black, Native American, Asian, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, male, female, transgender, a gash, a vagina, a vine, a lamb, a carpenter, a businessman, a boxer, a boyfriend, the bread of life, a wafer (see, e.g., Prothero 2003; Pelikan 1999; Bynum 1990, 2011; Blum and Harvey 2014). Of course, not all drag is equal. This is where Navarro shines: he knows how to camp well. His performance of Jesus, perhaps more than any other camping in Like a Prayer, becomes something more than playful parody. It is that “more” to which I want to attend here. Navarro’s Jesus performance builds not only upon a longer history of Jesus drag but also upon particular histories of lay Christian engagements with images and with the figure of Jesus himself. Navarro taps into what Jesuit sociologist Andrew Greeley (2001, 6), following theologian David Tracy (1981 [1998]), has called the “Catholic imagination,” by which he means a tendency for Catholics to see hints of the divine in “objects, events, and persons of ordinary existence.” He contrasts this “sensibility” with a Protestant tendency toward a strict separation between a sign or a symbol of the divine and its referent. While Greeley risks overgeneralizing this distinction, it resonates with more recent historical and anthropological writing on religion, secularism, and affect. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood (2009) draws a similar distinction in her discussion of the controversy that erupted over Danish cartoon drawings of Muhammad. She seeks to understand why it is that some devout Muslims became upset about the drawings, when so many others (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) readily upheld the rights of the cartoonists on the grounds of free speech. Mahmood’s important challenge to dominant readings in this case is to move beyond what she calls the juridical languages of free speech versus blasphemy. She attempts to understand instead what it means for some Muslims to describe the cartoons as a kind of “moral injury.” Central to this, she argues, are different ways of relating to images like those of Muhammad in the cartoons. She builds upon the work of anthropologist Webb Keane to suggest alternative “semiotic forms” for interpreting images and for understanding religious practices that do not conform to dominant Western models. Keane traces the genealogy of Western models back to a “Protestant semiotic ideology” that sharply distinguishes between “object and subject, between substance and meaning, signifiers and signified, form and essence” (Mahmood 2009, 843; Keane 2007). This approach to representation has proved crucial not only to the development of Western modernity but also to dominant ways that we define religion (i.e., as adherence to or belief in a system of propositional claims) (also see Sullivan 2007; Smith 1991). Mahmood suggests alternative ways that a person can come to relate to a sign or symbol (or image). Scholarship in affect studies and on material and visual culture becomes crucial for this understanding, as scholars have for some time insisted that images and objects may themselves be understood as animated, as helping to exert a kind of force or attachment that blurs the boundaries between an object and its representation or even between a spectator and an image (Mitchell 2006; Bernstein 2011; Bennett 2010; Chen 2012). In this sense, Mahmood (2009, 842) is interested in understanding relationships with images (like those of Muhammad) not on the model of representation but on what she calls “attachment and cohabitation.” In this reading, the religious imaginary must be understood in relationship both to a history of practice within a particular religious tradition and to the potential power of images and objects themselves. For Mahmood, this is a Muslim imaginary, not a Catholic one, but the analysis carries over well. Historians of American religion have documented the power of material objects and images, especially among lay Catholics. Colleen McDannell (1995) describes how the theology of Incarnation (God made into flesh) opened the doors for Christians to see the divine operating through everyday objects and people. Under the guidance of an ordained priest, Catholics can partake in major sacraments, or rituals, through which the divine becomes present. Perhaps the best known of the sacraments is the Eucharist—a rite during which the Communion wafer becomes the blood and body of Christ, according to the doctrine of transubstantiation, before it is taken into one’s own body. Catholics also have a long, related tradition of smaller rituals, or sacramentals, “something that is more than a sign or a symbol but less than a sacrament” (McDannell 1995, 189; also see Morgan 1999; Promey 2014). Praying with the rosary is one of the most common examples of a sacramental. This power to imbue objects or images with great meaning, even with divine presence, has not been limited to Catholics. American Protestants also become attached to objects and images, often imbuing them with a sense of the divine (and often doing so against the orthodox beliefs of their traditions). Images of Jesus, in particular, have often been welcomed with a reverence that belies any strict acknowledgement that a picture is “merely” a representation. Warner Sallman’s painting “Head of Christ” (figure 1), based on a 1924 sketch, is likely the most famous image of Jesus in modern American history, especially among Protestants. Some evangelicals have even complained that too many Christians make it into an icon (see Morgan 1996a; McDannell 1995, 189). I bring it up here because it helps us to understand the power of Navarro’s Jesus, which echoes Sallman’s “Head of Christ.” Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ © 1941, 1968, Warner Press, Inc., Anderson, Indiana. Used with permission. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ © 1941, 1968, Warner Press, Inc., Anderson, Indiana. Used with permission. One of Navarro’s vignettes begins with a shot of Jesus staring off the right side of the frame, his eyes gazing upwards. His face is bathed in light (figure 2). He holds this pose for a couple seconds, almost like the shot is meant to mimic a painting, after which he looks toward the camera. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ray Navarro as Jesus in Like a Prayer (DIVA TV 1990), AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Ray Navarro as Jesus in Like a Prayer (DIVA TV 1990), AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. The resonance extends beyond posture and lighting. As Sallman’s painting soared in popularity in the 1960s, critics began to comment on the effeminacy of Jesus, with his long, flowing hair and soft face. They mocked the painting, hung in millions of households across the country, as little more than kitsch, shocked that anyone, let alone Protestants, could imbue it with such meaning (Morgan 1996b, 21; 1996c, 196–203).25 Navarro’s Jesus, too, comes off as feminine, not only through its visual depiction but also when he turns to the camera and speaks to his flock. His voice is calm, soft, slow. Navarro’s body is thin and even graceful in its movement, as he holds up a condom or a Bible. Navarro’s Jesus could be read as a kind of Warner Sallman drag. The differences between these representations—these inhabitations—become meaningful. The audience for Like a Prayer (fellow AIDS activists) would have known or suspected that Navarro was a gay man and that he was seropositive, factors that would have shaped their reading of his performance. But Navarro’s Jesus also moves away from Sallman’s through its potential racial significations. American Christians gazing at Sallman’s Jesus have almost uniformly seen a Caucasian son of God. Navarro’s ethnic markers are less obvious. Certainly, those who knew him were familiar with his Mexican American background. But even without this knowledge, his darker hair, even soaked in light, does not carry the golden highlights of Sallman’s Jesus. This shot of Navarro in Like a Prayer thus plays on the most popular devotional image of Jesus in the United States, while also recasting Christianity’s central religious figure with a gay Chicano man with AIDS. Navarro’s Jesus also resonates in several ways with what Robert Goizueta (2002) calls “Mexican American popular Catholicism.”26 I do not want to overstate the connection here between popular Catholicism and Navarro’s Chicano political identification and AIDS work. There is no record of Navarro making this connection himself (aside, of course, from his Jesus drag itself), and his relationship to Catholicism appears more “cultural” than devout, as Carlomusto (2002) notes above. But neither would Catholicism have been foreign to Navarro, whose mother Patricia attended Catholic schools and whose political identifications with Mexican Americans would have brought him close to many practicing Catholics. And Chicano political movements have often drawn from Catholic imagery and tradition. Navarro’s Jesus drag blurs any simple line one might draw between merely cultural Catholicism versus devout or practicing forms, which we can see in part through its similarity to popular forms of Catholicism. Goizueta (2002) describes the powerful role that death plays in the symbolic world of Mexican American Catholicism, a tradition forged in the context of colonization, racism, violence, and poverty. But he suggests that although death may seem central, this form of popular Catholicism actually “undermines the modern Western dichotomous worldview in which life and death are perceived as contradictory or mutually exclusive realities. Popular Catholicism also challenges the church to discover among the poor and marginalized the prophetic love of God” (Goizueta 2002, 120). We see one of the most powerful illustrations of this popular piety in reenactments of the Via Crucis (Living Way of the Cross) on Good Friday. Karen Mary Davalos (2002) describes the annual Via Crucis performance that has taken place in Chicago’s predominantly Mexican Pilsen neighborhood since the late 1970s. Men and women dress as biblical characters—Jesus, Mary, the Roman soldiers—and march through the neighborhood, performing the stations of the cross. “From the beginning,” she writes, “the event conveyed Mexican Catholic sensibilities, social commentary on local injustices, dramatic reversals of power and authority, the sacralization of space, and acts of cultural recovery” (Davalos 2002, 46).27 It has grown into a “community-wide ritual” and draws people from throughout the region. Media coverage estimates over ten thousand people in attendance each year since the early 1990s. This event collapses conventional binaries that separate the divine from the world, the spiritual from the material, and even acting from reality. One participant explains to Davalos (2002) his role as a Roman soldier whipping Jesus. “This is my sin,” he insists. In performing the Via Crucis, he continues, “We say forgive us for what we did then—in the past when Jesus was actually put to death—and for what we are doing now, as I whip him.” The man explains that what they are doing is not a play: it is “a reenactment of a historical event, but it is not a play” (Davalos 2002, 41). It is not a play because the reenactment, the repetition, partakes in the same economy of sin and grace as the original event. It collapses historical time into sacred time. It is this combination of a sacramental reenactment of Jesus with the very social and political concerns so characteristic of Mexican American popular Catholicism that Navarro’s performance of Jesus shares. What is different is that Navarro and the other members of DIVA TV queer this performance through their appeals to camp. CAMP PERFORMANCE AS PUBLIC CATHOLICISM I have probably already put too much faith in camp, a term that is nearly impossible to define, in part because it is not a fixed idea but rather a kind of relation between two or more things. It is filled with contradiction. “The bitter irony of camp juxtaposes the ludicrous and the earnest,” writes Mark Jordan: “It is the genius of camp to balance the two, to resist the dreary triumph of earnestness” (Jordan 2005, 89). Camp is about making fun, subverting meaning, mocking authority—not things most modern Americans or scholars of religious studies would align with “religion.” But it also requires deep attachment, even intimacy, with the thing that becomes the object of camp. Catholicism and camp share a long history—an obsession with liturgy, aesthetics, and form. The homosocial spaces of Catholic tradition, from the all-male hierarchy to women’s convents, have long served as sites of sexual suspicion and aesthetic possibility. It’s not for nothing that so many men happily trade the freedom of living as openly gay for the thrills of the clerical closet. Outside the formal Roman Catholic Church, drag activists like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have, since the late 1970s, donned habits as they parade around gay ghettos blessing their patrons and teaching safe sex. Like “real” nuns, the parodic Sisters undergo a period of training and take vows, in this case, “to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt” (Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, n.d.).28 They have also been accused of anti-Catholicism. Like the work of the Sisters, Ray Navarro’s Jesus drag is threatening not simply because it is camp, but because it takes place outside the authority of the Church. It brings something of the sacramental to the people—and not just any people: to lesbians and gay men, feminists, and AIDS activists. AIDS activism, and Navarro in particular, helps us to see anew claims about anti-Catholicism and the place of religion in the public sphere. Navarro’s Jesus drag was far more than secular or anti-Catholic parody, in part because these critiques mistake habitation for representation. Navarro’s Jesus moves beyond the type of communicative or representational model that Mahmood and others have aligned with modern Protestant and secular sensibilities—sensibilities that I suggest conservatives writing about the new anti-Catholicism impose upon AIDS and feminist activists, sometimes rightly, sometimes not. Navarro’s Jesus drag, like all drag, does not merely represent some “real” referent (in this case the historical Jesus). As gender theorist Judith Butler and so many others have shown, drag does not simply imitate an original. Its critical and social power comes from foregrounding the power of representation itself. Butler focuses on gender, but her analysis could be extended to include religious drag. “Gender parody,” she writes, “reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (Butler 1990, 175). Drag, in this account, reveals the original, the object of drag, to be itself illusory as such, a site that is produced through the work of cultural representation. Drag thus opens a space for queer politics. “Parodic proliferation,” Butler continues, “deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities” (Butler 1990, 176). Navarro’s performance layers religious drag over the gender drag that Butler describes. His camp performance exposes the very social conventions that allow for dominant representations of Jesus or, to put it differently, for some representations to become dominant or “true” (that is, those authorized by the Catholic Church, in particular). Navarro’s drag not only challenges representations of the “real” Jesus: it challenges the need to appeal to an original Jesus to begin with. As we learn in Like a Prayer’s fairy tale-telling, moral truth is far more important than reality, and moral truth can be disclosed through even the most exaggerated stories. Navarro’s drag resignifies Jesus in at least two ways. He reclaims Jesus from Christian conservatives, but he also resurrects Jesus for secular or formerly Catholic AIDS and feminist activists. In his performance, Jesus becomes a figure to play with as well as one to aspire toward, even to inhabit. Navarro’s Chicano AIDS activist Jesus thus becomes not only another representation of the Son of God, but also a performance that makes Jesus present. Let me close with two points. First, at the risk of stating the obvious: the “Stop the Church” demonstration—including Ray Navarro’s Jesus and the documentary Like a Prayer—is not what conservative Christians have in mind when they say religion should have a greater place in the public sphere. Second, if my readings have been at all convincing, “Stop the Church” included some of the most spectacular images of religion in public in recent decades in the United States—not least, Jesus marching down Fifth Avenue to confront his oppressors. If both of these statements are true, then why do conservative Christians (along with many secular historians and scholars of religion) not see Like a Prayer or Navarro’s Jesus as examples of religion in the public sphere? How do they come to signify as secular rather than religious, trapped into what scholars have aptly diagnosed as a modern Protestant binary, no less? Like many other works of queer art and performance that draw upon religious themes, Like a Prayer raises questions about what we mean, and what our historical subjects mean, when we talk about the presence or absence of religion in the public or political sphere. What is the epistemology of the religion we have in mind? How does camp performance challenge prevailing epistemologies of religion? Like a Prayer suggests forms of religion that are not propositional, sincere, obvious, conservative, formal, authoritarian, or traditional—asking viewers to see religion where we might least expect it, and then to ask why we assumed it would not be there to begin with. Like a Prayer helps us see something about the current state of religion-versus-politics debates, which is that there is a powerful orthodoxy (probably on the Left as much as on the Right) informing what religion is and can be. Navarro’s Jesus refuses the authority of the Catholic Church to define Catholicism or religion. His religion is invisible because those who wish to uphold the Church’s authority (or those who wish it never existed to being with) refuse to see it: they cannot imagine an alternative Catholicism. This failure of imagination is, oddly enough, a failure to understand the long history of Catholicism itself, within which lay Catholics have been inhabiting, altering, mocking, and dragging the Church for just about as long as it has existed.29 The debate over anti-Catholicism, in this reading, in the obsession with queer AIDS activists and with “Stop the Church,” in particular, reveals itself to be less a battle between secularism and religion than a battle over definitions of Catholicism, over the legacy of Jesus, over the power of religious imagination. This point does not discount that some activists (and scholars) do push for secularism, even for a naked public sphere. And we can already hear the voices of secular activists asking why religion continues still to haunt queer politics. But I think that is a question they will be trying to answer for a long time. Footnotes 1 " On the “Stop the Church” protest, see Petro 2015, 137–85, which describes in greater detail media responses to the protest that emphasized debates between sexual and religious freedom. This article focuses on ACT UP’s participation, since DIVA TV was one of its affinity groups. On WHAM!, see Morgan 2002. On ACT UP, also see Gould 2009; Brier 2009; Crimp and Rolston 1990; and France 2016. 2 " On the culture wars, see Hunter 1991; Hunter and Wolfe 2006; and Hartman 2015. 3 " In 2002, Fordham University hosted a conference on “Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice?” that included remarks from a number of leading scholars of Catholicism coming from a variety of methodological and political perspectives. See part three of Steinfels 2004, 149–90. 4 " On Catholicism and camp, including the long relationship between the two, see Jordan 2000, 179–208, and 2010; important early collections on camp and gay culture include Bergman 1993; Meyer 1994; and Cleto 1999. 5 " In the former phrase, Newton borrows from Charles Keil’s ([1966] 1991) characterization of the importance of “soul” in black communities. 6 " While Massa (2005) and Jenkins (2003) make similar arguments, I focus on Weigel (1992) here because his article is one of the earliest and most compelling presentations of the “new anti-Catholicism” thesis. Massa offers a longer and more measured history of anti-Catholicism, attending to the different ways that Protestants and Catholics have come to see the world and also deepening Weigel’s argument about secularism. Jenkins’s more polemical account traces the “new” anti-Catholic rhetoric across feminist and gay political movements, mainstream media, popular cultural representation, and the academy. William Donohue has emerged as the most ardent critic of contemporary anti-Catholicism, especially in his role as president of the watchdog organization the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Also see Donohue 2009. 7 " Queer Nation grew out of the radical activism of groups like ACT UP in the 1990s. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a street performance group in which men dress in elaborate Catholic drag, also frequently come under attack for mocking Catholics. See, for example, Massa (2005, 42) and Jenkins (2003, 98). For an alternate appraisal, see Wilcox 2012. 8 " Weigel (1992) mentions ACT UP, but leaves out WHAM! 9 " Later waves of Catholic immigrants, including Latinx Catholics, likewise find themselves confronting racial and religious barriers. 10 " Weigel is drawing from Neuhaus (1984). For a recent appraisal of Neuhaus’s argument and its reception, see Griffith and McAlister 2007. 11 " Massa (2005) and Jenkins (2003) make similar points. 12 " This narrative is not limited to conservative writers—most histories of the LGBT civil rights movement and of the AIDS crisis likewise cast secular activists against conservatives, often religious, including the Religious Right. 13 " See also Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2003) on religious and sexual freedom. 14 " The action at Helms’s house is documented in the video Deadlier than a Virus (Hilferty and Huff 1991). 15 " The other two films were Target City Hall (DIVA TV 1989b), which covered ACT UP’s protest against the Koch administration on March 28, 1989, and Pride (DIVA TV 1989a), which covered the twentieth anniversary Pride march in New York City. 16 " James Wentzy revitalized DIVA TV after joining ACT UP in 1990 and, in 1993, he began airing a 30-minute weekly public access show called “AIDS Community Television.” For more information about Wentzy, see Juhasz 1994, 1995. 17 " The writing is in all caps, broken into three separate segments that appear sequentially (indicated in the quotation above by the “/” mark). 18 " Early Christian practices of confession were public and served as rituals of moral pedagogy for the broader community. Here, the activists reversed this practice to produce a counter-discourse. See Foucault [1979] 1999. 19 " The clowns of Operation Ridiculous recalled a major development in queer theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, Charles Ludlam’s “Theatre of the Ridiculous.” See Marranca and Dasgupta 1997; Edgecomb 2007; and Bordowitz 2004. 20 " My discussion of these narrative devices does not move chronologically, since the devices themselves appear at various moments through the documentary, sometimes repeating. I want to highlight how they work to disrupt any simple chronology in the video that might be suggested by the timeline of the protest or the presentation of Seven Deadly Sins. 21 " This footage is included in a memorial reel—“Ray’s Tape” (1990)—that fellow DIVA TV members made after Navarro died in 1990. Though this scene did not make it into Like a Prayer, I include it in my discussion to offer another example of the journalistic drag that Navarro and DIVA TV enacted in their coverage of “Stop the Church.” 22 " This scene is also discussed in Saalfield (1993, 34–35). 23 " On Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” as a form of liberation theology, see Hulsether 2005; Jesuit priest Andrew Greeley (1989) offers a positive reading of Madonna. 24 " Patricia Navarro says 1988, while Debra Levine says 1989. Later seems more likely. 25 " This discussion is indebted to David Morgan’s fascinating analysis of the reception of Sallman’s Jesus, including criticisms that it was “effeminate” and even “homoerotic” (Morgan 1996b, 197). 26 " On Mexican American religions, see Espinosa and García 2008; Matovina 2014; and García 2010. 27 " Chad E. Seales (2013) describes a similar performance by Latino immigrants in Siler City, North Carolina. 28 " Wilcox (forthcoming) has written a superb study of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and their use of camp, which she calls “serious parody.” 29 " Byrne (2016) offers an indispensable account of “other” Catholics in US history. Films DIVA TV . 1989a .Pride 69-89. VHS. Held in the AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. 00:26:30. ——— . 1989b .Target City Hall. VHS. Held in the AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. 00:27:00. ——— . 1990 .Like a Prayer: Stop the Church. Original documentation footage by Ellen Spiro. VHS. Held in the AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. 00:28:22. Hilferty , Robert. 1990 .Stop the Church. Original documentation footage by Ellen Spiro. VHS. Held in the AIDS Activist Videotape Collection, New York Public Library. 00:24:00. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Ray Navarro’s Jesus Camp, AIDS Activist Video, and the “New Anti-Catholicism”
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfx011
DA - 2017-12-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/ray-navarro-s-jesus-camp-aids-activist-video-and-the-new-anti-F7f73dnjLw
SP - 920
VL - 85
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -