Baby, You Are My Religion

This book details the butch femme urban mid-century primarily American community as a possible site of a lived corporeal theology and political space where the beginnings of gay and lesbian civil rights were fomented. Included is a small scale ethnographic quantitative study regarding positioning within the community and a search for meaning that happened for participants in their connection to this culture; key informants were also interviewed using methods of thick description in terms of their participation in this culture. This book documents the community in a way that has not been done before - namely through the lens of a possible sacrality. To that end, after documenting the culture of the period and how it was influenced by butch femme, and the participants own testimony, a possible theology based on the period and its praxis is constructed. Resonances with this period's practice and other sexual modalities - namely indigeneous Hindu Tantra, Celtic sex magic,and contemporary lesbian sex culture, are also explored. These comparisons substantiate how this community is in relation to perhaps other sacred sex traditions. The work is grounded in cultural reference and primary ethnographic interviews and suggests a re-framing of gay and lesbian history to firmly include this period as a period of gay and lesbian civil rights. It also shows a connection within this period to other sacred traditions, a lived theology embodied within it, and its importance to other cultural movements of the time - namely the cult of James Dean, the new working woman, the new emotional man, and how this created butch femme cultural lineage strongly influenced them.