AUDITIONING FOR GOD: DRAG AS RELIGIOUS ART
If anyone had told me in 1983 as a sixteen-year-old underage kid in a gay nightclub, talking to the working girls on the street outside at 1am in the morning, that their spirits would shape my views on God, I would have called them “bonkers.” I myself had just dropped out of a Catholic boys’ school the year before, and these quirky nightclub personalities welcomed and protected me after the trauma of rejection. Community protection was crucial on so many levels. To be gay where I lived in Perth, Western Australia, was illegal until 1990, and police and community anti-LGBTQ violence was commonplace.
When I was asked in 2024 to contribute art on the theme of God for The Blake Society’s Vala Journal in London, I realised that I still carried the memories of that queer generation. I can say that there was a spirituality in practice that today’s queer activists (myself included) tend to overlook when we reflect on those times. In my experience of those earlier years, I remember a highly evolved but invisible code of empathy, dignity, and kindness towards not only those deemed unfit for God’s love, but for those that couldn’t accept us. There was a hidden language between the oppressed and oppressor, articulated through art and culture, which we seem to have lost. Today the battle lines feel so thick. The missiles are so loud; and the soft power of the creative voice so lost.
I sometimes feel as silenced by today’s queer movement as I did at my Catholic school in the 1980s. Sometimes, contemporary queer advocates misread our histories of resistance. When they do, the eyes of so many old friends and mentors who died during the AIDS crisis return clearly in my mind. They appear, I think, as forms of resistance often imbued with a humour, wit, innocence, and creativity missing today. My visual essay for Vala Journal triggered memories of how queers performed resistance in a different era.
When I first came out in 1982, I encountered Australian followers of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gay male charitable, protest, and performance movement founded in San Francisco in 1979. They were very globally active during the AIDS crisis. Their “drag nuns” publicly posed the same question I’d been asking myself as a young artist: “What is ‘religious art’ anyway and why can’t I see myself in it?” At the time, I felt instinctively, especially given my experience as a recently lapsed Catholic, that these Sisters never meant to be cruel. Rather, they created a cultural, even artistic shield against human doctrines that imagine a God of bigotry, wrath, and scorn. So, this was my mindset when asked to depict, in art and writing, how I saw God in the art and poetry of iconic English 18th century Romantic poet William Blake. Blake’s work was critical of religious doctrine, as well as slavery, war, and monarchical rule. His complex poems had inspired several of my paintings, leading to my friendship with The Blake Society in London for whom I have presented online talks and writing.
At the same time as their invitation to write for Vala 5, my colleague Juliette Scott asked me one day if she could photograph me in drag. The coincidence in timing with my submission to Vala (and their theme of God) brought the ghosts of my friends and mentors back to the present. The queers of my generation always knew that the Sisters had drawn a clear line between ‘pastoral care’ and drag as entertainment, so I immediately said yes, with intent to use drag to ask the same question about religious art that my sixteen year old self asked in 1983. Like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I wanted to physically inhabit several characters in drag via the memories of queer friends, mentors, and kind strangers, who had died during the AIDS crisis. They stayed with me for the entire shoot.
I looked back to the visual cultures they used to re-create themselves in resistance to the Church’s exclusion and public hate. I performed my question about our absence in religious art by making my own, which instead said: “This is who I am. I re-create my gender, my mind, and my outward appearance with visual forms from the culture of my time. God, you have loved and produced me. I love and produce myself for you now.”
William Blake’s famous line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell came to me clearly then. Blake wrote “Eternity is in love with the productions of time (Plate 7, Line 17).”
Blake’s integration of God (and Jesus) with human imagination over 200 years ago set a precedent for us to use our creativity to build our “personal God” with forms we can understand and relate to. I am so grateful that our gatekeepers of art and culture never own the means for Blake’s “productions of time” because we own that. We are the script writers, the costume designers, and producers of the stories which clothe our souls.
These sentiments also do not divide the LGB from the TIQ+. There is no hierarchy of cis-gender or straight-passing over trans or non-binary souls. All are loved by Eternity. All are loved by God. We are all creatively imagined productions of our time. We live, love, and dress along a constantly changing spectrum of what it means to be human. Eternity loves us just as we are.
The three photographs I perform here were created from my personal memories of queer people from another time. They say that however we look, speak, or love–and in the most personal way–we are all deeply loved by God.
Three of five photographs first published in Vala Journal (The Blake Society, St James, UK, 29th November 2024)
Photographs Copyright © Juliette Scott 2024
