Balancing acts: drag queens, gender and faith

While engaged in research on the same-sex marriage debate in mainline denominations, I interviewed 23 LGBT Christians, four of whom were drag queens. While it is not possible to generalize from such a small sample, the drag queens in this study insist on maintaining their identity as Christians despite the hegemonic discourse that renders faith and LGBT identities mutually exclusive. They developed innovative approaches to reconciling their gender and sexual identities with their spirituality. Their innovations are potentially liberating not just for them personally, but for LGBT people generally because they challenge Christianity's rigid dichotomies of gender and sexuality.