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Showing posts from June, 2024

Drag Queens and Church

When I was the LGBTQIA2S+ Advocacy Coordinator for the OR-ID United Methodist Church Conference, I spent a glorious night in Twin Falls, ID, at a cafe called “Golden Brick Road Cafe,” with a group of drag queens and a wonderful audience. The theme? Drag Queen Theology. Another minister in the area set this up, and asked me, along with another United Methodist minister to be on a panel, along with a drag queen, in which we would spend time enjoying a drag performance by one queen after another, with question-and-answer period, with questions from the audience written on 3" by 5” cards. What a blast! Kathryn Post of religiounnews.com reported on drag queens and church. Post wrote this in her report:  Clad in heels, lace and a billowy white hairpiece, the guest preacher at Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Idaho  approached the pulpit  last August with markedly more sparkle than the usual cleric.  Bonnie Violet Quintana, a drag artist and queer chaplain, had been invited to

Celebrating Twenty Years of Same Sex Marriage

Though weddings and marriages are not considered sacred rituals or sacraments in most Protestant denominations, there is a sense that, no matter what, it is a sacred moment when two (or three for those in polyamorous relationships), say “yes” or “I do.” Having been married twice--once to a woman and the second time to Christian Halstead--each wedding ceremony was special, remarkable, and memorable, including the build up to the wedding vows and exchange of rings on the day of the wedding. Music; wedding ceremony participants; Order of Worship of wedding itself (I am a minister, after all, and it must have a certain flow); space or place of the wedding ceremony; clothes and rings; and the marriage license, of course. Don’t forget the license! All of this matters, whether it is a heterosexual wedding or same sex wedding. And of course there are the events before the “big day,” as well as the reception afterwards, followed by a honeymoon. And why is it such a big affair? First, over one-t