Baby, You Are My Religion
The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:16th Jul '26
£38.69 was £42.99
This title is due to be published on 16th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£140.40was £156.00(9780367000776)
Baby, You Are My Religion: The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space is a foundational work of lived lesbian and queer theology, which offers an exploration of how lesbian bars served as spiritual havens for queer women.
Drawing on more than 100 oral histories, Marie Cartier reveals how lesbian bars from the 1940s to the 1980s functioned as sacred spaces – churches in exile – for women cast out of traditional religion. Through these testimonies, Cartier situates the lesbian bar as a site of ritual, community, and spiritual resistance, where queer women fought to form community, forge family, and survive against the odds. This second edition expands on the original research with a new foreword and afterword addressing the disappearance of lesbian bars and the continuing need for sacred queer space post-millennium. Blending cultural history, feminist spirituality, and theology, the book introduces theelogy – a theology grounded in “thee” elevating community ties to the sacred.
Baby, You Are My Religion is ideal for scholars and students of queer studies, women’s history, theology, and religious studies, offering a framework for understanding how lesbian experience shaped the very foundations of queer spiritual thought.
My first edition copy of 'Baby, You Are My Religion' is streaked and starred with all of the historical insight and connections Marie Cartier makes between lesbian bars and religious spaces. Culled from first-hand oral histories of those who came up in the early dyke bars -- the 'only place we had' -- 'Baby' is a tangible testament to the rituals, practices and beliefs of butches, femmes and their friends. Consider it biblical.
-Trish Bendix, New York Times, regular contributor
"When Marie wrote me about her project that was to become this book, -- I did not get the connection. But she convinced me. Her enthusiasm, her delight, her insights gave me a new perspective on the loves of my life."
-Joan Nestle, author Restricted Country and Persistent Desire: A Butch Femme Reader
The many stories that Marie Cartier captures in Baby You Are My Religion were an important part of the fight to save Hershee Bar, Virginia’s oldest lesbian bar when it was forced to close. Though we ultimately were unsuccessful in saving it, the heartfelt testimony delivered to city leadership about Hershee’s importance echoed Cartier’s findings about the myriad functions that lesbian bars serve. Baby You Are My Religion is a powerful record of so many of those bars and the women who gathered in them.
-Cathleen Rhodes, Tidewater Queer History Project founder
ISBN: 9781138369290
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
352 pages
2nd edition