Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
The indie rock band Luxury, who released their most important early album in 1995 through Tooth and Nail and whose engagement with the label helped them solidify their emerging reputation at festivals like Cornerstone, are today most famous for two reasons: their surviving a devastating van accident (that killed one crew member and seriously injured two other band members) and three of their five members eventually becoming Eastern Orthodox priests (even as they still record and occasionally tour). They thus are examples within musical culture of a broader phenomenon, small but influential within the U.S., of evangelical conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.
As explored briefly in the 2019 documentary Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury, even prior to the members’ conversion to Orthodoxy the persona of the band’s frontman, Lee Bozeman, presented a somewhat sexualized and gender-fluid presentation in his stage presence. The fact that Bozeman is now an Orthodox priest and that the public’s perception of Luxury encompasses both Bozeman’s charisma and the status of Bozeman and two other bandmates as Orthodox priests means that the band sits at an interesting intersection amidst Orthodoxy’s ongoing negotiations in the U.S. context around sexuality.
The reality that the members of Luxury are converts to Orthodoxy in the U.S. adds to this dimension, since, as demonstrated in scholarship by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Aram Sarkasian, Robert Saler, and others, there are multiple “culture war” fronts (including sexuality) that are exacerbated and transmogrified amongst convert-heavy spaces in U.S. Eastern Orthodoxy.
This paper will discuss the case of Luxury amidst ongoing contestations, particularly amongst converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, of how debates around sexuality and gender identity “travel” with converts from Evangelical Christianity to Eastern Orthodoxy, and how locating those debates within the broader sweep of contemporary Christian music (CCM’s) interaction with punk/metal cultures within Eastern Orthodoxy (as exemplified by such movements as Death to the World, an online punk-inspired zine with Eastern Orthodox content) helps to clarify the various cultural and religious streams that fuel contestation around sexuality within these convert orbits.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper analyzes the ways that these negotiations between evangelical and secular space have been exacerbated and trasnsmorgified in the convert-heavy spaces of U.S. Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Tooth & Nail band Luxury has three members who serve as Orthodox priests, one of whom created discourse around sexual and gender ambiguities in his stage presence, opening space for an analysis of the ways Orthodoxy in the U.S. negotiates sexuality and gender particularly as debates around gender and sexuality tend to “travel” from with evangelicals as they convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.