Do we accept the terms we are given or break them, transform them? This panel examines the religious construction and constriction of queer, gay, and trans men in three settings: a Catholic ministry for “same-sex attracted” men, the sanctified and pentecostal witness of Black gay men in the 1980s, and the algorithmic production of the Black butch queen. Across philosophical theology, sacramentology, and close readings of film and literature, “Sacrament and Surveillance” considers the places from which contemporary gay/queer/trans men derive their conceptions of freedom—and what happens when they realize that they are, in fact, not free. As these papers make clear, their liberatory journeys might lead them through landscapes of unpredictability and pleasure, surveillance and embodied encounter, Instagram, Catholic liturgies, coconut oil, and cum.
Early in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), the line “baptize me in coconut oil and cum” reworks the language of Black Protestant ritual into a queer invocation of spirituality and desire. Read alongside Joseph Beam’s anthology In the Life (1986), this paper argues that Black queer cultural production draws from, subverts, and reconfigures Black religious forms rather than existing outside them. It reads Tongues Untied as both an extension of and response to Beam’s earlier call for Black gay self-representation in In the Life. Their titles signal this relationship: Tongues Untied invokes Pentecostal glossolalia and the refusal of silence, while In the Life names Black queer community in language resonant with sanctified existence. Through testimony, Riggs and Beam mobilize Black Protestant rhetorical forms to voice Black queer life during the AIDS crisis. Together, these works stage Black queer expression as a liturgical practice of voice, body, intimacy, and communal witness in a moment of imminent death.
In recent years, the profile of Courage International, the Catholic Church's official apostolate to gay, lesbian, and bisexual Catholics, has risen both in public discourse and within the Vatican itself. This paper explores the historical and ideological development of Courage, along with the testimony of liberation that many gay men claim to have found through the organization. Ultimately, this paper suggests two problems with the Courage model. First, the liberation Courage offers is predicated upon anti-trans and anti-queer violence. Second, Courage's theology of grace is nothing less than a betrayal of the Catholic theological tradition. In conversation with Hanna Reichel, Micah Cronin, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Raher, and Elizabeth Johnson, this paper suggests the contours of a theology of queer grace that could form a foundation for greater solidarity among LGBTQ+ Catholics.
This paper examines how a particular strand of Black gay consumer culture has become complicit in its own surveillance through what I term "predictable desire." Drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of internalized power, Simone Browne's genealogy of anti-Black surveillance, and Denise Ferreira da Silva's critique of the "transparent-I," the paper argues that the normalization of Black gay desire—expressed through repetitive aesthetics, digital performance, and aspirational consumption—renders Black gay subjects, particularly the ‘butch queen,’ mathematically predictable and therefore controllable. Against this condition, I propose a Christian practice of mystical discernment, rooted in Howard Thurman's mysticism and Georges Bataille's theory of sacrifice, as a mode of radical detachment. Reading Matthew 5:29–30 theologically and phenomenologically, the paper calls for a thoroughgoing destabilization of the sedimented self—not self-destruction, but an ecstatic, Spirit-led dispossession that disrupts the surveillance economy by making the Black gay subject harder to track, to sell, or to contain.