'Draw a Wider Circle or; Perhaps, Erase' Queer(ing) Hymnody 1
IntroductionJust behind us, members of St. John's Metropolitan Community Church pulled a little red wagon carrying a boom box playing familiar hymns "Jesus Loves Me, This I Enow," "Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine," and "Just as I Am, without One Plea." They sang as they walked, transforming the hymns from songs of private piety into profound public affirmation of a faith in God's radically unconditional love and acceptance. These lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual people had every reason to turn their backs on the church because they had been condemned, rejected, and vilified in the name of God and Jesus. But they were not just singing, they were testifying:Just as I am, without one plea,But that thy blood was shed for me,And that thou bidst me come to thee,O Lamb of God, I come, I come!Just as I am, though tossed about,With many a conflict, many a doubt,Fightings and fears within, without,O Lamb of God, I come, I come!2Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist minister who was removed from ministry after celebrating a same sex union, poignantly describes the scene at the 1988 North Carolina Gay Pride Weekend. Through their reclaiming of these hymns, the "brave voices" Creech heard were queering the hymns as they claimed "that they, too, were children of a loving God who had blessed them with innate dignity and integrity."3 By queering, I mean that persons who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, or ally (LGBTIQQA*)4 were taking hymns that were sung in conservative churches that had previously shunned them and were now proudly singing them in the streets, during a gay pride parade, with a different church that loved and accepted them. The members of St. John's Metropolitan Community Church were proudly singing of God's radical love and inclusion, a radical love that is "so extreme that it dissolves our existing boundaries, whether they are boundaries that separate us from other people, that separate us from preconceived notions of sexuality and gender identity, or that separate us from God."5In addition to (1) hymns that have been reclaimed as "queer hymns" such as those above, there are also four other categories of queer hymn texts to consider:6(2) hymns that may not specifically address queer issues but the text and/or tune was written by a LGBTIQQA* person (or what we would now consider a LGBTIQQA* person if those terms did not exist when the person was alive)(3) hymns that speak of inclusion and acceptance that might hint at the inclusion of LGBTIQQA* people but do not explicitly say so (this category also includes hymns that, following the call of queer theology and queer theory, disrupt the normative in any way, so it includes issues of sexual characteristics, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and class)(4) hymns that specifically use the word lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer;(5) hymns written for specific experiences in the life of LGBTIQQA* people, such as hymns written for same sex unions, for Pride parades and festivals, and hymns that address HIV/AIDS.We at The Hymn Society7 had a moving hymn festival featuring LGBTIQQA* hymns in Colorado in 20117 There are some persons who embrace queer hymnody, while others think it is unnecessary. This is not an either/ or situation, but rather a both/and, and this is because we live in a time of already/not yet, which means we who identify as LGTBIQQA* persons live with both our baptismal identities as Christians and our socially constructed identities as queer people. The first stanza of Adam Tice's hymn "Draw a wider circle" speaks to this tension:Draw a wider circle or, perhaps, erase.Spiral toward God's center,gravity of grace.Raze former fencesmarking out and in holy and unholy,sanctity and sin.8Adam Tice, 2011(c) 2013, G LA Publications, Inc.