1CROSS + 3NAILS = 4GVN: Compulsory Christianity and Homosexuality in the Bible Belt Panopticon

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Bernadette Barton

While some areas of the United States have made progress in securing rights for gay people, Bible Belt states lag behind. Not only do these states lack domestic-partner benefits, but also lesbians and gay men can still be fired from places of employment in many regions of the Bible Belt for being a homosexual. The article argues that regional social mores for small-town life, rules that govern southern manners, and expectations of submission to Christian institutions function as a “Bible Belt panop-ticon” to perpetuate both passive and active homophobia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and excerpts from in-depth audiotaped interviews with lesbians and gay men from the region, the article explores the intersections among religiosity, region, and sexual identity to theorize how the Bible Belt panopticon operates to create an environment of compulsory Christianity.

Keywords: Bible Belt / Christian fundamentalism / homosexuality / lesbian and gay / panopticon

Recently, I opened my front door to let in the sunny day to find on my welcome mat a cheap tract in lurid red font stating: “There Will Be NO Fire Escape In HELL.” I live in Kentucky, a red state in the Bible Belt, in which over 60 percent of the population identifies as Christian fundamentalist. Along with other Bible Belt gays, I am daily assaulted by bumper stickers that claim “One man + one woman = marriage,” church billboards that command me to “Get right with Jesus,” letters to the editor comparing gay marriage to marrying one’s

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dog, and nightly news about the latest homophobic attack from the Family Foundation. While some areas of the United States have made tremendous progress in securing rights for gay people, Bible Belt states lag behind.1 Not only do we lack domestic-partner benefits, lesbians and gay men can still be fired from places of employment in many regions of the Bible Belt for being a homosexual. Why is this?

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and excerpts from in-depth audiotaped interviews with lesbians and gay men from the region, I argue that a widespread Christian fundamentalist influence in the Bible Belt maintains a heteronor-mative status quo. Regional social mores for small-town life, rules that govern southern manners, and expectations of submission to Christian institutions function as a “Bible Belt panopticon” that perpetuate both passive and active homophobia. This article draws upon theories of domination and oppression (Collins 2000; Frye 1983; Pharr 1996)—specifically exploring religiosity, region, and sexual identity—to examine how the Bible Belt panopticon creates an environment of what I call “compulsory Christianity.”2 Using Michel Foucault’s (1979) analysis of the panopticon—an innovative prison design of the eigh-teenth century that allowed one guard to observe many prisoners at the same time—this article shines some light on the regional forces that shape bigoted social attitudes toward homosexuals. I argue that the Bible Belt differs from other regions of the United States, including other homophobic, hostile areas, because of the concentrated institutional presence and influence of the “theo-cratic Right” (Pharr 1996). This presence enables the widespread articulation of fundamentalist Christian attitudes in a range of social environments in the Bible Belt and, as I will argue, thus has a panopticonic effect on how residents interpret presumably politically neutral Christian symbols, such as a cross or fish. To briefly illustrate, Amy—age 48, a white woman from Oklahoma—explained that she no longer had to hear homophobic statements “to evaluate my appear-ance as too dyky or [to] change my pronouns. All it takes now is to see a hand with a cross ring on it, or a fish key chain.”3

Geography Matters

What is the Bible Belt? The phrase was first coined by journalist H. L. Mencken around the time of the famous “Monkey Trial,” also known as the Scopes Trial, a 1925 legal case that tested the state’s stake in the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public school science classes in Dayton, Tennessee. The Bible Belt is a diverse region that consists of large cities, small towns, and rural areas. A variety of racial and ethnic groups populate the region, as well as a range of religious denominations—for instance, a visitor finds Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues in Kentucky. At the same time, Protestant Christian fundamentalism overshadows other forms of religious expression in the region.

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The geographic area of the Bible Belt overlaps with the West South Central (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana), East South Central (Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama), and South Atlantic (West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida) census regions of the United States. After doing a cross-tabulated analysis among census regions and the 2008 General Social Survey question that taps religious orientation—“Do you consider yourself a fundamentalist, moderate, or liberal?”—the data illustrate that a much larger percentage of respondents living in the Bible Belt self-identify as fundamentalist (see table 1).

In the Bible Belt, self-identified fundamentalist Christians are the majority of the population, and they exert a powerful influence on city, county, and state political and cultural institutions (Gray 2009). Institutional authority figures openly opposed to homosexuality and enforcing homophobic institutional policies and practices affect how families and communities perceive and treat gay people, as well as how comfortable an individual lesbian or gay man feels being openly gay. Historian John Howard (1997) explored this phenomenon in his anthology Carryin’ on in the Gay and Lesbian South, examining how “a cultural configuration unique to the Bible Belt South” of police, political leaders, media, and churches target homosexuals (108). In this article, I illustrate that the expression of Christian fundamentalist ideology is not confined to Sunday worship, but that it suffuses multiple environments in the Bible Belt. Christian crosses, messages, paraphernalia, music, news, and attitudes saturate everyday settings in which people work, shop, exercise, socialize, and worship.

Christianity in the Bible Belt

“Fundamentalist,” “evangelical,” “religious right,” and “Christian right” all describe Christians and forms of Christianity that are sometimes confus-ing, poorly defined, and overlapping. It is a fact worth repeating that not all

Table 1. Analysis of Bible Belt Residents Self-Identifying as FundamentalistRegion of the United States % of individuals self-identifying as fundamentalist

East South Central* 63.8South Atlantic* 39.9West South Central* 38.7East North Central 27.2West North Central 24.3Mountain 23.8Pacific 15.5Middle Atlantic 14.5New England 11.5

Note: An asterisk (*) indicates the Bible Belt regions.

Christians, nor Christian denominations, denounce homosexuality. Certain denominations like the Episcopalians, for example, have made great strides in recognizing gay people as being equal to heterosexuals—all as God’s children.4 Even among evangelical Christians, there is a diversity of perspectives on social issues, including homosexuality. “Evangelical” comes from the Greek word meaning “gospel” or “good news.” Essential evangelical beliefs include: Recog-nizing the authority of the Bible; salvation though being born-again in Christ; and spreading the word of Christ (Marsden 1991). Importantly, self-identified evangelicals may be either politically conservative or liberal. While the majority of evangelicals tend toward the political right, a significant minority are leftist (Balmer 2006). For instance, in Thy Kingdom Come, an Evangelical’s Lament (2006), professor of U.S. religious history Randall Balmer opens his book with the following: “I write as a jilted lover. The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who have distorted the gospel of Jesus Christ, defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, and failed to appreciate the genius of the First Amendment” (ix).

While most fundamentalists consider themselves evangelicals, not all evangelicals identify as fundamentalist. Jerry Falwell famously described a fundamentalist as “just an evangelical who is mad about something” (White 2006, 11). Fundamentalists typically have a militant political agenda and share a set of religious beliefs, which Didi Herman, a law professor and author of The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (1997), explains can be “reduced to two key tenets: Biblical inerrancy and premillennial dispensa-tionalism” (12).5 A Christian fundamentalist believes that the Bible is inerrant, because it is the literal word of God, as opposed to many Christian denomina-tions that teach that the Bible is the inspired word of God. For fundamentalists then, the Bible is a rulebook specifically laying out sinful actions that one must avoid and denounce or risk eternal damnation, not a spiritual guidebook open to multiple interpretations. Premillennial dispensationalism, the other key tenet of Christian fundamentalism, is an end-times theology that prophesies that true believers will be “raptured” into heaven, while those left on earth descend into chaos and war. A period of “tribulation” will follow with the rise of the Antichrist. After seven years of nightmarish suffering, Christ returns, defeats the Antichrist, and ushers in a thousand-year reign of Christians on earth. This end-times scenario is fictionalized in the immensely popular Left Behind book series. Dispensationalists perceive the present age as radically corrupt and sinful, a state of affairs that will be rectified by the return and reign of Jesus Christ.

Fundamentalists do differ in how they interpret and experience their fundamentalism. Some denominations forbid women to speak within the church. Members of charismatic churches, such as the Pentecostal, may speak in tongues. While parishioners and clergy of fundamentalist churches vary in their fundamentalist beliefs and expression—some do not allow musical

instruments, some forbid dancing, some expect women to sit in the back, wear skirts, and never cut their hair, and some expect members to walk door to door to save souls for Jesus—they are uniform in their construction of homosexuality as an abomination to God.

The fundamentalist world is extremely hierarchical and sexist (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992; Bendroth 1993; Finlay and Walther 2003; Joyce 2009; Kirkpatrick 1993; Pharr 1996; Robinson and Spivey 2007; Shaw 2008; Stein 2001). God is on top, followed by religious leaders, then husbands and fathers. In her article “Gracious Submission: Southern Baptist Fundamentalists and Women,” Susan Shaw (2008) succinctly observed that “husbands rule their wives” (65). Members of each group are expected to submit to those above them, and to exert dominion over those below. Those in authority are automatically “right” in their ideas about the social world, because they are closer to God. Several of my informants explained that questioning someone in authority or some passage in the Bible was not only discouraged, it was viewed as evidence of being in a sinful state. However, it is also important to note that, as one anonymous reviewer (2009) of Feminist Formations clarified: “Responsibility, compassion and love are also central to Christian fundamentalist theology along with hierarchy, sexism, and sin. While this may not emerge in every sermon or social interaction among fundamentalist Christians, it does provide some bal-ance, i.e., God’s love is as powerful as God’s judgment,” which partially explains fundamentalists’ commitment to their faith. Moreover, those higher up in the Christian hierarchy are expected to assume greater responsibilities; husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and serve as head of the family.

In the Bible Belt, Christian fundamentalists influence a wide range of local secular institutions like schools and workplaces. Social norms about religious practices and the public presentation of one’s Christian identity differ in the Bible Belt relative to other parts of the country. This is especially so in rural areas with small populations, in which people know one another and their family histories spanning generations. In these areas, regardless of any indi-vidual’s actual church attendance, most people self-identify as Christian—which is assumed to mean fundamentalist Protestant—defer to the assumed righteous-ness of any Christian institution, and are suspicious of and deem inferior anyone who is not of the same religious persuasion. As Ellen—age 39, a white woman from Eastern Kentucky—wryly noted: “The only thing worse than being gay in the Bible Belt is being an atheist.” Amy, previously mentioned, experienced this firsthand at her public high school in suburban Oklahoma City. Although she should have been valedictorian of her class, her Southern Baptist school principal skipped over her to the next candidate, who was also Southern Bap-tist, and Amy received no honors—ostensibly because she lacked any church affiliation and had been raised as an agnostic.

The Study

This article draws on a “bricolage” (Denzin and Lincoln 2003, 5)—a work cre-atively constructed from a patchwork of tools at hand—in this case, of qualita-tive methodologies to best illuminate the lives and experiences of lesbians and gay men living in the Bible Belt.6 These methodologies include ethnographic fieldwork at local fundamentalist churches, content analysis of media texts both written and visual, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with Bible Belt gays. In ethnographic fieldwork, which is a classic anthropological method, the researcher immerses herself in the environment of her subjects to observe firsthand their physical geography, climate, culture, and habitat. Such immersion produces a “thick description” of the research setting and subjects (Geertz 1973) and thus identifies, explores, and interprets the often messy and multilayered phenomenon of human interactions. From the local tire store advertising “Wheels and Bibles” on its front sign, to a radio advertisement for an area church in which the pastor explains “that God will give you not just one chance to redeem your life but many more at the Trinity Baptist Church,” to the Christian inspirational section in my town library, I engage in thick description of the Christian-soaked environments of Bible Belt gays.

This study is a feminist-standpoint research project. It begins with the claim that “an oppressed group’s situation is different from that of the dominant group, its dominated situation enables the production of distinctive kinds of knowledge” (Harding 2004, 7). Methodologically, standpoint theory also recog-nizes that the production of scholarship is never value-neutral: Both researcher and subject are each differently privileged and oppressed within the various institutions (government, education, family, the economy) that shape their social worlds. In my role of researcher, my individual standpoint influences the questions that I decide are important to ask, as well as the knowledge I wish to produce. Therefore, as researcher, standpoint theory urges me to locate myself in the study by identifying how my background and experiences intersect with and differ from my research subjects. Because my life followed a different trajectory from most of my interviewees, I perceived certain dimensions of the homophobia the gay people I interviewed had learned in childhood to tune out and take for granted; at the same time, I could also be naive about specific social mores on homosexuality in the South. In other words, the heterosexism I easily saw and the regional norms about homosexuality I struggled to see provided a useful analytical contrast with my interview subjects.

My background is unlike that of my interview subjects. I grew up in Mas-sachusetts, in a politically progressive Catholic household. I was heterosexually identified until age 27. I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast and landed in Kentucky only on a whim. During the seventeen years that Kentucky has been my home, I have been in both a heterosexual marriage and two les-bian relationships. My partner Anna and I celebrated our relationship with a

civil-union ceremony in Vermont in 2002, and we have been together for eleven years. Because I identified as heterosexual until I came out in my late twenties (in 1995, during the relatively tolerant Clinton years) and lived in politically progressive areas of the country most of my life up till then, I never heard the message that there was something inherently flawed about my person-ness, nor did I have any negative associations with homosexuality.

Bible Belt Gays

Coming to terms with being gay for my partner, most of my gay friends, and the gay people I interviewed in the Bible Belt involved facing and overcoming barri-ers and much homophobia. Of the fifty-eight lesbians and gay men interviewed for this study, who ranged in ages from 18 to 74, many describe living through spirit-crushing experiences of isolation, abuse, and self-loathing.7 The most damaging of these included rejection by family and friends, social ostracism, and an internal psychological struggle over their same-sex attractions. I found my interview participants through a mix of personal contacts, convenience and snowball sampling, and attending a meeting of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance, a statewide gay rights organization.

These interviews took place between 2006 and 2009. I also spent a week at Texas A&M in College Station as a visiting guest researcher for Coming Out Week in October 2008, where I interviewed seven of my informants. In total, I have interviewed thirty-five lesbians and twenty-three gay men, compris-ing: Seven African Americans, three Native Americans, four Hispanics, two Jewish people, and forty-two non-Hispanic whites. In addition to these formal interviews, because I participate in several gay rights groups, have gay friends and acquaintances, and give public lectures on being gay in the Bible Belt, I have had informal conversations with hundreds of Bible Belt gays, their straight supporters, and some Christian fundamentalists about the issues explored in this article.

The Undifferentiated Homosexual

It is common for scholars and activists working on gay issues either to use the moniker LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) or, more recently, LGBTQQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, and ally) to refer to a gay and gay-affirming population. Although LGBTQQA speaks to what I perceive of as an admirable public commitment to inclusion and recognition of diversity, I deliberately do not invoke this alphabet-string phrase, because I explore what it means to be gay in the context of multiple and overlapping hegemonic Christian fundamentalist environments—what I call, for convenience, the Bible Belt. One significant finding from this study is that it is our undifferentiated status as homosexuals, regardless even of gender,

much less whether we are bisexual or questioning, that frames the experience of Bible Belt gays. For example, most of the people I interviewed attended fundamentalist Christian churches—that is, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Church of God—and grew up in fundamentalist families, in which homosexuality was frequently denounced. Consequently, my participants’ identity struggles more often took place under the shadows of preachers’ voices thundering floridly about “homosexuals” and parents proclaiming that “any child of mine that is gay is dead to me” at dinner tables than in an LGBTQQA center.

The arguments that I make emerge from Bible Belt gays’ lived experiences of being stigmatized by those around us. Thus, in terms of the oppression we endure, how Bible Belt gays identify is less significant than how we are perceived by others. Early twentieth-century sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902) theorized this with his interactional theory, the “looking glass self.” Cooley imagined the social world to be a mirror, reflecting back to us others’ percep-tions and judgments, which, in turn, shaped the way we see ourselves. In the Christian fundamentalist looking glass, under the Bible Belt’s panopticonic gaze, it matters little how an individual identifies. Consider, for example, the case of a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship. Her bisexual identity is both invisible, unless she shares it, and irrelevant, often even if she does share it. Similarly, if she is in a committed lesbian relationship, her bisexual identity is again invisible and irrelevant, because she engages in a homosexual lifestyle, which Christian fundamentalists consider sinful. And, in my case, it matters not at all that I identify as a former Catholic, agnostic academic, happy in my long-term lesbian relationship, a Northeastern outsider observing my surroundings with an ethnographic eye, because the Bible Belt panopticon paints everyone with one brush, including me. You either conform or risk social stigma. This became visible to me on a spring day in 2003, when I met Jim.

Homosexuality = Abomination

I was digging in the garden at our house in Thomasville, a small town in Ken-tucky, pulling out a few random weeds before putting in my tomato, pepper, and cucumber plants when Jim, a lean man wearing a Christian fish belt-buckle and black T-shirt, walked up to the fence bordering our yard, introduced himself, and offered to till the area I was weeding. He seemed nice, was very persistent, and I am an easy sell when it comes to extra labor in the backyard. When he finished, he immediately inquired: “Are you married?” I knew this was a precur-sor to asking me on a date. I have a conventional feminine appearance, which makes people assume I am heterosexual.

“No,” I stammered, uncomfortable, and queasy, “I’m involved with some-one.” Jim then asked, “Do you go to church?”

“No,” I responded, and then took my own leap of faith: “We’re gay and the churches around here aren’t very supportive of it.”

He paused, looked confused, and examined me closely. A long moment passed. And, out of the blue (at least to me), he announced: “It’s an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.”8

Stunned, I just stood there looking at him. The air grew thick. I felt dazed, afraid, shamed, and weirdly curious. “Someone just called me an abomination in my own backyard,” I thought. “This isn’t supposed to happen.” Jim added: “I’ll pray for you,” . . . (long pause) “that you grow good vegetables.” We chatted briefly about soil quality. Meanwhile, I didn’t recognize myself. Because I am a very outspoken, some might even say opinionated, person, I was surprised by my reticence. I found that I was reluctant to confront him. What if he decided to burn a cross on our lawn? Looking at myself from far away, I listened to him pontificate about his relationship to the Lord in the righteous tones of the born-again.

This practice of speaking with non-believers or sinners about the Christian God is a form of testimony called “witnessing.” Witnessing is premised on the belief that the faithful are charged to seize every opportunity to introduce God into an unbeliever’s life and let the power of the Lord work on changing her or his heart. Although witnessing is commonplace in the Bible Belt, this was the first time I personally experienced it. “The Lord called me,” Jim continued, apropos of nothing, as I stood frozen beside him, a hostage in my own backyard. “I believe in the Lord. I’m so close to God, I left my wife and children. She went one way and I went the high way. My relationship with the Lord was more important. I just don’t get into all that sleeping around, going from bed to bed.”

“But you were married,” I inquired, puzzled.“My wife wanted to sleep around,” he clarified.“Okay, this guy is really creepy,” I thought. “And he’s in my backyard!”

With some follow-up innocuous pleasantries, Jim wheeled his tiller to the gate. He left and I went inside my not-so-safe-feeling home. This encounter with Jim was a watershed moment. I suddenly realized that “Yes, I am a lesbian living in the Bible Belt.”

Reflecting upon this interaction with Jim, I recognize that my fears that he was violent, that he might burn a cross on our lawn were, if not completely unfounded, at least unlikely. At the same time, while most fundamentalist Christians would not engage in violence against another person, they do ascribe to a religious ideology that constructs the behavior of an entire group of people as an “abomination.” This influences social attitudes and behaviors and is the regional context within which the lesbians and gay men I interviewed for this study grew up and live.

For example, Ron, a 36-year-old white man from Eastern Kentucky, has not told his parents that he is gay. When he began to feel same-sex attractions at age 11, he not only did not have anyone to discuss these feelings with, but also he “feared that it would be discovered. I almost felt like I may be in danger, physical danger, if I told it.” Ron explained that he worried that if his parents

learned that he was gay they might “harm me, get rough with me, kick me out, withhold their love.” When I pressed him further to explore whether now he still thought his parents would really have beaten, killed, or ostracized him, he said, “No, but I do think that I would have been taken to counseling, maybe even prayed over. The terminology is referred to as ‘laying hands upon.’ ” The laying on of hands—supposedly a blessed touch that cures or enlightens—is a spiritual practice in many religious traditions. Within Christianity it can be either a symbolic or a literal invocation of the Holy Spirit into another. It can also border on violence, as was the case with Chris, age 42, a white lesbian from Eastern Kentucky.

When Chris came out to her family at age 27, her father, a state trooper, and mother put their arms around her in a suffocating embrace to order the devil to leave her and to enter her father instead. Chris explained what happened:

They were both there and they came up to me and they hugged me and they put their arms around me, a grip so tight you couldn’t get out of it, literally saying that the devil needs to come out of me and into my father. They liter-ally thought that an evil spirit had come into my life and had taken me over and that the only way that they could help me is to take it from me and put it on themselves. You know, here they were fifty, late fifties. And they had lived their lives. They felt like they were making the decision that whatever had come upon me, had taken control of my life, to come into them, so that I would have an okay start.

Frightened, Chris struggled free. With both parents blocking the front entrance, Chris ran to the basement door, her father chasing her down the stairs. She managed to escape. Later she learned that her parents thought if only they could have kept her at home (she speculated that they planned to handcuff her in the basement) until their family preacher came to pray the “devil of homosexuality” out of her, she might have been cured. As psychologically traumatic as this experience was, Chris still interpreted the event as evidence that her parents loved and cared for her. They had made a calculated decision that Chris’s father as head of the household was best equipped to handle the devil of homosexuality, and both acted to spare her this suffering.

Most remarkable to me as I digested the implications of her story, Chris’s partner Deanna, who had been listening in, sadly added, “At least Chris’s parents fought for her. My parents didn’t even care enough to try.” Completely rejected by her southern Ohio Catholic family for being a lesbian, Deanna perceived Chris’s familial relationships as far superior to her own. Over time, Chris’s parents grew to accept that Chris and Deanna were “special friends” and the couple is welcome in their home. After sixteen years, Deanna’s par-ents still refuse contact with her. Bible Belt gays learn early what I was just beginning to grasp: That you need to be careful who you tell that you are gay, as well as who you let in your home and your backyard. You don’t give

up your privacy, and risk insult or injury, for the low reward of some freely offered yard work.

The Bible Belt Panopticon

“Where are You Going to Spend Eternity? Dear Soul, if you were to die right now, do you know

whether you would go to heaven or to hell for all eternity? The Bible, the Word of God, says that you can know.”

—Fellowship Tract League, Tract 130

The tract quoted above appeared on a green mat that Anna and I have outside the front door of our house on our quiet street, welcoming guests to our “Home Sweet Home.” And it is not the only Christian text to appear uninvited at our door; we also regularly receive flyers and pamphlets urging us to join one or another of the fifty-two churches in our town of population 16,500. Moreover, in addition to the usual rounds of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons knock-ing upon our door, individuals from local Christian churches have come and personally invited us to visit “Damascus Baptist Church” and “Blueberry Hill Church of God.” We are invaded by the Bible Belt even before we get into the car and leave our property. As I will illustrate, Christianity is constantly on display in the Bible Belt in both signs and symbols, such as bumper stickers, tracts, yard signs, billboards, and charity cups. Further, casual conversations and social interactions often include references to one’s church, church attendance, and general Christian identity. These Christian signs, symbols, and social inter-actions continually remind residents that they live within a social landscape controlled by fundamentalist Christians.

Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon is useful to my discussion of social surveillance in the Bible Belt. When the panoptic prison was first introduced in the late eighteenth century, the guard station was centrally located so that one individual could survey many cells at once. In the twenty-first century, ubiquitous video cameras documenting our every move, in prison as well as at the ATM machine, the convenience store, and the gas station serve this same function. Foucault (1979) argued that “the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assure the automatic functioning of power . . . the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (201). Americans from every region of the United States have grown accustomed to local, state, and federal surveillance of both our whereabouts and behavior via vehicle registrations, telephone records, credit-card purchases, and computer usage. We have some vague sense that we are always being watched, or might be being watched, by federal antiterrorist organizations. Although this panoptic effect is not

regionally specific, the Bible Belt panopticon adds another, more personal layer of surveillance. Instead of functioning through anonymous and invisible state authorities, this panopticon also manifests through tight social networks of family, neighbors, church, and community members, and a plethora of Christian signs and symbols scattered throughout the region. As Foucault theorized, the panopticon “automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, sur-faces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (202).

For example, Thomasville has one bookstore in town—a Christian book-store. In addition to Christian books, this bookstore also sells Christian-themed plaques, T-shirts, bumper stickers, jewelry, music, knickknacks, and homeschool-ing materials for kindergarten through middle school. The Thomasville Public Library lends “inspirational” Christian books; its number of inspirational titles is comparable to those in the mystery and science fiction/fantasy sections. The library also has a long table and bulletin board for the community on which members can advertise and share information. Christian tracts like those quoted above and one I picked up on a recent visit, showing a large white man dressed in camouflage holding a rifle next to a dead deer and titled “Me Now! God Later?” and invitations and information about local churches are liberally displayed. In the waiting room of my physical therapist’s office, a copy of the Bible and a few old magazines, including a National Geographic from 1983, are my reading options. At the checkout counter, I notice a bedraggled cup asking for charitable offerings for the Christian ministry Operation Baby Blessings. In Goody’s, a local clothing store, I come across a table displaying Christian T-shirts for youngsters. These are all in gender-appropriate pastels and have sayings on them like “Got Jesus?” and “Saving Myself for Jesus.” In the sum-mertime, I can hear the ice-cream truck luring young people for sweets with the Christian hymn “I Know My Redeemer Liveth.”

Where my partner and I get our vehicles serviced, the local auto-repair shop invoice says at the bottom: “We thank you for your business. Jesus is Lord. May God Bless You.” On a fishing trip to a federally funded campground, Anna received a flyer, along with the campground regulations and map, invit-ing her to a “casual service to worship the Lord, Jesus Christ.” Several times throughout the semester I walk over a sidewalk chalk message advertising a “Campus Crusade for Christ” while going into my university office building. People’s vehicles sport a variety of Christian messages: Pro-life bumper stickers like “It’s a child, not a choice,” born-again announcements like “1CROSS + 3NAILS = 4GVN,” fish ornaments, family-values license-plate holders, church affiliations, and, perhaps the most disturbing of all, back-windshield appliqués of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, His face twisted in agony. And the church options are prolific. Within a three-block radius of our house, there is a church next to a liquor store, a church above a grocery store, and a church next to a

discount store. Once I leave my house, I encounter Christian symbols, texts, music, and messages everywhere.

These symbols are not value free; they function as shorthand for beliefs, opinions, and ideology. In most of the Bible Belt, because the dominant context is fundamentalist Christianity, residents learn to associate even presumably value-neutral Christian symbols like a T-shirt proclaiming “SAVED” or a cross over a local grocery store with fundamentalist social attitudes. This exacts a heavy toll on Bible Belt gays like Jessica, who may begin to read all Christian symbols as signals of homophobia. Jessica—age 50, a white woman from Central Kentucky—explained how she perceived Christians, since the 2004 anti-gay marriage amendment on the Kentucky ballot:

I am scared to death when someone tells me they’re Christian, and I hate to say that. Anybody that says they’re Christian, or they have a cross around their neck, I say, “Oh hell I’ve got to be careful around this person, because I just don’t know.” And I guess that’s terrible, but I assume that they’re going to be anti-gay and very homophobic, and mean and cruel . . . and after what we’ve gone through in Frankfort I’m right sometimes.

Jessica’s partner Mary—white, age 61—concurred:

It’s affected me like that. Sometimes when I see these religious bumper stick-ers, I feel the way I think a Jew might feel, seeing a swastika displayed on somebody’s car. There goes somebody who thinks that I’m less than a full human being, that I can be deprived of my rights. Now granted, these people are not going around collecting us up and putting us in concentration camps and sentencing us to death by hundreds of thousands, but still, these are people who think we are less human, that we have less in the way of rights than they have. Because of that they are a danger in a great number of ways and we are harmed by that. And it’s not just symbolic harm, we are truly materially harmed.

Like Jessica and Mary and at least 40 percent of my informants, the 2004 election campaign, with its lurid anti-gay ads, ubiquitous anti-gay-marriage bumper stickers and yard signs, and virulent public discourse darkened my perception of Christians and Christianity. I learned to associate Christian symbols—the fish, the crosses, the music, the Bibles—and Christian institu-tions—the churches, charities, and bookstores—with a menacing bigotry. In spite of my strong Catholic background, I began to perceive Christianity as the exclusive territory of homophobic Protestant fundamentalists.

Not only does the surfeit of Christian signs and symbols embedded in the physical landscape reinforce the Bible Belt panopticon, so also do routine social interactions. For example, conversations in Kentucky are highly mannered, with each party careful to spend an appropriate amount of time situating them-selves within a common social network (such as “So you are from Paintsville,

do you know Bob Smith? There’s been an awful drought round there lately”) (Campbell 2009; Gray 2009; Offutt 2002). This repetitive small talk establishes trust, particularly in the case of small towns and rural areas, but it can also be a factor in larger cities, to the degree that individuals interact in smaller social networks. You are rude to another at your own peril in a small town. Members of small-town communities know one another; they know one another’s parents and relatives and neighbors and children. If you say something sharp to Ms. Johnson across the street, cut someone off in front of the convenience store, or neglect to nod at an acquaintance at a local diner, you will be talked about—and not in a good way. It will get back to your mom and your aunt and your cousin, who will then fuss at you and warn you, for example, not to offend so-and-so, because she is on the school board and your little sister is trying to raise money for the cheerleading squad and do you really want to sabotage her chances? This is one example of how southerners regulate one another’s behavior, and it is an important element of the functioning of the Bible Belt panopticon.

Under a panoptic gaze, people feel that they are always being watched, even when they are not, so that they regulate their own behavior according to an imagined, external authority. In the Bible Belt, the church community, God, and Scripture are powerful external authorities. Under a godly veil of righteous-ness, preachers interpret Scripture for community members and set the moral guidelines that family, friends, and neighbors enforce. One of my heterosexual students, Jake, a 25-year-old white male who gave me permission to use this story, illustrated this dimension of the Bible Belt panopticon with the story of a young man named Bill who was a faithful worshipper at his Baptist church. Jake described Bill as “somewhat feminine,” devout, and punctual. When a parishioner spotted Bill in the company of a “known homosexual,” he told the church deacon and a special meeting was consequently called and Bill’s fate in the parish debated. Some wanted to immediately expel him from the church community; others felt that the claim that Bill was homosexual must be proven before he was ostracized. Jake explained that the “whole church” agreed to get rid of Bill if he were indeed gay, because homosexuals are evil to God. After investigating the matter with a thoroughness that Jake compared to the state police, they concluded they had no hard proof that Bill was homosexual, so they would tolerate him so long as they never had any future reasons to suspect his sexual orientation. The pastor spoke with Bill and warned him to avoid associ-ating with known homosexuals; he explained that the deacons hated to cause a disturbance in the church, but they were willing to do so if it ever emerged that Bill “is thought for sure to be gay.” Jake concluded:

I have observed that the members who were aware of the situation still harbor negativity toward him. Bill felt shame and guilt about the accusations brought against him, although he seemed to brush it off as a simple misunderstanding. I could tell from talking with him that he felt hurt. He never did completely

tell me straight out that he was gay, but he knew I knew he was. He felt like he was evil and sick, and that everyone was ready to stone him to death.

Those of us raised and/or who live in more anonymous, urban, progressive areas might puzzle over Bill’s story. “Good riddance!” we might say. “Bill is better off away from this insular, judgmental environment. Don’t sell out, Bill. Don’t settle for crumbs. Dump this parish and move on.” However, this response—and I confess that it is one that comes easily to me—underestimates the influence and significance of local churches in small towns and rural counties in the Bible Belt. In rural communities, in which there are few public places to gather, church communities serve as both social support and entertainment. Entire families often attend a specific church, including generations of the same family. One’s great, great grandfather may have laid the foundation for the church. Because family, church, and community are so interwoven in these areas, Bible Belt gays, or Bible Belt maybe-gays, recognize that there is more at stake than simply their membership in a specific parish, even more than their eternal salvation if they come out or are found out. They must weigh the consequences of their family members rejecting them, as well as the impact of community disapproval focused on the entire family unit. A Bible Belt gay, or maybe-gay, expelled from a parish not only loses his or her social network, but also the entire community, includ-ing, of course, his or her family, who witnesses his or her public shame—and some family members may even share it.

Personalism

Moreover, in the presence of someone who espouses Christian fundamentalist attitudes, even those who do not share them may hesitate to say so, because of the regional social norm of “personalism.” Essayist Loyal Jones (1997) describes personalism as a traditional Appalachian value: “We will go to great lengths to keep from offending others, even sometimes appearing to agree with them when in fact we do not. It is more important to get along with one another than it is to push our own views” (81). Not only an Appalachian phenomenon, personalism—the desire to fit in, to get along with one’s neighbors, to not offend, to present the social façade of harmony and good humor—influences social interactions throughout the Bible Belt.9 In this environment, regardless of one’s opinions on a particular topic, such as teenage sex, abortion, attending church, women’s role in the household, gay marriage, or even where the pond you used to swim in is located, people typically do not contradict the preacher—doing so invites censure and isolation and, in some cases, a holy harangue, which any reasonable person would seek to avoid after encountering it once.

In Out in the Country, Mary Gray (2009) writes: “Powerful individuals wield a disproportionate amount of power in setting local agendas and, therefore,

the conditions for LGBT visibility. This leaves little recourse or incentive to risk one’s local acceptance by registering dissent.” In her study, she primarily identified local politicians as “powerful individuals,” but the same argument can be made about local clergy. When you couple personalism with the Bible Belt panopticon and the dearth of gay public space, bigoted ideas about homosexu-als are normalized. Mandy—age 24, a white woman from Eastern Kentucky—explained this in a follow-up e-mail to me after our interview:

So, to put it into context begin first by imagining yourself in a rural area, the nearest gay establishment is 50 or 90 miles away. So right off the bat there is no, what I call “gay space” that non-gay people may have to pass and be aware of at all. So, there aren’t necessarily ever any encounters with gay culture by straight people in this area. This can allow learned, false, negative beliefs to continue for years without having an experience which contradicts these beliefs. So isolation and seclusion are a factor. What you are exposed to on a fairly regular basis, however, are preachers teaching that gay people are an abomination, sinners, unnatural and that sod-omites were struck down by a wrathful and vengeful god. While this might be a main topic of a sermon on occasion at church, the twice-yearly evangelical visiting pastor always devoted a whole night to it, sometimes a night at these revivals might last two and a half hours. So homophobia is institutionalized in religion.

Some people go to church only so that they will not be talked about by other members of the community. They certainly are not going to challenge the preacher, whose high regard most are seeking, to speak out for homosexu-als—an almost universally despised group in the region. When there is little to no impetus to stand up for gay rights, homophobia persists unchallenged. Mandy continued: “This, for me, is a major way religion and my family colluded to keep me or anyone in the toxic closet. You see your whole immediate family, not agreeing so much like they are sitting and nodding their heads as he speaks, but you see them in no way disagreeing. They listen intently, shake the preacher’s hand on the way out with a smile and the belief system has been reinforced.” The Bible Belt panopticon functions to maintain the impression that “every-one” (meaning good Christian folk) seamlessly agrees that homosexuals are an “abomination,” even when this is not the case. Personalism—the collective discomfort with expressing conflicting perspectives—and fear of the “sticky stigma” (Goffman 1963) of homosexuality inhibit people from challenging homophobic comments.

Domination Politics and Compulsory Christianity

“We’re going to get out. We’re going to voice our opinions. We’re going to fight the immorality. We’re going to let

this world know there’s only one God. There’s only one way to heaven and you better sit up and you better take notice and you better start listening.”

—qtd. in Alexandra Pelosi, Right America: Feeling Wronged (2009)

Attending local churches while gathering ethnographic data, I heard preachers and other religious-authority figures directly encourage parishioners to bring the Word of God with them into other environments: “Teachers, see your classroom as a vessel of God and your students as an opportunity to spread God’s word” (personal notes, 2008). Church members were specifically instructed to perceive their workplaces, schools, daycare centers, doctor’s offices, and libraries as Christian spaces. The Bible Belt panopticon trains fundamentalists to repeat-edly present their Christian identity to others in routine social interactions. As with questions about one’s hometown or workplace, people regularly query acquaintances about which church they belong to. The answer to this ques-tion conveys a wealth of information, not only about the particular Christian denomination (for example, Old Regular versus Free-Will Baptist), but also about the set of potential political and social attitudes held, as well as class status.

Domination politics begins with economic exploitation and inequality, and it maintains its grip on people’s imaginations through much-repeated ideologies of exclusivity, scarcity, and meritocracy (Jensen 2009; Pharr 1996). Christian fundamentalists are natural partners with those engaged in the politics of domi-nation. The compulsory Christianity they practice is exclusive and absolute: There is only one God and one way to heaven; there is an us and a them; you are either with us or against us. Further, the Christian fundamentalist construct of human beings as sinners and constantly engaged in personal and political battles with immorality keeps the focus on individuals, not institutional forces. The fundamentalist Christian who cannot find work in a crumbling economy is told, “You need to get right with Jesus,” rather than receiving education assistance to learn a new skill. Suzanne Pharr (1996) explained that “the theocratic Right acts as the ground troops of the collective forces of the Right and works to dismantle the gains of the Civil Rights Movement for people of color and women, vehe-mently opposes reproductive rights, tries to prevent lesbians and gay men from achieving equality, and opposes efforts to protect the environment. The work is done in the name of morality, law and order, and free-market capitalism” (44).

At the same time, although most of the people worshipping at the churches I attended while gathering data for this study voted against my civil rights,

my viewing them singularly as hateful bigots is not useful. In fact, the more I observed them at such churches, the more clear I became that these seemed to be mostly nice people intent on doing “good,” even if our definitions of what that meant differed. For example, I would rather vote for a politician who promised to put more money into social programs for the poor than to house eighteen homeless men once a week in a church building. But the parishioners at Southview Christian Church embarked on just such a program for the home-less, believing that they were doing good work, God’s work. The Bible Belt panopticon, shaped as it is by a regional culture of manners, traditional gender roles, and respecting authority, especially religious authority, “is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous effects of power” (Foucault 1979, 202).

Because nowhere within the fundamentalist framework is homosexuality permissible, lesbians and gay men from fundamentalist families and communi-ties must choose between staying in the “toxic closet” or else risk rejection and ostracism from the people who are supposed to care for them the most—their families, friends, and neighbors (Barton 2010).10 Philosopher Marilyn Frye (1983) calls this a “double bind,” a facet of oppression in which there are no good solutions to a problem. Further, the fundamentalist socialization to submit to God’s authority prevents the gay child, sister, or cousin from making an effec-tive argument based on the inviolability of kinship responsibilities. By this, I mean that a gay relative cannot reasonably argue that their well being within the family system is more important than what God thinks about homosexuals.

To illustrate, in one of my earliest interviews, I asked Celia—white, age 40, from Eastern Kentucky—what might happen if she said to her fundamentalist aunt who had rejected her: “I love you and care about what you think, and it makes me sad that you won’t accept that I am gay and include my partner in family events.” Celia paused for a long time and looked confused. She said that it had never occurred to her to say any such thing. She explained: “God’s feelings on the matter are really the only ones that matter. And yours don’t, mine don’t.” Celia suspected that if she asked for some verification of her aunt’s acceptance, her aunt would respond: “Celia, I love you, but you know what the Bible says.” Thus, the fundamentalist framework constructs “morality” as objectively determined by God and Scripture, which prescribes that a usu-ally loving aunt—Celia described her as her favorite aunt—to not only reject her niece, but also to deny responsibility for that rejection. Therefore Celia’s aunt is resolved from reflecting upon the emotional, psychological, and social consequences of her actions—ostracizing her niece—because she is following God’s law and doing His will.

Bible Belt gays grow up, live, and work with people like Celia’s aunt—people who, as sociologist Arlene Stein (2006) describes, “wish to construct a conception of the world that is secure, unambiguous, where there are good people and bad people, and where they are clearly on the side of the good and

true.” Ellen—white, age 39, from Eastern Kentucky—described the theological doctrine condemning homosexuality as the “glue holding together the Christian fundamentalist house of cards.” She speculated that “they need to feel that they are better than others, that they are on a side and it is the side of God. They need to have someone to hate and right now, it’s us.” The “theocratic Right,” according to author, academic, and activist Pharr (1996), operates through this politics of exclusion. Many fundamentalists are so wedded to this ideology that they continue to produce the homophobic “glue” that Ellen described, no matter what the costs to their loved ones and themselves.

It is impossible to know just what fundamentalism exactly means to the people who identified as such in the General Social Survey data I cited at the beginning of this article. Do the women cut their hair? Do they eat shellfish? Have they worn a polyester/cotton-blend shirt? All of these are prohibited acts in the Bible. Do they really believe that the universe is only 6,000 years old? Or is it that they feel “watched” as Christians, so much so that they check the fundamentalist box on an anonymous General Social Survey in order to “stay right with God”? Because the Bible Belt panopticon equates Christianity with fundamentalism, it makes at least the presentation of complicity with Christian fundamentalist attitudes compulsory for most in the region. In this way, the Bible Belt panopticon is a tool that furthers the politics of domination.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Emily Askew, Shondrah Tarrezz Nash, Patricia K. Jen-nings, Constance L. Hardesty, Kathleen M. Blee, Charles Combs, Misty Dyer, Anna L. Blanton, Ric Caric, Clarenda Phillips, Ashley Currier, the members of the Queer Studies Working Group at Texas A&M in College Station, Rebecca Ropers-Huilman, and the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Forma-tions for thoughtful feedback on this project. I would also like to acknowledge the Institute for Regional Analysis and Public Policy, Research, and Creative Productions and the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminology at Morehead State University for generously supporting this study.

Bernadette Barton (PhD, University of Kentucky [2000]) is an associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at Morehead State University. She is the author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (2006). Her current research project examines the experiences of gays and lesbians and is the focus of a book in progress titled Pray the Gay Away: Religion and Homosexuality in the Bible Belt (forth-coming, New York University Press). Barton writes and lectures on contemporary issues of gender, culture, sexuality, and the sex industry. She can be reached at b.barton@morehead-st.edu.

1. Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Connecticut, and seven other states (California, Rhode Island, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington) and the District of Columbia permit same-sex couples to enter into civil unions or have domestic-partner laws that entitle them to the same state rights and benefits as heterosexual couples. Thirty-nine states prohibit gay and lesbian couples from marrying, with state laws that resemble the DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).

2. This article is part of a book in progress titled Pray the Gay Away: Religion and Homosexuality in the Bible Belt. Special thanks to Professor Shondrah Tarrezz Nash for her ideas about panoptic functioning in the South.

3. All the names of informants and my hometown of “Thomasville” are pseudonyms.4. The Episcopalians elected Gene Robinson bishop in 2003. Robinson is the first

openly gay, noncelibate bishop in a major Christian denomination. Additionally, the United Church of Christ ordains openly gay people to the pastorate. Regions of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a denomination born in Kentucky, are either now ordaining gays and lesbians or are having conversations about it.

5. Fundamentalism as a distinct category of Christianity and an organized set of tenets is relatively new. It was codified in the early twentieth century. American funda-mentalist doctrine includes five beliefs: The inerrancy of the Scriptures, the Virgin birth and deity of Jesus, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement through God’s grace and human faith, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of Christ’s miracles and/or his pre-millennial Second Coming (General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church 1910). Moreover, all religions have movements within them that we categorize as fundamentalisms, because of the reliance on the same sorts of trajectories toward Scripture, history, and society that we find in Christian fundamentalism. For a discussion of post-millennialism and a-millennialism, see Mel White (2006).

6. To date, the majority of published research on homosexuality has explored heterosexual attitudes toward homosexuals from a social science, mostly psychological perspective (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992; Finlay and Walther 2003; Haddock and Zanna 1998; Henley and Pincus 1978; Herek 1987; Laythe, Finkel, and Kirkpatrick 2001; Swank, Eldridge, and Mack 2006; Whitley 1999). Much of this research has focused on the relationship among prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism, and the dimensions of religiosity (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992; Fisher et al. 1994; Kirkpatrick 1993; Laythe, Finkel, and Kirkpatrick 2001; Whitley 1999; Whitley and Egisdottir 2000; Whitley and Lee 2000). Most of these articles found a positive relationship between a measure of religious fundamentalism and homophobia and/or an authoritarian worldview and sexual prejudice. These studies, almost exclusively quantitative survey data, form a body of literature exploring which personality characteristics dispose an individual to behave with prejudice toward certain groups. Few studies explicitly examine the relationship between being gay or lesbian and Christianity; however, many gay individuals reference (Califia 2002) or focus their struggles on Christianity (Bawer 1997; Gold 2008; Perez 2007; Truluck 2000; White 1995) in published works. Social science that explores gay Christians tends to focus on the processes by which homosexuals integrate what are often assumed to be conflicting identities: Being gay and Christian (O’Brien 2004; Walton 2006; Wilcox 2003, 2006).

As my data in this article illustrates and as other work demonstrates (O’Brien 2004; Truluck 2000; Walton 2006; Wilcox 2003), for many gay individuals, rejecting religion, at least at first, is part of the coming out process. A sign, perhaps, of exaggerated “heterosexual dominance” (Seidman 2004) during the George W. Bush administration, two recent book-length studies of individuals in ex-gay organizations—Michelle Wolkomir’s Be Not Deceived (2006) and Tanya Erzen’s Straight to Jesus (2006)—illustrate how religiously based ex-gay programs use informants’ own religious-belief systems and traditional gender-role conformity as the foundation for their attempts at conversion. Work on fundamentalism and the Christian Right includes Tina Fetner’s How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism (2008). Fetner’s research explores how the Christian Right and the gay-liberation movements each shaped the other as they gained influence as social movements. Recently published trade books that critique religious fundamentalist attitudes (Dawkins 2006; Hitchens 2007; Joyce 2009; White 2006), as well as those that describe, explore, and critique recent manifestations of evangelical Christianity (Aguilar 2008; Goldberg 2006; Sheler 2006) and works reflecting on individuals’ personal experiences with religious-based bigotry (Campbell 2009; Gold 2008; Perez 2007; White 1995, 2006) have informed the ideas explored in this article. None of the works cited here examines the consequences of Christian fundamentalist attitudes in the lives of Bible Belt gays.

7. Most of the individuals quoted here lived in Kentucky or Texas at the time of our interviews. Some lived in other areas of the Bible Belt, and outside of the Bible Belt, during their life courses. Institutional Review Board approval was sought and secured for this study. Interviews took place in a location of the subjects’ choosing, most often their homes or my home or office. Prior to our tape-recorded interviews, informants read a consent form that described the interview process and made it clear that she or he could refuse to answer any questions or terminate the interview at any time. Using a semi-structured interview guide, questions explored informants’ histories of coming out, community, familial, and religious support in the process, and experi-ences of homophobia over their life courses. Interviews lasted forty-five minutes to two hours, with the average interview time being ninety minutes. Each interview was fully transcribed, coded, and analyzed. My ethnographic fieldwork included visiting area churches, the Creation Museum, reading fundamentalist literature, attending the Exodus International 2009 annual conference, and subscribing to several gay-oriented listservs. Further, because I am a member of the group I am studying and live in the Bible Belt, my everyday life places me in numerous business and social settings that allow me to observe both the lives of Bible Belt gays and Christian fundamentalists.

8. Fundamentalists draw on the following six biblical passages to condemn homo-sexuality as sin: Genesis 19:5, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:26–27, I Corinthians 6:9, and I Timothy 1:9–10. The passage Jim quotes to me is from Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination.”

9. We perceive the affects of personalism in conventional attitudes about southern-ers and northerners: Southerners often perceive northerners as rude, while northerners are mystified by southerners who are cordial to them to their face, while holding negative, unspoken attitudes about them.

10. I explore my theory of the “toxic closet” in detail in my work-in-progress Pray the Gay Away.

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1CROSS + 3NAILS = 4GVN: Compulsory Christianity and Homosexuality in the Bible Belt Panopticon

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Desire, Passion, and Homosexuality: Exploring William Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Mesopotamian Christianity