Do you remember Leslie Jordan?

This week in North Philly Notes, Royal G. Cravens, III, author of Yes Gawd!, writes about the connections between religion, politics, and the late actor Leslie Jordan.

The Tennessee-born actor, comedian, and singer Leslie Jordan was an icon of southern queer culture who left an indelible mark on the world. Perhaps best known for his portrayal of the character Beverley Leslie on Will & Grace, Jordan’s status as a queer hero was cemented (in my opinion) by his portrayal of Brother Boy, the uncle of Ty (Kirk Geiger), the protagonist in Del Shores’ cult classic comedy, Sordid Lives.

I am not a biographer of Jordan’s life, but I have admired his work through the years. Like so many others during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found joy in his viral videos and I grieved with many when I learned of his tragic passing in October 2022. One of my biggest regrets is not asking Jordan for an interview when writing my book, Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States.

While doing research for the book, I found an interview with Jordan that contained an example   of what I found in my survey and interview data about the religious experiences of LGBT people. It stood out, so much so that I quoted it at the beginning of chapter 2: “I never walked away from the church,” Jordan told country music legend Shania Twain in a 2021 podcast interview, “I just quit going.” Jordan’s quote sums up many of the experiences I document in Yes Gawd!

“He could preach, preach, preach:” growing up a southern Evangelical

In Sordid Lives, Jordan’s character was institutionalized for being gay.  A major subplot involves unpacking the ways conservative Christianity facilitated his involuntary committal and society’s negative views about Brother Boy and his gay nephew. The role of conservative Christian religion in the oppression of LGBT people is especially pronounced in the film’s sequel, A Very Sordid Wedding, and in another of Shores’ productions, Southern Baptist Sisses, which features Jordan as “Peanut” a “backsliding, homosexual, former Baptist.”

Jordan was vocal about his own experiences with organized religion. Literally vocal —he recorded an album of Christian hymns featuring country music royalty like Dolly Parton in 2021. When asked by NPR’s Ari Shapiro why he decided to record a gospel album, Jordan expressed a sentiment that I found to be relatively common in the research I explain in my book.

“I grew up in the church,” Jordan said. “When you grow up in the church, everything that we did — even socially — was around the church. It was just such a big part of our lives. And I loved that music.”

Jordan grew up Southern Baptist, but my work shows that LGBT people who were raised in Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and more faith traditions have a shared experience. Namely, religious socialization (the milieu of institutions, practices, beliefs, and people that teach us about faith and politics) is a powerful force that can have lasting effects on their identities and politics.

Importantly, I conceptualize socialization as positive, negative, or neutral with respect to affirming LGBT people and rights. Some, like Jordan, who experienced negative religious socialization had “an axe to grind with the church” that didn’t “embrace” him after he realized he was gay. Most of the LGBT people I surveyed who identify as religious pointed out that “organized religion” is frequently wielded as a weapon to divide and suppress not just LGBT identity, but also pluralism – the spirit of appreciation for diversity and democracy.

For example, I found that growing up in a non-affirming Protestant denomination is significantly related to coming out (openly identifying as LGBT) later in life,  even though the LGBT people raised Protestant I surveyed thought they might be LGBT at roughly the same age as LGBT people raised in all the other faith traditions. There could be  several reasons, but it is likely that being raised in a non-affirming faith tradition, especially a Protestant tradition, contributes to stigma and internal identity conflict. Experiencing both of those things makes it more likely that an LGBT person will leave the faith tradition in which they were raised.

Even after disaffiliating, negative religious socialization influences LGBT identity and politics. Like Jordan said, he didn’t “walk away from the church,” he just stopped attending. As I show, these negative experiences can inform an activist politic primarily to prevent the consolidation of political power by conservative religious forces. Negative religious socialization can also inspire LGBT people to seek out faith traditions that affirm their LGBT identity or to reimagine their faith and spirituality altogether.

This comes across most in my evaluation of affirming faith traditions and how the efforts to create inclusive, pluralistic religious communities have helped LGBT people – cognitively, by helping resolve spiritual and psychic conflict; physically, by providing resources and tangible benefits; and politically, by inspiring and facilitating political activism – assert agency in matters of faith in politics that have long been foreclosed by hetero- and cisnormative religious institutions.

In detailing the experiences of LGBT people and the intersection of faith and politics, Yes Gawd!, is not only a story about the political weaponization of faith against LGBT people. Neither is it solely a story of religious disaffiliation. Instead, Yes Gawd! is a story about LGBT people drawing on previous experiences with religion – both positive and negative – to inform who they are and how they engage with the political world. What emerges from the book is an understanding of the ways LGBT people democratize both American politics and religious spaces, holding America to its pluralistic ethos.

Adoptees in reunion: Moving beyond happy endings

This week in North Philly Notes, Sara Docan-Morgan, author of In Reunion, writes about the complexity of birth family reunions.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to see the movie Wonka. The film centers on a young Willy Wonka as he outsmarts villains in his pursuit of opening his own chocolate shop. Along the way, he befriends Noodle, a smart and watchful preteen girl who becomes his assistant. Throughout most of the film, viewers are led to believe that Noodle is an orphan; however, at the end, she learns that her birth mother is alive and heartbroken, having believed her daughter had died many years ago as an infant. Shortly thereafter, the two reunite. After running toward each another, they embrace and cry tears of joy and healing. Their family and individual journeys are both assumed to be complete.

I admit that I groaned a bit at this storyline, not because I can’t appreciate a happy ending but rather, because the media too often portray birth family reunions in ways that elide the complexity of these interactions. I was likely the only one in the theatre thinking, “What’s next? How will Noodle and her mom transition from being strangers to being family? What similarities and differences will they find with one another? How will they navigate challenges in their relationship?” But these are the types of questions I have been exploring for the last 15 years as a family communication scholar and even longer as a Korean adoptee in reunion.

My book, In Reunion, draws attention to the experiences of transnational Korean adoptees who have reunited with their Korean birth families. Longitudinal, qualitative, in-depth interviews with 18 adult Korean adoptees revealed that there is no single reunion story, but one finding was most apparent: the first meeting between an adoptee and their birth family is the beginning of a story.

Reunion is risky. Adoptees risk losing the Hollywood-based fantasy of reunion—instant connection and comfort, unconditional acceptance, and heartfelt emotions. Instead, reunions most often involve moments of discomfort, as adoptees are confronted with family members who they don’t know and who may be very different from what they envisioned. Adoptees also risk their sense of security, as reunion opens up the possibility of being abandoned by their birth parents a second time. Birth families risk coming face to face with adoptees who feel angry or hurt, who pose difficult questions about the past, or who have lived lives marked by alienation and trauma. Additionally, birth mothers may risk being outed by reunion if they haven’t told others about their relinquished child. Adoptive parents may also experience reunion as risky, particularly if they fear that they might somehow lose their child to the parents that society often deems as “real.” These risks put a great deal at stake for families in reunion.

In addition, transnational Korean adoptees assume a great deal of responsibility in reunion. Along with the extensive logistics involved planning overseas travel, they bear communicative responsibility—what I call discursive burden—to build relationships with their birth families while maintaining relationships with their adoptive family, given that some adoptive family members feel threatened by reunion. Some specific discursive burdens include accommodating to Korean culture, expressing forgiveness to the birth family, narrating a positive life story to the birth family to assuage their guilt, learning some Korean language, masking uncomfortable emotions during reunion meetings, asking questions about the birth family’s past, and reassuring their adoptive parents. This list, which is far from exhaustive, suggests that the idealized reunion stories portrayed in the mainstream media may lead to unrealistic expectations and unpreparedness.

In many ways, adoption requires adoptees to release the past—their birth culture and birth family—and live in the present, in their adoptive country with their adoptive families. Reunion, however, asks them to dive into the past—even if it’s painful—and step into a present and future with multiple families, both of which are real in their own way. Through knowledge of the risks, complexities, and responsibilities inherent in reunion, adoptees can be best equipped to meet their birth families with an openness, not just to what could have been but also to what might be.

Getting an Education

This week in North Philly Notes, Grant Farred, author of The Perversity of Gratitude, writes about what his apartheid education taught him.

I write this blog on the 4^th of January, 2024, having just hours ago received my advance copies of The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education. It’s CLR James’s birthday today, and James figures, tangentially, in the book. I was introduced to James by one of my teachers, a Trotskyist who held James’s The Black Jacobins in high regard.

Long before it arrived, 2024 had the feel of a tumultuous year. Half of the planet’s population goes to the polls this year: India, just to begin with; South Africa, where the African National Congress seems destined to capture less than 50% of the vote – and not a moment too soon, say I; and, of course, the United States, where God alone can possibly know what will happen.

Fear. Dread. Expecting the worst.

Surely a good moment for revolution, James would have said. If only . . .

If we start with the failure of the post-apartheid regime in South Africa, then today is surely an opportune moment to reflect on what it meant to have lived and been educated, as a member of the disenfranchised, under apartheid.

“Apartheid made me think.” That is the opening line and the resonant sentiment that animates The Perversity of Gratitude. I am grateful to my apartheid education, perverse as that might seem; my anti-apartheid teachers prepared me for this moment. They did so in no small measure because the rise of black petit bourgeoisie nationalism, ethno-nationalism fueled by the fires of religious fundamentalism and the United States’s impulse toward hegemony were always made a matter for thinking by them.

Today I write from an academic position securely located within the United States. But, even after almost 35 years of living in this country, I retain more than a vestige of the tendency toward political skepticism and philosophical critique instilled in me as a high school and college student.

Not one of us is sufficiently ballasted against the political headwinds that are approaching and will shortly reach gale force strength.

Certainly not me.

But I do have a singular advantage: my apartheid education. It prepared me, against the will of the white minority regime, to live in the world. Fully. And it encouraged me to be open to the complexities of the world and its uncertainties. To live in anticipation of the event.

On CLR James’s birthday, I am moved to reflect on the perverse gift made to me by apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, when the tumultuous was the order of the day in apartheid South Africa.

In this way, it might be that The Perversity of Gratitude is a gift most timely. A gift I am able to make myself.

Presenting Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we present Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 catalog.

Below are our forthcoming books, arranged alphabetically by title. You can also view the catalog online here.

Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories, by Marianne Novy

Bringing together birthmothers’, adoptees’, and adoptive parents’ portrayals of their experiences in memoirs

Beyond Left, Right, and Center: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Germany, by Christina Xydias

Debunks our assumptions about ideology and women’s representation in democracies

Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy, by Amy Jane Cohen

Philadelphia’s Black history as seen through historical markers, monuments, murals, and more

Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration, by Wendi Yamashita

Critiques how Japanese American public memorializations unintentionally participate in maintaining and justifying a neoliberal racial order

Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder, by John D. Fairfield

Forging a path forward toward modes of production and ways of life, less dependent on despoliation and manic consumption, that will be genuinely sustaining

Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal, by Jeevan R. Sharma

How the changing political economy of rural Nepal informs the desire and agency of young male migrants who seek work in cities

Death Penalty in Decline?: The Fight against Capital Punishment in the Decades since Furman v. Georgia, Edited by Austin Sarat

Examines how the politics of capital punishment have changed in America since 1972 and the current prospects for abolition

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes: Fitting Policy to People and Place, by David C. Campbell

Turning deeply rooted governance dilemmas into practical policy results

Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism, Edited by Tatiana Konrad

Explores discourses related to gender, race, imperialism, and climate across the colonial era

Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, by Linh Thủy Nguyễn

How American children of Vietnamese refugees connect and express their experiences of racialization using the tropes of family, war, and grief

Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society, by Rebecca A. Glazier

Showing how community engagement can build stronger congregations and improve democracy

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, Edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg

Initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity

From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City, by Adam Baird

How longstanding socio-economic vulnerability in Belize City created fertile grounds for embedding deported Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles

The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking, Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno

Exploring improvisation as a fundamental practice for teaching and learning

Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm, by Tongyu Wu

A critical exploration into the gamification in modern workplaces as a means of control