Gender- Religiosity and the Construction of Idenity in the Music and Ritual of the Metropolitan Community Church of Northern Virginia

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CHASING THE RAINBOW: GENDER- RELIGIOSITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENITY IN THE MUSIC AND RITUAL OF THE METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY CHURCH OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA Gaetano Romano Lotrecchiano, PhD 2005 Dissertation Directed By: Carolina Robertson, PhD Professor of Ethnomusicology, Division of Musicology and Ethnomusicology Luke Jensen, PhD Affiliate Assistant Professor of Musicology, Division of Musicology and Ethnomusicology The intersection of belief, identity, and performance enacted in the Metropolitan Community Church of Northern Virginia (MCC NOVA) - a lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, queer community of faith, provides an arena for ethnomusicological inquiry into ritual performance and identity construction. As a safe-haven for persons marginalized by mainstream religious traditions, MCC NOVA serves as an alternative to historically oppressive and suppressive worshipping environments where LBGTQ lifestyle is often considered antithetical to the goals of religiosity. It grounds ritual and musical practices in its core values: elastic theology, inclusiveness, diversity, community, member-ministers, and love and acceptance. These core values are the basis of a variety of performative events which allow for the self-fashioning of identity and spiritual exploration on both an individual and corporate level. Affected by a variety of “cradle traditions”, this LBGTQ group draws on a complex assortment of sacred musics and ritual practices which form a unique gender-religiosity as MCCers journey to describe and re-invent their collective self. MCC NOVA intensifies the experience of faith through its multi-gendered condition, alternative spiritualities, and idiosyncratic performance events by fashioning a Judeo-Christian-based LBGTQ spirituality in light of freedoms which allow for exploration beyond the boundaries of the Christian ordo. This project deals with a series of unexplored important questions concerning the significance, process, problems, negotiations, and repercussions involved in performing a variety of hegemonic ritual musics and acts in light of MCC NOVA’s emerging central core values. Analyses are a consideration of the behavioral aspects of conversion considered in light of the process of establishing a self-concept and its affects on socialization. The musical material is analyzed through a methodology which considers musical change as a consistent domain in the perceptions and performances of MCC NOVA rituals. Foremost is a consideration of the relationship between individual existenz and corporate identity and the role this relationship plays in understanding the commonality between continuity and discontinuity of performances in relationship with core values. The overall methodology of the research strives to interpret the multifaceted expressions of this community by understanding them through a series of analytical lenses. ii CHASING THE RAINBOW: GENDER-RELIGIOSITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENITY IN THE MUSIC AND RITUAL OF THE METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY CHURCH OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA By Gaetano Romano Lotrecchiano, PhD Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Carolina Robertson, PhD, Co-Chair, Professor of Ethnomusicology Luke Jensen, PhD, Co-Chair, Affiliate Assistant Professor of Musicology Katie King, PhD, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies Judith Freidenberg, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology Jonathan Dueck, PhD, Lecturer of Ethnomusicology iii © Copyright by Gaetano Romano Lotrecchiano, PhD 2005 iv Preface Although this research began in 2001, in many ways it is a culmination of personal revelations from over twenty years ago and in fact even from childhood. My interests in liturgical musics began at an early age as my own musical abilities and sensibilities were framed within a highly ritualized context. Being a cradle Roman Catholic, ritual and music served as a means of identifying with a corpus of belief supported and fostered by my own Italian-American heritage and the social hegemonies that culture represented. As a youngster, music-making played an integral part in the process of exploring my own diverse and sometimes confusing identity. Learning a variety of instruments, participating in many ensembles and shows, and discovering my own musical voice were not only musical achievements but vehicles for understanding my own self-concept in light of an emerging persona. These revelations promoted what would become an intimate relationship between my own religious heritage, my self perceptions, and a life of occupational music-making. These factors played a major part in the decision to pursue a spiritual life. I began preparation for religious life as an Augustinian friar at age 14. Through experiences of a religious vocation, every aspect of life had the potential to contain liturgical and ritual consequences. Everyday living proved to be a constant translation of spiritual, material, hierarchical, and even sexual realities into a symbolized and ordered expression of what it meant to be an individual living amidst corporate priorities. As a gay man, religious and liturgical life afforded me many venues for understanding how performance was integral to the self disclosing of my own sexual ii orientation and ultimately my integrated gender-religious identity. In retrospect, I discovered that amidst the sometimes debilitating structures and confines of religious community, ritual and music performance were opportunities to disclose facets of my own identity which at times seemed to be contradictory to local and church cultural expectations. As a friar, the program of daily ritualizing often proved to be a privatized expression of self, breaching the taboo discourses embedded in same-sex religious interactions. On the one hand, as a musician, it allowed for latent discoveries about my own maturing self identity to be performed and disclosed amidst the guise of normative liturgical expression. Stereotypes about the marginal personas of artists and musicians and the charisms1 which they exuded became the material from which discourses of freedom and liberation arose. The constructs which make them up were constantly negotiated and systematized by those of us who were afforded greater gender latitude –for lack of a better term—as a result of perceptions about the interrelationship between musicality, creativity, and spirituality. A life of immersive musical and ritual performance served in this case as a “cloak”, masking the unspoken reality of gender marginalism, ambiguity, and homosexuality found in all religious communities of same-sex men. 1 Charism is a term used by religious communities of both men and women which describes an outlook toward spirituality designed on founding and operative priorities. A religious group’s charism may be one which highlights service, a preferential option for the poor, or community building. Ultimately this is related to personhood, a way of life, and the intimate relationship between being and doing as having an innate relationship based in a spirituality. In this context, the statement about the charism of artists and musicians draws attention to the innate relationship between being creative spirituality. It allows for an interpretation of beliefs and acts that one embodies as being integral to their own innate identity. More specifically in this case, the charismatic identity of musical and artistic members of the community served as a means for latitude and license in light of gendered behavior. iii Ritual expression served as a means for disclosing these latent aspects of religious life. It provided for an arena where the outlawed and often times uncomfortable reality of male same-sex communal living was performed publicly. On the surface, aesthetics of Catholic (monastic) ritual served to embellish gender diversity. Flagrant costuming, liturgical and everyday religious garb, and a general desire to maintain an artistic and sensitive existence simply served as normative aspects of religious and liturgical life shared and accepted universally, even though they simultaneously represented an outlet for gender variable performances. These activities spoke of the real and otherwise unspoken subculture of gay life within religious communities of men. For many homosexual friars, the normativity associated with liturgical practices was a public opportunity to disclose otherwise unaccepted personal tendencies in a public setting. Ritualized same-sex embraces and affections which were identifiably charismatic aesthetics among Augustinian men served as a means for disclosing the interconnectedness between personal and often undisclosed self-awarenesses and the affinities felt between same-sex individuals. It proved to be a source of consternation for some friars who experienced it as threatening to gender stability while for others it was a constant reminder of their own sexual dynamism. Flower arranging, sewing, music- making, candle-making, and incense burning, all contributed to a latent, but very real alternative setting. The performance of certain liturgical aesthetics, the normativity of ritualized physicality between community members, or the subtext of gay culture as played out within these constructs, each served as a latent reminder of the relationship between personal identity consciousness and the community. Even though from the iv observational standpoint

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