Introduction: from clashes to coexistence

Abstract

Religion and lesbian, gay, trans, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) issues have traditionally been represented as only intersecting in ways that were either characterised by complete invisibility or moral judgement and condemnation. Even today, graphic artist Bronwyn Lundberg's 2012 rendering of the Lesbian Last Supper, which depicts Ellen DeGeneres as Jesus and women like Rosie O'Donnell and kd lang infiltrating Leonardo Da Vinci's original painting, has been cast by some newspaper columnists as the height of blasphemy. Similarly, an exhibition in 2012 by Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, 'Ecce Homo' featuring a transgender Jesus and his leather-men disciples, had to be accompanied by 24 hour armed guards when it went on display in Serbia and 2000 police were called in to control protesters. However, with changes in secular social trends towards tolerance and acceptance of sexual issues generally there have been enormous breakthroughs in religious thinking. When the New South Wales Court of Appeal ruled that Norrie May-Welby was legally neither male nor female, rather than responding in horror, the once conservative Jewish News respectfully interviewed Jewish LGBTIQ representatives and courteously asked whether a non-gendered' Jewish person should wear a kippah or a sheitl. In July 2013, Pope Francis unexpectedly remarked during an interview that he had no right to judge gay people in the priesthood or religious community, and that they shouldn't be marginalised. Religious organisations and the average person's conceptualisation of the intersection between sexuality and spirituality have started to shift.