Touring Homophobia: Understanding the Soulforce Equality Ride as a Toxic Tour

Abstract

This article considers the 2010 Soulforce Equality Ride, a movement of queer Christian students who traveled around the country protesting conservative Christian colleges and universities with anti–lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) policies. We argue that the movement is comparable to a toxic tour, as described by Pezzullo (2007), because of the harmfulness of the campuses' policies, the difficult rhetorical challenge the movement faces, and the importance of presence for the Equality Ride activists and the students they met along the way. We understand the conservative Christian college campuses as environments and the anti-LGB rhetoric and policies as toxins. We argue that the movement offers hope by undermining the notion that LGB sexualities and Christian spirituality are mutually exclusive categories of binary opposition.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Kelly Happe, Jamie Landau, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions throughout the development of this essay.

Notes

Because we are particularly interested in the ways in which sexuality and spirituality intersect on religious campuses, in this article, we use LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) to discuss the Riders' sexual identities. While queer may represent the identities of some of the activists we study, more often they identify in terms of lesbian, gay, or bisexual and do not address the political and theoretical underpinnings of queer identities. Thus, when we highlight their voices, queer may arise. However, when we speak in our voices, we use LGB. For more on how the term queer differs from LGB, see Levy and Johnson (2012).

This study analyzes all the blog posts (a total of 19) made between March 7, 2010, and November 17, 2010. Most of the posts were made during the ride (between March and May 2010), but the two most recent posts are retrospectives about the ride written a few months later. All these posts are part of the Soulforce blog and are categorized as posts related to the 2010 Equality Ride. Posts erroneously tagged as 2010 Equality Ride posts were excluded from this analysis. Throughout this article, the posts are cited by date and author, but for the sake of parsimony, only the link to the blog archive is listed as a reference (Soulforce, 2010b).

While our work chiefly draws on Pezzullo's (2007) ethnographic study of toxic tours, we contend that written accounts of such tours also present scholars with a generative space for interrogating the tours' rhetorical function. In the case of the Equality Ride, the blog posts serve as a rich accounting of the day-to-day activities of the Riders with thoughtful insights into how they and others were influenced by the tour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leland G. Spencer

Leland G. Spencer, Department of Communication Studies and Institute for Women's Studies, University of Georgia.

Joshua Trey Barnett

Joshua Trey Barnett, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.