On July 8, Divine Playhouse opened inside a deconsecrated 158-year-old former church on Kent Street in Sydney, Australia. Although the organizers had a permit and received a $100,000 grant from Create NSW to host events in the previously unused space for a whole year, the organizers were forced to shut down after just three days of operations after receiving a tenant breach notice about “offensive trade” under the 1919 Conveyancing Act.

A day after the Divine Playhouse opened, Redevelop, the company leasing out the church (that was deconsecrated almost a century ago) to Heaps Gay Events cited a clause in their contract that prohibits tenants from noisy business. The clause didn’t include any note about political or religious imagery, but even so, Redevelop wrote that Divine Playhouse “insulted and mocked the sincerely held religious beliefs of millions of Christian Australians.”

On opening night, members of conservative Christian and Catholic groups including Fit for the Kingdom and Prodigal Sons protested (without proper authorization) the live music, cabaret shows, and performances they argued mocked the Christian faith. Protesters called drag queens dressed as nuns (the legitimate vestments of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) and events like the Sunday Mess, a brunch party that incorporated religious imagery, “equivalent to hate speech” according to the Redevelop landlords and their lawyers. 

But as reports show, the organizers were aware of concerns from the nearby Christian community and made changes in good faith to address those concerns before opening, including changing the name from Unholy Playhouse to Divine Playhouse. Organizers intentionally changed the name in order to make it more inclusive, rejecting the idea that they were mocking religious beliefs in their performances.

But this has not swayed members of conservative Christian groups who, on opening night, shouted at attendees that they “should be ashamed” and were “disgusting.” Redevelop gave the organizers two days to cease operations. As The Guardian reported, volunteers and organizers took down signage and painted over a mural that had all been commissioned for the year-round residency.

While the organizers initially explored whether they could sue for discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, the organizers decided to cancel all upcoming events and close the space to protect performers, as protesters filmed people entering and leaving the event without their consent on opening night. Along with facing a breach of contract, Meta also shut down all of Divine Playhouse’s social media accounts, along with personal accounts and LGBTQ+ community accounts. This is an increasingly common problem for queer content creators. 

Now, the LGBTQ+ community is in a justified uproar, and conservative Christians in Australia and beyond are furious about what they are calling “offensive art.” The lease violation sets a dangerous precedent for classifying LGBTQ+ art as offensive, which could lead to laws or local restrictions that could be used by developers to discriminate against people who they deem “offensive,” i.e. LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations. This already exists in the United States, where racial covenants enforcing segregation remain on the books.

As theater lecturer Charlotte Farrell wrote, there is a long history of art and performance in church spaces, but Farrell largely cites art in more progressive Christian spaces as opposed to Catholic ones. Queer art in Catholic spaces (including operational and consecrated Catholic churches) do exist, including God is Trans: A Queer Spiritual Journey hosted by the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City in 2023 (although this show also generated controversy). 

With the risk of empowering conservatives to lobby for laws or restrictions that would allow them to deny renting to “offensive” people or on the grounds that a person’s art is “offensive,” I argue further that there is an urgent need to call out what this situation was–the explicit attempt to equate queer art that challenges religious institutions, trauma, and abuse as inherently “offensive” and to use this to deny an artist and community’s right to exist in a space. 

Art has historically been a vital way not just to evangelize but also to challenge religious institutions that use their power and influence to not just isolate and abuse LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities but to systematically oppose their rights. Take for example Sinead O’Connor’s protest performance on the October 3, 1992 episode of Saturday Night Live. O’Connor, who had experienced severe institutional confinement in a Magdalene Laundry run by the church and had experienced intense physical and emotional abuse by her devout mother, tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II. 

While she originally planned to hold up a photo of a refugee child, she swapped it with a photo of the pope after singing an a cappella version of Bob’s Marley’s “War” where she changed the lyric to “child abuse.” She looked at the camera and said “fight the real enemy” before throwing the pieces to the ground. At the time, the Irish singer faced intense backlash and a lifetime ban from SNL, but as more information came out about her time in the Laundry, her mother’s emotional abuse, and systemic sexual abuse and people attempting to cover it up in the Catholic Church, people today recognize her protest as the start of a vital conversation.

For some people, O’Connor became a secular saint, a prophet exposing systemic sexual abuse before people were willing to confront the lived experiences that survivors were sharing and religious leaders were covering up. Dr. Margaret Kennedy, founder of Ministry and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors and author of “The Courage to Tell,” wrote for Premier Christianity that “when she tore apart a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she was preaching.” 

Is O’Connor’s religious liberty to preach through this act of protest not equal to that of her critics? Did O’Connor, like anyone at the Divine Playhouse, threaten any religious person? 

No, they made a statement about religious institutions and people that continue to abuse people. If that can be targeted so can any other form of protest or acts of resistance that threaten systems of power.

Protest art like O’Connor’s is at the bedrock of human rights in any democratic country. When people stop creating art or move out of spaces out of fear of precipitating anti-LGBTQ+ violence, or are forced out because of claims of lease violations, the whole society loses a vital way to challenge and confront abuse and exploitation. There is a need not just to legally protect people creating protest art but also protest artists themselves so that their work cannot be censored or attacked on the grounds of religious liberty. 

To be clear, protecting people’s rights to create protest art is not the same as allowing people to insult or desecrate the imagery of marginalized faiths that face persecution and misrepresentation in the United States today. It’s also not a license for anti-religious bigotry or violence that hurts anyone. Instead, the protection of protest art is a protection of the right to protest itself, the right to challenge and grapple with institutional abuse and religious trauma in ways that cause no one physical harm. 

As James Thorpe, co-chair of the Night Time Industries Associates, explained to The Guardian, “Christians have a right to preach, protest and stand outside Divine Playhouse and pray. Queer artists have the right to make art that is confronting, irreverent, and yes, offensive.” Thorpe says that LGBTQ+ artists and communities, and all marginalized groups, have a fundamental right to create art that unsettles people, that challenges social systems that prioritize and sacralize a cisgender, heterosexual norm intrinsically connected to Christian nationalism. 

Because in a society where Christian nationalism is fast becoming mainstream, protest art, sacrilegious art is the only language that far right religious groups understand. At the heart of the issue is civility politics, or a strategy used by conservative and far right groups to argue that marginalized communities censor their protests and calls for change to be “respectful.” What respectful is and who deems it respectful is deeply subjective, often the creation of a dominant social group like Christians in the United States. 

If far-right forces want to call LGBTQ+ protest art like that at the Divine Playhouse “offensive” or “sacrilegious” so be it. Yes, calling our art, our identities, “offensive” is a form of bigotry, a practice of hate. It reminds many of us raised in high control religious spaces that we are outsiders to the very religious systems that raised us and cultivates the same shame, guilt, and abuse that caused many of us to leave or explore affirming religious or spiritual traditions. 

But calling art “offensive” doesn’t change or invalidate the fact that it is a fundamental exercise of our right to free speech, and our fundamental human right to create art that unsettles and upsets people in positions of power. It also doesn’t change the fact that for many of us, creating protest art is a spiritual practice, a form of sacred resistance that helps us challenge systems that have long abused us through purity culture, conversion therapy, and cultures of shame. 

Protecting the right to create protest art isn’t just enshrining our right to free speech but for many of us, our right to practice a spiritual act of resistance. And in a time where LGBTQ+ identity, people, and bodies are deemed “offensive. Because at its core, this isn’t just an issue about art anymore, it’s about protecting our right to exist in public spaces and our right to create safe spaces for ourselves. 

Emma Cieslik is a D.C.-based museum worker and public historian.

‘Garbo: The Actor Who Saved the World’
Sept. 3-27
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th St., NW
$25-$50
galatheatre.org

Conflict, intrigue, and abundant imagination – all the elements for an extraordinary story. Add real-life Spanish spy Juan Pujol García who worked as a double agent loyal to the United Kingdom against Nazi Germany during World War II to the mix and it’s truly inspired.

Code-named “Garbo” by the British (a nod to his acting prowess), the anti-fascist’s mission took him from Madrid to Lisbon and later a London suburb where he created fictitious reports while unassumingly blending in with middle-class commuters. 

By inventing a phony spy network of 27 agents with intricate backstories and tales of espionage worthy of Balzac’s pen, Garbo convinced Hitler’s generals that the D-Day invasion would hit Calais instead of Normandy, saving thousands of lives along the way. 

And now the tale unfolds on stage in “GARBO: The Actor Who Saved the World,” a premiere thriller at GALA Hispanic penned by GALA artistic director Gustavo Ott, staged by Cuban director Carlos Celdrán, and starring out actor Kevin Jorges in the title role. 

When Jorges was tapped to play Garbo, he (like the rest of the cast) was utterly unfamiliar with the play’s cunning protagonist.   

But that changed quickly. Jorges, 37, has immersed himself in the biography and become increasingly interested and somewhat enamored with the character. 

Charismatic with an easy smile and rich, warm voice, Jorges says he had to put aside his sensibility as a gay man in order to portray Garbo, who was a straight, patriarchal figure. But he also embraced similarities with the spy, like their shared aversion to physical violence. 

And Jorges cites what he finds a pivotal moment: Garbo says to his British MI5 case officer and handler Thomas Harris (played by gay GALA veteran Carlos Castillo) that after what they’ve been through, neither will be what they once wanted to be. They are changed. They’ll never be the same. 

Performed at 90 minutes in Spanish with user friendly English surtitles, “Garbo” is about imagination as resistance. “It’s also about a theatrical vocation that went unfulfilled,” says Ott. “That is perhaps the greatest disappointment of modernity: the insurmountable obstacles a vocation faces.

“Through his imagination, Garbo attempts to reclaim his lost calling—that of being an artist—and in his new trade as a spy, he uses it as a lifeline.”

Ott adds, “Walt Whitman viewed imagination as a traveling companion. He could rely on it when he was alone, when he lost hope, and when life slammed every door shut.”

Jorges was was attracted to acting at an early age, but the murder of his father in Caracas in 1999, made it more than an interest, theater became a refuge that saved him from tragedy. Today, he believes that theater is a refuge for many Venezuelan artists, it’s a way for them to contribute to society despite difficult circumstances.  

Despite enjoying a successful early career in Caracas with many roles and accolades, Jorges had no choice but to seek new horizons. Political turmoil and economic collapse prompted him to leave Caracas in 2019 for Spain where he worked outside of his profession for a few years. 

The actor credits “migrant persistence” for his return to the stage. On New Year’s Eve in 2022, Jorges made a pilgrimage to the famous monument to Cervantes at Plaza de España in Madrid where he made a heartfelt wish to act again. 

Soon after, Jorges was collaborating with playwright and director Elio Palencia on “Timón Of(f) Caracas,” a personal one-man adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens, reframing the universal themes of betrayal, excess, and misanthropy to mirror the sociopolitical realities of Venezuela. To much success and acclaim, the production toured important cities throughout Spain. 

It was Palencia who suggested to GALA’s Ott that Jorges hop the pond to play Garbo in D.C. 

While he once viewed each acting job as an opportunity, Jorges now sees them as gifts. And, he says, the part of Garbo is a gift filled with possibilities: “It’s wonderful performing in Spanish with English translation. I love the interaction of culture. I really enjoy seeing the way things are done at GALA. Maybe sometime I’ll be performing in English too.” 

‘Finding Renée Richards’
By Julie Kliegman
c.2026, HarperOne
$28.99/272 pages

Come on in, the water’s fine.

Wade into it up to your ankles, your calves, your waist, you’ll be OK. You’ll adjust to the waves that swirl around you so come on, dive in, it’s all good. As in the new book “Finding Renée Richards” by Julie Kliegman, that goes for swimming, and for controversy.

Assigned to do a story on books written by trans tennis great Renée Richards, Julie Kleigman read the books and became “transfixed by a woman who had fought so hard to simply live as who she had long known she was….”. Their editor had figured that, as a nonbinary and trans individual, Kleigman would have “something incisive to say…” in an article. Instead, once they met and began interviewing Richards, Kliegman was left frustrated.

Born in the late summer of 1934, Richard Henry Raskind seemed to have arrived with a tennis racket in his hand. His mother was a psychiatrist; his father was an orthopedic surgeon who hoped “Dick” would follow his footsteps but Raskind was drawn instead to ophthalmology and tennis. He was also irresistibly drawn to wearing women’s clothing.

His sister knew of this pull and Raskind eventually came out to both parents, but few others on the tennis circuit were aware. When Raskind visited his hometown of New York City, however, he enjoyed furtively going out in women’s clothing but he also tried to squash the desire; in the meantime, he fell in love, married, fathered a son, and eventually learned that it was possible to become the woman he knew he really was.

To continue playing tennis professionally was a bonus.

And right there were the disagreements Kleigman had with Richards.

Richards, “To this day… [makes] a point of describing herself as a woman, period,” says Kleigman, but she firmly acknowledged Richard, almost as a separate individual, insisting that Kleigman use “him/his” pronouns when describing her earlier life.

And as for tennis and trans women’s participation in the sport, Richards had something even more frustrating to say.

Take that as a fair warning: you might be equally surprised at what author Julie Kliegman uncovered in “Finding Renée Richards,” and you may be truly gobsmacked by reading opinions from other women about the topic of trans women in sports.

That’s the main, huge point of interest in this fascinating book; the other is Richards’s life as seen through the lens of a trans individual. Kleigman’s wrestling with the 90-year-old Richards’ firmly dug-in heels is, in itself, worth your time as a study of highly varying viewpoints. That Kleigman and Richards have both lived at least a part of trans history is somewhat of a key to understanding how this book unfolds, as Kleigman offers up Richards’s tale. Readers who are able to read between the lines will be riveted.

If you’re a sports fan and you have opinions, you must read this book – and that goes double if it’s tennis you love. Also check out “Finding Renée Richards” if you just want a raucously good and very fine read.

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