Animal Sacrifice and Sexuality in Santeria

So what have you learned over the course of your research?

I've interviewed women of all sexual orientations and gay and bisexual men who practice Santería. Some are initiated, some are not initiated, and they are from most walks of life. Some people had explored many religions, while others had always been Santería practitioners.

While Santería has opened up a space for gays and lesbians to participate, it has opened up a very different space for gay men than for lesbian women. Gay men are allowed to serve in some roles that are exclusive to men. I agree with Mary Ann Clark (author of Where Men Are Wives and Mothers Rule: Santería Ritual Practices and Their Gender Implications) that this gendered configuration of roles need not be seen as a hierarchy, and instead provokes new ways of thinking by redefining ritual power.

Although only men can become Babalawos (the highest Santería priest position, usually limited to men who are perceived or presumed to be heterosexual), all practitioners become "wives" when they are initiated. As "newborns," these initiates become the wife of the deity or Orisha that "claimed their head." This deity will become the focus of the initiate's worship, and the "wifely" relationship to the deity is the same for all practitioners, regardless of gender.

Can you say more about how the wife-dynamic empowers women and non-heterosexual men?

Ritual possession allows practitioners to experience deity-presence, and everyone benefits when others are possessed, because the possessing Orisha speaks to everyone present at the ritual. Members of a given religious house feel proud whenever there is a lot of deity-presence at one of their events. In possession, a practitioner is "mounted" by the deity -- an expression that has obvious gendered and sexual implications, which are generally recognized by practitioners. And, to speak to your question, non-heterosexual men and women of all sexual orientations tend to be possessed more often than their straight counterparts. So their presence is highly valued.

Finally, and more broadly, what do you make of popular notions about Santería in the United States? And what's your take on recent court decisions that recognize and protect the religiosity of the practice?

Generally speaking, when we are talking about racial and ethnic minorities, the United States' racial (and racist) system tends to find much of what is non-white "suspicious." That's why Santería continues to be categorized as a cult by some, and why the media usually frame practitioners as somehow "criminal" in the coverage we see in the news.

That tendency is mirrored in entertainment media. For at least the past two decades, portrayals of Santería practitioners in movies and television shows have resisted the opportunity to represent them as religious people and focused instead on Santería as a hypersexual space, recalling earlier representations of Africans as savages.

That does seem to be changing, at least incrementally. The recent Texas lawsuit acknowledged the religiosity of the practice: José Merced, a Puerto Rican Santería priest, retained the right of animal sacrifice because the court saw the link to religious freedom. Regardless of how one might feel about animal sacrifice (for consumption or under regulations that maintain public health standards in the handling of food), this religious-cultural practice has ritual elements that one ought to respect, in the very same way most of us respect Judeo-Christian religious practice.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at American University in Washington, D.C. Among his recent work is the co-edited special issue of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society on the topic of "Retheorizing Homophobias" (with Karl Bryant) and a co-edited book, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (with Nancy Naples and based on the work by late Lionel Cantú), published by NYU Press.

Nick Street, LGBT contributing editor for Religion Dispatches, studied Christian ethics at Oberlin College and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. After a decade as a religion editor in the world of academic publishing, he returned to graduate school at the University of Southern California, where he completed an M.A. in print journalism. His writing has appeared in Search, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Jewish Journal, and The Revealer. He is also an ordained Buddhist priest at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles.