⋆°.☾⋆.ೃ࿔*:⋆

As described in the previous two chapters, many Ghost fans were raised in religious conservative communities which explicitly and implicitly marked queerness as abject, sinful, and shameful. This theme of religious trauma was by far the leading theme in the entire body of the data, but it did not represent everyone interviewed. This troubled me, and stalled my research for months. On one level, I knew that much of Western society (and, from data, at least some of colonized non-Western society) was established on, and continues to be influenced by, religious morals and ethics. Even participants who were not raised in religious communities would be impacted by religious thought, especially in the United States. Following the religious conservative theme would account for the experience of the largest proportion of the fans I spoke to, and, my supervisors thought, that should be enough. But if I followed the religious lead, I would also be writing myself out of the data. Though I was raised Presbyterian, and my mother is Catholic, I have never in my life felt sinful or ashamed of being queer. Part of this is luck of the draw: I grew up in liberal upstate New York in a shifting time, with an out gay cousin to set an example for me. In 2007, years before New York State would legalize same-sex marriage, I attended a gay rights rally in my hometown and met a long-standing group of lesbians called the Adirondykes (a play on the Adirondack Mountains). I have always been able to find queer community and queer elders, and until very recently, I have never felt unsafe being loudly, openly ‘out.’

But a significant set of the interviews addressed other ‘ways to be othered,’ so to speak. They described bullying in school, debilitating mental illness, a sense that the only people who shared their interests were the people they met on tumblr. They felt that Ghost united us all, every misfit and outcast, and gave us a place to call home. In this chapter, I attempt to account for all of us, at least in some small way – I offer a view of queer tumblr Ghost space using the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque, paired with an understanding of Gnosticism following Pagels, Bloom, and Jonas. I believe that for queer Ghost fans, queer Ghost tumblr and the Ghost concert, or ‘ritual,’ offers a Carnivalesque space to behave exactly as they wish to, but cannot for some reason or another. The online fandom or the ritual function as a ‘pressure release’ for those who are oppressed on the basis of their queerness, their deviance, their inability or refusal to conform. Fans attribute the efficacy of this pressure release to Ghost founder and creative lead Tobias Forge, and their perception of the Ghost fandom, as well as to their experience at live shows.

This concept has been the hardest for me to conceptualize and lay out in academic writing, because, like queerness, it is inchoate and self-referential: understanding it relies on a very complicated system of language, signs, and subtle body language designed to go unnoticed by those who are not ‘in the know.’

Based on this tweet