LGBTQI+ artists have been targeted for ‘insulting Christianity’. To queer people, this feels particularly cruel | James Thorpe

A priest and two nuns walk into a bar. In Sydney this week, this wasn’t the setup for a bad joke but for a fiery culture war.

The bar in question is within a long-deconsecrated church, and the City of Sydney is considering an application for its redevelopment into luxury apartments. Divine Playhouse, which opened to the public last Wednesday, is a year-long queer-friendly and inclusive arts pop-up, supported by the New South Wales government and the City of Sydney.

The venue was conceived as an affordable and accessible space for Sydney’s artists, promoters and performers to create, experiment and find an audience. But Christian groups met the launch party with protests outside and, since images were shared of some of the performances – drag queens dressed as nuns, for instance – campaigners have demanded the return of $100,000 in state arts funding; an open letter calling on the government to apologise to the Christian community has gathered more than 5,000 signatures; and the venue’s Instagram account has been taken down due to complaints.

Now its lease is under threat, after the venue was issued a breach notice complaining that Christian beliefs have been “insulted and mocked”, and that Divine Playhouse must cease operating on the grounds of “offensive trade” and to prevent “public protests [that] are almost certain to occur and are likely to endanger members of the public”. The premier, Chris Minns, meanwhile, has said that government officials are investigating whether Divine Playhouse’s offering is consistent with how it was described in the grant application.

It would be easy to treat this as yet another skirmish in the culture wars, witness the inevitable jokes about habits and holy orders, and move on. But beneath the debacle is a much more fundamental debate: a question about who gets to speak and, perhaps most importantly, whose offence carries the power to silence another’s voice.

Liberal democracy rests on an uncomfortable bargain. We surrender the power to silence those who offend us in exchange for the freedom to speak when our own ideas offend others. Queer people know quite a bit about that bargain. For generations, we have fought for places where we could gather, perform, be loud, irreverent, joyful and entirely ourselves. Those spaces were not given to us. We built them, often in a world quite comfortable telling us that our lives were sinful, our relationships immoral and our families somehow less worthy.

I grew up in the church. Christian stories, symbols and rituals were part of the cultural vocabulary handed to me long before I understood myself to be queer. I suspect I am hardly alone in that. There is something rather audacious in telling queer people raised under the shadow of the cross that Christian iconography belongs exclusively to those who remained faithful to the institution. We are entitled to wrestle with it, parody it and subvert it. In many cases, it is part of our story too.

We also know what it is to be offended. I was offended, for instance, when Lyle Shelton of the Family First party – who has added his voice to the protests – compared children raised by same-sex couples to the Stolen Generations. I was offended by his talk of “rented wombs and eggs for sale”, accusations that queer people are grooming children to believe in gender fluidity, and being told, yet again, that children need a mother and a father.

These are not isolated views. Some groups now campaigning against Divine Playhouse celebrated Israel Folau after he warned homosexuals that hell awaited them. They have amplified rhetoric describing queer culture as perverted.

I find those views profoundly offensive but I have never demanded church doors be closed or tried to control what is said from their pulpits. I have never suggested Shelton should be denied the taxpayer-funded salary he is seeking in the NSW parliament because I find his politics offensive. Nor have I demanded that religious organisations return the immense tax concessions they receive because I object to the speech they enable.

At the centre of the outrage here is $100,000 in Create NSW arts funding. The argument is that taxpayers should not support art they find offensive. But taxpayers support ideas they disagree with every day. As a taxpayer, I help subsidise the income, payroll, fringe benefits tax and land tax concessions that buoy institutions teaching people that my relationships are sinful – and indeed the staggering public funding delivered to their private schools. Christians help fund art they may consider blasphemous. Republicans fund monarchist institutions. Pacifists fund armies.

This is not a failure of pluralism. It is pluralism, simpliciter.

A liberal society cannot reserve public support for ideas nobody objects to. There would be precious little culture, politics or religion left. Christians may preach, protest and stand outside a queer venue and pray. They may tell me my life is sinful and my family is wrong. Queer artists have the same right to make art that is confronting, irreverent and, yes, offensive.

That is the bargain we make in a liberal democracy. It has to go both ways.

Yet silence is increasingly what this campaign is producing, against a broader backdrop of queer erasure online. Digital rights organisations have warned of queer Instagram accounts being wrongly removed or restricted, with litigation under way in Europe. Australian organisations have raised similar concerns.

The targeting of Instagram pages and brigading of Google reviews is not harmless theatre. When a venue or artist loses an Instagram account, it can lose its audience, ticket sales and connection to community. Many of the artists who will lose their bookings at Divine Playhouse have told me they are frightened to speak out because they have seen how quickly visibility can make them the next target.

We should also dispense with the idea that Christianity occupies some unique or ancient claim over Australian public life. Australia is not a Christian nation. Fewer than half of Australians identify as Christian and, for tens of thousands of years before Christianity arrived on these shores with colonisation, this continent was home to the oldest continuing cultures on Earth. Christianity is an important part of the Australian story but it does not own that story. And if being “insulted and mocked” becomes a mechanism for eviction, every artist who challenges power is vulnerable.

There is a particular cruelty in asking queer culture to make itself smaller to accommodate the sensibilities of people who have spent so long arguing for our erasure. Queer history is, in so many ways, a history of people refusing to disappear: finding one another, building spaces, making art and creating joy in the face of institutions that would have preferred us silent.

Divine Playhouse should not have to become quieter, straighter or more respectable to earn its place in Sydney. Sydney belongs to it too.

And to those who say they are offended, I say: I understand. Queer people understand offence very well. We bore your right to offend us. That was our part of the bargain. Now it’s time for you to honour yours.