On Easter Sunday 2025, I went to Mass at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Castro gayborhood.

I walked through boisterous streets—I remember it was on 4/20, so the smell of weed was already in the air—and into a packed church. The liturgy was beautiful: flowers, music, incense, bodies gathered. The homily was joyful. The Eucharist felt especially meaningful in a moment that, politically and socially, feels heavy—especially for queer people.

Sitting there among a mostly LGBTQ+ congregation I’ve known for years, I had a simple thought: no one does Easter like the queers.

A few hours later, I changed into a mesh shirt and went to Dolores Park for the annual Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary pageant, hosted by Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Thousands gathered. Jesuses (or “Jesi” as the Sisters conjugated it) vogued. Marys strutted. The theme this year was “No Easter without the T,” centering trans lives in a moment when those lives are being debated, restricted, and endangered across the country. Performers sang, lip-synced, and danced. The crowd roared.

The winner—Cowboy Carter Jesus, channeling Beyoncé—took the stage and preached a kind of gospel. Here were his words: “I am Cowboy Carter Jesus. Just as Beyoncé is reclaiming Country Music with its foundation in black southern roots, I am reclaiming Christianity. As the son of a southern Baptist minister from rural Appalachia, I wish that more people would act Christ-like: act with compassion, love your neighbor, be empathetic, and caring. If we all acted a bit more as Christ would like and less like Christian nationalists, our country wouldn’t be as f*cked up as it is.”

The crowd went wild.

It would be easy to dismiss this as mockery. Many do. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just attended two Easter liturgies.

One in a church. One in a park.

I also thought: if the queers were truly done with Christianity, they wouldn’t show up at all. They wouldn’t spend time embodying Jesus and Mary—however irreverently. They would simply walk away. But they didn’t! They returned, performed, and reclaimed.

Queer theology has long insisted that the body, even the queer sexually-explicit body, is not a distraction from God, but a site of revelation. Marcella Althaus-Reid called this an “indecent” theology—a refusal of the sanitized, respectable Christianity that has often excluded queer lives. For her, God is encountered in the messy realities of embodied experience.

And that feels, to me, like Easter because the risen Christ is not clean. He is wounded and his body looks indecent.

So what if queer Easter celebrations—even ones deemed irreverent—are doing something similar? What if they are not rejecting Christianity, but rejecting a version of it that has denied their bodies, their dignity, their belonging? What if they are saying: if Christ is risen, then we rise too—not as sanitized versions of ourselves, but as witnesses of how we love?

To call Jesus “hunky” or Mary “foxy” might seem irreverent. But it is also an invitation: to see holy figures as embodied, alive, close to us—not distant ideals, but part of our world.

Resurrection is not tidy. It shows up where it is not supposed to be—outside the tomb, outside the temple, outside respectability.

Even in a park full of queers shouting for the various Jesi.

Easter is the claim that life breaks through where it shouldn’t. That death does not get the final word. That what has been rejected can become the very place where God is revealed.

These stories belong to us queers, too.

So this Easter, I hold both spaces.

The altar and the park.
The Eucharist and the runway.

And somewhere between them, I hear the same proclamation:

Alleluia, gurl.

He is risen.

Dr. Ish Ruíz, Director of the CLGS Catholic Roundtable