The Documentary
Baby, You Are My Religion
The Sacred Culture of Lesbian Bars from Pre- to Post-Stonewall
The Baby, You Are My Religion documentary is based on Marie Cartier’s book, Baby, You Are My Religion: The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space.
Drawing from the book’s oral histories and scholarship, the film brings this work to the screen through interviews, archival material, historic locations, photographs, and additional voices.
The documentary explores the communities women created in gay and lesbian bars before Stonewall and the meanings those spaces held for the people who gathered there. More than places to drink or socialize, these bars could offer recognition, belonging, intimacy, ritual, resistance, and a place to become visible to one another.
The film also carries the book’s questions forward, considering what has changed in the decades since Stonewall and what the history and disappearance of many of these spaces can tell us about community, memory, and sacred space today.
Featured Voices
The documentary brings together people whose lives, memories, scholarship, and activism illuminate the worlds explored in Baby, You Are My Religion.
Featured voices include Nancy Valverde, Ellen Ward, Barbara Kalish, Joanne Astrea, Pat Lamis, Dr. Tanya Gilbert, Andi Segal and others whose experiences add personal testimony and historical depth to the film.
Kimberly Esslinger
Director & Producer
Kimberly Esslinger is a filmmaker, writer, digital media artist, and producer whose work centers queer culture, memory, and community. As director and producer of Baby, You Are My Religion, she is bringing Marie Cartier’s scholarship and oral-history work into documentary form while expanding the project through new interviews, archival materials, and contemporary perspectives.
Marie Cartier
Author, Narrator & Executive Producer
Marie Cartier is the author of Baby, You Are My Religion: The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space and the scholar whose research forms the foundation of the documentary.
An author, educator, theologian, artist, and longtime scholar of queer culture and religion, Cartier conducted more than one hundred interviews for the original book. In the documentary, she returns to that research while continuing the conversation about lesbian community, sacred space, memory, and cultural change.