The James Avery by me has a drive-thru
The James Avery by me has a drive-thru
God, queerness, and sterling silver jewelry
Tuesday, lunchtime: There I was, consuming one of my favorite podcasts, enjoying the banter, chewing my cud. Minding my own. The two hosts started singing part of a song, a tongue-in-cheek callback to their Catholic school days. Just a single line.
I activated like a sleeper agent.
Podcasters: ♫ You came from Heaven to Earth ♪~~
Me, nearly choking around a mouthful of leftover lentils and kale: TO!!! SHOW!!!! THE WAY! FROM THE EARTH TO THE CROSS! MY!!!!!! DEBT!!!!!!!! TO PAY! FROM THE CROSS TO THE GRAVE! FROM THE GRAVE TO THE SKY! LORD I LIFT YOUR NAME ON HIGH!
I had not thought of nor heard this song (“Lord, I Lift Your Name on High”) in 15 years. But I finished reciting it down to the outro, in a fugue state, earnestly head-thrashing to every word.
This isn’t a completely novel experience for me. It’s happened a few times in my adult life with anything from a lesser-known hymn to a 2000s Christian rock song to an obscure Bible verse.
My Pride Month secret? I like it when this happens. And this realization is directly tied to the para-religious jewelry brand James Avery.
Solemn purveyor of heirlooms
For the uninitiated, James Avery is a mid-range jewelry company catering mainly to WASPs. It’s still popular but had a particular chokehold in the mid 2000s. Think Kendra Scott but more stoic; a very hot place to buy gifts for your niece at significant points of her womanhood. They offer every permutation and combination of sterling silver, 14 karat gold, crosses, doves, and hearts. They also popularized the charm bracelet, hugely popular with the unwashed masses, but those were like the donuts in the atrium meant to lure you in to the main event (the body of Christ).
Their catalogs in the 2000s featured ridiculously thick paper that made you feel like you were handling a religious artifact, or at least a funeral program for someone famous. I circled my wish list items slowly, prayer-like.
Their stores also felt more religious than most actual places of worship. In an architectural era where many Protestant churches were being remodeled to look like malls and airports, James Avery stores were dim, warm-toned, and acoustically pleasing. The most “at church” I’ve ever felt was when studying their Adorned Floral Heart Cross with Emerald at one of their altar-like displays.
Queering James Avery since 2007
My James Avery artillery has only ever consisted of two pieces: one sterling silver ring with a bunch of doves engraved on it, which I got as a confirmation gift, and one braided gold ring I bought for myself as a high school graduation present after a lucrative babysitting year.
I still wear both every day. They’ve slowly migrated to the most lgbt fingers (right pinky, left thumb), roughly aligning with my personal trajectory of unlearning to hate myself. I’d go back to various James Avery stores over the years to get them resized and reshaped as they got bent from weightlifting (gay—girl flavor), as my fingers got spindlier and somehow all the same width (gay—boy flavor), or as they once got run over by a go kart (trans, somehow?).
Going back inside a James Avery continued to be a weirdly reverent experience. My rings felt like my tokens back to the church itself. This is likely due to Mx. Avery’s commitment to convincing me it is holy, and succeeding. A consumption-mythologized-into-spiritual-belonging slay. Even though I have no intention of going back to the church, I’ve long found a perverse comfort in a physical reminder that I could. My degenerate hands still hold the tickets to the secret tunnel! I’m still in some registry somewhere!
Church is a foosball table
I’m still in some registry somewhere because I’m a confirmed member of the United Methodist Church, which means I took a year-long class when I was 14, went on some retreats with a counselor who “struggled with same-sex attraction,” and committed myself to Christ and stuff in a packed 3-level worshiptorium.
I got off easy—my religious trauma is mostly limited to quiet and polite bigotry. Your garden-variety comphet niceties, demure circumlocutions, and a dash of classism. As a white young woman of Christ, you needed a Coach bag to slot onto the windowsill with the other white young women of Christ’s Coach bags during Bible study.
Compulsion also played a big role in my understanding of God and religion until my twenties. My OCD first surfaced as scrupulosity, which is when you think you’re going to Hell for eating the holes of a Saltine cracker in the wrong order. This, in the end, proved useful in helping me realize there was maybe Something Sus About Youth Group. There were too many similarities between my OCD telling me I’m choosing a path of wickedness and the closeted worship leader sitting backwards in a folding chair casually implying it.
All that to say, I spent a lot of time very worried about the criteria for going to Hell, for fostering Christ-like courtships, for successfully passing as Rich and Church and Girl. All baffling grids we overlaid on the concept of the divine to make it noisier, more rigid, more reflexive.
Hey can I get uhhhhh
Anyway, the James Avery drive-thru. I went, just to see what the deal is, under the ruse of getting my rings cleaned for the first time in years.
It’s a drive-thru because the building used to be a bank. They’ve removed the pneumatic tubes (sad!) but kept the part with the teller window and little black box they push out to you through the wall. Upon closer inspection of the worst sign I’ve ever seen, not just anyone can pull up to it.
I obviously didn’t have anything to pick up, so I went inside the building to see what it’s like now and learn more about the drive-thru.
The interior was a bright white barndominium. The employees wore coral aprons. I stood at the service counter next to a man named Jesus.
“It only works if we’re just giving you something,” the lady behind the counter said when I asked about the drive-thru rules. “You can’t give anything back to us.”
They still did free cleanings, though, which you could then pick up in the drive-thru. I took my rings off, placed them on the little velvet tray, and the associate started a surprisingly detailed intake process.
“I don’t know what to call this anymore,” she said, inspecting one of my rings. I guess their system expects a specific product name, and these styles had been discontinued for a while. She ended up just typing out a description instead.
I came back that evening to Order Pick-up (only please), drove through the drive-thru, talked to someone I couldn’t see behind layers of tinted plexiglass, and retrieved my rings from a bag they pushed out to me inside the industrial-grade reliquary.
The cleaning was still free. James Avery is just a jewelry store, and that’s what most jewelry stores do. There’s no secret tunnel. No tickets to redeem, except when there are.
It’s a strange type of privilege. Beyond the cleaning and drive-thru enrichment experience, I’m still benefiting from decisions I didn’t make for myself at all, or made out of fear. I’ve enjoyed the lifelong perks of knowing the stories and archetypes around which much of the Western canon is based. I can pass—I know the lingo, I know the moves, but I like to think I’ve deprogrammed the homophobia, the transphobia, the snobbery, the sexual violence.
This drive-thru is not of God, but I am
The reason I get a sick sort of pleasure from my sleeper agent activation hymns is not a yearning for youth group. It’s not the allure of being called back as the prodigal they/them. Whenever I enter a Hillsong United-induced stupor and emerge to continue eating my lunch, I see how religion and para-religion can pass through me now as easily as I pass through it. I get satisfaction from having decoupled God from the church, from mental illness, from the symbolic language of a charm bracelet tycoon. The rings I still fidget with are both souvenirs from a past life and anchors to a current one I like much better.
The biggest gag is that I still consider myself religious, even if I don’t know what to call it anymore. God is an L.O.L. Surprise doll from which I’ve spent a long time unspooling layers of poorly manufactured accessories.
As with those mystical baby slut orbs, the entity beneath all of that is ultimately incomprehensible but feels better to carry.
Happy Pride!
p.s. buy my book