The common area of the dorm was standing room only. My pastor from the Baptist church sat directly across the circle from me, collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. Calm, unruffled, as always, he gently explained in his soft voice the concept of “sin” to the gathered students. The tension in the room was palpable. Fewer than half of us in the room were regulars at this Bible study that I helped lead. The others – members of the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies (in 1999 I think the acronym was still just “LGBT”) – had showed up, not necessarily to protest, but ready to argue. That week, the announced topic was “what does the Bible say about homosexuality?” Word had spread.
He carefully explained how the Bible didn’t set apart gays and lesbians as some special class of wrongdoers who were somehow worse than other run-of-the-mill sinners. The Bible doesn’t actually have a whole lot to say about gay sex, he explained, and a lot of the proof-texts that conservatives trot out to condemn gay people are taken out of context. But he argued that the few passages that do apply are clear: gay sex is wrong.
My pastor was framing it in his reasonable, moderate, “no big deal” kind of way. But a year prior, one of the students in that room, a gay man and devout Baptist from the deep south I’ll call Robert, had been told he couldn’t read scripture or lead worship at the Baptist church because he disagreed on that point. In practice, Robert’s conviction that love is love was the line in the sand that got him excluded from full participation in his faith community, and Robert’s friends and allies were pissed.
The liberal arts college I attended in rural New England had a strong, vocal queer community. The biggest party of the year was defiantly named the Queer Bash, reclaiming a slur in a time when Matthew Shepherd’s martyrdom was still a fresh memory. Everyone was welcome, and for one night, anyone could be queer. To my evangelical, culturally sheltered gaze, it looked like nothing more than a drunken debauch in drag. Loud, crowded parties were never my scene (they still aren’t), and while I tried not to come across as a judgmental Christian asshole my faith gave a moralistic pretext for my distaste for hard partying.
For most of that Bible study we talked and argued past each other, the crux of the issue being what we’re talking about when we’re talking about love. My pastor and I insisting that something being a sin doesn’t mean God loves the sinner any less, and that we’re all – including straight folks, including ourselves – equally sinners in God’s eyes. And the queer folks in the room insisting that their relationships embodied love even though I assumed – based largely on my sidelong glance at the Queer Bash – it was nothing more than fucking. “You’re confusing love and lust,” I said. “No,” came Robert’s retort, “we mean love.”
For a moment, a breakthrough. For a moment, each side realized that when we said love, we were both talking about care, sacrifice, tenderness – something we all needed and desired. But then we went back to our corners, the queer folks largely rejecting the faith, and me rejecting the possibility that one could embrace queer love and be faithful.
I wish I could say that that tense evening changed me overnight. It didn’t, though it planted seeds of respect for the ones who had the courage to challenge me in public. It would be roughly another ten years before I would abandon evangelicalism, before I would reach out to Robert on Facebook and apologize for the stance I took and which I’d repeated in many similar forums in the years to come. Ten years later, speaking and acting as an ally had become a conscious value. But for those crucial, formative years, I was invested in Christian heteronormativity. And even though I tried to emphasize love, distancing myself from the overt cruelty and bigotry of Christians further to my right, I surely harmed people. I helped keep the soil fertile for the fascism that targets queer folks today.
Today, over 25-years later, I was recently helping to test run a gender justice training we are developing in the nonprofit I work for. We are all community organizers or support staff, and I am lined up along one side of the retreat center’s conference room while a coworker reads a series of statements out loud.
“If you are female, please cross the room now…”
Almost three quarters of the group crosses the room, then returns.
“If you or any family members have a disability, please cross…”
A majority of us cross the room, leaving only a handful behind.
“If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or transgender, please cross…”
For the past couple years I have begun thinking of myself increasingly as nonbinary. I’ve been introducing myself with “he/they” pronouns. But here, now, I hesitate. Two people cross the room. I stay put.
I am in my mid-40’s, and did not even consider questioning my gender identity until two years ago. It was a combination of things that led me to that place of openness, of questioning: my social and political community has shifted over the years, and I’m moving in spaces where gender binaries are not normative; as I re-examined my lifelong mental health struggles through a political lens (with the support of a movement elder) I gradually came off psych meds after being medicated for over 15-years, which opened up new emotional and mental vistas at a time when I was no longer loyal to the social structures I’d once been invested in.
As a result, I am more open to ambiguity, to the ebb and flow of my subjective feelings about my gender. I do not experience dysphoria with my body much, but there are days and weeks when I don’t feel masculine, days and weeks when I feel a desire to embody something more feminine. I put on a running skirt and go running around the forest and feel euphoric, and I know: yes, this gender thing is all just made up, and I should feel free to wear a skirt anytime I want if it makes me feel happy.
So why in that moment at the training did I opt not to own “nonbinary” as my identity and claim my belonging in the LGBTQIA+ community? Sorting through my feelings and doubts, I think a lot of it has to do with where I was and what I was doing 25-years ago in that college dorm, the ways identity politics get weaponized in toxic ways today, and the kind of work I need to be doing now as someone who has benefited from cis-het male privilege their entire life.
Some of that doubt is connected to my need to know that I’m claiming this identity for the right reasons. Because it feels so subjective to me, because my feelings about my gender have shifted back and forth, I want to be sure I am not claiming a marginalized identity to evade accountability or to gain clout. And while conditions are rapidly deteriorating for queer and trans folks now, even a few weeks ago an accusatory inner voice could tell me, “sure, it’s easy to come out now: you get to reap the benefits of all the groundbreaking work your peers did while fighting people like you two decades ago.”
And so I am writing this piece to put my cards on the table, to make it clear: I have not always been on the right side when it comes to queer liberation. Because of that, I missed out on learning opportunities and experiences in community with queer folks that I could have otherwise had. Rejecting the hegemony of gender over me personally is a process of learning and unlearning, of entering into new spaces where, even though I might technically belong as a nonbinary human, I’m still coming as a relative outsider.
That isn’t to say that I’ve done no accountability work in the intervening years. In this age of polarization, algorithmic manipulation, and online echo chambers, I think it is worth saying that, once upon a time, it was possible for people to change their minds on existential issues. I have to hope that it still is.1 In my case, I was learning how to be an ally to queer folks by my late 20’s, and the biggest single factor that deprogrammed me from my earlier conservatism was finding friendship in community with a gay man named Tim who loved Jesus as much as I did, and bonding within a shared subculture. He genuinely cared about me and was fun to be around. Once I knew Tim, it no longer made sense to make anyone’s beliefs about sexuality a litmus test for their faithfulness. Once I witnessed someone who accepted their own sexuality while staying steadfastly committed to their faith, I saw that these identities were not the contradictions they seemed to be in the dominant culture. I saw that other ways of being were possible.
Tim had the harder job, took the bigger risk. It was not my belonging that was being debated in Christian spaces, but his, and once I saw that I was the privileged one in the relationship, I wished it hadn’t been that way. It is an injustice to expect the oppressed in any relationship to be the bridge builders, to do the work of winning over their oppressors, because moral suasion has historically and systemically been a failed, often suicidal strategy for any marginalized group. One way I honored Tim was by learning to be a voice for justice and inclusion in contested Christian spaces from then on.
But eventually, I left those spaces. It is worth saying that Tim and I were members of an inclusive, anarchistic Christian intentional community engaged in mutual aid and anti-violence work, where I was in the ideological minority and the belonging of queer folks wasn’t up for debate. The power dynamics were healthier, and that made it a safer context than a traditional hierarchical church structure for this kind of relationship. As I’ve become more radicalized over the years, I saw how moral suasion was not going to turn most Christians – even and especially the liberal ones – into trustworthy accomplices in the sweeping revolutionary changes I saw as necessary in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism.
I’ve remained engaged with my faith tradition, but it is no longer the center of my identity. My identity is multi-faceted, in-process, and not individual, but connected to a community that is, in many ways, also under construction. We are facing down a fascist regime that is coming for queer folks, and (accusatory inner monologues aside) it’s not a great time to be coming out. That also means it is all the more important that I own this part of myself and honor it, because our community is going to need all the fighters it can get.
To be fair to my younger self, the movement itself has evolved. As far as I know, the mainstream LGBTQIA movement wasn’t deconstructing gender binaries much in 1999, at least not in my hearing. The campus Queer Bash was basically a drag ball, but I didn’t know anyone who identified as trans until many years later. My first time being exposed to contemporary gender theory was at a training I attended in 2009.
Thanks for the kind words! I look forward to hearing more about your journey.