The Call to Queerness
Late into 1969 June night, police raided the Stonewall Inn. Instead of getting compliance, the cops catalyzed a queer uprising that lasted days and inspired generations. Can you hear their chants?
“We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair…
We wear our dungaree
Above our nelly knees!”
Nearly every June since folks have commemorated those nights in Greenwich Village. Today, we call it Pride Month. (For more on Stonewall and a few of its heroines check out here, here, and here.)
While some churches and denominations have sought various forms of justice and reconciliation with the queer community, the Church has too often been a place of hate and a powerful force of anti-queer politics. In this tension, a question arises: What is the Church’s vocation during pride month? As one queer among many, let me propose one piece of that vocation. Be open to the call of queerness, to the call of a queer God—away from overly rigid ideas of who we are and of what is normal.
We’re here, we’re queer
The term "queer" has meant strange, it's been a form of hate speech, a reclaimed term of liberation, and an umbrella term to corral all the letters in LGBTQIA2s… For those not familiar, thankfully, there are good resources to help you navigate all the letters (like here and here).
But queer is also something more. Queerness teaches us that who we are is both fixed and fluid. We are both free from and bound to these identities.
There are tons of identities that we either take up or are imposed on us: From plant-mom, houseless, or Lutheran to trans, Asian American, or a gay bear. Sometimes societies or institutions trap us in these—like when someone assigned female at birth comes out as a man, they’re always haunted and confined by the “trans” that comes before “man.” But at the same time, being trans links that person to a community, a diverse yet collective experience of other folks like them.
From the age of twelve, the homophobia of my church and country began seeping in; an experience many describe—whether around racism, queerphobia, or classism—as internalized oppression (for more on this concept, check out here and here). During high school, I endured conversion “therapy” where I learned to think of my gayness as a disease I could be cured of. Years of this passed. By God’s grace, I eventually found self-acceptance and came out, only to be kicked out of my “Christian” college and my church communities. For eight years of my life, I was endlessly asked, by myself and others, to give an account of my gayness. Now that I’m older, I grieve everything I missed. Queerphobia doesn’t only suppress our queerness, it subordinates every other part of us.
Nevertheless, the whiteness of my experience can make invisible the ways race and sexuality intersect. For BIPOC folk, the dynamic I’ve been describing plays out in complex ways. Take one example. The American writer and activist Audre Lorde, a self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” wrote about this tension in her own life:
“As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”
Lorde was describing her experience within multiple activist communities. At times, she was asked to subordinate either her woman-ness to her Blackness or her Blackness to her woman-ness or her lesbian-ness to her…and the list continues.
If getting too particular in our identities can sometimes cause problems, why do we hold so close to them? While same-sex folk having sex is old news, the concept of “homosexuality” is fairly new. The concept of “heterosexuality” is an even more recent invention. The words we use to describe ourselves shift and change through time. Yet calling myself gay helps me navigate the world, be understood by others, and take up political action.
When fighting for gay marriage, making the strategic move to stand on a narrow and stringent identity—“I am bi, I am a lesbian, I am gay”—is politically required to be recognized by the legal system. In a similar way, when fighting for trans rights, trans folks are being strategic when they narrow their whole selves into one statement—“I am trans.” But trans folks, like the rest of us, are also multi-racial, committee chairs, neuro-divergent, and board game lovers.
What does this mean?
“Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”- Michel Foucault
What does all this have to do with the Church’s vocation during pride month? As one queer among multitudes, let me propose a small piece of that vocation.
“Do not ask me who I am…” First, if you’re not a member of the queer community, be ok with not always understanding. Why do straight folk love displaying sayings about coffee, wine, and “live, laugh, love”? We don’t understand it, but we don’t need to. We love you anyway. Straight-cis folk may not understand why some queers dress up in drag, have T parties, call themselves butches and femmes, yell “yaaass queen,” or wear colored hankies, but that’s ok. Be comfortable with not always understanding.
“…do not ask me to remain the same…” Second, don’t ask people to remain the same. None of us—queer or otherwise—are as transparent to ourselves as we’ve been led to believe. Too often, our doctrines ask us to value the immutable over the mutable; the fixed over the fluid. Like the trans folk who bear the scars of their trans-formations, Jesus changes too—after the resurrection, at first, not even Mary Magdalene recognized him. Don’t ask us to stay the same—to be predictable or respectable or understandable. Let others experiment with who they are, with what they do, with how they take up what it is to be whatever they are. Let yourself do the same. Leave it to the cops, like the ones who raided Stonewall, to make sure our papers are in order.
“This world is queer indeed and those who wish to play it straight are failing to see that new horizons are declared holy and we are propelled on in courage and not certainty. Where are those who will sit with fear and uncertainty and not flee in the face of a queer god—the early followers fled in the face of a crucified god…They fled to ‘life as normal’ but it didn’t work—it can never work because life if fully engaged with is far from normal. Norms are easy conveniences for those who like surveys and statistics, they are not for those who live. Life can never be normal for those who embrace the flesh as divine, those who are lovers of god through that flesh in all its diverse glory.”