Why I am … Queer

This series celebrating the ways different Christians traditions and movements have shaped me is coming to a close. But before wrapping it up on Friday, I’d be remiss not to talk about queer theology. I’m in an interesting position with this theme, because in some ways it’s too close to me and yet I also spent the first half of my adult life fighting it.

I am queer because, quite simply, I am queer. To be specific, I am gay. Despite my increasingly desperate prayers for the better part of two decades, and despite all the incredible ways my life was transformed by the Holy Spirit, I was and am gay. For good and for bad, my sexuality has been the arena in which my wrestling with God has taken place. And this has left an indelible mark on me and my faith. And yet, even after I came to accept my sexuality as something I can engage with faithfully rather than rejecting outright, which was a very long process, I still held ‘queer theology’ at a distance for a long time, and resisted seeing what I was doing as fitting under this label for even longer.

But over the years I’ve come to see a lot more of the blessings my queerness has brought to my life of faith, and some of the major contributions I think queer Christians of all stripes make in the community of faith. Today I’d like to talk about two of them, using excerpts from previous writing I’ve done here on the blog.

The first is that queer people are reminders of the ancient, biblical, truth that we can’t get too comfortable with our categories and concepts:

The Spirit of God takes our expectations and conceptions and reveals them to be finite and inadequate to fully express the reality of God and God’s heart for the world. This is why, historically speaking, those groups who have cared most for cultivating life in the Spirit — whether mystics and sages of old, or charismatics today — have always been suspicious of the language of theology. (And, why those who have cared the most about specificity of language often been the most suspicious of the life of the Spirit!)

If we step back, the whole Gospel is about subverting expectations and categories. In the Christmas story, God becomes a baby, a virgin becomes a mother, the armies of heaven proclaim peace, a king is found in a stable. In Jesus’ teaching, it is the poor, the mourning, the meek who are blessed, the losers who are the winners and the winners who are the losers.

[…] Somehow over the past few hundred years, the West became too satisfied in its categories and boxes. That is not of God.

As we saw in the post on gender in the creation story, God loves the messy margins and boundaries between categories. The in-between people and places are where the most diversity, fruitfulness, and life can be found.

And this is where the connection with queer folk comes in. Like the Holy Spirit, the presence of people who don’t fit into the nice-and-tidy categories of gender our society loves pokes holes in society’s conceptual boxes and reveals them to be inadequate. We are reminders that the world is a far more creative and interesting place than received, fixed notions of gender and sex would lead us to believe. What is drag if not the performance of gender in order to make fun of it and reveal how superficial and silly, not to mention ever-changing, so many of our social conventions around it are? (Something I find hilarious about the current climate of increased antagonism towards drag queens is that many of the elements drag’s opponents fixate on — a man wearing makeup, painted nails, or high heels — were originally used in the West as part of men’s fashion! And we’re only a hundred years distant from the time when the idea of a woman wearing pants was considered a shocking violation of gender norms) In the face of social convention, queer folk of all stripes whisper important doubt into the world’s ear: What if I told you that the clothes don’t make a man? What if I told you that being a mother doesn’t make a woman? What If I told you that sex can be about reciprocity? What if I told you that nurturing can be masculine and that power can be feminine? That the male and female archetypes don’t grow more distant in their mature forms, but actually meet? The more we interrogate our social conventions around gender, the more we come to realize just how flimsy and unnecessary they are, both socially and theologically.

And so, what do the Spirit and queer folk have in common? We shake things up. We break up stodgy conventions and the status quo, we question assumptions masquerading as eternal truths. We reveal the world as it is, not as society wishes it to be.

And second, being queer has opened my eyes to new and interesting ways of reading the Scriptures, especially how some of the contradictions within them actually offer us the opportunity to pick which threads we choose to pull on:

Some of this evidence seems to be contradictory. We’ve seen, for example a creation story that seems to stress male and female equality, but also Scriptures that reflect deeply patriarchal attitudes; we have Scriptures that promote a big vision where all are welcome, but also Scriptures that go out of their way to exclude people. What’s going on here? And what are to make of this? I think a likely solution is that the stories of the Bible have always been more ‘progressive’ than the cultures that have created, treasured, and promulgated them. There’s never been a ‘conservative’ prophet — the myth-makers, storytellers, visionaries, and prophets have always shone the light towards the revelation of God’s loving, gracious welcome. Where things get bogged down in very finite cultural values is when we’ve tried to codify and regulate how to live this vision out. (It’s telling that the two most ‘conservative’ figures in the Bible, who go against the grain of so much of the prophetic legacy, are a legal scholar (Ezra) and a politician (Nehemiah).) And I think this same tendency explains why later interpreters came to give Genesis 19, which the Bible says is about injustice against the vulnerable, an anti-homosexual spin, and why more recent Bible translations have tended to give the general term malakos a specifically anti-gay meaning and to translate arsenokoites as though it were an explicit reference to homosexuality, when all we can legitimately conclude from the limited evidence is that it describes some form of abusive behaviour. […]

The traditions that we’ve received don’t appear to have room for us [as queer people]. We’ve committed to following Christ and have experienced the transforming work of the Spirit and yet our queerness has not changed. We’ve tried all the traditional pathways for us and found that they are dead ends. They bear bad fruit of poor mental health, broken relationships, and spiritual desolation, and leave us as outcasts in our own families, communities, and faith communities. And so we’re coming before the Church and before God pleading our case, trusting that God will see us and hear us. And we have good, Gospel reason to believe that God does. For, God heard the outcast Hagar and blessed her son Ishmael even though he was not the child of promise. For God heard the case of the daughters of Zelophehad and found that their case against the Law was just. For God welcomed the eunuchs whom the Law excluded and gave them, within God’s house, “a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” For God sent the Holy Spirit upon the household of Cornelius and convinced Peter that God welcomed even the Gentiles, just as they were, despite the fact that all of the legal, narrative, and theological precedents were against them. Our God is a God who sees and hears the outcast and the marginalized and who welcomes them into the family.

As I put this idea in a post looking at gender equality:

The point is, when faced with a diversity of stories in our sacred Scriptures, we have the freedom to choose which one we will highlight, which thread we will follow, which story we will tell as our own. And, when presented with a legitimate choice of a story in which God’s grace destroys every consequence of our sin, including unequal gender and racial relations, why wouldn’t we take it? (And if we choose not to, we should really ask ourselves why we prefer the smaller story.)

All this is to say that , beyond the simple facts of my life and the arena in which I’ve been given to wrestle with God, I am queer because queerness shakes things up and reminds the Church and the world that our categories are never adequate to confine human experience or the infinite ways God can work with and within it. And I am queer, because it has a big, bold, and beautiful sanctified imagination and asks us, when given a choice between a bigger or smaller story, why we’d choose the smaller one. And for that, I give thanks.