Favored sports teams might be a suitable topic that inspires playful rivalry (especially if one of you doesn’t really care about sports), but, to some, the religious and political beliefs of your potential mate are defining characteristics in the calculations of your potential for success.

Light installation of Robert Stadler

Lets imagine:
As you share a drink and an appetizer with a person you met on OKCupid, the banter might be light and airy, the preferred age of cheddar matching, the eye-contact solid without being creepy. You might begin to feel something for the person sitting across from you, as they tell stories about the delights of being an accountant, or deliberate on the social scene during their undergraduate tenure at State School University. You both liked Lord of the Rings, but not as much as Harry Potter. You agree that Brad Pitt has become a real actor now, and that Mary-Louise Parker only gets more beautiful as she ages. Kite Runner was good, but Three Cups of Tea really loses its flavor once it came out that Greg Mortenson might be a liar.

It’s going really well.

After a couple drinks, your date informs you that they are having an awesome time, but can’t stay out too much later.

“My church is way up North, and I have to be there by 9.”

Or perhaps:

“I’d love to hang out a little longer, but I got tickets to a Glen Beck rally down-state, and my sister and I are leaving at 6 AM.”

Did this charming watcher of Weeds just mention a Churchal obligation? How can a person who enjoyed the magic of Harry Potter indulge in the pure evil of Glenn Beck?

Perhaps these comments don’t bother you at all. Maybe you are the kind of person who thinks that an individual’s political or religious views are just one tiny aspect of their whole being. You think, nothing they said was judgmental of my beliefs, just statements of theirs. Or are you the kind of person who sees differences in religion or politics defining factors in your relationships?

If you run in a liberal or conservative circle, perhaps you often meet people who have similar views to you, but what about online dating? I tend to think, on a lot of levels, that opposites attract , but are there certain ideological things that could keep you away from someone who otherwise you are really attracted to?

Would you date someone who was a passionate believer or supporter of a religious or political group that conflicted strongly with your own beliefs? Is this the type of information that should be divulged on the embryonic stages of a relationship?

Submission by Walter Hawkins

They say confession is good for the soul. So, here goes: I was raised as a Southern Baptist. It does feel cathartic to admit it. Growing up, I was actually very active in my church. I not only attended Sunday services; I was there most Wednesday evenings, and I also joined the youth group on various overnight retreats. I have relatively fond memories of my churchgoing experience. Miraculously (no pun intended), the pastor and congregation managed to eschew much of the virulently anti-gay rhetoric that permeates modern-day religion. Not to worry, though. I heard plenty of that from my own father, a good solid Christian who despised anyone who wasn’t a Caucasian, heterosexual Protestant – as all good solid Christians should.

As a Southern Baptist, I was naturally led to believe that through God and prayer all things are possible. The power of prayer was indisputable, and great things could be achieved by simply dropping to your knees, closing your eyes and begging ( sometimes the jokes just write themselves.) I never took prayer all that lightly. After all, asking God for some sort of favor is serious business. To request something so frivolous as a nice car or a cute boyfriend would be insulting. I would always start out by thanking God for all that he had done for me. I didn’t want to seem unappreciative. And, I really only remember praying for two things: to not be gay, and to not be harassed at school. These weren’t just a couple of requests made in passing; these were heartfelt, earnest pleas. I didn’t want to be gay, under any circumstances, and I wanted to “fit in” with my peers – not to be popular per se, just to be accepted. Of course, neither of these prayers was ever answered. I don’t think they were even on the table for consideration.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about “praying the gay away”. It’s become especially prominent due to the fact that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann — a Republican presidential contender — and her husband Marcus — who may or may not be a raging queen (but probably is) —  jointly own a Christian counseling center in their home state of Minnesota that may or may not (but probably does) practice ex-gay reparative therapy. They supposedly believe that the gay can be prayed away. I know for a fact, as do most homosexuals, and the American Psychological Association, that it cannot. It’s heartbreaking that this option even exists for those struggling with their sexuality, particularly for adolescents. It convinces them that they are awful people who need to be corrected. Or, as Marcus Bachmann so delicately phrases it, that they are “barbarians” who “need to be educated…to be disciplined”. This sort of thinking has been consistently criticized by the professional psychological community for having catastrophic consequences.

On August 6^th, another potential presidential contender, Texas Governor Rick Perry, held an all-day prayer rally in Houston’s Reliant Stadium, asking people to gather to fast and pray for the United States, which he describes as being “in crisis”. Is this how a President Rick Perry would deal with a nation in crisis – by asking an invisible man in the sky for help? Would we really want a president who prays and then claims to have had an answer from God? Recent history has proven this to be a tad risky. Former President George W. Bush claimed to have received a calling from God to run for president. He also claimed that God wanted him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I think we all know how all of that turned out. Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann claim to have received a similar “calling” to run for president. God can’t seem to be able to make up his mind. Why would he endorse two competing candidates? And, after the whole Bush presidency, should we really trust God’s obviously questionable judgment?

I would consider myself to be Agnostic. My rationale for this is that I am someone who is too chicken shit to say that God doesn’t exist because, in the event that He or She does, and I have denied said existence, I’m screwed. And, whether or not God exists, I’m monumentally happy that my gay couldn’t be prayed away. I love being gay. I think it’s made me a significantly stronger person than I would have been had I not experienced the daily adversity that the homosexual community encounters. It’s certainly made me more snarky. I still pray occasionally, usually as a “thank you” to God when something good happens. It’s mostly a precautionary measure. Again, I wouldn’t want to appear unappreciative. That would just be unSouthern. But, prayer now seems relatively useless to me. Bill Maher once said to imagine a man talking into a hair dryer and asking for guidance. We would think he was crazy. But, take away the hair dryer, and that’s prayer. Maher’s assessment may seem a little simplistic, but it’s not completely unreasonable.

“Well, ask anyway, and maybe I’ll answer later.”

“Why do you think that Judaism is a good place to express your feminism and your queerness?”

You know those questions that just kind of smack you in the face? Not because they make you realize something about the way that you think, but because they make you realize something about the ways other people don’t think. It took a moment to sink in that my friend saw these three categories — Judaism, feminism, and queerness — as separate and independent entities, and believed that my combining them was a chosen path, one I could just as easily eschew.

I answered in that moment in the simplest terms I could: my Judaism, my queerness, my feminism, they are not discrete from one another. I cannot separate the part of me that is queer from the part of me that is Jewish, or separate the part of me that is feminist from either of these. All three of these things encompass the entirety of my being, and therefore must be integrated.

It has been bothering me though. This question, thinking about it, makes me tired. It reminds me, despite the advances of the past few decades, of how little has actually been accomplished. How can someone, even a heterosexual man, not understand that feminism is not a whim; that it is essential? That queerness is not just in my left foot, it is who I am? That Judaism isn’t just what I study in school or what I do in synagogue, but is the medium through which I see and understand my world and my life?

Perhaps I should have asked in response, “Why is it that you think Judaism is a good place to express your heterosexuality?” Of course, there is a simple answer to this question: because Judaism has developed in such a way to anticipate the lives of heterosexual people, especially of heterosexual men. Why do you think that Judaism is a good place to express your European heritage, as you do every time you use a Yiddish word or pronunciation, or pray in the forms that have come to us through Eastern European Jewry, as distinct from Middle Eastern or Spanish? Because mainstream American Judaism is rooted primarily in the culture of the European Jews who, because of their numbers and sometimes affluence, became the dominant voice in the religious expression of American Jews. But a Jew of Moroccan or Algerian or Ethiopian descent will express their own distinct heritage through their Judaism. One may as well ask why they think Judaism is a good place to express their cultural identity through differing customs, distinct forms of prayer, unique rituals.

Again though, despite the hardships of being a minority within Judaism, these categories of Jews still have a Jewish history, a story of ritual development, a narrative for how their Judaism shaped to their culture and vice versa. For queer and feminist Jews, we have no such advantage. At least, not yet.

The development of queer and feminist Jewish culture began only very recently in the grand scheme of things. From the ordination of the first female rabbi of the Reform Movement in 1972, to the Queer Jewish wedding ceremonies I witnessed a few weeks ago outside the New York City Clerk’s office, to the still emerging body of liturgy developing to meet the ritual needs of those who experience the lifecycle event of a sex change, the whole of self-identified queer and feminist Jewish religious expression has only been in existence for about 40 years. And yet, when one of my professors wondered aloud why his class on Jewish Feminism had been under-enrolled and therefore cancelled, we heard a woman respond, to our amazement, “Well, that problem’s been solved, hasn’t it? I mean, there are female rabbis!”

The development of the heteronormative model of Judaism has been underway for over 3000 years, and is still developing. Yet there are people who believe that two score years of development of feminist Judaism has been sufficient to declare the problem “solved.” It’s like being told “But, we installed women’s bathrooms! How can you still claim that there is sexism at The Seminary?” Even more so, the development of queer Judaism suffers a dearth of development and attention. As much as “classical Judaism” has diminished women’s visibility, at least throughout Jewish history, it has been acknowledged (even if grudgingly) that women do in fact exist, and are an essential part of a Jewish society. Non-heterosexuality on the other hand, while acknowledged through condemnation or else vaguely alluded to, has been persistently hidden and swept under the rug.

Religions develop in response to peoples and their lives. We as a species have a need for ritual to process the reality of our lives, to acknowledge moments of change, to order our experience into a coherent picture. Unfortunately, religions can also be hijacked. Even a religion whose core prophetic principles are to address the needs of the weak and underrepresented individuals of the society, can make itself blind to certain elements of a population that those in control wish not to see. Judaism as a religion has only just begun to open its eyes to the existence of a woman accustomed to freedom and equality, and to the existence of non-heterosexual and non-gender-normative individuals who will no longer stand for invisibility, will no longer take condemnation for granted.

Religion is not a place where we may or may not express elements of our selves and our lives, religion IS the expression of ourselves and our lives. It is a communal expression of who we are – as members of that religion, and as people. I am a person who is a woman and who is queer. I am a Jew. My religion must respond to who I am, to who we are, or else it has no relevance, and a religion with no relevance is dead.

And so this is my response to my friend’s question. Why should I express my feminism and queerness in my Judaism? Because a Judaism that cuts off Jews is a Judaism that hacks off its own limbs.

I exited at City Hall and started walking toward Worth Street. It was about 8:30 in the morning, and already muggy. Turning the corner and walking toward the NYC clerk’s office, I soon saw the telltale signs of what was happening where I was heading. On one side of the street I saw a flock of multi colored umbrellas. On the other I saw the familiar signs (and some familiar faces) of the Westboro Hate Movement. As I came closer I recognized Shirley Phelps-Roper. She is the loud, wild-eyed woman who manages to be at, it seems, every single Westboro demonstration. I remembered her from when she and a contingent of the group came to yell anti-semitic slogans at my synagogue the day before Yom Kippur last year. I was pleased to note, however, that the showing of Westboro was rather pathetic compared even to the small demonstration at my little Brooklyn shul.

I crossed over to the side with the umbrellas after snapping a couple of pictures of the hate-mongers. Queer Rising had called upon supporters of same-sex marriage to provide a rainbow of umbrellas to shield couples, figuratively and literally, from the hatred of protesters. Taking a moment to get my bearings, I looked around, and found what I was looking for, kiddy-corner from where I was standing. After consulting a police officer about my path of travel, I crossed both streets toward the familiar big rainbow chuppah (wedding canopy) with which Congregation Beit Simchat Torah had marched in the Pride Parade last month, and under which Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum was now going to officiate at a number of newly legal same-sex weddings.

There were a number of us milling about while Rabbi Kleinbaum spoke to the press. After a bit, she came over, gave me a hug, and announced that it was time to make signs. She pulled out a bunch of poster board sheets and colored Sharpies, while someone else tossed in more markers, plus glue sticks and glitter. Needing no further encouragement, I plopped myself down on the ground like a 6-year-old and started drawing. While engaged thus, I looked up at one point and noticed that I was being photographed and videotaped from several angles. Sitting on the ground, playing with markers and glitter. I turned my eyes back to my project, giggling to myself. What could be better than this?

The crowd began to build and became more and more colorful. Couples started to trickle out of the clerk’s office brandishing their marriage licenses. The first couple to receive their license (not the first couple married) were members of CBST who had been married years earlier in a religious ceremony. Today they had their children with them.

We began to prepare. It is Jewish tradition, at the culmination of a wedding ceremony, for a member of the couple to smash a glass underfoot. One interpretation of this ritual is that the broken glass reminds us that, even in what would be our happiest moment, there is still brokenness in the world, and it is at our own peril that we allow ourselves to forget that. However, glasses can be difficult to break underfoot. Lightbulbs, on the other hand, are easy, cheap, and make a great noise. We therefore began placing individual light bulbs in Ziplock bags for smashing. Meanwhile, a celebrity couple approached admiring the chuppah… Rod and Ricky, the puppet couple from Avenue Q, along with Kate Monster, had shown up to celebrate Rod and Ricky finally tying the knot. Rod was wearing akippah, Ricky was not, which led to some uneasiness among some of us about this being an intermarriage – but as CBST is non-denominational, they were welcomed by Rabbi Kleinbaum and, a little later on, married by her (and by a number of other officiants of varied religions and denominations in later ceremonies).

Rabbi Kleinbaum signs her first legal same-sex wedding contract

The five couples who were married under our chuppah (other than Rod and Ricky) were all folks who were familiar to me by face, but with whom I wasn’t personally acquainted. They were young and old, with and without children, male and female. They were all beautiful, and for each of them we sang and we danced. We yelled “Mazal tov!” at the sound of each breaking lightbulb… in one case, there were five distinct “pops” as two moms and three children each broke their own. A small group of us crowded around a music stand laden with traditional Jewish wedding songs, one played a melodica while the rest of us sang, substituting gender appropriate wording and grammar into the familiar Hebrew words for each couple.

A lone Orthodox Jewish man dressed in the black suit and hat of his community walked back and forth occasionally holding aloft a sign which read “Bad Idea” taped to the end of a plastic case intended to house a lulav, a palm-branch used ceremonially during the holiday of Sukkot. I could comment on the irony of the juxtaposition, since the holiday of Sukkot is one on which we celebrate the marital union between God and the people Israel, with Israel (traditionally understood primarily as the male population) are likened to the bride of a symbolically masculine God…

It is a mitzvah, a commandment in Judaism to rejoice with brides and grooms on their wedding days. A Jewish wedding is about the couple being married, of course, but more so it is something bigger. The chuppah symbolizes the house that a married couple builds together – the home, the family, that comes into being and builds up the larger family to which we all belong. The beauty of a Jewish wedding is that the celebration is not limited to the fact that two people have found one another, but that we as a people are succeeding. We continue to build Jewish families and Jewish homes on the foundation of love: the love of an individual person for another, and the love of a community. Every time I dance at a Jewish wedding, I am cognizant of my role in building with love, and in helping to restore that which is destroyed by hatred, helping to heal the brokenness in the world. I continue to be baffled by people, especially people of my own faith, who scream for hatred and destruction in the name of that same God Who commands me to build, to love and to rejoice.

Around 1:30, as the scheduled CBST marriages wrapped up, I gathered by stuff, said goodbye to friends new and old, gave and received sweaty hugs, and headed back toward the subway. I caught a Brooklyn bound train just as the doors were closing, and gasped as the cool air-conditioning chilled the sweat on my skin and clothes. I took a deep breath and settled in… and then began to giggle… because I was covered in glitter.

c. Dundak, Wikimedia Commons

Check out Domina Vontana’s column, The Goddess Files, every Wednesday at 2 p.m.

Some women are born Goddesses. I am one of those women. The first-born grandchild on my mother’s side and the first female grandchild on my father’s side, I was showered with gifts and affection from the moment I arrived on this planet. My kindergarten report card had all superior marks and one hand written comment from my teacher Ms. Rusk. It said: Shamaine needs to learn she cannot always come first.

At the tender age of five I took the hand of my father and was led into a dark sanctuary filled with grown men. The lecturer was a gentle, elderly man who showed us a series of astonishing slides using the ancient technology of a classroom projector. The images were of ghosts and demons – entities that pulled the ectoplasm right out of the human host next to them and shrouded themselves in this substance so they could manifest a physical, documented form. Yes, Ghostbusters the film was all the rage at that time.

Shortly after that I was instructed in the power of prayer. I was told I could slay demons and bind evil spirits with just the name of Jesus. I was taught to love everyone unconditionally the same way G-d loved me. At the age of seven I sat on my father’s knee in his upstairs study at the church and drew a diagram. Heaven was the top of the page. Hell was at the bottom. Jesus and the cross were in the middle.

“Where do you want to go after you die, daughter?” My father asked. I pointed to the word heaven and glanced into his face for reassurance.

“Yes,” he confirmed, nodding his head at me and smiling. “And what do you have to do if you want to get to heaven?”

I was a top student who excelled at facts and figures. I snatched the black marker from his hand and pointed at the cross grinning. “I have to accept Jesus as my savior.” I drew a circle and exclamation points next to the cross and then took the red marker from the desk and drew a giant “X” over the word “hell” at the bottom of the page.

Several days later, on a Sunday evening, my father donned rubber waders with suspenders and led me down the steps of the baptismal tank. I was wearing a white gown, he said a short prayer, addressed the crowd that was watching and then as he held my hand against my face so I couldn’t breath and wouldn’t swallow the water, he pulled me under.

As a teenager I attended fundamentalist Pentecostal congregations. I was a talented musician who sang solos for church services and led the local March for Jesus worship rally when I was 14. I abstained from drugs, made perfect grades and joined band and choir. I also wore knee-high boots to school the first day of my senior year and told a freshmen boy seated on the floor to kiss them for me. And he did.

Like most, later I wandered away from regular services. I moved to DC for work and college and took a position as a nanny for a Jewish family. I was 19. The house kept Kosher and so I did, too. I celebrated the high holidays with them. The kippah kept sliding off my head. I drove the children to Hebrew school every week and began to absorb the notions around me. These people didn’t go to a temple to get saved, because they didn’t believe there was anything inherently fractured in their spirit. They went to services and classes to stay informed and in touch with their heritage. That’s when things started to change for me.

After I graduated from the University of Maryland I took an apartment in Dupont. Most Sunday mornings I woke up with a different woman in my bed. The moment the church bells around the corner began to peel, I usually busied myself with carnal distractions. Having sex with someone of the same gender as the iconic sound of steeple bells fell all around me used to get this preacher’s kid off like a rocket. I was horny, feeling mean because of all the shame I was experiencing, and I just wanted to fucking get laid.

After the shine of my new gay lifestyle wore off, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So one Sunday morning when I woke alone in my bed, I took myself around the corner and sat down in a church pew for the first time in a decade. For the next five years that’s where I sat, while I watched the world of modern religion unfold around me. Foundry United Methodist at 16th and P is truly one of the most consequential, passionate, committed congregations, at the moment. They recently approved full gay marriage forcing the issue into the spotlight on the national and international level.

I became a member, I tithed, I put on my Easter dress and went to holiday brunches with the other Christians. I attended meetings about social justice issues, such as fair labor wages for immigrants, and benefited from free instructional seminars presented by leading business and church life consultants. During my initial process, I attended lunch with my favorite pastor. I wanted to serve in truth so I hesitantly said, “I’m a member of the queer and kinky communities.” She said, “It’s not about what community you are a member of, it’s about how you embrace it and move through it.” Once I started this blog, I wanted to share my joy with her and so I did. And that meant telling her the whole truth. And I did. She hugged me and congratulated me on my new development.

Eventually, however, I kept coming back to the one item that even made it possible for me to get back in that church pew in the first place. When I decided to go back to church full time there was only one way I could see to do it. I told myself to worship like a Jew. I didn’t start back in Christianity to get saved, not even in a gay way. I went to connect with my family history as a preacher’s child. After a while, that can leave a little lacking in the faith, especially if you don’t believe you need Jesus to be saved, or if you don’t believe you need to be saved at all. Born a Goddess, I’ve always known God was within me; I’ve never been alone or forsaken by his presence and never will be. I didn’t do anything to gain his presence and I can’t do anything to lose it. It is a gift, not a sacrifice, and no one, not even myself, can take that from me.

Then I heard it. The woman said: it’s not about whom you’re attracted to, it’s about who is attracted to you. It was a time in my life I was wondering about my full direction in life. What path would I choose? There is only so much time in one life span, only so many sunsets and sunrises. I took a look around at my life. Everyone was Jewish — From my best friends to my favorite clients to my longest serving submissive, each and every one a Jew. I’d finally found my tribe. Recently I made my decision to convert publicly, which in my eyes makes it official. I’m in touch with a sponsoring Rabbi and trying to figure out where and how I want to study for my conversion.

My motivation for conversion is simple: I want to serve and worship SHAME FREE. I have come to the conclusion over the past five years that I will never be able to do that in a Christian congregation, even one as amazing as Foundry. This is not their shortcoming; it is my own. But nonetheless, I deserve a shame free spiritual existence and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to finally experience a type of religion that is not based on sin and redemption. Instead, I plan to invigorate my lagging spiritual life with a type of study that is focused on ethics, not individual shortcomings. From what I can tell at this point there is no hell in the Jewish faith, at least not a prominent one. So the little girl who wanted to please her father and follow her Savior to heaven is going to have to find a different way of being, because there is no hell. All we have is today, and one another.

Nico Lang is an intern at Interfaith Youth Core and a senior at DePaul University.  Lang co-founded the Queer Intercollegiate Alliance and is the Change Coordinator for LGBT Change’s The Faith Project. Follow him on Twitter @GidgetLang.

c. Luigi Diamanti

As a queer man, I’m used to coming out to people.

I remember the first time I did it.  I was 15 and sitting with my mother on the bottom half of the bunk bed I shared with my five-year-old brother.  I wanted to tell her I was in love and that it hurt.  I wanted to say all the things that I was still too young to say and name all the emotions it would take me years to grapple with.

Instead of telling her outright, I did what any artsy introvert would have.  I drew her a picture.  I had been out bowling the night before with my straight best friend – the object my unrequited affections – and so I sketched her ten bowling pins, hoping that she would be able to figure out what I was trying to say.

She stared at the yellow notepad that held all my secrets for what seemed like forever, looked up at me and yelled: “You’re in love with a palm tree?”

Apparently, I wasn’t as good of an artist as I had hoped so I had to tell her.

She hugged me and cried, and when I came out to her again a year later, when I was finally in love with someone I thought could love me back, we cried again.

However, when my mom came out to me, I didn’t have the same reaction.

During my sophomore year of college, she told me that she had made the decision to become a Pentecostal. 

Three days before, I broke up with my first long-term boyfriend in what would prove to be the most difficult experience of my life.  When she came out to me as a Pentecostal, we were at the dinner table with her handlebar-mustached fiancé, whom I assumed was the source of her decision.  I looked up with swollen eyes, ruby slipper red from days of crying, and said nothing.  I never would.

Once again I simply couldn’t find the words to bridge the divide that separated us, and I spent most of Christmas break in silence.  I opened our Christmas presents solemnly, and when I boarded the Greyhound bus back to Chicago the following week, I felt like I was leaving behind a stranger.

For most of my life, my mother had been a Catholic, strong but private in her personal faith.  Because my father was a non-practicing atheist, I didn’t grow up in her church and rarely attended mass.  I’ve never brought this up to him, but I don’t need to ask know his reasons: he just couldn’t let me go, couldn’t let me see the parts of my mother that were uncomfortable for him to talk about.

Looking back, all I really remember about my mother’s faith was that every Christmas, she would light birthday candles for the baby Jesus and sing to him over a cake, resolute in her belief that he would light her path through the darkness.  As a child who realized at a very young age that he did not share her belief in God, I knew that her path was not my own. I never joined in to sing.

More importantly, I never learned how to sing for her.  I never knew how.

For most of my life, the only other Christians I have known were the ones who wanted to convert me, to change me or to see my “faggotry” go up in flames.  Extremists like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Ann Coulter taught me to hate Christians, but nobody taught me how to love them.

But in the past couple years, I’ve had my own conversion experience. Through a little bit of luck and a little bit of fate, I was hired as a media intern for Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC).  I spent two years working with religious and non-religious people alike, getting to know them as colleagues and people that share most of the same values that a gay atheist does. When I strolled in my first day in maroon corduroys, they didn’t want to save me or cast stones at me.  Rather than seeing people like me as part of the problem, they knew that this humanist could be part of the solution.

At IFYC, we talk a lot about building a world where we are better together, one where religious cooperation can build bridges across social divides.  Although I’ve worked with them to fight for that world, I never saw the process up close.  But around the end of my first year in the program, I was accepted to live in the Vincent and Louise House, DePaul University’s intentional living community, and I began to see what those divides looked like.

For the first time in a very long time, I experienced open hostility and derision from family, friends and acquaintances for my “lifestyle choices,” and oddly enough, this had nothing to do with my sexuality.

You see, the problem was that the Vincent and Louise House is a Catholic institution, and although I work with religious people, some of my friends could not fathom why I would want to actually live with them.  My lowest moment came while talking with a guy who I routinely flirted with before my Geopolitics class. Flopping my backpack down next to him one day before class, I excitedly squealed to him that I “got into the Vincent and Louise House!”  He asked what it was, and I casually explained.

Without probing further, he coldly informed me that he “wasn’t into that sort of thing” and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the quarter, except to occasionally borrow notes.

In sharing a house with Catholics, I would learn that this sort of thing happens to them all time, and most of them find themselves “toning down” their faith to escape this involuntary intolerance.  Most of my housemates identify as very religious, and before I moved in with them, I never thought of them as being victims of prejudice.  At a moment where Peter King’s anti-Muslim witch-hunts are dominating the news, I’ve been blinded to the ways in which intolerance and hate affect us all, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or none of the above.

And I’ve been blinded to my own intolerance.

I’m now past the point where I could ever truly apologize to my mother for not being able to accept her with the same openness she was able to accept me.  I want her to know that although I was taught to hate what she was, I know that, one day, we can start teaching each other something else.

Contrary to this “proof-texting,” traditional Christian theology has always affirmed that Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ) is the only one in whom God is fully revealed and the only one in whom human nature has been expressed in its fullness. (This point was secured through the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon). Therefore, those faithful to the Christian tradition ought to appeal to Jesus—not Adam and Eve—when reflecting on what is appropriate for human nature. However, even here, we might be puzzled by what we find.

Sadly, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life lack any details regarding his sexuality. There is no marriage, no overnight hook-up, not even a moment of masturbation; and the attempts to unearth some hidden historical Jesus behind the narratives can be dubious. Instead, the Gospels present Jesus as a celibate and almost asexual figure—in every sense of the word, he is “queer”. Since Jesus is the fullest expression of humanity and there is a lack of sexual narratives in the Gospel, some have taken this to mean that sexuality is nonessential to the human life. But, no lie, I think Jesus’ celibacy can teach us a lot about our sexuality and our relationships. (OK, I know celibacy isn’t a very popular topic these days, but hear me out).

On one hand, being celibate, Jesus refuses to claim any sexuality or human relationship as bearing the mark of Divine approval for humanity, not even marriage. However, rather than simply ignoring sexuality, in his celibacy, Jesus creates space for various sexualities and relationships to be present in God’s good future—heterosexual and homosexual, monogamous and non-monogamous, BDSM or vanilla. It is easy to forget that celibacy and asexuality are also queer, since they, too, disrupt the categories and the power dynamics of heterosexism (why is celibacy/asexuality absent from contemporary queer discussions?). However, it also upsets those who live in the binaries of gay/lesbian vs. straight, since Jesus’ queer sexuality destabilizes even that dichotomy.  As celibate, Jesus affirms that no sexuality or form of relationship is held as the ideal for human life because humanity’s greatness is found in its diversity—even of sexualities—without hierarchy or rank.

On the other hand, Jesus also teaches us an invaluable lesson about the value of the individual. An individual is not just a cog in a larger machine such as the family, or society, or the nation. An individual is not a puzzle piece awaiting fulfillment when the rest of the pieces fall into line and the larger picture is complete. As the embodiment of full humanity, Jesus’ celibacy illustrates that each individual is whole—lacking nothing—by virtue of their relationship to God. Jesus gives us an ethic of self-affirmation and of loving oneself. His celibacy teaches us to see ourselves as God see us; not as a fragments of a larger picture, but as individuals—absolutely singular and infinitely valuable. As the fulfillment of human nature, Jesus’ celibacy establishes that each individual is fully human, in and of themselves; a value so great that nothing can be added to it and nothing can subtract from it. I believe this remains a powerful message, especially regarding our sexualities and relationships.

In a world bent on dating sites, romantic comedies, and how-to guides to relationships, this celibate, queer Christ reminds us that we are not halves awaiting completion by another. We are not lonely souls in need of a soul-mate or damsels in distress who need knights in shining armor in order to survive. These romanticized ideas and images seem harmless but they create frameworks for destructive behavior and abusive relationships. Moreover, talk of sex, relationships, or lack thereof can become oppressive standards in our culture (Who’s getting laid and who isn’t? Have you found “the one”? If not, when? And how are you working to find them? You’re not a virgin, are you?) Even among sexual minorities, there is still the pressure to obtain the idyllic love life, to sleep around, and make ourselves desirable by staying young, rich, and sexy. In light of Jesus’ celibacy, these questions and concerns are exposed as inabilities to love one’s own self and to value oneself as already complete. In fact, Jesus should give special comfort to LGBTQ of all stripes—offering encouragement to self-appreciation and joy.

Understood in this way, a kind of celibacy should underlie all of our sexual encounters and relationships. Whether one is married, dating, polyamorous/nonmonogamous, or celibate, our sexuality is best understood as a creative and fun act between whole persons rather than desperate attempts find completion. As queer, Jesus shows us that it is in accepting and enjoying our individuality that we can lovingly accept and enjoy [being with] others. In Jesus’ celibacy, the fullness and perfection of humanity is found not in marriage, or dating, or who we’re sleeping with, but in each individual as they are in God’s grace.

Before Stewart sold his soul to become a lawyer, he studied religion in a graduate program at Duke University.  There he learned a lot about God, or at least a lot about what people have said and thought and prayed about God over the centuries.  He still has many questions.

Some Christians claim that same-sex couples cannot fulfill the procreative purpose of marriage, even when they adopt, because children do best when they are raised by both biological parents.  Does this explain why Jesus, who was born of the Virgin Mary and had no biological father, lived such a troubled life?

We know Jesus was sinless.  That much the Bible makes clear.  But we also know he never married or had a family.  Nor does he seem to have had much of a career.  He worked for a while as a carpenter, but by the time he started his ministry, he had to admit to his followers, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head ” (Matthew 8:20).

Of course, many of us face difficulties with love and money, and our Lord was only 33 years old when he passed away.  It’s possible he would have worked through these issues had he not been crucified first.

Possible, but not likely.  When you read the Gospels, you quickly realize the problems of Jesus ran much deeper than those of the typical thirtysomething.  The scriptures say he spent much of his free time cavorting with tax collectors and whores.  When he wasn’t doing that, you could probably find him out with his disciples eating and drinking, something the Savior apparently liked to do so much his critics could plausibly accuse his of being a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19).

Even more troubling than how Jesus lived is the casual manner with which he broke the law.  Once, for instance, he unlawfully healed a man of a disease on the holy day of rest, brazenly insisting that the Sabbath was made for human beings and not human beings for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).  On another occasion, when a crowd had gathered to stone a woman who had been caught committing adultery, he stopped them by saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7).  It’s almost as though the incarnate Word of God momentarily forgot the very words he had spoken to the ancient Israelites when he commanded them to put all adulterers to death (Leviticus 20:10, which, incidentally, is only a few verses away from the law that makes male homosexual behavior a capital offense).

The list of Jesus’ abnormal and antisocial behaviors goes and on.  Whether it was his fetishistic interest in his disciples feet or his unsettling lack of respect for religious and civil authorities, the one who claimed to be “the way, the truth, and the life” clearly suffered from some sort of serious adjustment disorder (John 14:6).  The question good American Christians can’t help but ask during this season is why.

Now, far be it from me to suggest our Father made a mistake when he sent his Son into this world via a virgin birth. But the fact is we know a lot more about the importance of biological fathers than we did 2,000 years ago.  As evangelical theologian Ron Sider recently noted, in explaining why same-sex couples can never truly fulfill the procreative goal of marriage intended by God even when they adopt:

In many situations (including abuse, neglect, and financial deprivation), adoption is much better for a child than remaining with one or both biological parents—but that does not change the fact that, other things being equal, it is better for a child to grow up with both biological parents. Even the best adoptive homes recognize that the absence of biological parents brings painful struggles.

Some may protest that Sider has confused a descriptive observation of how things often work for a moral imperative.  After all, not only was Jesus raised without the benefit of a biological father, but Moses grew up without either a biological mom or dad.  Yet it’s hard to think of anyone who has influenced the spiritual history of mankind more than those two.

When you read the Gospels, however, you quickly realize Jesus did indeed have a troubled childhood.  How else can you explain why, instead of learning to play rough-and-tumble sports with his adoptive dad as normal boys do, he ran away at the age of 12 in order to spend time in the Jerusalem Temple learning about God?  Or why, instead of repenting when his worried parents finally found him, he highlighted his failure to bond with his adoptive father Joseph by insisting he had only been “about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49)?

Other biblical texts make it clear that Jesus was “naturally attuned to what other people are thinking and feeling,” an ability some have viewed as proof he was the Messiah (see, e.g., John 4:6-29), but which the experts at the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality have discovered is actually a trait associated with gay men.  Most damning of all is the passage in the Gospel of John which cryptically speaks of the “beloved [male] disciple” who enjoyed reclining in the Lord’s “bosom” (v. 13:23).

We cannot know for sure whether things would have turned out differently for Jesus had there been a biological father to lead the Holy Family.  Perhaps, instead of submissively suffering like some sacrificial lamb, he would have fought back against his Roman executors.  Instead, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords let them beat him and mock him, even going so far as to pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

We all know how well Jesus’ approach to conflict worked out.  They don’t call him the Crucified One for nothing.  The question good American Christians living in this age of uncertainty should be asking is why on earth we would ever want to follow Him.

Submission by Sylvia Renee, TNG columnist

On December 8^th Georgetown University hosted a “debate” featuring Andrew Sullivan, staff writer for the Atlantic, and Maggie Gallagher, the president of NOM, as well as two students. The goal was to have a civil discussion on the question of marriage from a Catholic perspective. Though in a case like this where neither side is likely to be convinced of much by any argument it is ultimately an exercise in circular talking points. I spent most of the night in pure astonishment at some of the things being said – by both sides even!

Now I must admit outright, I am not now nor have I even been a Catholic. My qualifications on this level basically amount to the one time I was in a church and the fact that once upon a time I slept with a Catholic.

Ms Gallagher was given the opportunity to open the discussion. She began by asking the audiences perspective on marriage by a show of hands. As it turns out, approximately 80 percent of the room thought she was full of nonsense. And that is before she even opened her mouth. Her statement opens with a predicable declaration that her position is based in reason and that heterosexual marriage has been a universal social institution. Even though there may have been variations, the goal was always the same: children. Not property  transfer. Not to unify political districts. Children.

This was followed by, and I quote, “There is some pretty wacky stuff out there in anthropology.”

Having dismissed a vast majority of the human experience in a single  moment, she then went on to discuss the three universal truths of this universal(ish) institution: baby-makin’, the social necessity of baby-makin’, heterosexual baby-raisin’ for more baby-makin’. I am simplifying here, but honestly not that much. Her concern was how society could raise “good” men with the proliferation of single mothers and men running around having multiple illegitimate children.

There are two things that I feel are important to mention here. The first is that, regardless of reality,  there is an explicit cultural image of what this man with multiple children through multiple partners looks like. If you need a hint, it isn’t a white, church-going man. No, this prodigious philanderer is almost always imagined to be black. As are the women left in his wake. When you consider that most of the anxiety around the issue is the weakening social relevance of marriage, I am left wondering how much of this investment in heterosexual marriage is based in part on restraining black sexuality?

The second point is that her position is fundamentally insulting to women and especially single mothers. To say that they should have the sperm donor in their lives assumes that they are somehow damaged and less capable without. Despite the fact that, by Ms Gallagher’s own admission, she was a single mother for a large portion of her life.

Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, managed to say some extremely articulate and moving points, most of which were ones that we are all probably familiar with to some extent. He managed to weave his words in such a way as to make his opponent seem as if she were desperately clinging to the few threads holding her worldview together. “The world is bigger and wider than we used to believe. Though this has always been the case.”

He began his statement by talking about how there was no contradiction, in his mind, between his god and his identity. His god designed bodies so that they might feel “sublime pleasure” and the enormous power to love and be loved – regardless of the source or destination. But we are taught to deny these pleasures and experiences, because the only way he and others were taught to be gay and Catholic was to be completely desexualized, which is really just another form of dehumanization. To this end he asks a pointed question to anyone who is threatened by his marriage to his husband. “Is describing a human being as pathological and inherently disordered really caring in the image of god?”

However, Mr. Sullivan was also guilty of saying some incredibly egregious things. One of his worst moments was when he made light of the endemic child abuse within the Church. “I was a good Catholic boy, an alter boy even. Somehow despite my good looks I was left alone.” Later, he went on to conflate all of the rapists with gay men, since they were obviously driven to molest children because they were taught to hide their same-gender desires.

Despite one feeble and token effort to include lesbians in the discussion, all of his references were explicitly masculine. At one point he mentioned that men are just more inclined toward sexual actions.  In fact throughout the entire discussion the point of reference was a male sexuality. Because lesbian sex just isn’t threatening. Or worth really even talking about. Obviously.

Perhaps the most astounding theme of the evening was the sheer level of cognitive dissonance presented by the opposition. Prior to the “debate” NOM operatives were handing out buttons that said “I support marriage equality.” Underneath this statement was a blue figure and a pink figure being equated to marriage. Fortunately gender is really really simple, so the colors simply restated that fact.

One of my favorites involved Ms Gallagher saying that she would reach out to a young queer kid considering suicide to try and make them feel loved and wanted. And then she would confront the bullies.

Another involved the Straight-White-Male-Republican on the panel declaring while he was “against gay marriage, he was gay tolerant.” Whatever the hell that means.

However the best moment was when a woman stood up and declared that her Catholic family had disowned her when she married a black man in the 60′s, but she did not think that gays and lesbians in Catholic families could really understand what that was like to be not have their family accept the person they love. Thus once and for all proving that the current marriage debate is nothing like inter-racial marriage.

By the end, the only thing that was really certain is that we are at a point where there is not much that can be said that has not already been said by either side. But as the room’s overall opinion proves, the time for debate is nearing an end. And it must be terrifying to be on the wrong side of that tide. As it should be.

Nico Lang is the Communications intern at Interfaith Youth Core and a senior at DePaul University. Lang co-founded Chicago’s Queer Intercollegiate Alliance and acts as head of campus outreach for the Secular Humanist Alliance of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @GidgetLang.

***

“Islamophobia is the new homophobia.”

When looking back over the year that was 2010, I am constantly bombarded with this phrase from media analysts, news commentators and interests on all sides of the spectrum.  As just about anyone with a television knows, anti-Muslim and anti-gay hate were notable presences in the final half of our calendar year.  “Bullying” became the buzzword du jour, as the media scrambled to respond to an epidemic of LGBT suicides, most notably epitomized by the Tyler Clementi scandal.

However, rather than seeing bullying as uniquely targeting the queer community and queer youth, shouldn’t we also be using it to describe what’s happening to American Muslims?  For me, this year showed that homophobia and Islamophobia are not so thinly divided, that hate binds us all.

In the Muslim case, we started out the year by drawing blasphemous depictions of the Prophet of Islam.  Then Fox News told us “they were building a Mosque on Ground Zero,” and even that “liberal elite” New York Times scrambled to interview people who felt like that gosh darned “Mosque” didn’t belong there.  Now, Newt Gingrich wants to make America safe from Shariah law and, by extension, from Muslims.

Ask yourself: Is this not bullying?

Of course, it is.  This was the year of mid-term elections so bullying and demonizing minorities once again became incredibly profitable for the Right, notably the Pam Gellers and Tea Partiers of America.  Islamophobia wasn’t just spreading across the country.  Groups with an interest reanointing Islam the Supreme Evil had to be spreading it.

Gays understand this phenomenon well, especially those that lived through the 2004 elections.  When a right-wing group wants to drum up support for their platform, that wily homosexual agenda acts as a simple scapegoat.  Although linking Tinkie Winkie’s purse to 9/11 and the downfall of America may a relic of the past, the industry of homophobia is alive and well.  Just ask Tony Perkins, the American Family Association or Sarah Palin’s daughter.

Although FBI data showed that actual hate crimes are decreasing, gays still remain the most retaliated against minority group in the country, joined by Jews and, yes, Muslims.  Analysts warn that gay rights victories may increase the amount of anti-gay violence across America, just as increased Muslim visibility after Park51 led to unspeakable acts of hate.  After events like stabbing of a Muslim cab driver in New York, many Muslims stated that they had never been so scared to live in America.

Gallup data further proved that their fear is justified.  A majority of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Islam, and more than a quarter identify as extremely prejudiced against the religion.

At a time when a majority of Americans likewise still believe that homosexuality is a sin, activists like Sherry Wolf believe that our struggles make gays and Muslims natural allies.  Although we surely cannot excuse the anti-gay policies of fundamentalist Islamic countries like Iran, this in no way represents all or even most Muslims, and Wolf states that we must look past these divides to find common ground.  Doing so is crucially important for “any oppressed people, whether…black, LGBT [or] immigrant” to fight for equality for all.

Last Spring, a dialogue between notable Chicago Muslims, like Hind Makki of the Interfaith Youth Core, and members of the Secular Humanist Alliance of Chicago (SHAC) proved that we can find the common language to be able to articulate our shared struggles.  Discussing the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day controversy, the event’s Muslims and LGBTQA members of SHAC found that our perspectives were motivated by the same thing: a need to feel safe and secure in our communities.

Recently, Hind Makki put it even more succinctly.  Recently, Makki devised a Twitter hash tag around the topic of “Gays and Muslims Have a Lot in Common,” and the response in the affirmative has been incredible.

As a queer activist and intern at Interfaith Youth Core, I find commonality in the struggles of Muslim allies like Hind, who chooses to wear the headscarf at a time when one simple expression of her core identity is sadly unpopular. Although choosing to lead my life as an out queer man led to some harassment and hatred, I can only imagine what life is like for Hind’s queer co-religionists.

Whether Muslim, queer or queer and Muslim, all of us just want to be true to our selves and to be respected for exactly who those people are.  We want to live in a society where we aren’t wedge issues, where we have the ability to create the homes, the families and the communities we so badly want.

What this year has shown us is that we must work together to build them.

Dan Savage, who is typically quite critical of religion, tells the BigThink.com how a Catholic priest helped his mother come to terms with his homosexuality.

You can find the original article here, or check out the video below.

We used to pray, when I was little, when the family was young and the occasion was important and we were forced into this odd intimacy, with the mystical tones of something like church but at home. As a child the ritual was like a magic show, waiting spellbound as the secretive words were spoken.

Soon, as many families take a seat at their Thanksgiving table, after the food is set but just before the feasting begins, a paralyzing moment will occur. What now? They’ll wonder, glancing left and right. Should we pray? Uncomfortable seconds will tick by. Finally, someone will ask to be passed something and people will dig in, grateful to get on with it.

My oldest brother Hal would pray at the dinner table with his head weighed heavily in his hands, as if he had a massive migraine or was avoiding the paparazzi. Maybe he was just embarrassed, since the act seemed so foreign and mortifying, like peeing in front of one another.

Once, Mom asked Dad to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the Thanksgiving table. He started strong and then the words came more slowly, until his memory of the prayer – recited every Sunday in church services he wouldn’t attend – failed him. Everyone just sat there in awkward silence, staring at our dad the heathen, until my mother finally prompted him, utilizing a Nancy Reagan whisper into his shirtsleeve.

It was about that time that prayer was discontinued at our dinner table. For a few Thanksgivings someone would suggest we all say what we were thankful for, but the practice faded. It seemed like some sort of consolation anyway. All the magic had long since been revealed.

Today, my recovery from being a drug addict includes many suggestions about prayer. It’s encouraged, primarily for me to exercise enough humility to acknowledge there are powers greater than myself. After years of selfish using and living on my wits alone, it’s an important reminder. But that doesn’t mean I do it. Pray, that is.

I’ve been getting by with the claim that I meditate. Just the word “meditation” has less of the religious baggage than “prayer.” It feels less embarrassing, more reasonable. Maybe I’m remembering Hal, with his head buried in his hands.

I do believe that an awesome power, a god out there somewhere, is responsible for my existence and good fortune. I’m just not in the habit of chatting him up to express my appreciation or even for a passing hello. Which means, if I believe something created me, I must be one ungrateful son of a bitch.

Interesting. I’ll have to meditate about this.

Submitted by Nico Lang, TNG contributor

Nicholas Lang is the Communications Intern for Interfaith Youth Core and a Senior in International Studies at DePaul University. Nick just started up DePaul’s first film club, the DePaul A.V. Club, and represents the lone agnostic among 2010-2011′s Vincent and Louise House residents, who represent DePaul’s Catholic intentional living and social justice community. Lang co-founded the Queer Intercollegiate Alliance, which builds community among Chicago’s LGBT campus groups, and acts as a regular contributor to NonProphet Status, the DePaulia newspaper and DePaul Interfaith’s blog. Also, Nick is the new head of Campus Outreach for the Secular Humanist Alliance of Chicago. Occasionally, Nick sleeps.

When I heard about Tyler Clementi for the first time, I looked into the face of a stranger. I didn’t know his middle name or what he was really like, but when I heard that he had leapt off of a bridge to take his own life I cried. When I heard about Tyler Clementi for the first time, I saw that many commentators and bloggers were confused by this sudden suicide, said that they couldn’t fathom the incredible loneliness that leads to such a drastic action.When I heard about Tyler Clementi for the first time, I cried because I did understand. I cried because America is full of Tyler Clementis. I cried because I was Tyler Clementi.

When I heard about Tyler Clementi for the first time, I thought about the first time I pondered committing suicide.

When I, too, Contemplated Suicide

It was 7th grade; I was in gym class, wearing shorts ten sizes too big for me and a thick gold chain with a cross at the end. Thinking about suicide was surprisingly easy.  I knew exactly which pills I would take.  I knew what my body would look like when my grandmother discovered it in the morning. I knew the words I would write to my family, knew I would take the longing looks I sent to a certain male classmate with me to my grave. I couldn’t name my feelings, but I knew I wasn’t like everyone else. I knew I wanted to be the same, to cover up the Agatha Christie books I read in secret, to feign interest in the bland rap songs the other students were blaring.

And if I couldn’t minimize my difference, I would execute it.

Throughout high school, I would devise a number of ways to kill myself, some melodramatic, others rather macabre; my preferred method involved a simple revolver to the head in my stepfather’s dilapidated pick-up truck. I even made it into a favorite pastime, finding myself surprisingly adept at doodling my Rube Goldergesque strategies in my notebooks. For me, suicide was the only way to sublimate the secrets I couldn’t share, to minimize the hurt of having my backpack thrown in a garbage can, to deafen the “gay jokes” of a father who had to know what he was doing to his oldest son.

When I came out in my Very-Southern Baptist church at sixteen, a few of my fellow churchgoers were wildly supportive: one boasted that he had been fired from his job at a car wash because of the HRC Equality Symbol that rested proudly on his windshield. However, I was largely met with indifference or scorn, and the week after my sexuality’s unveiling, the subject of Sunday’s sermon was something akin to “San Francisco: How the 21st Century Sodom and Gomorrah is Destroying Your Family.” Although all sinners were in the hands of an angry God, the head pastor sat me down that day to explain to me that God reserved his most special brimstone for us “flamers.” In particular, God was waiting for me specifically, waiting to “cut me down” like a Johnny Cash song.  God may have been loving and forgiving for normal folks, but He doomed gays to a life of ostracizion and depression.

In conclusion, my pastor sent me away with a simple homework assignment: change. He asked me to read those Bible passages about my “abomination” and gave me some helpful anti-pornography literature. With a little help from Jesus’ friends in the publishing industry, I was to turn from a sinner into a winner.

After that day, I never went back.

Religion: A Dividing Tool

In my case, and in many other cases, religion was used as a tool to divide us, a way to mark “others.” For extremist Salafi Muslims, labeling fellow Muslims as “kafirs,” which translates to apostates or non-believers, allows these radicals to wage violent jihad against their own people.  In my case, labeling me a sinner allowed my co-religionists to wage spiritual violence against me, to rhetorically put me to death. I once went to a service where the pastor told us that God loved all of His weeds, but I wondered why I was labeled a “weed.” Why was my difference so pejorative, so ugly? Why was my difference always in need of heavenly forgiveness?  Everyone else seemed to agree that weeds like me needed to exterminated, that AIDS was God’s lawnmower. They were so busy telling me to die that I never got around to wondering about how to live.

Years of Pat Robertson condemning me to Hell, Jerry Falwell condemning me to Hell, my grandmother condemning me to Hell only served to further support their argument. When I read about Anita Bryant telling good, God-fearing Americans that they had to “Save the Nation” from people like me, I understand that it’s our culture that teaches LGBT kids to hate themselves. How can we truly speak of change in our society when Focus on the Family ads still proclaim to be saving Americans from us, when Bush’s outspoken opposition to gay marriage largely got him elected in 2004? We uphold the loneliness of LGBT kids when we tell them that their love doesn’t belong in this church, their love can’t go to this prom, their love isn’t legal in this state.

In his seminal book, “Acts of Faith,” Interfaith Youth Core founder Eboo Patel speaks of a “Faith Divide” that permeates today’s society, a religious intolerance that leads people of separate faiths to blow each other up. To borrow from Mr. Patel, what I see in the midst of the LGBT suicide epidemic is a Gay Divide:  One which arms good Christians, good Jews, good Muslims to destroy people they don’t know. In a letter published in the Salt Lake Tribune, William Germain writes that recent events show a growing “divide in the way we treat each other, whether with religion, race, sex or politics. We have become a people of hate…It’s almost like we’re fighting a bunch of civil wars, and for no reason.”

In an article for the Washington Post, columnist Mitchell Gold likewise finds that these divides can “have deadly consequences. Gay youth who are rejected or ostracized by their families are at high risk of depression, substance abuse, HIV infection, and dropping out of school. They are also at least four times more likely than other youth to commit suicide. For gay youth who are sent to a therapist who tries to change their sexual orientation, that risk is even higher. Let me emphasize, it is not their being gay that puts them at risk but rather how they are treated by their parents and clergy.” Gold’s column was in response to recent remarks by media demagogue Tony Perkins, who has used the “bullying” controversy to publicly insist that it’s not society’s intolerance that leads to the suicide of kids like Tyler. Perkins affirms that what drives them to suicide is an understanding of their own immorality.

Although people like Tony Perkins, and the many others like him, many be on the front lines of this conflict, Gold seems to insist that an entire system of religious teaching and preaching is implicit in perpetuating the Gay Divide. Gold writes, “During my visits with people of faith in all parts of the country, I have spoken with Evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews who have been taught that homosexuality is immoral and wrong. Almost invariably, they are surprised and concerned when they hear about the harms caused by those teachings. Many have told me they had not fully considered the impact on a gay young person of being told that he is sinful and abnormal, or that he will be cut off from God’s love unless he can do the impossible and change who he is.”

Certainly, the members of my church never stopped to consider what the effect that their condemnation would have on me, the years of psychological damage that thinking God didn’t, couldn’t possibly, love you would cause. I spent years hating God because of the bigotry of one man, and I was lucky that such sentiments didn’t have the same ultimate effect on me that it had on Tyler. Although I am no longer at the point where I call myself a believer, I know what my travails made me believe in: the power of communities to heal. In high school, I didn’t have God, but I had friends to lift me up, friends who understood what being an outcast was like.  I had the guidance of a history teacher, who was deterred from taking his own life by the kindness of a complete stranger. These allies were living proof of Dan Savage’s assertation that “It Gets Better.”

Religion: A Uniting Force

And I’m here to tell you: it does get better. I don’t believe in a God, but as a member of the Vincent and Louise House, which is DePaul’s Catholic intentional living community, I have nine faithful housemates that I do believe in. As a queer man, I believe in the power of allies like these to help heal the hurt we that we share, to build bridges across social divides. At a recent DePaul vigil to honor the number of LGBT youths who have taken their lives in recent months, a mother from PFLAG came to talk about her unfailing support for her gay son, and another speaker related that their mother’s support in a time of crisis saved their life. But the incredible diversity of attendees showed that this mantle has been taken up by more than just our mothers. In the crowd, I saw teachers, students, friends and lovers standing together, people committed to a better world, committed to making America a safer place for our “weeds” to grow in.

Just as importantly, I stand in solidarity with people of faith committed to speaking about intolerance and calling for change.  Following these controversies, religious leaders like Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach preached understanding and tolerance, wrote that our congregations have a place for all people, regardless of sexuality.  But what really inspires me are the people who have come together to take action towards building a culture where people of faith and LGBT people are not seen as diametrically opposed. An ideological cousin to the “It Gets Better” project, the “Faith Gets Better” campaign, an initiative by Faith in Public Life, argues that hatred and bigotry divide us, not religion. These courageous religious folks — some queer, some allies — show us that religion can be a force for good in this conflict.

The “queer people of faith” involved in LGBT Change’s The Faith Project likewise testify to the fact that religion does have the power to affirm people of all backgrounds and sexualities. But at the initiative’s launch on Oct. 20, the evening’s speakers preached a far more important message: faith cannot get better all on its own. If we want a world where religion unites rather than divides, where LGBT kids are safe in their own communities, we have to build it.

As an intern for Interfaith Youth Core, we recently launched the Better Together campaign, where we are asking people a similar question: “What If?” What world could we build if “we took action together?” I already know what this world could look like. I see it every day when people come together to dialogue around difference, when people decide that we are better than inherited hatreds.  I see it in the faces of my ever-loving brothers, who never had to work to “accept me” for who I am, whose support and solidarity was as easy as an embrace. I look in their eyes and know that this better world is there, waiting for us to fight for it.

We all have a role in building a society where we love past difference: where we teach our children not to hate each other, where we teach adults not to hate each other, where we are not alone. To be Better Together, all it takes is to be an ally to someone. So, all of you reading this — people of faith, people of no faith — tell someone today that you love them for exactly who they are. Tell them that they don’t need to die for you to stand in solidarity with them. Rather than waiting until it’s too late to honor a loved one, hold up a candle for them today. Taking action now might save a life.

Gay people, or at least some gay people, have been fighting for decades to integrate their style of life with their religious beliefs. Here in America, there are some congregations that accept gay people and there are even some gay preachers. However, even some of the more progressive churches are reluctant to accept gay people and the Catholic Church calls gay people to chastity: that means to not be sexual in any way at all.

But is it possible to put together religion and gay life? I think we need to ask first if it is possible to put together religion and plain human life. The Thinking Atheist thinks it is not. How is it possible for a newborn to be a sinner? In this video they explain clearly how Christianity made it possible centuries ago. The argument is hard and is exposed clearly. If you are a religious person, be prepared. If you are not, then just enjoy the show and let these guys put some ideas together!

To watch some of the Dan Savage videos, go to: http://bigthink.com/dansavage

Dan Savage said on his Big Think channel that “Religious people have to reconcile themselves to ignore what the Bible says about gay people.”

I remember talking to a guy that insisted sex was only for procreation and not just for fun –  he was a liberal gay democrat – and he was against the condom. I could not understand why, so to illustrate his position he used Ratzinger.  I asked him how many siblings he had and he told me he had a brother and a sister. I argued to him that then his parents had sex just one time for a child and then they respected a chastity vote. Nobody, not even he could stand something like that.

Of course, his parents never listened to Dan Savage. I think this is the first time that I knew that somebody says that we should talk to children about sex and its non-reproductive aspects, because they are more than the reproductive aspects. Sex has a major role in society: it creates boundaries, institutions, roles… and sometimes a lot of fun. However, when people don’t know about it, it can also create much suffering.

People should read the Bible. I did and it is very difficult to understand. The Bible is not just one book, but many of them. That is what “Bible” actually means: books. They have been written in different times with hundreds years of difference… which is why religious people just ignore some content of it.

Dan Savage remarks that people usually ignore what the Bible says about things like, for example,  slavery

“ However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.  You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land.  You may treat them as your property…” (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)  or women “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” (I Corinthians 11:3).”

They still use the Bible to condemn homosexuality, even though its equally extremist. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination… Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:.. And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.” (Leviticus 18: 22, 24, 25)

Shouldn’t we have a more critical reading of these books, or a  reading at least? I think sometimes Christianity is based in some other book!

So Bishop Gene Robinson, the gay Anglican minister who has caused quite a bit of controversy for his mere existence, has announced that he will step down from his post seven years early. It’s not satisfaction in a job well done that leads to this news, unfortunately. It’s the steady cavalcade of death threats and personal stress that comes with being a queer religious figure, Robinson told the Guardian.

Robinson will be retiring early, in January 2013, robbing the world of one of its rare non-pop-star gay heroes and showing that some heteros really can’t take it when the divide between straight privilege and queer rights (or lack thereof) grows smaller. While people may always take personal or moral offense at LGBT folks in positions of power, someone has to feel very threatened and angry to actually wish that person dead.

And this raises an important question: Are public queer figures indebted to the public first or their own happiness? I think that the world would be a much different place today if some civil rights activists hadn’t put everything on the line to ensure that things got better, but they might have lead much more peaceful and happy lives. I want Robinson to enjoy the things that I do, like a death-threat-free existence with his husband,  but I hate that we live in a world where people have to choose. What do you think, TNG?

In Barcelona they had an interesting idea for protesting against Benedict XVI (B16) and the church’s policy against the non-reproductive sex: they will gather same sex couples for kissing in B16’s face. It’s a queer kissing flashmob“Our goal is to express this disagreement from a place of passion, sensuality and love rather than from a place of violence,” said a blog created for the event. The smooching event is planned for November 7th at 9am at Barcelona Cathedral.

If the Catholic Church did change it policy, I imagine it would play out a little bit like this:

In Argentina, the first Latin American country that established marriage equality, some progressive Catholic voices are now raising at the interior of the church: “Gay marriage is now a fact and we need to embrace the new couples in the heart of the church,” said a priest who spoke on the promise of anonymity. “Now we need to renew our ethics to make gay people feel guilty because having sex, in the same way that straight people once felt, but in the heart of the mother church. Gay marriage is a new market for visionary priests.”

“The task is difficult,” said the priest, “and that is why the church has been so reluctant in this matter. We need to be very creative to invent new sins for gay people and creativity has not been the most distinctive characteristic of the priests. In the gay couples’ case, we cannot just forbid contraceptives or abortion. I am now preparing a prohibition for gay divorce, in the same direction as our prohibition for straight divorce! In that way a new church can enter in a new era of equality making everybody equally miserable.”

Our anonymous priest told us a little history: “Catholic marriage was invented by Ganimedes of Cesarea in the year 210. His objective was to make people miserable, because miserable people turn to God instead of worldly pleasures. Some versions tell that he had constipation the day he received the divine inspiration.” The priest also told us that these documents are in the Vatican Secret Archive and they will be disclosed soon.

“We are now in a new era: homosexual people will not be called gay anymore! They will be as miserable as straight people, so there will be nothing gay about being homosexual. Soon we will see a version of Married with Children with a homosexual Al Bundy that is as miserable as his straight counterpart.”

Is the objectionable content of the video what deserves attention, or was the Italian media correct in writing off this video as some kind of “Priests Gone Wild?”

Still from Fish Out of Water

Ky: Here’s the thing: I love science. I’m a voracious reader. I’d rather stay in and learn than go out half the time. I have this deep curiosity that really makes me infatuated with science. So I reject the idea that only dumb people or uneducated people believe in God because I marvel at science and knowledge. However, I also marvel at what I consider to be signs of something greater. Simple things like the fact that the largest mammal on earth eats the smallest plankton. And I marvel at the idea of consciousness. My chest hurts and feels heavy if I am doing something or saying something that will hurt someone or diminish them in some way. I’ve been mid-gossip before and I feel this terrible anguish. I might keep going but I know I’m being untrue to something in me. And those little things make me believe that there is something.

TNG: Right. I think, unfortunately, when people dismiss the (to me) totally illogical idea that there’s a big dude in the sky wagging his finger at me when I do “bad” things with my fingers, they also adopt this adamant rejection of an appreciation of mystery. Which is really discouraging; just because I don’t believe in God doesn’t mean I don’t lose my shit over the unexplainable occurrences of life.

Ky: Yeah. And I also realize that it might just make me feel better to believe. It does feel better to believe that life continues and that answers happen. The main reason I believe goes back to my finding of faith in the first place, which was at the time of my friend’s accident and my brother’s suicide attempt, when I had these two surreal experiences. Almost out of body experiences that might be TMI to tell the general public. But they made me believe forever. Whoa. Heavy.

TNG: Heavy, but real. Even the most adamant atheist will admit that life is hard.

Ky: Chris, I don’t believe that you don’t believe in God anymore. Can I say that? I think somewhere you do.

TNG: [Laughs.] You can totally say that. Dude, I hear it every day. And not just from atheists who accuse me of being a “spy for the enemy.” I mean, hell, I have to admit it seems pretty silly to say I don’t believe in God; I’m in a spiritual direction program, for crying out loud.

Ky: Curiosity is the purest reaction to something you love.

TNG: But seriously, I don’t, in the sense that I think the word “God” is too fundamentally tainted. It’s just inadequate. God means personified deity to me, which is not something I believe in.

Ky: You did, though, for a long time. So what happened? Why did you stop believing?

TNG: You know, it wasn’t some instantaneous decision to stop believing in God like it was to start. It was a little more gradual. I kept holding on to this belief, thinking I needed to have it in order to participate in the kinds of things religion puts forth. But I began to realize I had the agency to make those things happen for myself; to carve out my own community apart from church, and also to sit alongside believers at a church service and absorb the warmth they produced.

Ky: But do you not believe in God because of truly not believing or because of the taintedness of the word? Because I get the tainted feeling. I think even church feels tainted sometimes. I’m almost embarrassed to talk about any of it sometimes because it carries such a negative connotation. However, as we can both imagine, I was forced to get over that, but I still feel the “shame” that can come with believing. It’s real, it’s out there, and it’s easy to not want to claim something that is going to make others automatically think you are uneducated or lame.

TNG: But it was more than that. I realized that I didn’t need to believe in God to make moral choices or to do “good work.” I didn’t even need to believe in God to think that Jesus was among the most important people ever to have lived.

Ky: Yeah. I didn’t either. I totally understand; it was about the community, the feeling of “fellowship.” But I never got the good works thing. That felt controlling and contrived to me. I like people being loving and real with each other. And faith communities, if really convicted, I think do work from a place of love and selflessness.

TNG: You’re so right—and I also totally understand the “shame” bit. I get viewed suspiciously all the time for the interfaith work I do. But ultimately I just came to think that “God” was a beautiful metaphor but not a reality for me. That doesn’t mean I think that those who believe in God are delusional; “to each her own,” right?

Ky: Right. So you are still attracted to the warm, communal aspects of faith?

TNG: Yeah, I am. I’m a total softy! Though I shouldn’t say that on here because I’ve got a reputation to uphold! And I don’t have your tomboy background cred to balance it out. [Laughs.] But, as a friend of mine always says, “being a person is hard.” So religion’s got it right in aiming to make being a person a bit easier. But I also don’t think that religion should have the market cornered on that; and it doesn’t. Just look at our queer communities. I felt just as loved the other night when we were at FKA as I have in some churches! [Laughs.]

Credit: Flynnworks

Ky: But I think that’s why we can shun religion but not faith. I shun religion. I think religion is a man-made, money hungry, power driven, socialistic, heterosexist, patriarchal institution of B.S. that was created simply to tame the masses. However, faith—that is what I imagine Native Americans felt. This sense of connection, of wonderment with nature, the feeling of ancestry and wisdom sourcing from an unidentifiable place inside your gut. This is what I relate to; this is what I believe and I think many of us are going through the transition of kicking off the chains of religion while reaching for the simplicity of faith.

TNG: I couldn’t have said that any better myself. You know, you should really consider this Spiritual Direction program I’m in. [Laughs.]

Ky: Yeah, right? Advertising is getting tiring. I could use a change. [Laughs.]

TNG: To conclude my answer to your question, I guess I am a public secularist because I want to encourage people who find the term God inadequate, like myself, to not throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater; to recognize that they can still explore the incomprehensible possibility of all that is mysterious without having to believe in capital G god. And to also consider the idea that the existing religions have already done a lot of that work for us and contain really great fodder for considering those things. I love doing interfaith work because I get to learn how to pray from a female Hijabi Muslim friend who is nearly a black belt, talk about Christ as a radical social reformer with an evangelical Christian, and still sit there and say “I don’t believe in God.” I get to take those things seriously while still knowing what I (think I) know.

Ky: I think faith is often an acknowledgement that life holds wonderment that we can never understand. It’s a humility in the vastness of our interconnectedness. It’s the respect for our pervasive, fragile human need to simply love and be loved. Faith is the curiosity it takes to keep asking questions so that we can try to understand where we came from, why we’re here and where we’re going. I think faith has less to do with church or Jesus and more to do with a realistic perspective of our slight yet magnificent humanness.

TNG: Absolutely! But here’s why I think atheism can be so amazingly spiritual.

Ky: Go for it. Are we converting each other? [Laughs.]

TNG: Yeah, I’m not going to be satisfied unless you walk out of this conversation a hard-line atheist. [Laughs.] Anyway, maybe we can’t understand “why we’re here”—because maybe there is no reason. We just are here, for no reason at all. Nothing got me here but randomness and chance. To me that idea is even more amazing than the thought of being a part of some “plan,” you know?

Ky: Yeah.

TNG: But see, here again I think we’re bumping up against the problem of language. The more we talk, the more I see that we’re saying similar things, just in different ways, like we sometimes see in the religions. We’re all just speaking from our own experiences and endeavoring the best we can to connect them to larger narratives of interconnectedness, historicity and meaning.

Ky: Absolutely. I think about what you just said often. The fact that we’re all here means that we’re the survivors. You and I and everyone else on earth has, in their bloodline, those that slithered along the banks of marshes or caught dinner with a fork-toothed tongue, or burrowed and forged through ice age after ice age. I mean, the folks left here are amazing survivors. And I dig it and agree that maybe there is nothing, but then why do we communicate? Why do humans commit suicide? Seriously? That is the most anti-evolutionary thing ever conceived. Why do we feel such pain when someone dies? Why do we want so badly to have attention? To have connection? To have partnership? Why does regret eat at a human being like acid? Why is shame more debilitating than a broken leg?

TNG: [Pause.] Ky, you’re killing me here. We need to be having this conversation in person, in the back corner of a poorly lit bar. Drinking PBR, of course—this “urban” cliche can’t change his striped XS American Apparel fitted tee.

Ky: [Laughs.] I know, I know. And yeah, we really do. It’s like an old man poet comes out and just can’t help himself. See why I was teased now? I was talking like that at 6. “Why does regret eat a human being like acid?” I seriously just said that. I’ll genuinely believe in nothing if you publish that.

TNG: You’d better believe I’m gonna run that line! And I can relate, since I tried to teach myself Hebrew as a child. Man, we could on and on and on but I think we should bring this to a “conclusion,” knowing these conversations never actually end. To be continued! Hopefully with a PBR in my right hand and a cute guy distracting my eye while putting something good on the jukebox.

Ky: Yes! To be continued. You, Christopher Stedman, have gotten me to open up about things that I’ve never told anyone else, especially others in the media. And I think the reason why is because I feel like we are cut from the same cloth. So either I’m an atheist, you have faith, or we’re both Native American. So now you, Mr. Stedman, are the first to know this film did not start at Vanderbilt. It did not start with Tri Delt sorority sisters, but it started with the fear of being totally rejected by the sweet Christians who took me in when my family was so dysfunctional that I had to cry on their couch instead. Go figure.

TNG: Well Ky, that story needs to be told, I think. Because it’s the full story.

Ky: Yeah, I know. I didn’t realize it until tonight until you asked.

TNG: And I think our stories should be honored. Especially our queer stories. And our religious stories. Which are one and the same, right?

Still from Fish Out of Water

Ky: They are one and the same. I’m telling you that dozens have asked; maybe even hundreds. But truly, you are a Jedi.

TNG: “The Force.” I’m more comfortable with that than I am with “God,” but maybe that’s because I collected Star Wars cards as a kid. [Laughs.]

Ky: Cool. Me too. Let’s both believe in The Force. Can we pray to The Force? Also, I think that’s the name of the Chicago women’s football team.

TNG: Awesome! But besides that football team, I don’t want to pray to anything; but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to pay attention, reflect, and put forth good energy.

Ky: Oh no! [Laughs.] Here we go.

TNG: [Laughs.] Oh man, sorry! I can’t help myself, it’s just so automatic to me. It’s a “conversation for the ages;” so easy to slip into. I can’t believe people say you shouldn’t discuss religion over dinner. What else is there to discuss?

Ky: Right? What’s wrong with those people? Or sex or politics? There’s nothing better to discuss.

TNG: Maybe they’re right though; it’s probably better over beers. [Laughs.] I think they’re afraid, Ky. And I used to be, so I get it. We don’t want to be “wrong.” But the thing is, you can’t be “wrong” if you recognize that we’re all trying our best and limited in our experiences and abilities to process and express.

Ky: Yes, I agree. There is no wrong. Just conversation. It’s so funny: one of my biggest frustrations when going out is not getting to know what someone feels or fears, what someone is struggling with, etc. So small talk, over dinner at a bar, to me feels like being thirsty all the time.

TNG: Absolutely. I think you’re my “soulmate,” Ky. [Laughs.] Don’t tell your girlfriend!

Ky: I know! We’re platonic soulmates! I’m going to draw us a picture. We have so many good tweets in this conversation. Because one just came to me!

TNG: You and your Twitter. You’re a twitter prophet, too. Everyone should follow Ky on twitter! [Laughs.] Yeah; and to think I wanted to talk social networking with you during this “interview.”

Ky: Yeah, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, no pun intended.

As you’ll soon see it went very long. Though my journalistic instincts dictate otherwise, I’ve opted to leave it somewhat intact. It’s lengthy, as much about the interviewer as it is about the interviewee, and at times pretty self-congratulatory. But, I’d like to think, it is also honest and human.

Without further ado, The New Gay “interview” with Ky Dickens.

Still from Fish Out of Water

TNG Chris: Hey Ky!

Ky: Hey!

TNG: So I figure this can be a casual, fun chat that is, on one level, about Fish Out of Water, but more broadly about queer and religious identity.

Ky: Okay, that sounds great – and the two interweave oh so well.

TNG: They do! Let’s start at the meat of things, shall we? We’ve obviously discussed Fish Out of Water a lot, both in my interview for Jettison Quarterly and as friends, but for the sake of this column, I want to ask: why make this movie? And by that I mean that I’d like to go beyond the political and educational ways in which this film functions. Why did Ky the person make this movie, more than just Ky the activist – not that those two things can ever really be divorced, of course.

Ky: There are a few answers to these questions. One element to this is that I was bullied a bit as a kid, early on. I was a bit wild and uncensored. I was a tomboy growing up so there was always a part of me did not fit in with others. I always had football pads on and was roughing up the boys in the neighborhood. I was also just goofy, with this wild imagination so I was easy to tease. Being teased manifested itself in a way that has made me very sympathetic when people are bullied. I will explain how this tied into everything in a second.

The second thing that happened in high school is that I had a really rough run my Sophomore through Senior year. My younger brother attempted suicide and I was involved in a fatal car crash where my close friend died and we were held responsible for his death for a short blip. My friend Nick, who was driving, was responsible for driving too fast, and I was held responsible for moving the body when I performed CPR. That led to a whole slew of things. And on top of this, my parents were doing terrible and my older brother was always struggling with fitting in socially.

So why does this background matter? Well, because my brothers were both a wreck, I felt this deep pressure to be a golden child. Yet I was dealing my younger brother’s suicide attempt, my parents struggling marriage and the death of my friend – and also being blamed for it. I did not want to talk to my folks about things because I wanted them to have one kid that they didn’t need to worry about. I wanted them to think I was good, happy, etc. And that’s when I met my Young Life leaders. They were these super happy, cool, awesome people that came around and listened to me, and I felt a genuine compassion from them that I didn’t find at home.

And, boom, that was when I was introduced to this world of Christianity. My family was not religious, but here was this couple that would let me cry and be weak and be scared and they would talk to me about God and I think that was when I met my faith, so to speak. It was the thing that connected me to the people that were, at that time, my safety net. I became aware of the verses about sexuality and I remember underlining them at 16 with a big pink marker, thinking, “Yep, I need to get to the bottom of this.”

TNG: Wow, Ky. That is so profoundly moving and makes me think of a lot of different things. First, I just want to say thank you for sharing those stories. One thing I love about so much of religion is its emphasis on the power narrative has to transform hearts and minds. Folks like Jesus and the Buddha excelled in telling stories, giving context to the messages they were promoting. And I think that’s one thing Fish Out of Water is really aware of – how the stories of people matter. It’s a great platform for the stories of the queer folks caught in the middle of this big debate on gay marriage and theology, and it shows it’s not just an academic discourse but about real lives. And of course, since you made the film, it’s about your life. Do you feel like Fish Out of Water tells your story well? How often do you get the opportunity to tell it? And second, I think your story echoes mine in some pretty striking ways – I also grew up in a secular home but became a Christian during a tumultuous time in my life when my family was going through a very serious crisis and found the comforts of Christian community and the message of God’s love so stirring. But I too had a significant dilemma around those verses and wound up reading them obsessively, trying to “figure them out” and feeling like I had no resources to process them, which is one reason why I think your film is so important.

Credit: Flynnworks

Ky: Wow, our paths are so similar. Right, so one element was those verses. Here were these Young Life leaders – I have this very deep memory of high school of going to their house and that’s where I’d go to cry. There is something so intimate about the person that you can crumble around, and it was the Christians! And I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be accepted because of my gayness, and yet there they were, these verses. It made me angry. I knew that a very real, intimate aspect of my relationship with them would go away if I came out. And I think I knew I had to actualize the Bible and the verses. Not because I was scared of God not loving me but because I was scared of the Christians that I loved not loving me. I never thought I was wrong in the eyes of God; I was concerned about being seen as wrong in the eyes of man. So that is uber vulnerable, but wow. There it is. The bullying stuff comes later…

TNG: Yeah, I want to hear more about the bullying. Because, you know, I was never bullied as a kid.

Ky: You? I don’t believe it! [Laughs.] Us queers. We were bullied, weren’t we? Man. I would have totally protected you if you lived on my block. I used to dress up as Superman and make my older brother, who’s really small, dress up as Lois Lane so I could save “her.”

TNG: [Laughs.] That’s amazing. But yeah, it’s so terribly silly isn’t it? Because everyone is “different.” I was also lucky to have a tough sister. So when she cried after I came out because she felt bad for calling me gay when I bought the issue of Rolling Stone with a shirtless Justin Timberlake on the cover, her vulnerability was especially cathartic for me.

Ky: She called you gay knowingly or just jokingly? Or was it a knowing joke?

TNG: She probably knew on some level, but didn’t think about how it might hurt me. But she got married last summer and had a table at the reception asking people to sign a petition for gay marriage in Minnesota and brought me, her “Man of Honor,” over to the table and cried. Later that night I made fun of her in my toast.

Ky: Wow. I love that you were her man of honor. That’s so sweet.

TNG: Yeah, she’s the best. My family has always been so supportive; one of my younger brothers got in a fight at school on the Day of Silence when a kid on his football team said his older brother was a fag. Not that I condone violence, of course… [Laughs.]

Ky: [Laughs.] Never.

TNG: Though they still do always give me shit for wearing skinny pants and having tattoos. “You’re so urban,” they say. No, y’all just live in Fargo.

Ky: Perfect! [Laughs.] So did you have the same thoughts about not being worried about God but not wanting to lose your Christian community?

TNG: See, I was scared of both. I convinced myself along the way that this was some cruel cosmic joke; I knew I hadn’t chosen to be gay but I also was told that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. Those were irreconcilable for me. I did come to that conclusion eventually, but it took me a while to get there. I had to see that attitude modeled in someone else first, and was lucky to meet an amazing queer Christian mentor.

Ky: I can imagine how that would help; the “fellowship groups” in high school, things like Young Life, seemed so special. Just being around people who were trying to be good, who listened and were there and who would always show up – I loved it and don’t think anything in your adult life can compare. I don’t really even go to church anymore. It was more pure, more organic, when you were sitting in someone’s basement in your socks and pony tails, playing guitars and talking about love.

TNG: Yeah, I completely agree with you about how powerful church communities can be. It’s why Erik and I co-founded the Secular Humanist group here in Chicago. You don’t need to believe in God to still want the things that church communities provide.

Ky: Yeah, that’s so true. I’m coming.

TNG: Of course we’d love to have you, Ky!

Ky: So, where were we? Yes, the bullying thing. This is hard to articulate.

TNG: Yes, please. I’ve a problem with staying on track in these conversations because I just love what happens when you exchange stories – it’s such a great way to identify commonalities, to make yourself known and know another person. That’s what religious communities do so well! Fuck, there I go again. Please, continue. I’ll zip my lid for a minute. [Laughs.]

Ky: I think the truth I knew in my heart, my young little, soft, innocent and very open heart, in high school was a clarity that God loved me and celebrated me but that Christians wouldn’t. So later in life, when I started becoming aware of the idea that gays and lesbians weren’t tolerated or accepted in church environments, it made me furious. It felt like the ultimate form of bullying: a bunch of grown-ups picking on people because they were different and using God as their means of justifying the spiritual swirlies they were giving to people. And if you look at the institution of the church, it really is a good thing. I don’t care if you believe in God or not – the church/temple/mosque is often the first or last place you turn to when you just lost your mom, or your job, or your fight with cancer. When you just lost hope or started drinking again or your marriages breaks up, people have the church to go to. They can go and get advice and love and companionship there regardless of whether they believe in God or not. Our places of worship function as a social safety net. And it made me so angry to think that gays and lesbians would be barred from this, would have doors locked and no net to catch them in times of hardship or despair.

Still from Fish Out of Water

TNG: Spiritual swirlies! That needs to be the title to Fish Out of Water‘s sequel.

Ky: Spiritual swirlies! [Laughs.] Yes. God, it sounds actually kinda fun.

TNG: Yeah, like a big whirlpool in the sky.

Ky: Right?

TNG: But back on track, I think you’re so right. On every account.

Ky: Thank you. That’s always such a nice sentence to hear.

TNG: Affirmation conversation! Anyway, though I totally understand why so many queers do, it really makes me sad that so many of us have written off religion altogether. And I say this as a non-theist, you know? But I still see that religion contributes so much good. Look at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X; all motivated by their religious beliefs. And I just want to encourage queers to remain open to the good religion can offer, you know? Even though we have every right not to.

Ky: Well yeah, and to be honest I have too. And what’s funny is that as I’m saying this I feel a real pang; God, I loved being involved, actively involved with God in everyday life, but once the sense of rejection set in, I rejected it first. But I also think that you can lose your church, or lose your religion, but not lose your faith. I completely still have my faith.

TNG: Totally. “Faith” has become such a dirty word in some circles, hasn’t it? I feel like it’s not too far gone though, like we can still reclaim it and use it. For example, people think faith is opposed to reason, whereas I think it’s just a natural extension of it. Faith informed by reason, if you will.

Ky: Yes, of course. It takes just as much faith to believe in something as it takes to believe in nothing.

TNG: So what do you have faith in, Ky? [Laughs.]

Ky: There is no way to answer that question without sounding totally corny. Which is interesting in and of itself.

TNG: Right. We immediately bump up against the limitations of language. Which is why I think religion is so incredible, and why we need to cut it some slack in certain departments – it’s trying to do the impossible: to take the intangible and describe it somehow. But unless you want me to make the headline “Ky Dickens Believes in Nothing,” you gotta give me something to work with. [Laughs.]

So, what does Ky believe in? Cliffhanger! Come back next week to see the rest of our conversation.

It’s 2 AM and my buddy Erik just dropped me off at my apartment after a late post-airport arrival catch-up session over dinner and beer. I open the door of my bedroom and am confronted by the remains of the harried, frantic packing of a morning nearly three weeks ago. I take a deep breath and decide that I can’t deal with it right now; hell, I probably can’t deal with it for a week or more. I strip off my clothing and climb into bed, ready to relent to exhaustion and the culture shock of being back in this room and… fuck, I’d forgotten that it was full of sand after some thoughtless rollicking on the beach right before I left town and that I’d resolved to deal with it when I got home. Oh well; I decide I can sleep in a sandbox for one night – besides, it’s possible that I have literally done just that at some point in my life. No big deal. Still I close my eyes and want to be somewhere else, a place where such mess is earned, where mess means something more than procrastination, an inability to donate infrequently worn clothing, and the sandy reminder of the life I had three weeks ago before everything changed.

Suddenly I am back in Crown Heights, New York City, at Starlite Lounge, the “oldest, black-owned non-discriminating bar.” The Bible’s got some interesting stories, sure, yet after years of biblical study I’m not sure even it can hold a candle to what I heard the night I stopped by Starlite. I signed the petition to save it from being closed, drank something invented by the bartender on the spot, and barely spoke a word. Sitting beneath dim lighting, dusty bottles and inactive disco balls, I made of myself a container to be filled with stories and mystery mixed drinks. My cup raneth over. And this night when I was told the stories of countless lovers lost to AIDS and infidelity (and, often, both) wasn’t the only time during this nearly three week trip to attend various conferences that I felt like I was in the presence of the wholly (with or without something that may or may not have contained Stoli).

So often we think of religious missionaries as the storytellers, as people inserting themselves into a foreign context to redefine the dominant narrative into something resembling their own. But in the Spiritual Direction program I’m currently enrolled in I am learning that, while there is a time and place for dictation – it would be silly for me to try to refute this notion considering the amount of “preaching” I do regarding ethical secular-religious relations – the bolder, more radical prophetic step is simply to listen.

There were moments on my trip, when I sat in quiet absorbent reverence, that I felt a bit like that allegedly young, allegedly bearded, allegedly prophetic dude wandering a small corner of the world with only the Birkenstocks on his feet and a flock of followers, except my feet were encased by glow-in-the-dark Nikes and I was saddled with two bulky bags that increased in girth with every American Apparel I saw. Still, like Jesus, I infrequently went it alone. The people delivering these stories became my people, my messiahs. In my work I aim to facilitate dialogue between diverse people, to help construct communities – so how could I not look to Jesus, who organized what has become the largest community on earth, as an example?

At each stop on this only loosely structured journey – New York City and Newark, NJ, Washington, D.C., Rochester, NY and Boston, MA – I found myself both assembling and inserted into temporary communities. In NYC it was a set of casual acquaintances from the Midwest who opened up their charming Greenpoint loft as a refuge from the trauma of watching participants at the American Atheist Convention jeer “ooh, I see an ankle!” at burka-wearing women; in D.C., my now-real-life-friends at The New Gay who distracted me from the Internet aftermath of the aforementioned incident that turned me into that day’s most despised man in Atheism (the same day I turned 23); in boarded-up downtown of Rochester, the interfaith community that embraced me as one of their own and a handsome Muslim DJ who took me to the best damn dive bar I’ve visited this year; and in Boston, my oldest friend who shared her floor and a cute new friend with a Liars concert ticket who got me in the door. None of these are people I see more than once a year, nor are they people I talk to more than once a month. Many were near strangers. These people beyond the network of my daily life buoyed by regular interaction opened their doors, their beds, their refrigerators to me, gifting me with things far greater than incense, oil or myrrh, all because I took it on myself to embark on some circuitous East Coast Chris-cross to spread the message of religious-secular dialogue like some dehydrated wild-eyed desert prophet or the weary protagonist of an LCD Soundsystem song.

It was exhausting and I am still exhausted. Establishing the intimacy of community without the precursor of a shared history means engendering a trust on nothing more than faith alone. Who says secular folks don’t believe in God? God may have died in the fires of my academic lust but this relational transcendence remains. My God is found in the almost-stranger who treats me as his brother, buying me breakfast and taking me to the bus so I have a body to grip onto several times over before I take off into the next great unknown. And though he remained where he stood as my bus drove away, I continue to cling to him (and the others) today.

I attended four conferences but it was my hosts who most profoundly impacted me. Who knows why these people agreed to take me in (my friend from high school aside). When I get overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of feeling that comes with being human, it’s easy to notice my less attractive qualities: how I’ve consumed enough of my own cuticles to be reasonably called a cannibal, how my brain rarely yields to my body’s obvious pleas to be cleaned, how my hands that so often carry a cup of coffee also tremble with such frequency that something as simple as a handshake is fertile ground for a treacherous coffee-related gaffe, how I imbibe enough of the stuff every day to be held personally responsible for economic injustice in Latin America, how I sweat so profusely – even when completely stationary – that wearing most t-shirts becomes a tragic social miscalculation. Yet somehow in spite of all this (and many less superficial, more problematic flaws I rarely advertise) I am beginning to carve out a community of people in my permanent home of Chicago who are willing to pick me up from the airport, or from a frat party at 1 AM to take me to White Castle while I sorrowfully stammer my way through a reiteration of every person I’ve wronged; people who insist I see them the night before I go out of town for a nearly three week secular sojourn even though I’d already decided to stay in and pack and thus resulting in harried, frantic bag-stuffing the morning of my flight; people who love me not by some accident of birth but because they have chosen to. And, rapturously, people who choose to do so day after day after day.

Sitting in a Rochester, NY hot tub in the warm afterglow of an affirming interfaith conference and warm, over-chlorinated water, I responded with patience and sympathy to the questions of two older women about the work that I do – “You work with Muslims? Aren’t you afraid they’ll try to convert you? Or, worse…?” – as they eyed my tight red swim trunks and scattered tattoos with suspicion, and thought of the community in Chicago that I would soon return to. A community that, unlike so much of my work, does not require that I meet them more than halfway. A community that, in fact, often meets me where I am, no questions asked. A community that is not some beautiful novelty like those I culled in New York, Newark, D.C., Rochester and Boston, but a daily lived reality.

But for those three weeks I was privileged to wander and collect new friends along the way in place of the heavenly kingdom of my home, people who took me in for a period of three days at a time with the stark awareness that such love is only temporary. And like Jesus’ preferred company, many of those I met were society’s marginalized, today’s lepers and prostitutes (TNG staff, I’m talking about you). Perhaps this is the fate of today’s new gay; to make community where she or he can find it among diversely cast-off kin, to unite us all under a common cause of loving and being loved. This must be why I do interfaith cooperation, and why, even though I am not a Christian, I have so much regard for a man named Jesus.

There are a lot of people in this world – the gays of D.C., the interfaithers of Rochester, the Liars-attending hipsters of Boston, the art school kids of Brooklyn, the angry Atheists of the Internet – and somehow, by stepping onto an airplane, then a batch of buses, trains, and another airplane, minding the turbulence with even more sweat than usual and praying for a full can instead of just half, my world expanded to include more of them. These disparate people became a part of my larger community, and I theirs.

All of us are rootless, homeless, spiritual nomads, each craving community and always just missing it, constellating meaning out of our relationships with others like so many unreachable stars. But for each glimpse I caught of the East Coast’s communities, I was reminded all the more of those who were waiting for me to climb off my self-imposed cross, push aside that heavy stone, and sit beside them where I belong, back on the ground in Chicago. I sent myself to be known but here I am home, the prodigal son in a sandy bed, resting my head on the things strangers said. I acquired some beautiful baggage, and I don’t just mean the too many overpriced American Apparel shirts I purchased.

What would Jesus do? Take a long fucking nap, I imagine. At least I had orthotic support and public transportation on my travels. Three weeks was long enough; how he wandered from city to city seeking out community for three full years is quite literally beyond me. Christians like to say that Jesus took the sins of the world with him when he called it a day; I prefer to see him as a story-collector and distributor. Likewise, though I’ve got much less to offer the world than he, I carry the stories of strangers with me into a world that is both new and full of familiarity and family.

There is no thesis to this treatise and I’m not Jesus. It is finished.

Chris’ weekly column, The Non Prophet, was on hiatus for several weeks while he traveled the East Coast to attend various conferences but is back and will be appearing bi-weekly on Wednesdays at 2 PM (EST). For more on Chris and his travels, visit his website.

The Church Releases a Coloring Book

Just in case you haven’t seen this yet, here is the latest attempt by the catholic church to alert future victims about how to avoid being molested by your priest.

In recent news the church has made some deplorable decisions in protecting the memory and reputation of a now deceased American priest who molested some 200 deaf boys. Only another notch on the totem pole of like offenses that have surfaced in the past decade regarding priests and other ranking officials of the church taking advantage of their young parishioners, this latest offense is being condemned by the world at large as well as many members of the church itself. In a recent mass a senior Vatican Priest likened the world’s outrage to sexual abuse scandals to the persecution of the Jews. Of course this only made things worse!

While the coloring book seems to be a small step in the right direction it also seems to point the finger at the victim rather than illuminating the wrongs enacted by the adults in positions of power. The whimsical angel seems to make light of this situation and I’m not sure that is good enough. If the church would just admit it’s wrong doing and condemn these priests for their actions maybe we could move forward and start preventing this from happening in the future. I also feel like allowing the priest to marry would give them an outlet for their sexual needs and hopefully kill the need to act upon young boys. With all the good the church is capable of doing, there are simultaneously a million things that need to be modernized and corrected. Like all people set in their ways, it’ll take a lot to get the church to budge and move forward. Progressive actions are not a strong point in the Vatican.

What do you think about the coloring books? A step in the right direction, or a poor attempt at admitting fault?

Here’s a link to the Newsweek article featuring the coloring book.

With both Easter and Passover this week, it’s an appropriate time to ask:  what’s your take on religion?  Important social construct or ridiculous social crutch?  Something in between?  How do you identify?  (I guess that was more than one question.  Whatevs.)

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adam – Chicago Editor

Raised as a black Roman Catholic, I’ve been Baptized, received First Communion, and got Confirmed. After coming out, and growing up, I’ve grown apart from my religion but my faith has grown stronger. I believe that religion is the foundation for you to discover and build your own faith on. Not every foundation is solid or sound and while many can be built on extreme pretenses or ideas, some can help you grow. My faith is more on my personal relationship with whoever/whatever conducts/guides life. I do believe everything happens for a reason and while there might be a higher power I’m not sure who/what that is. But my faith does help me to try to do good by others and to respect all people of all walks of life.

Maybe they were just asking to bum a smoke off one of us.

“Fags! Repent!”

Oh great – those words. Turning to meet them, I rolled my eyes as those funny, short words echoed and bounced toward me over hot summer-baked pavement. The words were intended to hurt but the insult fell flat. “I’ve heard much worse, and much more creative, fuckers,” I thought with a self-satisfied smile of superiority.

Still, I couldn’t ignore them. My friends and I were in someone’s crosshairs, singled out as needing salvation. What had started as a normal night migrating from bar to bar in search of new friends and hot beats had quickly become something of consequence. With just two words, a divide was drawn between these strangers and my cohort as cloudy and seemingly impassable as the Guinness I had just gulped.

Did this really have to happen now? I was newly 21, looking to have fun, a few drinks in and feeling a bit defensive. I wasn’t sure I was really in the mood to navigate this assault gracefully.

The battle cry had seemed to manifest out of the ether. My friends and I were between bars, enjoying our evening and ready for some spirit-ed dancing. We are not exactly a motley crew – sure, a good number of us are marked by tattoos, lightly adorned with piercings, regularly extinguishing cigarettes, and dressed in clothing that might raise a few Sunday morning eyebrows, but we are an amicable bunch and my feeling is that we do not alienate others in spite of our appearances. Yet as we approached a queer bar one humid August night and prepared to pop, lock and drop it we were confronted by several men with Bibles in hand, accusing us of maintaining an “alternative lifestyle” – a phrase that always makes me smirk, as if there were such a thing as a uniform lifestyle when you cut to the bone of things – and offered our “offensive” appearance as evidence of this. (Or maybe we just had some serious gay face going on.)

My friends were clearly caught off guard – after all, we were just there to party – and responded in self-defense, though in all fairness I thought that some of what they had to say was not in the best taste. Slightly embarrassed, I thought to myself: “Well, politeness is not readily facilitated by beer and not easy when one feels ambushed.”

Sensing escalation, I suggested my friends move inside, recognizing that the conversation was quickly becoming aggressively didactic, not thoughtfully dialogical. They were happy to oblige – they had come to dance, not debate. A friend whispered in my ear as he passed by, “are you going to be okay?”

Maybe if they added some strobe lights and subwoofers my friends would've stayed for the conversation.

Though I’d had a lot of experience speaking with folks who disagreed with me, I suddenly wasn’t sure. I felt compelled to pursue a conversation with these individuals; perhaps because of a recent attempt that had gone terribly awry, or maybe just as a part of who I am. Either way, I sensed that they desired dialogue, so I went for it.

Our conversation began with a reading from the Bible, not intended to open dialogue with a graceful spirit but as a blatant attempt to proselytize. I thanked them for sharing their holy book with me, and asked if they would like to explain to me why they had chosen to spend their Friday evening on this particular street corner. They informed me that they had recently given their lives over to Jesus Christ and had been commissioned by their minister to recruit other believers. They had heard that this part of Chicago was “heavily populated by homosexuals” – you know, flooded with queers – and decided to come spread their message of reformation and repentance to a community that they believed was in need of it.

After hearing them out, I asked if I might be allowed to share my story with them. To my surprise, they nodded affirmatively. I told them of my years as a Christian and how immensely powerful they were for me – the love that I experienced, the joy I found in communion with other believers, and the inspiration Jesus Christ provided me. But there was a darker side to those years: my struggles with recognizing my sexual orientation and wrestling to reconcile it with the teachings of the tradition, the shame I felt over who I was, and the weight of what felt like living a double life. This was a very difficult time for me, and I shared with them every embarrassing, difficult detail.

When I was finished, I noticed that a quiet had overtaken the group. Finally, one member spoke up. With a gruff tone and eyes fixed down, he thanked me for sharing my story with him, saying that he had never actually known a “homosexual.” He hadn’t thought what it might be like to experience intolerance for being queer, comparing it to the xenophobia and racism he had known as a Mexican-American immigrant.

We engaged in open discourse for the next few hours with candor and respect, discussing discrimination and dancing and difference, beer and bigotry and basketball, religion and rap music and respect, fags and forgiveness and frijoles. Though we all remained fixed in our convictions, we came to understand one another as fuller human beings, not caricatures of our sexualities or religious identities.

Not all conversations go as well as this one – as I alluded to earlier, another summer night just one month prior to this incident, a friend and I found ourselves suddenly surrounded in a subway tunnel. We had been talking at length and not paying close attention to our surroundings, something my mother always warned me about, when we lifted our heads to see that we were encircled by a group of men who accused us of sin and sickness. Though I attempted peace-making and dialogue, the incident ended in violence.

I’ll never forget the night I was attacked on the Chicago Red Line; though I’d like to believe open dialogue can always overcome problematic conversations, I know that this is not true. As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, I have learned that there are times where personal safety is a higher priority than respectful engagement.

Yet I will also always remember my night outside a gay bar, sharing stories as bass-heavy music floated right on by me, carried away on a cool summer night’s breeze, my friends dancing just inside to a song I’d never know – I enraptured by music much sweeter in the form of dialogue despite difference with new friends who were supposed to be enemies.

Hey missionaries of the world – get at me. I’ve been burned a time or two, but I’m still your fag.

Chris’ column, The Non Prophet, runs Wednesdays at 2 PM. His column will be on sabbatical for a few weeks while Chris travels the country for three conferences this month. For more, visit his website.