“Where Are My Loved Ones?”: June Jordan, July 4, and Palestine

On Instagram today, I saw a post by Jewish Voices for Peace that emphasized the parallels between the colonization of Turtle Island and Palestine. It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share a paper I wrote this Spring semester that looks at June Jordan’s poetry about Palestine.

Jordan was nothing if not intersectional and prophetic. She was not afraid to highlight the connections between the U.S. and the State of Israel as colonizing forces—and criticize the complicity and silence of the American public in regard to both. And this was in the 1980s when it was even more verboten to name Israel as a colonizing power than it is today. Even in the progressive feminist circles of which Jordan was a part, her support of Palestinian liberation was controversial.

But more on that below. You can read several of Jordan’s poems on Palestine here. For more, check out this collection of Jordan’s work, Directed By Desire, at bookshop.org, your local bookstore, or your local library.

“Where Are My Loved Ones?”: June Jordan’s Rhetoric in “Moving towards Home”

Introduction

June Jordan’s poetry and activist work challenged various forms of imperialism, racism, and ethnic cleansing in different countries (Harb 72), including the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Even though it was Jewish and Israeli activists who first politicized Jordan on Israel (Feldman 209), and many of the activists and organizers who sustained Jordan in her work were Jewish women (217), Jordan’s support of Palestinians was very controversial. In 1985, Jordan published Living Room, a collection featuring poems on Palestinian oppression with specific attention to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila genocide, a massacre primarily of Palestinian refugees in Beirut, Lebanon, carried out by the militia of Lebanese Forces at the behest of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). 

As Keith Feldman, Zahra Ali, and George Abraham, respectively, have all observed in their writings on Jordan’s Lebanon poems, Jordan took issue with the way American media covered the invasion of Lebanon and the Palestinian plight. Jordan believed the passive voice constructions of mainstream media, and its failure to platform Palestinian voices, enabled and reinforced state violence: “[Jordan’s Lebanon writings made] visible how the abstractions of state discourse mask the violence of state practice” (Feldman 208). 

This paper will examine how Jordan’s Lebanon poems engage with the U.S. media, with special attention to “Moving towards Home,” in which Jordan quotes and directly responds to The New York Times’ coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It will argue that, in “Moving towards Home,” Jordan uses what Abraham calls a “collective lyric ‘I’” (“Teaching Poetry”) while invoking the theme of speech to forge and perform a new speech-act that serves as a counterpoint to the mode of discourse used by U.S. media. In the process, Jordan turns the poem into a discourse not only on Lebanon, but on speech itself, and how even the ways we speak can affect violence or restoration: Speech can move us closer toward home or further away. By opening her poem with the voice of a Palestinian woman in grief, Jordan centers Palestinian yearnings for home, in direct contrast to the disembodied rhetoric of journalism evinced the the New York Times’ coverage of the massacre.

Historical Background

Although Living Room was published in 1985, Jordan began composing her Lebanon poems three years earlier, during the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 (Feldman 207), some months before the Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. In Chapter 5 of A Shadow over Palestine, Keith P. Feldman discusses women of color feminisms and what he refers to as “the Lebanon conjuncture,” arguing that the Sabra and Shatila genocide shifted feminist discourse on Palestine in the U.S. (191). Fifteen years earlier, the June 1967 War “marked a discursive opening for race radical movements in the United States to critique Israeli settler colonialism and fashion anticolonial expressions of Palestinian solidarity” (187). 

As Israel’s racialized regime of rule intensified, the question of how to articulate the gendered tensions between Zionism, Jewishness, and race also intensified and reached a climax in the Lebanon invasion (195). Despite the invasion’s extensive coverage in the media over the summer, Lebanon was a taboo topic at the June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament rally in NYC and the June 16-20 conference of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) : “Reports note that the taboo was largely adhered to, save for a speech by Noam Chomsky at the New York rally, and several notable speeches and placards at the coordinated march in San Francisco” (Feldman 207). Jordan herself was not at the conference due to health issues, but two weeks later (June 30, 1982) came together with faith leaders and activists, including Israeli peace activist Shulamith Koenig, at a press conference to condemn the Israeli military’s action (207-209). 

There, Jordan read her poem, “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” which she dedicated to Koenig. Even then, several months before the Beirut massacre, it was clear to Jordan that the Israeli military’s project was Palestinian genocide, a conviction she did not hesitate to make clear in her remarks (Feldman 209). In a study of Jordan’s anti-war poems, Philip Metres argues that while June Jordan’s “righteous certainty” created a poetic rhetoric that attracted some and repelled others, this stance is “a necessary performance of self-empowerment on behalf of the disenfranchised selves that Jordan identifies with and champions—in particular, the people of color both at home and abroad victimized by American power” (181-182).  

Interestingly, Metres notes that most American poets have been “weaned on an aesthetic of ambiguity and disinterestedness,” and so might find Jordan’s poems unnerving (183), which may suggest that U.S. media discourse represents only one aspect of America’s larger discourse problem. When it is vague and unclear who the actors are, there is no one to blame for violence; absolution becomes a simple task of not looking too closely at the humans affected by American violence. In the summer of 1982, Jordan demanded that people pay attention to the Beirut invasion and look at the violence the American support of Israel was doing to Palestinians. Less than three months later, the Lebanese Forces, supported by the IDF, carried out the Beirut massacre. In light of this, an aesthetic of disinterest and ambiguity begins to feel far more unnerving than Jordan’s aesthetic of “righteous certainty.”

Memorialization of Lebanon

In “Aesthetics of Memorialization,” Zahra A. Hussein Ali focuses on the ways three artists memorialize the 1982 Sabra and Shatila genocide in their work: Kuwaiti sculptor Sami Mohammad, French writer Jean Genet, and American poet Jordan Jordan. Ali’s goal is to look at the role of commemorative art and literature amidst media hegemony by comparing the aesthetic strategies of three artists who commemorated the same event through different mediums. Ali argues that June Jordan’s poetic mode betrays an anxiety about media power and traces this concern to how the media often collapses the idea of political interest and the idea of justice (612). As an Afro-American woman familiar with the role the media has played in the subordination of Black Americans, Jordan is keen to show that American corporate media is not a reliable source; rather, the media betrays “disciplinary perspectives that homogenize the viewers’ perceptions and shape the meaning of the genocide to accord with a dominant Eurocentric discourse” (612). 

Aesthetically, Jordan’s poems play off the rhetoric of the media (612). Ali suggests Jordan’s satiric tone, tempo, cinematic style, and slowed-down pace serve as foils to the media’s verbalizations about the genocide. By structuring her poems this way, Jordan provides focus on the genocide across two distances (bifocality), in contrast to the media’s vision, which is monofocal (590). “Nightline: September 20, 1982” plays off the media by excerpting a quote from the ABC news program’s guest commentator that assigns the memory of the Sabra and Shatila genocide to “an insignificant event to the annihilating past”: “I know it’s an unfortunate way to say it, but / do you think you can put this massacre / on the back burner now?” (616). 

“The Cedar Trees of Lebanon” uses the image of uprooting an indigenous tree as an allegory to depict the optical horror of the slaughter of Palestinian refugees (612). “Moving Towards Home” and “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” portray the heinousness much more graphically “through the sensory onslaught on the reader’s consciousness of mutilated bodies” (612). Ali argues that, stylistically, all three of these poems contest “the anchorperson’s rushing sentences and the rapid flux of information articulated in a supremely detached tone” and, instead, offer readers “the controlled, decelerated rhythm of an attention-giving frame of mind” (613). 

Sirène Harb’s “Naming Oppressions” looks at the influence of June Jordan’s politics, philosophy, and thought on the writing of Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, arguing that both poets’ work “is inscribed in a comparative analytic inspired women of color critique” that shows the connections between neoliberalism and formations like nationalism, be it minority or bourgeois (71). Harb’s discussion of Jordan’s poems on Palestine are set in the context of how they contribute to this analytic.

Jordan is one of several other Black American writers who introduced Hammad to Palestinian writers, but Jordan’s impact was especially palpable (Harb 76). Hammad and Jordan never met or formally corresponded, but Hammad wrote about Jordan’s influence, particularly in “Moving Towards Home,” which was initially published in The Village Voice (75). Hammad reflected on how Jordan never directly discusses Palestine or the Right of Return in “Moving,” and suggested the poem’s power lay in how Jordan rendered the political as a story about the human, the personal (75). Harb suggests that Hammad’s insistence on reading Jordan this way “identifies an important axis pertaining to the epistemological framework of women of color feminism based on the decentering of normative politics” (76).

Speaking more broadly of Jordan’s use of the “living room” trope to write about Palestine, Harb shows how Hammad’s “love poem” is influenced by Jordan’s work. In this poem, Hammad “gestures toward poetic and political figurations of alternative spaces of being” by positing her body as “another possible living room that counters Israeli acts of racial and ethnic cleansing” (78-79)

Both “Aesthetics of Memorialization” and “Naming Oppressions” focus on Palestine in June Jordan’s work, but with very different emphases. The latter is concerned with the nitty gritty of linguistic aesthetics in relation to memory, how Jordan uses rhetoric to contest the American media’s portrayals of Palestinian genocide. The former surveys the influence of Jordan’s work on one specific poet, focusing more broadly on Jordan’s relationship to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist poetics rather than visiting the question of how Jordan employs specific rhetorical strategies in her poetry.

These two articles address four of Jordan’s poems on Palestine, but she included several others in Living Room, notably “March Song,” “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” and “The Beirut Jokebook.” The latter is tonally similar to “Nightline” in how it takes sentiments expressed by American news commentators (if not direct quotes) and arranges them in a way that highlights the incongruity and inhumanity of their messages (Jordan 396). “To Sing a Song,” is more meditative and mournful, even psalmic (345). It draws on images of land, curses, war, magic, and most of all the picture of the mother’s body as a metaphor for the creation of home, a living space. 

“March Song” feels surreal with its vivid descriptions of the land, presumably as seen through the eyes of Palestinians forced to march toward refugee camps, juxtaposed with the horrific reality of their displacement: “We follow the leaders who chew up / the land / with names like Beirut / where the game is to tear / up the whole Hemisphere / into pieces of children / and patches of sand” (362). Jordan dedicated Living Room to the children of Atlanta and Lebanon and, as both Ali and Harb have shown, Jordan saw the oppression of Black bodies as part of the same racist, colonialist matrix that enabled (and continues to enable) the oppression of Palestinian bodies. “March Song” and Jordan’s other poems on Palestine are set alongside poems that document oppression in other areas around the globe, showing the human cost of political conflict and how the political is always personal.

Moving Towards Home

“Moving towards Home” begins with an epigraph from a New York Times press release by Thomas L. Friedman on the Beirut massacre, published on September 20, 1982. As more details came to light, NYT published a second press release by Friedman on September 26. An analysis of these NYT articles shows that Jordan based the graphic imagery in her poem on these reports. Nearly every line in the first two-thirds of the poem can be traced to a specific atrocity reported by Friedman. 

Jordan’s references to “the bulldozer” and “the red dirt,” allude to images from the first NYT press release. Friedman reported that there was “a wide patch of freshly turned red dirt inside the camp with arms and legs sticking out one end” that appeared to be a mass grave (“U.S. Presses Israel”). “In addition,” Friedman wrote, “no one has any idea how many bodies were taken off in the scoops of bulldozers, how many were driven away and killed outside of the camp and how many are buried under buildings that were intentionally bulldozed to cover up bullet-riddled men, women and children.” 

There are a multitude of other details drawn from the NYT articles. Jordan’s lines on “the nightlong screams / that reached / the observation posts where soldiers lounged about” (398) allude to the complicity of the Israeli army during the Beirut massacre. Though Friedman was at first unsure whether Israeli army knew what was happening in the Sabra and Shatila camps, he speculated that from their observation posts “it would not have been difficult to ascertain not only by sight but from the sounds of gunfire and the screams coming from the camp” (“U.S. Presses Israel”). However, as more information came to light, it was clear that the Lebanese Forces had entered and exited the camp through Israeli lines, and Israeli soldiers had been lounging in their observation posts during the massacre (“The Beirut Massacre”). 

The Israeli army not only knew what was happening, they sent up flares to provide the Lebanese militia with light as they went from house to house killing Palestinian families in their beds and at their dinner tables (Friedman). In some cases, the they gunned down Palestinian or slit their throats on the spot, while they took others outside, lined them up against the walls, and shot them. While the NYT press releases do at times name various actors pair with verbs (e.g., the militiamen below “who burst in”), the language tends toward the passive language typical of reportage. Take, for example, the passive verbs in this excerpt (italics mine):

[T]hose people whose bodies were found toward the southern entrance of Shatila were killed at random while other [sic] appeared to have been lined up against walls and shot. In other cases, what appeared to be entire families had been slain as they sat at the dinner table. Others were found dead in their nightclothes, apparently suprised [sic] by the militamen [sic] who burst in on them Thursday evening. Some people were found with their throats slit. Others had been mutilated with some kind of heavy blade, perhaps axes. (Friedman, “The Beirut Massacre”)

When Jordan writes about “the piled up bodies and / the stench / that will not float” and “the nurse again and / again raped / before they murdered her on the hospital floor” (398), she is not taking creative license. Lebanese soldiers invaded both the Gaza Hospital and the Akka Palestinian Hospital and, at the latter, repeatedly raped and then shot a nineteen-year-old Palestinian nurse named Intisar Ismail (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”).

Jordan’s poem, however, is not a mere repetition of the explicit and unfiltered reports of the carnage. Rather, “Moving” is a distillation of the horrors of the massacre framed as an “unspeakable event” that must be spoken about nonetheless, and in ways that are more personal and intimate than the language of reportage allows.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Jordan’s entry point is the voice of a Palestinian in grief. “Moving” begins where the first NYT article ends, with a quote from a Palestinian woman searching for her son, Abu Fadi, in the aftermath of the massacre: “‘Where is Abu Fadi,’ she wailed. ‘Who will bring me my loved one?’” (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”). While a journalistic approach prioritizes the uncovering and documenting facts, the ‘what’ of an event, Jordan starts with the impact of the event on human beings. Following this epigraph, Jordan establishes a formula, “I do not wish to speak about...Nor do I wish to speak about,” that she repeats throughout the poem:

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the 

red dirt

not quite covering

all of the arms and legs

Nor do I wish to speak about

the nightlong screams 

that reached 

the observation posts where soldiers lounged about (398)

The phrase “Nor do I wish to speak about” occurs eight times, each followed by a specific atrocity committed during the Sabra and Shatila genocide.

After these eight occurrences, Jordan repeats the four opening lines with the gruesome image of a bulldozer unable to cover up all the corpses, and then explains why she (I consider Jordan the speaker) does not want to talk about these things: “because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events / that must follow from those who dare / ‘to purify’ a people / those who dare / ‘to exterminate’ a people.” The phrase “those who dare” is repeated five times, each paired with a sentiment (either allusion or direct quote) that encapsulates the State of Israel’s inhumane attitude and policy toward Palestinians. 

While these sentiments come from various sources, some Jordan takes directly from the NYT articles. “To purify,” for example, is an allusion to what an Israeli colonel told Reuters correspondent, Paul Eedle, about the Israeli army’s stance on Lebanese’ Forces massacre in the camps: “The colonel told Mr. Eedle that his men were working on the basis of two principles: that the Israeli Army should not get involved but that the area should be ‘purified’” (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”). 

The phrase “to mop up” comes from a third NYT article released dated September 27, 1982. In the second article released just a day earlier, Friedman had reported that “Israeli officers in East Beirut said what happened at the 4:30 Friday meeting was that the Phalangists told the Israelis that they needed more time to ‘clean up’ the area” (“The Beirut Massacre”). But Maj. Gen. Amir Drori, senior Israeli commander in Lebanon, denied knowledge of the massacre taking place in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Additionally, “General Drori was asked if the Phalangists [Lebanese Forces] had requested, and been granted, a few more hours just to mop up -as some Israeli military sources suggested. General Drori declined to comment” (Friedman, “Israeli General”).

Following this middle, “those who dare” section, Jordan then introduces a second a second series of reasons that is separated by a line break, but is not a new sentence:

because I need to speak about home

I need to speak about living room

where the land is not bullied and beaten to

a tombstone (399)

By fronting this section with a second “because,” Jordan creates a link between the “unspeakable events” that she does not wish to speak about to what she needs to speak about. The phrase “I need to speak about” occurs five times and, similarly, “I need to talk about” is repeated three times.

What is the effect of this repetition? In this second section of “Moving towards Home,” Jordan enlarges the concept of “home” introduced in the poem’s title. For Jordan, “living room” is a place where the land does not suffer abuse and such unspeakable horrors do not happen. Put differently, Jordan shows how these unspeakable events demand that we speak of a world where there is living room. This act of speech becomes a prophetic act of dreaming that not only grieves and marks the devastation, but aims toward a future where “home” is a reality.

The third stanza of “Moving” is the section that has received the most scholarly attention, perhaps because it is here that Jordan makes an explicit connection between her identity as a Black woman and the plight of Palestinians:

I was born a Black woman

and now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones? (400)

In “Reciprocal Solidarity,” Sa’ed Atshan and Darnell L. Moore discuss the intersection between Black and Palestinian queer struggles, naming Jordan as an example of Arab-Black solidarity (690). Atshan and Moore see connections between mass incarceration in the U.S. and Israel’s detainment of Palestinians, arguing that the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel is rooted, in part, the ways both have criminalized racialized bodies (687). 

To Atshan and Moore, the similar histories of racialized violence against Black and Arab people is opportunity for solidarity: “Palestine, the inner-city United States, Jim Crow America, and apartheid South Africa provide not identical, but parallel histories of segregation, racial violence, and opportunities for connection—and friendship—between Blacks and Arabs, queer and straight” (689). June Jordan saw this relationship between Black and Palestinian oppression quite clearly, and Atshan and Moore rightly identify the voice in the third stanza of “Moving towards Home” as as an example of Arab-Black reciprocal solidarity (690). They also cite “Born Palestinian, Born Black” by Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad as an example of solidarity (690), showing that this identification between Black and Palestinian people is indeed reciprocal; it is not simply Black writers who are making these connections.

June Jordan’s identification with Palestinians is not limited to the third stanza, but is present in the second stanza where she begins to speak about home. In an essay for Guernica, “Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse,” Palestinian American poet George Abraham discusses “an abusive pattern of language” employed by U.S. media that “contorts the English language into a supremacist enactor of the colonial projects.” Jordan wrote about these linguistic problems with the U.S. media’s coverage of Palestine, showing how passive voice and the absence of accountability-driven language that enables an ongoing Palestinian apocalypse: “[Jordan identified] an American capital-E-English which is not merely stagnant, but comfortable in our cyclic apocalypse” (Abraham). 

Abraham sees Jordan’s “Moving” as a form of resistance to such linguistic violence. They argue that Jordan’s “lyric ‘I’” in this poem is a self that is collective, a multitudinous self. Unlike the imagination of the singular lyric “I” so often found in white canonical English poetry, Jordan’s “I” constitutes a lyric collective that creates space for many consciousnesses:

The poet demands that we see Palestinians beyond images of bulldozers, beyond white problems of language, beyond victims suspended in eternal and cyclic apocalypse. Instead, Jordan chooses the more difficult and transgressive path: to See, to Build with, to Love Palestinians. What better way to say “I love you” to a people than to say, not “I am you” or “I beyond you,” but “I am become you?” Or “I future you?” (Abraham)

As noted above, “Moving towards Home” opens with the distressed cries of a Palestinian woman searching for her loved one, which contrasts sharply with the September 20 NYT report. The NYT article starts with coverage of the violence and does not move to the personal until the conclusion. Jordan also concludes her poem by alluding back to this quote in the second to last line (italics mine): “there is less and less and less living room / and where are my loved ones? / It is time to make our way home.” (400).

By returning to where the poem began, with a Palestinian woman’s search for her loved one, Jordan has moved the speaker of the poem into the voice of the Palestinian woman. And yet, this is not a usurpation of the woman’s voice or transformation of the speaker into a different, singular self. The speaker “was born a Black woman” and she has not left that identity behind, as though she has transitioned from one identity to another. She has not moved out of Black consciousness, but found resonances between Black and Palestinian experiences that suggest a shared vision of ‘home.’ Abraham’s emphasis on the futurity of the phrase “I am become” is apt because these words juxtapose present (am) and future (become) to suggest both movement and a perpetual state of solidarity. 

Both a Black woman and a Palestinian woman (who also represents a collective of Palestinians) are present in this lyric collective “I.” There is “living room” for both in this multitudinous “I.” When the speaker asks where her loved ones are, it is an expression of grief, but it is also a statement of solidarity. In asking where her loved ones are, she is making a statement about who her loved ones are: The people with whom she is grieving and moving towards home. 

It is significant that Jordan does not explicitly invoke the collective until that last line (emphasis mine): “It is time to make our way home.” She speaks about “my language,” “my children,” “my family,” and “my loved ones,” and does not use the first person plural until the conclusion. This lends further support to Abraham’s notion that this lyric “I” contains a multitude of selves. By the end, the Black speaker is “become Palestinian” and the movement towards home begins now, pulling the future into the present. 

Conclusion

While the U.S. media uses language that denies Palestinian subjectivity, and insodoing perpetually defers Palestinian dreams of a return home, Jordan’s “Moving towards Home” creates a speaker whose own subjectivity interconnects with Palestinian reality. Where journalistic representations of the Sabra and Shatila genocide encapsulate an aesthetic that is as disembodied as it is voyeuristic, Jordan steps in with a speaker that wants no participation in voyeurism or the replication of violence. This speaker talks about violence only because memorializing the violence and demanding accountability is an integral step on the journey towards home. 

Where is home for the speaker? Home is a place with living room “where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud / for my loved ones / where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi / because he will be there beside me” (Jordan 399). Jordan makes it plain who her loved ones are: Those in search of living room. As long as Palestinians continue to weep and search for their loved ones, Jordan will, too.

Works Cited

Abraham, George. “Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse.” Guernicamag.com, Guernica, 27 Sept 2021, https://www.guernicamag.com/teaching-poetry-in-the-palestinian-apocalypse/. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.

Ali, Zahra A. Hussein. “Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan.” Criticism, vol. 51, no. 4, Wayne State University Press, 2009, pp. 589–621, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23131533.

Atshan, Sa’ed, and Darnell L. Moore. “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet.” Biography, vol. 37, no. 2, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014, pp. 680–705, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24570200.

Feldman, Keith P. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt14jxvz2.

Friedman, Thomas L. “U.S. Presses Israel to Let U.N. Troops Move into Beirut.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 20 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/20/world/us-presses-israel-to-let-un-troops-move-into-beirut.html. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.

---. “The Beirut Massacre: The Four Days.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 26 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/26/world/the-beirut-massacre-the-four-days.html. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.

---. “Israeli General in Beirut Says He Did Not Know of Killings.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 27 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/27/world/israeli-general-in-beirut-says-he-did-not-know-of-killings.html. Accessed 18 Nov 2021.

Harb, Sirène. “Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects.” Feminist Formations, vol. 26, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 71–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43860762.

Jordan, June. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sarah Miles, Copper Canyon Press, 2007.

Metres, Philip. “June Jordan’s Righteous Certainty: Poetic Address in Resistance Poetry.” Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941, University of Iowa Press, 2007, pp. 179–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20krznv.12.

My Writing & Body: 35 Years in Review

I keep meaning to write a post on sex and another on what I’ve published this year, but life keeps thickening around me. So here, on the eve of my 35th birthday, I give you a quickly dashed-off post about some things I feel about sex, love, writing, and my body.

Tonight, I’m bummed about my writing, but in general I feel good about what I’ve been able to write and publish. I published 13 pieces within the past couple of years and also see tangible progress in my newer (unpublished writing). I’m especially proud of this creative nonfiction piece I wrote about How To Make Friends After Leaving Your Cult and the handful of poems I wrote that will be part of my queer and fem voices of the Bible collection. I wrote about the love of David & Jonathan, the witch of Endor, and the prophet Ezekiel’s unnamed wife. I was also able to write a second (even better) poem about Jonathan and David that I’m still trying to find a home for, and a story about Mary trying to get an abortion.

In the coming year, I hope to write about Jephthah’s daughter, whose mysterious two month journey into the mountains with her friends to mourn that she’ll never have sexual relations with a man is (to me) a fantastic space to explore her sexuality. I have a feeling she’ll fall in love with one of the young women she’s journeying with, but who knows? I also want to write about Esther’s relationship with the Haggai, the eunuch in charge of King Ahasuerus’ harem. Maybe Esther and Haggai will turn out to be queerplatonic lovers.

I am also still working on my novel (for my MFA thesis), but that’s sort of a super secret project right now. The things I’m writing about are very raw, and it’s hard to write (fictionalized versions) of some things that are happening in real time. More later.

So, there’s the writing update. On to the body.

The sex post was supposed to be a little survey of how I moved out of evangelical purity culture and got a bit of a sex education, with links to resources about sex. Spoiler: I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my sex education. In terms of sexual logistics and mechanics, Lindsay Doe’s Sexplanations series on YouTube is a great resource. For processing the trauma of evangelical purity culture, Jamie Lee Finch’s book and other work has been invaluable. The Ethical Slut is a little outdated in terms of language, but it’s a good introduction not just to polyamory, but on how to communicate about sexual desires, set boundaries, and operate from a consent-based ethic.

And yet, so much of my sex and love education has been through movies and fiction, and it has been very piecemeal. That probably sounds strange (and perhaps a little bit sad) coming from an almost-35-year-old who has been sexually active in the context of a monogamous relationship for over a decade, and there is much I’ve learned in that relationship that I haven’t shared on social media for various reasons (including respect for my spouse’s privacy). But if I’ve learned anything about my body in the past couple of years, it’s that I’ve been pretty passive about cultivating my sexuality. I think I’m just now getting acquainted with myself in that way.

You know that line from T.S. Eliot that went something like We had the experience but missed the meaning? I sometimes wonder if I’ve had the meaning but missed the experience. Or missed something crucial about the experience because the disparate bodies involved in the experience were vesting it with two different (perhaps divergent) meanings. Of course, that’s life—no one has the exact same experience. But what happens when you’re under the illusion that you’ve been having generally the same experience, and then that illusion dissolves?

That’s coming out of evangelicalism for you (in many realms, not just sex). You’re taught to think that if you’re not having the same experience, beliefs, theology, etc., then you really ought to. So, you try as hard as you can to experience everything the same way—god, sex, relationships, love. But as fundamentalism unravels, so does the illusion of sameness.

But I digress on this, the eve of my 35th birthday.

I intended to start the sex post with a scene from the TV series Rectify, one of the most gorgeous cinematic examples of what Jamie Lee Finch referred to in a podcast as “cordial sex.” If I remember correctly, Jamie preferred it to the term “casual sex” because the latter makes it sound like sex that isn’t part of a committed, long-term relationship can’t be meaningful, or that it’s necessarily unthoughtful or unintimate.

Daniel Holden, the protagonist of Rectify, has just been released after 15 years on death row. As he returns to his hometown and tries to adjust to life outside of death row, Daniel is offered a free haircut by one of his old high school classmates, who is now a hair stylist. Both she and Daniel are now adults in their mid 30s. While they awkwardly catch up during the haircut, she mentions that she always thought that if he got off death row, she might offer herself to him sexually. “Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I’m a happily married woman. But I thought it might be something you might need.”

Daniel accepts her offer with gratitude. The scene is such a beautiful, tender moment—one of many in Rectify where people lean into moments of intimacy with Daniel—and the two do end up having sex. Here’s how far I got writing about this in the sex post:

The scene from Rectify presented me with a quandary. Here was a beautiful human moment involving sex that transgressed the bounds of conservative Christian teaching on sex. It was extra-marital. And unless the hair stylist had a non-monogamous arrangement with her spouse, it fell into the “affair” category. It was also a one-off, and not within the context of a lifelong monogamous relationship. And yet it was deeply meaningful. Evangelical purity culture insisted that sex with more than one person meant you were giving away parts of yourself that couldn’t be gotten back. And maybe in one sense that was true—maybe you did lose parts of you, but maybe they also grew back, replenished, and gained other things.

Anyway, there’s lots more to say about that. That was just one of the first threads that started to unravel the monogamy thread even while I was still a conservative Christian bound by an abstract relationless set of morals. I believe one-off sexual encounters can be meaningful. I believe people have different sexual vibes and that sex doesn’t even necessarily have to be deeply intimate to be enjoyable, good, powerful, and/or healing. Again, there’s a lot more I need to write, but I was beautifully stunned by this episode of Where Should We Begin, “My Orgasm is Not Just for Me,” where one woman’s pleasure and polyamorous desire is framed as a quest for reclamation not just for herself but for her ancestors, too.

I’m not sure what made me think I could start jotting off a blog post on two huge topics and finish it before bedtime, but here we are. To continue the resource trail about love and sex: My lifeline right now is James Baldwin’s Another Country. There are so many potent scenes and lines in this book, but the line that keeps running through my head is “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” The book is about love and sex, but also love in the midst of inequitable power dynamics (both in terms of race and gender), and I think about this a lot. I appreciate how the book shows people struggling to love themselves and each other within social systems and power dynamics that are so much bigger than them. It is realistic and upfront about how disparate bodily experiences in the context of inequitable power dynamics can create profound rifts and barriers in romantic and sexual relationships.

Big questions I am still asking revolve around how to take ownership of my sexuality (and my body more generally) and how to cultivate emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy with the people I love. I don’t know the answers to the these questions, but at a minimum I want to make space for talking about these things, and how to negotiate your own personal journey of desire while reckoning the effect this can have on your partner(s)/spouse(s). Your body and sexual journey are never just your own even if you are uncoupled (or unthroupled) because you exist in community. Where/how do you find your own breathing room and safe place where you are empowered to move in the ways that are most authentic to you? And how to you negotiate the things you lose along the way?

Body is more than sex of course. I was telling a friend today that I feel better about my body at almost-35 than I have in a long time. I am rock climbing and running; I feel stronger and more in my body. I still want to improve my style game, but I feel generally good about how I present—hair, clothing, vibes. I upped my hair and clothing game a few years ago because I realized no Tan France was going to waltz into my life and do it for me. I struggled with clothing and body image from a young age (I mean, most of us do, in varying ways and degrees), but conservative Christianity made me believe this wasn’t important. So, I minimized my own desire to engage in intentional body curation. But when you don’t tend to a need and, instead, stuff it down, it will flare up in other ways—raging, ravenous, demanding to be fed. This is why I’m a feminist. I want a world where everyone’s bodies are nourished and nurtured.

I love how existing in queer community has helped me love my body more. When I cut my hair short, I felt like had stopped hiding behind my long hair. My mom always said I had a strong profile, but I was self-conscious about my nose and wanted to be beautiful more than strong. But leaning into my queerness has expanded my conception of physical beauty and I genuinely like the shapes my body takes. Here’s a little excerpt from my novel, a passage where the protagonist struggles with self-love mostly because they’ve been taught to view their own sexual desire as an indictment against them. The fact of their desire exacerbates the guilt they feel for being a body that desires, and they are forced to reckon with the body-loathing that flares up:

You cried in the shower, pounded your fist against the gray tile as warm water washed over the skin you hated for its hungers. Fuck you. Fuck this body. Fuck these callousing hands and muscling forearms. Fuck the traumatized tissue shaking your upper body. Fuck the legs and feet that carried you, and the sockets that bore your tears and tended your sight. 

You toweled off and shoved your legs into your pants without bothering to put on lotion. Your skin would rot and shrivel off your bones one day. Did it matter if it dried up sooner rather than later? 

As you tugged the zipper on your pants, its metal teeth bit your underwear, forcing you to stop and work the cloth free. You pulled the zipper gently back down, sighed, and let your hands dangle at your sides. 

From the full-length mirror on the wall across from the showers, your shirtless double arrested you with its stark shapes. Everything about your body was uneven. Your left breast hung lower than your right, and your right foot was size 11 to your left’s size 10.5. On the right side of your head, the hair thinned ever-so-slightly, and your natural part cut a little to the left. Your nose hooked right a smidge. One side of your blue-rimmed coke bottle glasses dipped lower because you’d stepped on them and were afraid that if you bent the pads back to normal, the metal would break.

You wondered sometimes what your clit would look like, if you shaved down there, opened the lips, and looked in the mirror. Would it, too, be an asymmetrical orchid, unperturbed by its intransigent lines?

You wiped your face, removed your pants, and started to lotion your legs and arms. Fuck nothing. Touch everything. This was your body—the lopsided, sensitive animal that had been with you from the beginning. There was nothing in the world you wouldn’t give to make it feel more like itself.

That passage is more about the movement towards body-love than its actualization, but I have a feeling the protagonist will come to love their uneven body even more.

I feel more attractive and confident as a human than in days of yore—like I have valuable things to offer people, and that they value me. But also that I have a core group of robust humans who just like me and can just be present with me when I feel very broken down and not like my most thriving self. I still feel insecure at times, but I feel rooted and less isolated than in days past. I have always felt more present to myself than anyone else, and although I still exist on an emotional spectrum of oscillation between presence and absence, I feel tangibly more present to people than I did in my early twenties.

I want more of this—more intimacy, more life, more intoxication by the cosmos I’m a part of. I want to live the queerest life I can live—to cultivate intimacy with humans I never expected, in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Of course, this is a blog post, written in so much abstraction. But my poems are getting detailed. My fiction is getting detailed. My life is getting detailed. And it’s so, so hard. Harder than I could’ve imagined. Here I am—older, more attuned to myself and others—but more bewildered than ever. Who am I? What are all these colors? Where do I even begin?

This Is Love: Why I'm Posting Pics with the Bible Over My Boobs

Yesterday, I started posting body-affirming photos of myself on Facebook and Instagram. I wrote this to accompany the photos:

This is the part of my religious deconstruction where I take body-affirming photos of myself. Some are sexy, some are silly, and some are sexy-silly. I'm especially fond of these pics with the Bible over my boobs ("Reading Ezekiel 16"). I'll be posting a few every day over the next week. I think these are relatively mild, but taking these and posting them on social media is a significant step for me. I love my body, but more importantly, I am my own and I want to share my body in this way. That's what this means.

I’m not doing anything new. For many (though certainly not all, nor does everyone need to do this), this is par for the course in religious deconstruction, especially those recovering from the trauma of evangelical purity culture. But as I began to reflect on why this is important to me, I remembered a passage from my (unfinished) memoir about a time when I was excelling in Christian academia, specifically in the application of my mind to puzzling out biblical texts. This excerpt made me understand a little better why I can’t just be content “exposing my brain” and not my body. 

In this passage, the undergrad persona (that’s memoir-speak for the narrator, aka, the “me” of the story) starts to discover the power of her own mind as a means of self-revelation and self-assertion. But it’s a power that’s emerged as a loophole within a patriarchal power structure, and it comes with baggage:

I am in love, not with flesh and blood, but with the Bible and the deity that haunts its pages. I have found a place exploring the contours of the divine body, my fingers tracing the nail marks in his palms, my hands caressing the scar on his side.

I can navigate this divine body with a modicum of confidence now. I am no master, but I have learned the techniques, how to read this body and interpret its curves. It has many secret passages and hidden doorways; I feel my way to each orifice.

I move gingerly in the beginning. My freshman year at Bible college is an orientation to the hallowed halls of learning and how to wield unfamiliar tools. But by the start of my second year, I am gaining steam and attracting attention. I win first place in a university-wide student essay contest. My professors, almost all of them male, give me perfect grades, but more importantly, they write affirming comments on my papers. 

I am a traveler arriving from a dry and weary land where there is no water. I drink in praise not caring if I vomit. Let me buy wine and milk without cost and tomorrow I will pay whatever price you ask. 

Here at the university, I am a Platonic ideal. I am eager to learn and awash with impressionable innocence. I am attentive, a good writer, and ready to please.

On top of all this, I am a true and breathless believer, a devoted worshipper. I hunger and thirst for knowledge. I am ready to be drawn past the temple’s outer courts and into its holiest inner room, where the invisible god of the cosmos straddles the million-eyed cherubim as night and day they let out their euphoric screams, “Holy, holy! Holy, oh lord! God almighty!”

In this world where it is a sin for women’s bodies to be seen, I have at last found a way to get attention: the astounding spectacle of my mind. With my hand, I am tucking unruly bra straps back under my shirt and, with my writing, exposing my brain.

Here, the persona gains a modicum of power through her mind, but in this patriarchal structure, everything is still oriented around the gaze and approval of white cishet men. She’s found a way to navigate this world, and to some extent it feels good. She’s grown up getting the message that her body’s a problem because it could make the good Christian men all horny, so she’s had to stuff herself down; now, finally, there’s a part of her that’s being told to show up, not stuff herself down. 

And so she uses her mind, she writes. She keeps writing. She writes her way out of evangelicalism. She writes her way out of Christianity and formal religion entirely. She writes herself into poems and short stories and new relationships. 

In those relationships, in her life that is more than writing (but not less than) she starts to push boundaries and find more of her body. And she wants more of that. But all around her, haunting her body, are the ghosts that tell her that her value is still bound up in gazes not her own, that her body will decrease in value in proportion to how much she exposes or shares it. 

It’s a mindfuck, really--it flies in the face of everything she’s learned about her mind, about abundance, about how things multiply the more you share them. She thinks about all the walls in her life: the theological boundaries she was never supposed to cross, the people she was never supposed to love, the way she would beat back her impulse to reach out until she couldn’t stand it any longer, and her desire burst out into the world.

And she knows this is the next step on her road to becoming more in tune with herself, her body, and her body in the world.

She’ll keep writing about bodies and expose her own body in writing. For her, there will never not be writing that is textual, but she knows these pictures, too, are writing, and that this writing is love.

My Queer Body: A Found[1] Sexuality

My Queer Body: A Found[1] Sexuality

My sense of being is grounded in a world that is deeply queer.[2]

+

I feel this pressure to get to know myself and then make a big presentation about the results. But that’s not how I think, not how I write, not how I live. Unlike the theology I was taught, I don’t believe we are moving toward one great and terrible day of revelation or self-discovery, and this is not how I understand sexuality either. I don’t think of knowledge as ultimately “revelatory” or as simple information transfer. It is a slow unfolding, but more than anything else, it is a shared shifting of everything.[3]

+

The coming-out-of-the-closet metaphor has its limits.[4]

+

I go back and forth between thinking I am on the asexual spectrum (aspec) and thinking that I am sexually repressed because of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing.[5]

+

I don’t know what that word means. What’s aspec?[6]

+

I didn’t realize I was ace until I was in my twenties. And realizing it meant I had to go digging for it. I didn’t have to go digging anywhere back when I thought I was just a straight woman—that was pretty much, y’know, what was expected of me.[7]

+

I’ve been reticent to embrace asexual as an identity marker because I still feel like I know so little about my own sexuality and do not want to feel pinned down to a label.[8]

+

Have you ever wanted to be invisible? You can become an identity that no one thinks exists and isn’t represented anywhere. So, virtually you will become invisible. Kinda like spiritually invisible rather than physically invisible. So, like, do you want that?[9]

+ 

THERE IS NO HETERO EXPLANATION FOR THIS.[10]

+

I consider myself part of the [queer] community. As a person who’s aromantic and asexual, I am of the opinion that anyone who is aspec should be able to be part of the queer community if they want to (some people don’t feel that they want to). We don’t experience romantic and sexual attraction in the same way that heterosexual people do. I consider it obvious that we deserve a place in this community, and for that reason I consider myself queer.[11]

+

I think the reason a lot of [aspec] people struggle [to identify as queer] is that, especially online, a lot of queer people are like, “No, you can’t sit with us.”[12]

+

Of course I’m queer. But I think being on the ace spectrum is only part of it for me and I’m not sure I want to be public about it until I can articulate more than the ace piece. Not that ace isn’t “queer enough” on its own, but it’s not the only factor, and I haven’t decided how I might communicate to, say, people I know mostly through social media now, or how I would identify myself in a bio.[13]

+

I recently came across the term ‘theosexual,’ which is not an actual sexual identity (more of a jest). But I felt like it captured something true about how I was raised to orient all my energies around a divine figure. In a way, I think leaving my faith (and leaving God), has left a vacancy for these energies, and often vacuums are catalysts for a reorientation/reshaping of the whole structure.[14]

+

Why did I start crying when I typed “of course I’m queer”?[15]

+

I initially never considered that I might be asexual because I’m a diehard romantic. But as I surveyed the spectrum of ace experience, I learned that you can be asexual without being aromantic (aro). I’ve experienced romantic feelings since my first crush at age 5. But it’s important to note that I always viewed the objects of my affection as rivals to God because evangelical Christian purity culture cast God as my true (and very jealous) husband. As a result, I had an intimate and romantic (though in many ways abusive) relationship with God, but also felt very guilty about human romantic interests. I even hated myself for having crushes on movie characters/actors.[16]

+

I guess I’ve never said I’m queer before. I’ve said things like “I operate from an intellectual/emotional space that is deeply queer” (not “I’m queer”) or “I’m probably on the ace spectrum” (not “I’m ace”). It’s like I haven’t allowed myself to just be a (complicated and queer) body, and so my language hovers in provisionality and performance. But who we are is never divorced from performance: “I am” is not a static category. So, it’s not an inherent contradiction to say “I am queer” and also leave it open-ended and malleable about the specific performance of my queerness. But I’ve been acting as if my own performance of myself is somehow divorced from both my verbal declarations about myself and my internal cognition about myself.[17]

+

I almost added the ace pride flag to my Twitter bio last night. I want validation of my sexual experience. I want to be able to say: “Look, this is a real thing. My experience is real.” I’m really tired, whatever sexuality I am, of being viewed as broken or less than.[18]

+

It is not a handicap to have one thing, but not another. To be one way, and not another. We are different shapes and ways, and our happiness is unique. There are no rules of balance. I wish that I could share with you the utter joy it brings me to spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon reading Emerson, or Melville, or Virginia Woolf...or discussing T.S. Eliot or James Baldwin with a dear friend until dawn...the fulfillment that I get from going to church, from reading theology, from reading science, from...praying. But I can’t. Because I am me, and you are you, I can’t relate to the total fulfillment that I get from these things. It’s impossible.[19]

+

There’s this scene in the movie Princess Cyd where one of the characters (an academic and writer of novels) is judged by her teen niece for not being very sexually active in the last five years. The novelist responds by asserting that everyone’s experience of pleasure is different, and that her pleasure (sexual or asexual) is valid, too. People have disparate desires and ways of negotiating those desires.[20]

+

My sexuality is complicated by the body/earth hatred of the religion I grew up in. I’ve told you how evangelicalism instilled in me a disdain for the body, and I don’t like its metaphysical dualism, how it splits the human person into mind/body. However, that said, I do think maybe I find writing about sex and sexuality more compelling than the bodily experience of it. Maybe I am out of touch with my body, but I enjoy other types of physicality. I love dancing. Eating. I hate running, but like the feeling of having run. I like cuddling and handholding and kissing and hugging. Why can’t these things be my version of sexuality?[21]

+ 

I want to know my body.[22]

+

I still feel like I know so little about my own sexuality and do not want to feel pinned down to a label.[23]

+

The poem then is a record of its own unsettling, a trace of the mind’s unsatisfied and unsatisfiable search for resolution, for escape, to know itself through self-creation and to unknow itself.[24]

+

I’m queer.[25]

+ 

I’m aspec.[26]

+ 

I’m

+[27]

[1] “Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems” (https://poets.org/glossary/found-poem).

[2] Blog post by the author, “Homophobia Lite,” December 22, 2020 (http://www.rebekahdevine.com/blog/2020/12/22/homophobia-lite).

[3] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[4] Blog post by the author, “How My World Became Queer (3/6),” January 24, 2020 (http://www.rebekahdevine.com/blog/2020/1/24/how-my-world-became-queer-36-queersighted).

[5] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[6] Cameron Esposito in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/).

[7] “Angela Chen,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 10, 2021, https://www.earwolf.com/episode/angela-chen/. Chen is the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).

[8] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[9] Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca, “The Perks of Asexuality and Aromanticism,” Sounds Fake But Okay (podcast), February 7, 2021 (https://soundsfakepod.buzzsprout.com/218346/7710982-ep-169-the-perks-of-asexuality-and-aromanticism).

[10] Text on the outside of a card given to the author by a friend, December 2019.

[11] Sarah Costello in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/). Edited for length and clarity.

[12] Kayla Kaszyca in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/). Edited for length and clarity.

[13] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.

[14] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[15] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.

[16] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[17] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.

[18] Author’s conversation with a friend, June 2020.

[19] Miranda Ruth in the movie Princess Cyd, directed by Stephen Cone (Wolfe Video, 2017).

[20] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[21] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[22] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[23] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.

[24] Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010), 54.

[25] A thing the author is saying to her body about her body.

[26] A more specific thing the author is saying to her body about her body.

[27]

Homophobia Lite

Most of my friends are queer. I don’t have any close relationships with people who are not queer-affirming. On the one hand, this isn’t intentional. It’s not like I’ve cut anyone out of my life specifically for operating out of homophobic beliefs that do violence to real people. I’m not opposed to severing relationships over this, I just haven’t had to do it. My sense of being is grounded in a world that is deeply queer, and the unqueered life doesn’t just feel nonsensical to me; it feels profoundly violent. And I don’t cultivate intimate relationships with people that are nurturing a posture of violence toward queer people.

Why do I call it violent? I feel the need to write about this because I recently came in contact with a former classmate whose approach to queer people and relationships is very similar to the posture I had when I was an evangelical Christian. It’s what I like to call “Homophobia Lite”—not because it’s functionally less damaging than other varieties of homophobia, but because its nuances enable those who espouse it to believe they aren’t doing damage.

Homophobia Lite operates out of the theological conviction that God designed humans to be heteronormative and that queer desires are a result of human sin nature. Now, I wrote a long ass series of blog posts on how I came to believe this simply isn’t true, so I’m not going to waste energy repeating myself.

What I want to talk about here is the idea that this belief isn’t fundamentally violent. When I held this theological conviction of heteronormativity, I didn’t think of it as homophobic, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t. Yet because my community was so insular, I was never put in a position where I was forced to see the violent fruits of those beliefs up close and personal.

In conversation with my former classmate, I decided to see if they were still in this position of polite violence. We were exchanging book recommendations, and I told them I was reading Stone Butch Blues, a famous queer novel, and that it was fantastic. They politely declined interest, saying that the book was probably well-written, but they would have to pass.

Um, okay then.

I wrote at length in my blog series about how fundamentalism nips empathy in the bud. The very point is to limit your engagement with people and ideas that are not pre-approved by God so that you won’t end up living in ways that don’t please this version of God. To be frank, that version of God is shit, and if that happens to be your version, you need to get a new one.

If you’re thinking, “I can’t just get a new theology,” I’m here to say, “Yes, you can.” People do it all the time. People have done it throughout Christianity. If no one ever changed their theology, we wouldn’t have church schisms. Don’t tell me you don’t know who Martin Luther is.

Shortly after starting this post, I saw a tweet by Caitlin J. Stout that I thought was apt:

I hate that so many people (PoC/Queers/disabled folks) are forced to do theology for survival. Theology should be FUN. We should be delighting in the never-ending work of discovering & rediscovering the Divine but instead we get stuck with 101 shit like “WhAT aBoUt ROmAns oNe??

Caitlin’s right. People shouldn’t have to do theology for survival. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence. They shouldn’t have to spend their energy trying to evangelize people out of Homophobia Lite (or Ableism Lite or White Supremacy Lite or what have you).

If you’re not willing to even try engaging the ample resources available to you, another angry blog post isn’t going to change your mind. But you need to know what your polite dismissal of queer people’s humanity is doing. It isn’t neutral and it isn’t apolitical or impersonal. If you fall into this camp, here are some examples of the violence you are contributing to:

1. On a basic level, you are affecting the mental and emotional health of queer people. When your messaging to queer people is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, this will take a huge toll on mental health, leading to higher risk of suicide and a host of other issues. If you’re a queer kid growing up in a non-affirming community, you basically get the message that you will never be acceptable to God, your parents, or your community.

2. Conversion therapy (https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-involved/trevor-advocacy/50-bills-50-states/about-conversion-therapy/). Even if you personally don’t support this extremely harmful practice, your non-affirming beliefs are making space for this abuse to continue with impunity.

3. Legal protection. It isn’t just marriage equality (though, that’s huge). Anti-queer theology contributes to a culture of unjustified fear towards queer people just for being themselves, which leads to discrimination and denial of basic civil rights.

4. Dehumanizing queer people in the theoretical/theological level gives others a license to be physically violent toward queer people. You may never lift a finger against a queer person, but your theology gives tacit permission for physical violence. Anti-queer hate crimes are a thing. And if you read Stone Butch Blues, you’ll know that state-sanctioned violence against queer people (especially BIPOC queers) was and is very much a thing.

I’m not saying deconstruction is easy or that you can snap your fingers and have a new belief system magically appear. It takes effort and, if you were raised in a homophobic environment, chances are your polyvagal nervous system will take a while adjust to the changes in your meaning-making system. What I am saying is that de- and reconstruction is in order if you want to stop living out an ethic of calm violence. But maybe I shouldn’t assume so much.

The Queer Castle: How My World Became Queer (6/6)

Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the sixth and final installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

After that very long and gradual move toward becoming open to different lenses, it didn’t take that many interactions with openly queer Christians to figure out that heteronormativity was a big fat charade that made zero sense. I met one of the most beautiful storyteller activists, a man who happened to be gay and married to a man. This was 2015 and I was still technically on the fence about same-sex marriage. But I couldn’t get away from what was so obvious now that I had eyes to see. This activist was lovely. He was married to a man, who was also lovely. How could this loveliness not extend to their union? There just wasn’t anything wrong here except my perception.

I can’t overemphasize how crucial direct encounter with queer voices is (in person and through media). It’s sad that this even needs to be said. It still appalls me that I was able to grow up largely reading only white voices, predominately male, and if any of them were queer, their queerness was obscured. I mean, who knew that Emily Dickinson was probably queer?

People deserve to tell their stories in their own way, and if you only ever read or watch things that other people have written about queer folx by others, you won’t get very far. But more than that: There’s often an emotional shift that must take place, especially for those of us who have been raised in homophobic religious communities. I don’t remember a specific point when I became “queer-affirming,” but I do remember two very different encounters I had with queer love stories. Somewhere in between the two, I’d had some sort of emotional shift.

The first was a movie I’d found from one of those “20 Movies on Netflix You Must See” articles. I can’t remember the name. A few minutes into the movie, I realized that the main character was a gay widower and that the rest of the story was about his grieving process and, later, his story of finding love again. I decided not to finish it. It wasn’t that I thought there was anything wrong with the story per say or that gay love was evil. I just wasn’t emotionally engaged, specifically because it was a love story about a man and another man. As a cis woman who’d only ever operated on straight love stories, I didn’t feel like the story was for me.

Fast forward who knows how long to another movie on Netflix, God’s Own Country (I guess it had to be 2017 or later). Set on a Yorkshire farm in England, it’s about a young sheep farmer and his relationship with a Romanian migrant worker whom his father hires for extra help during the lambing season. It’s a beautiful film about two young men whose paths unexpectedly cross. Their relationship unfolds in ways that bring healing and intimacy. It has all the things: companionship, romance, sexuality, etc. 

I remember watching and feeling so emotionally full. It was one of the most moving human encounters I’d ever seen. And in contrast to my response to that first Netflix film, I felt like every second of God’s Own Country was for me, that I was part of that love story.

The Queer Castle

In early 2019, things kicked up a notch. I got a new job and three of the six members of our tight-knit news team were not only queer, but very in touch with what queer identity meant to them personally. They also happened to be some of the coolest people on the planet, and it wasn’t long before these professional relationships deepened into friendship. 

These friendships have given me a safe space to start thinking more deeply about my own sexuality and gender identity. Evangelical purity culture was in its heyday during my adolescent years and I’ve had to do a lot of deconstruction in its aftermath, rethinking nearly everything I was told about relationships, bodies, sex, and gender. But until now, I haven’t had a judgement-free zone to do this. 

And here’s the thing about queer culture: It recognizes that there’s no one way to be queer. Heteronormative culture expects everyone’s sexuality and gender identity to follow the same basic pattern. But life doesn’t work like that. Every relationship is a negotiation. Things are messy. And queer culture gets that.

Queer culture also understands that society shames the bodies that don’t fit into a heteronormative mold. It ostracizes bodies that transgress the bounds of carefully manicured white order. But queer culture knows the secret: No body in its fullness has ever really been respectable. And so, its posture is one of reclamation: It takes symbols of shame and wears them as badges of honor.

I’m clawing my way out of the cesspool of shame that is evangelical purity culture. I need a culture of reclamation, an eagerness to take the old slurs meant for shame and twist them into paeans of pride.

Listening to queer discourse has also given me a more expansive language. Just as ancient peoples may not have seen blue because they didn’t have a language for it, so the capacity to perceive expands when you have words and names to describe things. Hearing perspectives from people who identify as asexual, pansexual, intersex, transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid or agender (this isn’t a comprehensive list–just examples of identifiers I wasn’t familiar with before) has opened me to a cornucopia of human existence I wasn’t aware of before.

But enough about me. I began this series to tell you about my journey toward queer-affirmation in a non-affirming religious context, so naturally it centers my personal experience, how queer people and thought have influenced me. But the important takeaway isn’t how queer-affirmation can expand the minds of straight people. So, go. Read. Listen. Engage. Here are some books by queer authors that you might want to check out. Some of these I’ve read, and others are on my to-read list.

Fiction:

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Essays Collections:

Sovereign Erotics edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti

Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives edited by Nia King, Terra Mikalson, and Jessica Glennon-Zukoff

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity edited Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane

Memoirs/Speeches:

Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Becoming Eve by Abby Chava Stein

Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia

There’s no one book that can tell you how to think about everything or give you the Definitive Experience about anything. That’s kind of the point–debunking the myth that there’s even such a thing as a definitive experience. And you’ll find even within LGBTQIA+ communities, there’s debate and argument about what different words mean and how they should be used. That’s par for the course. No community is a monolith.

But while no one can speak for everyone, you’ll find common themes and experiences. The more you read, the more you encounter, the more you’ll start to get a feel for the lay of the land and where you happen to be in it. The more you’ll see where all these stories connect.

I doubt you’ll come to any fixed conclusion or find a voice to speak the last word. I used to find this idea disturbing, but not anymore. I’m more troubled by aspirations of finality and grand sweeping narratives that drown out other voices. A society can’t be simultaneously just, living, and static.

Decolonizing the earth doesn’t mean the end of new names or the death of language. If anything, it signals an abundance of generative speech, and infinity of communal linguistic creation. We’ll keep eating and drinking and talking and making. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want this party to end.

Gender: How My World Became Queer (5/6)

Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the fifth installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Although my skin color was not a barrier to fitting into this cis-het-white-man’s world of biblical studies, my gender was. At the same time, however, I’d been lulled into a false sense of my body’s acceptability in my chosen field of study.

This doesn’t mean my gender was irrelevant (far from it). Gender had troubled me since my undergraduate days. I tend to think of gender as more expansive than a binary now, but when I first began studying the Bible formally, the world was divided into Men and Women and I was placed squarely in the Women category.

In an earlier draft of this section, a reader wondered why I used the term “gender” here – why didn’t I use the term “sex” if sex is allegedly about biology and gender is a social construct? Let me pause for a minute and clarify (as best I can) the difference between sex and gender. The two are related, but distinct.

Sex and Gender

Sex is a biological category based on the anatomy of a person’s reproductive system and secondary sex characteristics. Sex and gender are often conflated, in part, because we tend to talk about both sex and gender using the terms “male” and “female.” In the context of sex, for example, we refer to specific genitalia as male (e.g., penis, testicles) and female (e.g., vagina).

However, even thinking exclusively in these binary terms about sex is misleading since we know that not everyone has exclusively male or female anatomy. Intersex people have variations in sex characteristics (e.g., chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, and genitals). Even when it comes to biological features, the idea that there are only two sexes is a myth. The binary breaks down. In fact, you can even be intersex without knowing it, as intersex anatomy doesn’t always show up at birth. For a more expansive and detailed explanation, see the Intersex Society of North America’s FAQs.

Even though sex is a biological category, it’s still a social construct, as the ISNA points out: “Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation.” The ISNA likens sex anatomy to the color spectrum:

[N]ature presents us with sex anatomy spectrums. Breasts, penises, clitorises, scrotums, labia, gonads–all of these vary in size and shape and morphology. So-called “sex” chromosomes can vary quite a bit, too. But in human cultures, sex categories get simplified into male, female, and sometimes intersex, in order to simplify social interactions, express what we know and feel, and maintain order. So nature doesn’t decide where the category of “male” ends and the category of “intersex” begins, or where the category of “intersex” ends and the category of “female” begins. Humans decide. Humans (today, typically doctors) decide how small a penis has to be, or how unusual a combination of parts has to be, before it counts as intersex. Humans decide whether a person with XXY chromosomes or XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity will count as intersex.

What, then, is gender? Gender is, well, complicated. Gender Spectrum has a decent article on understanding gender that is worth reading in its entirety and quoting at length:

Generally, we assign a newborn’s sex as either male or female (some US states and other countries offer a third option) based on the baby’s genitals. Once a sex is assigned, we presume the child’s gender. For some people, this is cause for little, if any, concern or further thought because their gender aligns with gender-related ideas and assumptions associated with their sex.

Nevertheless, while gender may begin with the assignment of our sex, it doesn’t end there. A person’s gender is the complex interrelationship between three dimensions:

·         Body: our body, our experience of our own body, how society genders bodies, and how others interact with us based on our body.

·         Identity: the name we use to convey our gender based on our deeply held, internal sense of self. Identities typically fall into binary (e.g. man, woman), Non-binary (e.g. Genderqueer, genderfluid) and ungendered (e.g. Agender, genderless) categories; the meaning associated with a particular identity can vary among individuals using the same term. A person’s Gender identity can correspond to or differ from the sex they were assigned at birth.

·         Social: how we present our gender in the world and how individuals, society, culture, and community perceive, interact with, and try to shape our gender. Social gender includes gender roles and expectations and how society uses those to try to enforce conformity to current gender norms.

To be honest, I’m still not sure how to talk about gender. I can’t name it exactly, but I felt there was something deeply beautiful and true about Ashleigh Shackelford’s descriptions of gender in the essay You Could Never Misgender Me. God, just forget my blog post and go read that essay. It’s more poignant than anything I would ever be able to write about gender here.

The Realm of Men and Women

I use gender instead of sex in this post because, although I didn’t know the different between the two until a few years ago, I think what I was experiencing was more about gender than sex. I understood myself as a woman and my body was read by society as a woman’s body, even if I was often frustrated and conflicted about what being a “woman” meant.

My desire to pursue biblical studies professionally made being a Woman a problem, and vice versa. Desire does that to you–problematizes all your neat categories. 

While several of my undergrad professors (all cis men) encouraged me to study the Bible, only a few believed it would be permissible for me to teach the Bible in a church context. Armed with that question of what God allowed people in the Woman category to do, I’d hunkered down with my commentaries and exegetical tools and tried to figure out whether the Bible said I could even teach it (and if so, where).

My formerly rigid attachment to gender binaries was starting to break down in subtle ways. I’d imbibed patriarchal language from evangelical purity culture as a teen, and in my first years in college continued to mimic it, writing for the school newspaper about how men needed to lead and be assertive and how women needed to not get upset when men opened doors for them. I loved the patriarchal fantasy of Captivated and Wild At Heart because it spoke to many of the very real and raw emotional wounds inflicted by my father in very unhealthy yet compelling ways.

But in high school, being a girl hadn’t caused problems for me in many overt ways. I hadn’t wanted to do much besides write stories and poetry. And I was permitted to do that. Now that I was becoming interested in biblical studies, people were telling me I wasn’t allowed to teach the Bible because I was a girl. 

This tore at the fiber of my being. While I was influenced by patriarchy in more subtle ways, I’d very rarely been told growing up that I wasn’t able or allowed to do something because I was a girl. And in those rare cases, it angered me. I think I knew on a gut level that this is the ultimate attempt at erasure. You tell someone that their destiny is inscribed in the cosmos without any reference to their desires or abilities. What they want doesn’t matter. What they love is irrelevant. 

Love–that’s it. There’s no room for love here. What they desire makes no practical difference. It’s about control.

The borders of their body have been decided before the foundations of the earth were laid. They can do nothing to change these limits and to attempt this is rebellion. God may let them carry on for a little while, press against the borders, but it’s only a matter of time before he takes them in hand. “You’re just not supposed to do what you can do because someone bigger and stronger will feel threatened by you. So just don’t. Contract yourself.” 

One of the Boys

I knew I was just as intelligent than any of the boys in my Bible classes (in truth, I was smarter, but I didn’t know it at the time). Apart from the fact that I had different secondary sex characteristics (and how people treated me differently when they noticed them), I didn’t feel like I was substantially other than the boys. And complementarians were always quick to point out that it wasn’t because of lack of intelligence that women couldn’t teach or had to be subject to the authority of a man or husband to do so. It was because the very picture of marriage was a symbol of Christ’s relationship to the church. In other words, complementarianism came with the tacit admission that gender assignments (and attendant gender roles) were arbitrary–it’s just that in this case it was God who assigned gender, so it was okay.

Before pregnancy and childbirth, I’d mostly been able to blend in as “one of the boys” in biblical studies if I dressed conservatively. I don’t know if people really forgot I was a woman, but I mostly did. But then my body started to swell with child, and by the codes of conservative evangelicalism, that is the most feminine of things. And then I had a baby and the jig was up. I was now perceived as a Real Woman. And Real Women, while they might be allowed to do lots of things now (like wear pants and work outside the home and be doctors and stuff), still had a primary and Higher Calling of Motherhood.

I had been initiated into the guild of Womanhood and excised from the Realm of Men. No, I wasn’t kicked out of school or told I couldn’t be both a mom and an academic (not in so many words anyway). And there were even a handful of people within the evangelical academic system who tried to help alleviate the tension I was experiencing. But the sum of all the microaggressions, combined with the growing sense that my body’s belonging here had been an illusion, set the stage for me to keep questioning the whole white cis-hetero-patriarchal system until its credibility fell apart entirely.

In short, it was the realization of my own body’s unacceptability that made me start to wonder whether any of this system worked for anyone’s body. As I started to listen more, I realized that bodies of color were not acceptable. Femininity was not acceptable in any body, and masculinity was acceptable only in select bodies. Not being straight was not acceptable.

From there, it was more human encounters that facilitated my transition to queer-affirmation. I graduated and started working for a progressive Christian social activist. Although this activist was not himself queer-affirming, he worked with a lot of people that were, and this exposed me to several people who were both Christians (or people of faith) and openly, exuberantly queer. 

In this justice-oriented context, I also started to understand that all this arguing about what bodies were acceptable to God extended to the affirmation or denial of basic human civil rights. I saw how the church’s refusal to accept queer humans as good and holy contributed to mainstream society’s queerphobic stories that resulted in violence (verbal and physical) against queer people. I started to see sexism, racism, and homophobia as part of the same power matrix–all linked to the same colonizing myth about the supremacy of one specific type of body.

God's Brain: How My World Became Queer (4/6)

Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the fourth installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

God’s Brain

As of 2013, I was still trying to get into God’s brain. A few months ago, I came across an email exchange I had with a New Testament professor in 2013. It reveals a lot about where I was in my thinking then. 

I told the professor I was haunted by the question of how to love my LGBTQIA+ neighbor. (That’s actually a lie: I said “homosexual neighbor,” though I understand now that this word has a painful and sordid history.) I knew as a biblical scholar that presuppositions heavily influence interpretation. I understood that my conservative theological presuppositions about sexuality biased my reading of the Bible. I also understood that human experience does (and should) influence our reading of the text. The following is a condensed version of what I wrote to this professor:

I don’t think I’ve been given the hermeneutical tools to think about the Bible and the contemporary world. It’s one thing to discern (on a surface level) what the biblical authors said about same-sex relationships – it’s quite another to figure out what God is saying. I know I have heavy layers of bias that seem almost impossible to wade through. I don’t know what it’s like to feel attraction to someone of the same sex. I feel torn because, on the one hand, I think I really want to believe that same-sex relationships are okay. Most of the biblical arguments I’ve seen against same-sex relationships are terrible. If Paul addresses same-sex relationships, it’s in the context of something larger and focusing on the issue by itself seems very myopic. If same-sex marriage is pleasing to God, then we’re committing a horrible injustice by not letting Christians of the same sex get married. On the other hand, if God is against same-sex relationships, it’s vitally important–I don’t want to cavalierly accept same-sex marriage as God-ordained and wonderful if it’s something that’s damaging to human beings. I’ll be going to Wheaton this Fall to do an M.A. in Biblical Exegesis. I’ve heard great things about the program. But I do wonder if I’ll really be able to engage in these sorts of questions or if the answers will be so “obvious” to everyone (except me).

That last sentence is salient because of what I encountered at Wheaton. The program I entered at Wheaton is indeed an excellent program if you want to learn the technical ins and outs of grammatical-historical exegesis. 

But like most of white evangelicalism, Wheaton lacks critical self-awareness. (And I’m not talking about individual professors here–I’m talking about large scale, institutional attitudes, though of course individuals do play a role in this and are responsible for their complicity.) It doesn’t interrogate how its own presuppositions have been shaped. It’s good at historical reconstruction of the past (to a point) but doesn’t do a great job of negotiating how those histories inform the present. It’s very white in the sense that it’s disembodied, unaware of its own historical location and how that affects the thinkers it lets in.

In my program, we read very few cis women, very few authors of color, and no queer authors at all. The few (white) feminist scholars we read were assigned somewhat grudgingly with a sort of, “Well, we must read some of this drivel to be informed of what’s out there, but the really gritty stuff is this other writing over here.” 

This other writing over here. I think that gets to the heart of it. You don’t need to ban books to keep ideas out. You just have to divert the reader’s attention. “The party’s here, not over there. Forget over there. That’s not worth your time.” I’m starting to catch on, though. I know to search for the writing over there.

Although I didn’t yet realize how white and heteronormative my education had been, I came away from Wheaton deeply dissatisfied. At Wheaton, something changed, and I link it directly to my experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Another vital detail: I gave birth at the end of July 2014 and started my second year at Wheaton that August, right when the Ferguson protests were happening. Before that, I was unaware that police shootings of unarmed black people (and Native Americans and Latinx people for that matter) are a routine part of American life. Ferguson was the start of my journey toward understanding racism as a systemic issue rooted in the myths of white supremacy on which the U.S. was founded.

What does this have to do with Wheaton and my birth experience? Stay with me. There are a lot of complex intersections here that I’m trying to condense into this short space.

Here’s one of the things about being white–or straight or cis or any identity you’re not forced to think about because your body’s just accepted by mainstream society as the norm. There’s this illusion that all those other qualifying identity labels are not for you. Biblical exegesis and theology are good examples. These fields are largely white- and male-dominated and tend to operate from these perspectives. But we don’t call them White Theology or Cisgender Male Theology. Instead, it’s just Theology with a capital T. Everything else gets a label to signal the frame of experience people are interpreting from. Queer Theology. Feminist Theology. 

And even Feminist Theology should really be called White Feminist Theology because historically feminism (at least in the U.S.) has functionally most often meant liberation for white women, not all women. So, we’ve got categories for feminist theologies of color, like Womanist Theology and Mujerista Theology and so on. There are lots more. I should know them. I don’t. I have the luxury of ignorance because not-knowing doesn’t have an immediately adverse effect on my own body and well-being. That’s whiteness at work.

White experience often comes with the illusion of disembodied neutrality. We don’t tend to think of our white skin as a contributing factor to how we’re perceived or treated. In a similar way, if your sexual orientation or gender identity (or presentation) does not diverge from the “standard” heteronormative shape, it’s very easy to believe that your experience is the default and that most people think and experience the world the way you do. If no one’s harassing you or mistreating you for these aspects of who you are, you have less reason to be self-conscious about them.

How My World Became Queer (3/6)

Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the third installment of a six-part series. For context, check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Queersighted

In the nine years since that conversation with Sarah, I’ve learned that my life had long been full of queer people still in the closet. At many a coming out since, I’ve done a mental facepalm. Of course. It all makes sense now. Of course, she’s bi. Of course, he’s gay. Why didn’t I notice the signs?

With other friends, it wasn’t so obvious in retrospect, and it should be said that not everyone’s story of identity follows the “this is who I’ve always been and now I’m revealing my true self” template. (The coming-out-of-the-closet metaphor has its limits.)

But the point here is that I didn’t see what might have been apparent if I’d been allowed lenses through which to see. Queer invisibility is one of the perpetual horrors of conservative evangelicalism. Evangelicalism doesn’t just imply that queer people shouldn’t exist (as if that weren’t bad enough). It erases them to the point that you don’t even recognize queerness when it’s staring you in the face.

When I asked a queer friend I knew from Bible college to read an earlier draft of this series, they told me that a substantial number of students who made use of the college counseling center did so because they were struggling with their sexuality in the context of their faith. The campus culture at large saw queer sexuality as a problem and these students knew that if they were discovered, there would be hell to pay.

My friend related a story about a gay student who attended the same college. The student was found out to be gay but promised not to act on any same-sex attraction they felt. However, their roommate said they felt uncomfortable staying with them. The college’s solution was to give the student 24 hours to collect their belongings and get off campus (in the middle of the semester). No refund, and nothing transferable. No chance to finish those classes.

So, for many queer students, it was important to stay under the radar, invisible. It was a matter of survival.

The concept of frames is important here. Whether you want to call them lenses or use another metaphor for the orientation of your gaze, there’s no such thing as unframed sight. What you see will be guided by the scope of the frame. In biblical studies and a few other disciplines, your mode of approach or way of seeing is called a “hermeneutic.” 

You must routinely switch lenses if you want to see what you didn’t before. As more and more friends and acquaintances came out, queer stopped being an abstraction or lofty theological question.

It was unequivocally these personal relationships that started to rework the way I thought about queerness. I think everyone who transitions from a non-affirming religious context to acceptance of queer bodies does so because of relationships, whether face-to-face or by hearing people’s stories in books, podcasts, blogs, and other media.

And yet, I want to make it clear to anyone who is invested in biblical interpretation that it was my formal study of the Bible that prepared the way for me to become queer-affirming. I don’t mean that I had unmediated access to the Bible and that I figured out what it was “really” saying, and it led me here. Rather, the more I engaged the many texts that comprise the compendium we call The Bible, the more I saw that these texts evinced a plurality of perspectives that were sometimes in conflict with one another. 

And these tensions weren’t simply between one book and another. In a single book, there might be multiple voices present, and occasions where one voice had been incorporated into a larger body, present and yet marginalized–yet at the same time, not entirely erased either. I also saw the ways in which early traditions were reworked in later texts, sometimes with continuity and sometimes with contradiction (more often both at once). How had all these disparate voices managed to make it into the same Bible? How had the more marginalized voices that countered the dominant streams of tradition even survived?

Through that process, I learned that texts are under negotiation. Meaning is a negotiation. Reading is a back and forth, a wrestling. It is more about reclamation and creative rebuilding than about trying to obey one dominant voice. 

For some time, I’ve sensed the Bible is queer without quite knowing what that meant or how to explain it to others. My formal education didn’t include queer biblical hermeneutics, so I’m not even very well-versed in queer theory and its application to the Bible. What do I mean that the Bible is queer? 

Contrary to the way the conversation is often framed in conservative Christian circles, queerness isn’t primarily about who you want to fuck (though that’s part of it). It’s about deconstructing heteronormativity and the injustice generated by it and constructing a just world reoriented around the voices that have been silenced by dominant narratives. It’s about co-creating an existence in which the flourishing of one body (or type of body) is not contingent on the marginalization or exploitation of other bodies. In this sense, queerness is inseparable from decolonization and anti-racism.

Or, put another way: Queer isn’t about anything. Queer is. But when that right to just exist is questioned in one place, it knits you to all the other locales where that right is denied.

That’s why I think “queer-affirmation” only goes so far. Churches should not be queer-affirming. They should be queer-centering. This isn’t about who you want to fuck. It’s about disrupting the hegemony and reorganizing society so that who you want to fuck won’t be used to justify violence against you, anymore than your skin color, the size of your body, or your gender identity or presentation. But beyond that (protection from violence is a minimum), it’s about repairing the world and making it a place where difference is understood as a cause for celebration and a source of generativity.

The Bible is queer because it invites readers to reappropriate it in ways that elevate the voices from the margins. It’s not that the Bible doesn’t have dominant voices that at times overshadow those that diverge from mainstream theological threads (it does). It’s that the whole history of biblical writing and interpretation is a history of creative, subversive reappropriation.

The more I delved into these disparate texts that had been set alongside each other, I saw them in dialogue with each other, not only talking to each other, but reinterpreting each other. I saw how subsequent interpretations of these texts by faith communities resisted a single interpretation. These texts clearly could (and did) have multiple meanings, potentially boundless ones. I started to think that maybe it wasn’t so important for Christians to do as the biblical authors said so much as to do as they did. And over time, the question of same-sex marriage started to seem very narrow.

There’s common myth among biblicists that it goes something like this. The people who care about the Bible hold tenaciously to the text, and then there are all the other people who let new information or social trends or whatever’s in vogue twist up their interpretation of the Bible. 

This formula disregards an observed historical pattern about storytelling: You can’t hold tenaciously to a story without twisting it up, and it’s most often by intentionally twisting it up that you hold onto it. Just ask ritual theorists. New information and relationships should twist up your reading of the Bible. Texts acquire new meaning in every generation and that’s what interpreters have done for thousands of years (though even if they’d only done it for five minutes, it would still be a good way to go). 

So, although the personal stories of queer people (initially queer Christians primarily) was the straw that broke the exegetical camel’s back, it was my shifting view of the Bible that loaded up the mountains of straw that came before. I reached a biblical hermeneutic that would allow me to be queer-affirming long before I allowed my theological position to change. My linguistic philosophy and my biblical hermeneutic was in tension with what I believed my doctrinal presuppositions were supposed to be. It was only a matter of time before it all came to a head.

How My World Became Queer (2/6)

Here’s the story of how I became queer-affirming in a conservative Christian environment. This is the second installment of a six-part series. The first part is available here.

Divine Binaries

 When I think about my conversation with Sarah back in Scotland, I’m not sure I wasn’t mimicking the same behavior of the church I was criticizing. No, it wasn’t exactly “come as you are, and you’ll find out later that you’re not welcome.” It was more “come as you are and hang out for a while I figure out if I should push you away or not.”

I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance at the time. Growing up as an empathetic human in evangelical fundamentalism meant I was compelled to lead a bizarre double life when it came to the relationship between love and listening to people. Evangelicalism so often translated “Hear the word of the LORD” as “Don’t hear the words of anyone else.”

Love, as I understand it now, entails both taking people at their word and holding their speech about themselves in tension with the knowledge that their identity is constantly unfolding. You believe them, yet there is also a suspension of belief, not because what they are saying now is necessarily untrue, but because the human self is a universe in flux. The words a person uses today may not be the words they use tomorrow. It isn’t because their words are deficient in any absolute sense, but that no words stand alone and mean something all by themselves–that’s not how language works. 

The self evolves through perpetual intercourse with other selves, and so all speech is provisional and contextual, not the final word. There is no ultimate, unchanging authoritative word. Love involves trust in the interpretation of the self that is immediately present, but also expects to be astonished as new aspects of identity bud and flower within love’s line of vision.

Evangelicalism’s message on paper was that God is love and so Christians should love everyone. But evangelicalism also said I wasn’t supposed to believe people if they told me an account of their experience that contradicted or challenged core theological beliefs I already had. More specifically, I wasn’t to believe anything that seemed to go against what the Bible said. The Bible was God’s authoritative, unchanging Word and must be obeyed. The question was always: What does the Bible say about XYZ?

I was to draw near to people but hold them at arm’s length, to play with them but not trust them. Like the love I described above, this version of love also entailed a deferment of belief, but not because the self is a plurality and abundance of speech. It was because the self was knowable to God alone, the ultimate judge and final word on the self. Everyone was moving toward an essential self that would one day be revealed and consequently judged. 

As humans, we had the logistical problem of not being God, and thus not always knowing with absolute certainty what was a “right” or “wrong” part of the self. We had the Bible to guide us, but our interpretations were not infallible even if God’s Word was. If it was clear to us that part of a person’s story did not align with how the Bible said they should be, we would reject their witness as untenable. 

When it wasn’t crystal clear, we were permitted to suspend our disbelief. But even this was dangerous territory.

So, I found myself in a kind of limbo where I couldn’t listen genuinely to people and let their experiences inform my views unless they affirmed and reinforced what I already believed. I was operating in this binary structure of judgement that divided the world into two categories of human: The saved and the damned.

The self was in flux and this was viewed as an unfortunate but unavoidable reality. Self-fluidity couldn’t be helped, but you were aiming (with divine assistance) to move toward becoming the self that God had assigned you long before birth. That self, once the sin bequeathed by Adam and Eve had been removed through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross, would be good. In the meantime, no one was absolutely good or bad in a functional sense. Everyone had bits and pieces of good and bad mixed together. 

The difference between the saved and the damned was this: The saved recognized that they’d been born with something wrong with them and were trusting God to help them transition into his ideal of a Real Human, the Right Self. The saved knew they’d been born on the wrong side of the good/bad binary and wanted to be rescued to live on the right side. The Real Humans alone would make it into the kingdom of heaven and the rest would go to hell.

That’s where I was when Sarah and I talked. I knew I wasn’t God and didn’t have a complete picture of what a Real Human looked like. I’d been studying the Bible formally for over four years and I knew by then that the Bible isn’t always clear on everything. So, I was letting myself stray into that perilous zone of suspending my disbelief. 

I had enough interpretational doubt in my mind not to completely write off queer narratives as incompatible with biblical Christianity. And yet, my theological presuppositions were getting in the way of embrace. Maybe God was queer-affirming, but what if he* wasn’t? Wouldn’t my affirmation of queer people pave the road to their damnation? 

*I use the masculine singular pronoun for God throughout this piece for two reasons. In the community I grew up in, God was conceived of as masculine and it was verboten to call God “she.” Using masculine pronouns reflects the exclusively masculine conception of God I was given. For this same reason, I use God with an uppercase G. Also, while there are many ways think about god and gender (I prefer they/them for god, but also see potential in using she/her), uppercasing God goes hand-in-hand with the conception of him as exclusively masculine.

How My World Became Queer (1/6)

I grew up in a conservative American evangelical Christian environment circa 1990-2010. In this context, it was considered a sin to be queer. This is the story of how I became queer-affirming in that environment. This is the first installment of a six-part series.

Come As You Are, Just Don’t Be Queer

I didn’t know that Sarah was queer as we walked on a Scottish beach in 2010, talking about the church where we’d first met back in the United States.

Sarah came from a liberal church background but was interning at a more conservative church. At a time when conservative evangelicals were just starting to consider that maybe being gay or lesbian wasn’t a choice, queer affirmation wasn’t even a question for Sarah. Queer people should be treated equally with the same dignity and civil rights as anyone else. Queer Christians should be allowed to be ordained, love who they love, and serve in the church with the fullness of their identities out in the open.

Sarah herself was in seminary studying to become a pastor and was frustrated that the pastor of our mutual church back home wasn’t even open to hosting serious discussions about same-sex relationships.

This church was one of those young, predominantly white, hipster evangelical churches that opened its doors to the doubters, the skeptics, and the people with tattoos–and served them organic, locally sourced coffee to boot. But as has become increasingly common in such churches, the “come as you are” vibes were mostly smoke and mirrors that obscured a strong devotion to heteronormativity and theologically conservative values. If you were queer, you could come as you were and eat and drink and talk and (who knows?) maybe even take communion. But you’d soon learn that you couldn’t teach or serve in leadership positions. And if you wanted to get married to someone of the same sex, you’d have to do it in another church since the church couldn’t condone it.

Ever the reserved and cautious listener, I absorbed Sarah’s frustrations and agreed that churches should, at a minimum, be willing to talk about things and be open to change. Refusing to listen and talk is never the right answer. 

But I was conspicuously silent on whether I was queer-affirming. The truth is, I wasn’t sure I knew.

A Big Fucking Party

I was raised in a religious community that believed it was a sin to be gay–though it’s a little anachronistic for me to use that language. At the time, there was no real concept of “being gay” or any of the other identities represented by the initialism LGBTQIA+.

People tended to use terms like “homosexuality” and “same-sex attraction” based on the premise that attraction outside a heteronormative framework was unnatural (=ungodly) and should not be understood as part of a person’s identity. Desire was treated more like an alien invader to root out than a neighbor to negotiate with and hold dear.

In many Christian circles, the term “queer-affirming” is used to describe a church (or person) that believes Christians should accept LGBTQIA+ people without qualification and not view their queerness as a sin or a problem to be solved.

I’m not a huge fan of this term. It doesn’t feel restorative enough or come close to describing how fundamentally personal (and communal) consciousness can and must change as it embraces queer bodies and reorients to cultivate more equitable habits of being. 

Nonetheless, it feels important for me to write about how I became queer-affirming in a non-affirming religious context. So many of my friends and former classmates from Bible college have either come out or are negotiating the process of coming out, and they deserve support. 

But this isn’t just about them–it’s about all of us. Heteronormativity and queerphobia are rooted in harmful stories that damage everyone, albeit in different ways.

I think that’s why, on a very personal level, this piece has been so hard to write. I’ve moved far away from my initial questions and toward a posture of celebration of queer bodies, coupled with a deep lament for how the heteronormative patterns of our world continue to perpetrate emotional, psychological, and physical harm to real people. These wounds we inflict by participation in the dominant culture’s toxic stories about sexuality and gender (wittingly or unwittingly) are a kind of communal self-harm. These harms won’t be healed apart from the queering of our minds and the justice-oriented transformation that comes with it.

I can’t pretend like the query I started with was any good. The question for me as an evangelical Christian was: Does God affirm queer people or not (and thus should Christians affirm or not)? 

“Should we include someone at this table?” fails to interrogate the power dynamics at play. It does not challenge who owns the table or how it was designed to begin with. The question of whether to include or exclude comes from a position of power, from the bodies for whom the table was built.

“Why, yes, I affirm you. I’ll let you sit at this table that was designed for me and is still oriented around me. How big of me to let you sit here. And please know that I value your opinion, just make sure you use your indoor voice and say please and thank you.”

We need to overturn the whole fucking table.

But of course, this was not always so obvious to me as it is now. If it had been, I would have no journey to tell you about. This series could just as well be titled How I Realized My Questions Were Rubbish. 

Still, I can’t talk about “queer-affirmation” in the way I would’ve in the past, by whipping out my three higher degrees in theology and biblical studies and giving you an exegetical play-by-play of how my interpretation of specific Bible passages evolved. (If you do want resources that deal with biblical interpretation, though, drop me a line and I’ll help you get find them.) 

I can’t return to the old queries when all I want to do is haul in a huge table and help get ready for a dinner party. That’s really all people have been fighting for: A big fucking party with a new table where every body belongs and no one has to constantly argue for their right to exist. (It hardly needs to be said that this party includes basic civil rights and reparations, and lots of nice quiet rooms where queer introverts can celebrate in peace.) It’s a perfectly reasonable demand.

Maybe you’re not ready to pull up a chair. Maybe you’re still uneasy about this party because you, too, were raised in a homophobic environment and undoing that shit isn’t easy. If you are uncomfortable, that’s okay. Well, it’s actually not okay, but also, it is. You are where you are. But what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t invite you to the party? So, please join me, at least for a short while. Have a drink. Look around. 

It’s okay if you feel awkward or don’t know all the right words to say. No one does. That’s one of the hard and beautiful things about this party: The language is evolving and we’re learning it together. Many of the old names and ways of talking ended up erasing or alienating people, so we’ve got to keep making new vocabulary and reworking the grammar. 

At this party, it’s considered a gift to receive correction, for anyone to pull you aside and say, “Don’t use those words; they contribute to my erasure. Use these other words instead. Here, I give you the name I’ve chosen for myself–speak it. I give you the pronouns by which I want to be called–use them. Together, we will make the world over again.” 

A Good Father

This is an excerpt of my book-in-progress. The following is part of a chapter tentatively titled A Good Father.

*

“Whipping out your dick again, I see,” a friend remarks as I flash my credit card to pay for our drinks.

“Yup,” I say, feeling the tension drain out of me as I insert my card into the square reader’s mouth. Until this moment of release, I’m drowning inside, dragged by the undertow of memory into the rooms of a dozen odd restaurants in Manhattan and North Jersey where I watch as my family sits in the aftermath of a meal in public with Grandpa. 

Who’s won this time? I wonder as I survey the familiar faces around the long table where dirty plates and mangled napkins lie strewn with abandoned cutlery. Has Grandpa excused himself under the guise of a trip to the restroom only to sneak up front and pay the bill? Did the waiter bring the check to the table for the menfolk to haggle over? Did my father insist on paying this time or did he acquiesce to his father’s whims, resolving to pay for the next one?

Who is going to pay for the meal? The question mounts in me whenever I go out with friends. I can’t relax until it’s answered. I am bewildered now that I am grown and the world is no longer divided into those who whip out their dicks and those expected to receive them. I am lost without a polis to determine who’s supposed to finance this leitourgia.

I’ll pay this time. You can pay next time. Or maybe I’ll just keep paying every time for all those years I wasn’t given a choice. 

I’ll pay because when you love people you throw money at them. When you love someone, you pay for the clothes on their back and the food in their stomach. You set up a college fund for them and deposit money into it each year. You buy them coats at Christmas and mail a card on their birthdays.

And all you ask in return is that they laugh at your jokes, don’t talk back, and that they call you once or twice a year to talk for three minutes. You don’t need them to say ‘I love you’ because you already know–you’re family, after all. Flesh and blood.

I’ll foot the bill because I can’t stand the suspense of obligation, the social debts piling up waiting to be paid. I’ll be the father almighty, doling out cash and receiving nothing but honor and the satisfaction of being a self-made man beholden to no one. 

You can talk back as much as you like and you don’t have to laugh at my jokes, just please don’t think for a second that I need you. I’ll let you drink me dry before I’ll let you see me thirst.

Anatomical Inscriptions

The following is an excerpt of my book-in-progress. For context, see the previous section here. I am a bit reticent to post this section because it’s part of a longer chapter that’s in constant flux, and I’m always concerned with representation. So, take this for what it is: a work in progress.

Anatomical Inscriptions

The orbits of the skull watch me through the glass. I wonder for a split second whether I’m not the one on display in the museum case, head detached from my frame and placed on a low pedestal, my meaning curated for viewers by tidy rectangles of text posted beside me. 

My double and I are alone here in the museum basement: a fleshless, gutless nineteenth century cranium opposite a living twenty-first century head coiled with gray matter. The elder skull’s hollow sockets seem to peel off my skin, unwrap my bones. I feel a sharp cold enter my rib cage and creep around my joints, haunting the spaces between my radii and ulnae.

What do you see?

I say it aloud, but the hoary head doesn’t answer.

This augur has no power to pronounce a favorable word over me. Its pedestal is a witness stand, this skull one more testimony to my colonizing ancestors’ crimes. The mounting evidence points to a clear verdict: guilty. Judgement is passed. The sentence alone remains.

I read the bodies of text that frame my experience of the exhibit, but in years to come I won’t remember quite how they told the story of this skull. I’ll recall primarily that the skull was cast as a representative sample of over a thousand other skulls collected by Dr. Samuel George Morton. 

I will go on to read books and articles that deepen my understanding of colonialism and its links to white supremacy and the invention of race. And I will start to piece together all the feelings I do not now understand. Over time, my initial impressions will be reworked by new information. And I will write this scene in a way that doesn’t match the original experience. 

I’ll leave my readers with this solemn charge: Document my omissions, assess my arrangement of this story, critique its operations, and write it again. Do not let this book be the final word.

* 

I read that the skull and its thousand odd contemporaries were taken to Philadelphia from disparate places across the globe, the skeletons left at their burial sites. This staggered forced migration occurred at the behest of an American physician and natural scientist named Samuel Morton, who collected skulls to sate his taste for phrenology.

Phrenology was a white supremacist pseudoscience that was popular in the early-mid 1800s. Its main premise was that cranial features are indicators of a person’s character and intellectual ability. It was one of many tools employed by proponents of scientific racism, also known as ‘race biology.’ Phrenologists used their findings to promote the myth that humans can be divided into physically discrete races and categorized in a racial hierarchy.

 Samuel Morton marked each skull by racial type and geographic provenance, gathering an army of samples to prove his hypothesis that ‘Caucasians’ possessed the largest skulls. Morton believed not only that people could be categorized into ‘races’ based on variant physical characteristics, but that these differences suggested that people of other races were actually distinct species. 

He assembled his troops of skulls and measured their cranial capacity using seed and shot, comparing the average skull sizes of each ‘race.’ As he had anticipated, the Caucasian skulls were the biggest and the black African skulls (labelled ‘Negroid’) were the smallest, with the other races in between. 

The conclusion was inescapable: White people were the smartest race and it was this intellectual superiority that enabled them to colonize the globe. Morton published his findings in three volumes over the course of ten years, and his research was often cited as a scientific justification for slavery in the U.S.

I digest this exhibit–titled Year of Proof: The Making and Unmaking of Race–with cool reason and a critical eye. Morton was nothing if not meticulous–any challenge to his authority must match his exactitude measure for measure. Discrediting Morton’s work takes thirty-six years of balanced academic debate between a host of anthropologists, a science historian, and a philosopher. They must sift through Morton’s documentation to figure out where he went wrong. The public needs proof. No one will believe them if they just say he’s a racist and call it a day. The court of public opinion needs the cold, hard evidence of the academy, that just utopia where all men are created equal and their arguments receive equal scholarly treatment before the law of science.

I follow the scholars as they tease out the effects of Morton’s bias step by step. The story of white supremacy dominates the way he selects his cranial samples for examination, the different tools he uses to measure cranial capacity, and the presuppositions he has about racial groupings. 

Morton’s method and premise are flawed and his main conclusion–that Caucasian skulls are bigger on average–is wrong. He doesn’t just make incorrect racist extrapolations from correct data by claiming that white people are more intelligent because of their cranial capacity. He mis-measures the skulls and gets the data about Caucasian skull size wrong. 

But Morton isn’t rigging the results. He believes in the integrity of his work. He’s an unabashed racist but doesn’t think this interferes with his scientific method. He proceeds with the notion that this pageant of skulls and scholarship is about science and not the story he needs to believe to live comfortably in his cocoon of white supremacy. 

Morton is not, he believes, writing on the world but reading it. He is a witness to the way things are, not a co-producer of reality. He is interpreting nature’s signs, not signaling. This is about facts, not personal or communal identity, and certainly not the distribution of wealth.

The value of a story can be measured by what you lose when you let it go. Morton doesn’t need to assess the worth of white supremacy because the cost and gain are inscribed in the machinations of the legal and socioeconomic systems of the United States. 

Slavery is a Southern phenomenon, but systemic racism is endemic to both the North and the South. The so-called Age of the Common Man inaugurated by Morton’s contemporary, President Andrew Jackson, gains rights for working class people but, following the philosophy enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, only white men are defined as ‘people.’ Native Americans, Blacks, and women are excluded. 

The gains of a scientific justification for racism are very high for white men like Morton. The U.S. was founded on the presupposition that seizure of indigenous land by European colonists was divinely sanctioned. This theological premise had concrete economic and civil implications: Land ownership and governance belong to people of European descent. Morton’s economic livelihood and social status is tangibly contingent on the truth of white supremacy because the entire system was designed to facilitate the well-being and rights of white men at the expense of women and people of color.

The price of giving up white supremacy is high for Morton. It would entail redistribution of the power he wields and, by extension, a painful renegotiation of the self. So, he must dull himself to the flesh-and-blood cost being paid by others. He justifies the exploitation of women and people of color by excluding them from the definition of ‘human.’ If they are human, then America’s systemic racism is an unpardonable crime. But if they are something else, something Other, then maybe the commodification of their flesh is acceptable.

But this isn’t just about Morton’s personal consciousness. White America needs science to back up its conviction of white superiority to perpetuate a pristine vision of the communal white self. In whitened memory, the United States was founded on noble aspirations of freedom, rights, and equality for all. 

This is the myth written over the images of Native Americans dying along the Trail of Tears, a series of forced relocations inaugurated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. As Andrew Jackson worked to secure rights for working class white men, Indian removal was a concurrent and top legislative priority of his administration. 

“Freedom and Justice for All” is the slogan scrawled across the bellies of the American slave ships bound for Africa to secure labor to build a nation founded on the unfreedom of those peoples.

Lose this story and the white national self shatters. And when our delusions have been smashed and scattered into the wind, who will we be?

My Wandering Body

The following is an excerpt from my book-in-progress.

My Wandering Body

Under Oxford’s yellow moon, I am a transgressor. In daylight, I am buried alive in books, reading about ancient Near Eastern gods and how they visited the earth in physical form, embodied in cult statuary.

My god has no such face. The holy texts forbid us to make carved images of the deity in any form, whether human or animal. But into that empty space, I pour all my fears and horrors and stories about why my god has abandoned me to this world that must ever remain a pale and transient shadow in the wake of heaven’s realness. 

Tell me, O lover, why you have wandered away and left me a wanderer. What have I done? And what must I do to bring you back again?

I am lovesick for my god’s body, for I am only a glass held up to his luminous skin. I have no substance of my own. When his face disappears to the meadow, my form vanishes with him, our union contingent on mutual absence. 

Together, we disappear. As one, we fall apart. Hand in hand, we lose all bonds to the world of cells and atoms.

At night, I close my eyes and vacuity presses against my chest. I wear my nonexistence like a scarlet letter, waiting for divine breath to fill my lungs and make me real.

*

As fate and Dr. Stuttgart’s syllabus have ordained, I am reading what scholars have dubbed “disappearing god texts,” stories from a Bronze Age people in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) called the Hittites. In each of these myths, a god becomes displeased and quits the land they govern, which causes the land to languish. The lost deity is sought and found, and the people perform expiatory rites to reconcile with the god and entice them back to the region.

A new framing of the old Christian myths starts to weave in my head. Hasn’t my own god left this earth because of his displeasure with humans?

My god used to take walks in the garden of Eden in the cool parts of the day, the scriptures say. But when the two humans ate the forbidden fruit, he put a curse on them and on the ground and drove them out of the garden. At the garden gate, he posted the cherubim and a flaming sword to guard it so that the humans would not enter it again.  

Since that day, humans have been barred access to the deity’s presence. My god visits in dreams and visions and speaks through priests and prophets. We cannot see his face, for his beauty would kill our sin-ridden bodies. He hides himself in tabernacles and temples and in the cleft of mountain rocks. Yet without him, we languish. The world dies. Who will search out our god and draw him back to the land so that all can flourish once more?

The sacred books say that long ago the deity spoke to our ancestors through the prophets in many ways, but in these last days, he has spoken to us through his son. Hasn’t his son, Jesus, searched for god and found him? Isn’t it Jesus’ sacrificial death that has cleansed us? Has he not expiated our sin and made a way for the Father to return to us once more? 

I piece together an etiology of estrangement, filling out the mystery of my empty body. If I can take these dry bones and wire them into a crude frame, maybe I can start to feel my own flesh as real.

*

I treat ancient Near Eastern texts like castoffs from a thrift store, putting together the parts that resonate with my theology, decking myself out in an ensemble derived from many different cultures, eras, places, and peoples.

After about half a decade of approaching the ancient Near East in this piecemeal fashion, something starts to feel off to me. Maybe it’s the way I find it hard to remember the contemporary names of the geographic provenance of each myth. Why do I have to perpetually look up Ḫattuša, the capital of the Hittite empire (c. 1600-1178 BCE), to be reminded that its ruins lie near Boğazkale, Turkey, in the district of Çorum Province? Why do I find it so hard to connect these ancient texts to a specific region on a contemporary map?

It isn’t just Ḫattuša. There are many cities mentioned in biblical texts that I have to keep looking up. It’s taken a long time for the location of Babylon to settle in: The city’s remains are in present-day Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq, about 53 miles south of Baghdad.

But, I warn myself, knowing this geographic detail isn’t enough. When I hear or read the word ‘Babylon,’ I need to resist mental conflation that threatens to take place. Babylon isn’t a static name divorced from its usage in specific times and contexts. 

I have to remember that this same piece of earth housed multiple communities, kingdoms, and empires over the years. And that even talking about ‘Babylon’ in terms of city limits and geographic borders can be reductive because its symbolic meanings have lives of their own. There’s Babylon the city. Babylon the empire. Babylon as an image of power. Babylon as a symbol of injustice. Babylon as shorthand for its rulers. Babylon as the embodiment of ideologies that vary depending on the speaker. 

I repeat to myself the vital truth that a name or a story isn’t a fixed thing; its meaning depends on its usage in a specific context. I can’t pick and choose the myths and texts that I like and weave them into a modern theological system without doing violence to them and, by extension, the communities that produced them.

I come to this understanding slowly, gradually. The process of figuring out the riddle of my spotty memory is nearly as piecemeal as my study of ancient Near Eastern religions and mythologies. The distinction between adaptation and appropriation here is subtle, a matter of historical actors. 

If the inception of archaeology as a discipline hadn’t been predicated on violence, then maybe this melding together of stories wouldn’t be so bad. If the stories had been given instead of stolen, their transformation for new ears might have held a different message. If the purpose of ancient Near Eastern archaeology had started as a quest to elevate old voices instead of reifying the doctrine of European supremacy, maybe I could wear these stories without turning my body into an agent of violence.

But the history of exploitation of the Middle East by my European ancestors changes my relationship to these stories. I can’t pretend to be a disembodied or neutral storyteller.

If my memory lapses were merely a matter of a few facts or dates tumbling out of my brain, the offense might be forgivable, but the truth is much deeper and far more nefarious. The problem isn’t that I personally have a bad memory, but that archaeology developed as a nationalistic enterprise of European powers. 

Through the lenses of British and French archaeology, these texts and artifacts have only had significance as intellectual ‘ancestors’ of the West. I find it hard to connect the ancient landscape with the contemporary because colonialism framed these as two separate spheres and assigned them different symbolic values in the story of human history as told by the West.

Although the ‘ancient Near East’ and the ‘Middle East’ are Eurocentric names that denote roughly the same geographic area, they are separated not only by time, but by their place in the colonizing imagination. 

The image of the ancient world of Mesopotamia is a dead but glorious past resurrected by the West. Christened the ‘cradle of civilization’ by European powers, the East becomes the West’s own origin story, the birthplace of the globe’s oldest civilizations, which are precursors to the great British and French empires. By contrast, the contemporary Middle East is a portrait of the conquered, of lesser kingdoms that failed to achieve the greatness of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Both of these worlds are inferiors of the West. The civilizations of the ancient Near East are the immature child and Western civilization is the man, the apex of glories past. The Middle East is comprised of lands subdued by Britain and France, not simply by military might, but by the superiority of culture.

I don’t have all the details ironed out, but as I learn more about the shape of global colonization, I start to see the outline of its form in other places. The Church is the deity’s wayward bride, beloved but inferior, waiting for the day he will return to claim her and purify her for his glory. My body is an empty land, wild and waste, waiting to be discovered by a husband who will unlock all my mysteries. The East is the exotic other longing for the West to dig up its hidden treasures and open up its untapped resources.

Without the specific historical details, these shapes feel analogous but disparate. But as I move closer, I see how the threads intersect. Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 Papal Bull instituting the Doctrine of Discovery, the Rosetta Stone, the Behistun Inscriptions, my wandering body–all these are strands woven through a global tapestry that’s as sinister as it is vast.

I Know My Lover Is Watching

The following is an excerpt from my book-in-progress.

I Know My Lover Is Watching

As dusk falls on the city of Oxford one evening about halfway through the semester, I make a decision: I will have my first kiss tonight.

The move is cold and calculated. I am not even very attracted to my target, a stocky, bearded fellow with (as my roommate will later put it) “a creepy middle-aged man vibe.” I am not particularly curious about what a prolonged kiss feels like. No, this is my juvenile attempt at role play with god.

I am not supposed to be any of the things I become that night: assertive, flirty, cognizant of my body’s allure. Will god spank me for being a naughty girl?

My conquest that night is easy. I know my target is into me, an unfamiliar yet unmistakable feeling. I know, as we cram into the Eagle and Child pub with a couple of other students, that I am attractive. I am wearing my Primark faux-leather boots, a brown tweed skirt, and a burnt orange shirt that shows off my curves. And I know, as we drink stout and talk and laugh into the night, that my cleverness is an asset.

My lips are full and red and sitting across from me is a genre of man that makes all my thicknesses an advantage. The substance packed into my brain, my unruly eyebrows, my dark wiry hair, my full thighs and breasts–I have more than enough to turn the head of anyone with even a hint of sapiosexual desire.

Together, we leave the pub and walk toward the seclusion of a walking path illuminated by lampposts.

My conquest doesn’t know that all this is foreplay to my tryst with a divine lover.

We stop at a small bridge that looks over the Thames. He takes out the cloves we’ve purchased earlier that evening and we light up. I’ve never smoked so much as a cigarette before, but I’ve seen all the movies–I know what to do. My gestures are smooth and casual. The cloves taste sweet.

We talk, as students steeped in evangelical purity culture do, about what lines we have or haven’t crossed, how far we’ve gone, and how far we’re willing to go.

I know he’d have sex with me if I wanted, but I don’t. He’s not the kind of person I want to lose my virginity to and I’m not ready for that yet. This is not about exploration of my body or the body of another. This is about the production of erotic danger, and the truth is I don’t need to go very far to light my god’s fire.

Love is, as the poets bear witness, a delicate dance. Finesse and nuance are crucial. If I go too far, I’m damned. Sex before marriage will push me outside the deity’s realm of acceptance and he’s bound to divorce me. But a kiss? A little petting? These are dire transgressions, but ultimately forgivable. Just enough to make the deity jealous, but not enough to drive him away from me forever.

I am playing the role I’ve rehearsed for ages: mistress of transgressions. This gendered need planted in me long ago has flowered. I must know: If I break the rules will my god still love me? If my face is twisted will he still want to look at me?

I will dance a thousand dances and cut myself a hundred ways if you’ll just tell me you love me and make me believe it. I’m sorry, baby. Tell me you’ll have me back and make me beautiful again.

I know you love me, baby. Oh, how you love me. I know you hate it when I move, when I dance to the beat of my own drum. I can’t be trusted, baby. I know I can’t be trusted. Take me back under your wing.

We finish smoking and move from the light of the bridge into the shadows of a bench just off the path, looked over by silent trees.

We sit close. I move my body closer. The darkness helps. I can’t see his eyes, but I can feel the warmth as he responds to my movement. My cheek is against his cheek and our lips start to explore each other. I slip my tongue inside and his hand slides gently up my spine.

After a time, we pause to feel the air between us.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Rebekah,” I hear him say.

I know my lover is watching, gritting his teeth and counting me among the rebels. I laugh, knowing my part. “So how did I do at my first kiss?”

Love Triangles

The following is an excerpt of my book-in-progress. If this resonates with you or you find it interesting, please do let me know. I’m working hard to craft a memoir that is vulnerable and evocative and it’s helpful to have affirmation along the way. For context, the section prior is The Body I Did Not Touch.

Love Triangles

Mr. Andrews must remain in the appropriate category, and this requires intricate mental maneuvering. My conscious mind will not acknowledge Mr. Andrews as an object of desire and yet my subconscious knows and is desperate to distract me.

I am trained to feign monogamy of attraction and reason that I cannot focus my sexual energy in more than one place at a time.

And so I settle my attentions on Friedrich, a classmate of good German stock who cries often and hates himself for it. Periodically, in times of great emotional upheaval because of a girl, Friedrich threatens to haul off to some far off region to spend his days as a celibate missionary, living in rugged, wild manliness in the service of our deity.

No one in our class appears to think this is odd. We all know the deity’s ways are not our ways, and that he may call us to be his light to unbelievers in desolate places across the sea. He may decide to keep us single all our lives, devoted to him alone. But we know, deep down, that this is good even if it hurts. Our god is good. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He discerns our desires and most intimate thoughts even while we remain estranged from ourselves. He will give us the true desire of our hearts: himself.

My interest in Friedrich is kosher. He is single, godly, and cisgender male, which are the only criteria needed to put anyone in the potential husband category. And this ​is the only acceptable category. Only the deity knows who I will marry, but I know it is not his will for me to waste myself on flings that have no chance of coupling me to a godly man till death do us part.

But even though Friedrich ticks all the right boxes, I am ill at ease. I’ve liked boys–lots of them–since age seven, but I’m still not used to this divine love triangle. Truth is, until I get married, I don’t know that he is The One that the deity has for me. And so I’ve got to operate on the assumption that he’s not.

For if I fall in love with Friedrich or anyone else, what then? What if it’s not the deity’s plan? The pain of disappointment is doubled by shame. I lose the object of my love while the deity looks on with scorn, shaking his head and muttering to himself, “No patience, this one. Now I’ve got to start all over again.”

I know that my god is good. His thoughts are not my thought and his ways are not my ways. If only I could make myself conform to his ways. Then maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have to keep starting from scratch with me.

I finish out my summer classes tripping on the oxidizing acids of Bible commentaries, drowning in textual euphoria by day before sinking into melancholic nights.

My starlit walks around campus are humid and scratched with the sounds of crickets. I sit on the bench overlooking the black pond and feel afraid of things I cannot name.

At the summer’s end, I pack my bags for Oxford. I don’t know what to expect from the study-abroad program, but I know what it means to me. It means I will not have to see my father or go to any family gatherings for some time. I will not have to face Grandpa Nick. Where I am going, they cannot follow me.

While I am gone, Dad will move into an apartment across town and my parents will put the house on the market. And I will wander in a far off place where no one knows the taste of my skeletons.

The Patriarchy I Did Not Smash

The following is an excerpt of my book-in-progress. If this resonates with you or you find it interesting, please do let me know. I’m working hard to craft a memoir that is vulnerable and evocative and it’s helpful to have affirmation along the way.

The Patriarchy I Did Not Smash

I run my hand down the cold, carved scales of the dragon’s arched, serpentine neck. The sun god has long descended to the netherworld and the bricks beneath my fingers have lost their residual warmth. I move my torch closer to examine the details of the beast’s body, stroking its plated belly.

The dragon’s form is gold painted stone embossed on a wall of glazed blue bricks that gleam like polished sapphire and lapis. Its head and tongue are those of a twisting snake, but its middle is a panther’s torso, its feline forelegs and paws frozen in mid stride. Its back legs bear the ringed tarsi and talons of an eagle, and from its hind grows a tail as long and reptilian as its head.

I feel no ground under my feet as my body pulls back from the image to survey its whole. Am I moving back from the dragon or is it moving away from me?

Darkness surrounds and yet as the distance between us grows, I see that I am before the gate of a walled city that towers forty feet high. Its entire surface is a menagerie of animals set masterfully in an azurite sea. I see at least ten more dragons arranged beside each other in ordered pairs; above and below them are golden bulls with turquoise hoofs, the creases of their muscles outlined in black.

The doors of the gate open inward and I pass through them and along the processional way. The city is empty and noiseless except for the sound of my breathing and the soft burning of my torch. I smell a faint aroma of cedar.  

The faience walls to my right and left are lined with gilded lions, jaws and eyes open wide, my fierce companions on the way to the temple. I do not know how long I am among the lions or how I move along the way.

The lions disappear and I am at the base of a long flight of stairs that stretches up and into the center of a ziggurat where the gods sit enthroned over the city.

At last I feel the ground under my soft, bare feet. The baked clay steps feel cold and dusty as I ascend, but my quadriceps are burning. The scent of cedar grows stronger and begins to mix with other smells. The oils of myrtle and the dry, peppery prick of cypress and juniper wash over me.

The steps lead to the first terrace and I turn to look at the city, visible to me even in blackness. I see far below me the hundred lions that stretch toward the edges of the city to meet the azure gate of bulls and dragons.

I know I should have heeded their warning, that the powers these creatures guard are stronger and more ravenous than a thousand wild animals with gnawing bellies. The figures in this shrine I am about to enter move with the force of countless armies, hosts of both humans and angels. They speak with the authority built by the tales of their gruesome battles, their robes drenched in the blood of their enemies.

I turn back to the stairway and continue upward and inward until I reach the uppermost terrace and slip from the open air into the labyrinthine halls, leaving behind the world of beasts and humans. I walk through a series of antechambers to get to the central cella. Burnished bronze lamps stand at intervals along the hall, illuminating the way to the gods.

I reach the inner room where the cult images sit on their altar benches, a table of food spread out before each. Their bodies are carved of tamarisk wood and overlaid with gold and silver. The temple artisans have set jewels into the gods’ sockets and fashioned chains of gold and lapis lazuli for their necks. The weavers have dressed them in robes of coral and turquoise thread.

The cult statues are no bigger than infants, but they cloister the immensity of divine sanction in their bodies.

Panic seizes me. I realize in this moment that I have done it all wrong. I should not have been walking, but running. I should have torn through the streets like a warrior on the day of battle. The city should be aflame, my armies breaching the walls and razing it down to its foundations. I should have a band of soldiers thundering behind me ready to smash these gods and cut off their heads.

But I have come alone, with only a torch and an ax and my words. I cannot assault these wretched gods that rule my world with the might of a hundred silenced stories.

I start to babble, heart pounding in my chest. Surely, if I explain everything, these molten gods will understand and turn and see. I don’t know what I am saying, but I know it is the truth. At last, we will have it out face to face. And even if they do not listen, my stifled voice will go out to the ends of the earth and all the world will hear my witness and vindicate me.

The lamps of the shrine go out and the room becomes pitch. I hear only the sound of my rasping and my heart rattling my insides.

*

Try as I might, I can never seem to decapitate these cult images in my dreams. I am always talking to their heads as if I can reason with them, as though by some magic their amethyst eyes will open, their ears receive my speech, and their golden lips part to talk with me.

I wish I could tell you I grabbed the patriarchy and smashed it with the zeal of an ancient Babylonian warrior dashing a cult image of an enemy’s god. But that would be a lie. My liberation from the old gods has come slowly, timidly, with the fear and trembling of one afraid to lose their own face. I grope about in a dark room, searching for the right shape on which to expend my fury.

But which image do I shatter? The face of my Grandpa Nick, his protruding, irascible lips spewing racist, sexist bile laced with verbal affirmations of his paternal goodness? The dulled, deep-set eyes of my father lost in a vacuum of buried trauma, wakened only by a sense of the world’s wrongs?

Do I break the benevolent smiles of my male Bible professors, cheeks flushed warm with empathy and blissful ignorance of their own power? Do I split open the face of my ancestors’ invisible god, whose image has been all of these and none? And do I cut down my own body for complicity in its bondage and its repetition of white well-meant stories that pave the road to a racialized hell?

Where is the patriarchy? Hand me that ax. I will end this once and for all. I will cut down these altars, raze these temples, and cast every last one of these carved gods into a salt-sown field outside the city.

But I am not that brave. My hands shake and release their weapon. As it thuds and clanks to the floor, I breathe into myself and then out into the darkness.

Fear radiates from my every ligament, but it isn’t cowardice. This body is warrior and artisan fused together, an imminent eruption of iconoclastic and iconophilic energy. I am pulled between the cathartic thrill of swift shattering, and the slow, painstaking work of dismantling and rebuilding, edging toward a burst of new creation.

I pick up my ax and put it away; I may have need of it later. But today I am an artisan, pulling apart the patriarchy piece by piece, examining each material before I work it into a new shape.

Maybe I am a coward, afraid to up and shed my skin in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. But fear of skin is the foundation of this hoary shrine. I must love my body as I lose it, replacing it unit by unit.

The work of my shaping started long before I was aware of it or gained any agency. A child is raw material in the hands of artisans, a Galatea among countless Pygmalions.

But not all sculptors are the same, and over time you start to see how their visions compete for mastery over your body.

And you start to realize that you, too, are both sculptor and sculpture, and that mastery is a contradiction in terms. When you are the maker and the made, absolute ownership dissolves. It no longer matters who built your world, it is yours, ours. We are working it together, and this requires open eyes and elastic forms.

But we are not consistently or equally pliable. Time and trauma harden us and the worlds we have constructed. We fracture and crumble and the gods that hold our gaze are reinforced or broken down. We must sustain the myth or crack its skull.

I closet my ax, but keep it sharp, training with it every day.

I wish I could tell you I smashed the patriarchy, but the truth is that the patriarchy smashed me. It cut me into segments and doled me out for consumption, predicating my being on the premise that I couldn’t be whole unless I had all my old pieces in the old form. It broke me and told me brokenness was a sin, that god likes his humans pure, stable, categorized.

But I am not so frightened of breaking as I once was. I know that I am not alone, that we are one body, one house. Destroy this body and it rises again in a new form; malleable, resilient, and queer as fuck.

I may not have smashed the patriarchy. But I can read the signs of this body and tell you its days are numbered. The intractable borders of patriarchy are no match for the lithe limbs of a body that recognizes itself even as it moves among the shadows of so many shifting shapes.

Shapes. I see it now–that’s what all the fuss is about. It’s as simple as a child fumbling with plastic cubes, cylinders, moons, and triangles too big for its hand, trying desperately to push them through the right holes of the shape sorter. And a parent hovering close to catch the mistakes, knowing that society does not take kindly to the shapes it was not built to fit.

Hear the applause when a block makes it through the hole designed for it. Watch the correction when the moon gets pushed through the triangle hole. It’s a matter of survival now. Only the right shapes will make it through.

But this is the secret of the body’s power–it’s mutable, adaptable. It is form and formlessness in a single breath.

Shape intersects with power–long have my bones felt what my mind could not verbalize. It wasn’t until I enrolled at a small evangelical university, where I majored in Biblical Studies, that I first began to understand the pain and pleasure of amorphism. There, my first lesson in forms came from my Bible professor, Mr. Andrews, whose body I never touched.

The Body I Did Not Touch

The following is an excerpt of my book-in-progress. If this resonates with you or you find it interesting, please do let me know. I’m working hard to craft a memoir that is vulnerable and evocative and it’s helpful to have affirmation along the way. For context, a fairly finished draft of the first chapter is available here.

The Body I Did Not Touch

But before this window into how shape intersects with power, I learned the pain and pleasure of amorphism at the small evangelical university where I majored in Biblical Studies. Before meeting Maggie and the Oxford study-abroad program therapist who helped me unearth my childhood, my first lessons in forms came from my Bible professor, Mr. Andrews, whose body I never touched.

*

The Philadelphia campus in summer is quiet, but restless. Its ghost town aura forges a reticent bond between the few students taking summer classes and the skeleton crew of faculty and staff. The din of the Spring semester dissipated, members of the dwindled populace start to examine each other more closely.

I’m not even sure if I like my classmates and they’re not sure what they think of me. But we’re in class together 4-5 hours a day for 3-6 weeks of the summer semester. These are the faces I live with half the day before being sequestered in the library for the other half.

But I don’t need these surreal summer conditions to look at Mr. Andrews. I don’t need to be stranded in this sliver of time between my parents’ announcement of their pending divorce and the studies I will begin at Oxford at summer’s end. I have been looking at Mr. Andrews for some time, though I will not let myself so much as think this.

I am in love, not with flesh and blood, but with the Bible and the deity that haunts its pages. I have found a place exploring the contours of the divine body, my fingers tracing the nail marks in his palms, my hands caressing the scar on his side.

I can navigate this body with a modicum of confidence now. I am no master, but I have learned the techniques, how to read this body and interpret its curves. It has many secret passages and hidden doorways; I feel my way to each orifice.

I move gingerly in the beginning. My freshman year at Bible college is an orientation to the hallowed halls of learning and how to  wield unfamiliar tools. But by the start of my second year, I am gaining steam and attracting attention. I win first place in a university-wide student essay contest. My professors give me perfect grades, but more importantly, they write affirming comments on my papers.

Here at the university, I am a Platonic ideal. I am eager to learn and awash with impressionable innocence. I am attentive, a good writer, and ready to please.

On top of all this, I am a true and breathless believer, a devoted worshipper. I hunger and thirst for knowledge. I am ready to be drawn past the temple’s outer courts and into its holiest inner room, where the invisible god of the cosmos straddles the million-eyed cherubim as night and day they let out their euphoric screams, “Holy, holy! Holy, oh! God almighty!”

In this conservative Christian world where it is a sin for women’s bodies to be seen, I have at last found a way to get attention: the astounding spectacle of my mind. With my hand, I am tucking unruly bra straps back under my shirt and, with my writing, exposing my brain.

I do not verbalize any of these thoughts this summer, not to anyone else, and most especially not to myself. I cannot give them shape. I know the truth of words and their permanence: Mental transgression is synonymous with transgression of the body. To think about having sex, even to name an attraction, is the same as doing the deed.

And so, as I sit in Mr. Andrews’ summer class--the fourth or fifth Bible course I’ve had with him thus far--I do what I’ve always done since adolescence. I pull these sensations apart and place them in manageable categories.

I put Mr. Andrews in the father figure box where he’ll stay shiny and clean. The logic is simple: in the absence of an accepting biological father, I want a spiritual father. My affection is daughterly, pure and holy.

But this doesn’t work and I know it in the dark waters of my heart where wild sea snakes twist and writhe just below the surface of my consciousness.

I tell myself that I am enamored of the Bible, the deity’s word, and this is why I skip lunch and head straight for the library after class to submerge myself in commentaries and articles on the literary structure of the Book of Jeremiah. And it’s true enough: These texts rivet me. The writings of this dead prophet fill me with the ecstasy of a school boy from the Dead Poets Society.

True, but not all the facts. I bracket out the pull I feel toward those shocking emerald eyes and the sharp, angular face that is one moment still, pensive, and drawn and then abruptly contorted with laughter, puzzlement, scorn, or rebellion. I ignore the way I craft my papers to play with metaphors in all the ways Mr. Andrews has taught me to do. I pretend not to worry about his sporadic eating habits.

And most of all, I push away the thought that I want to keep him forever, that I have very carefully laid plans for the future. I will go off and get a PhD in Biblical Studies, make him proud. Then I will return to my alma mater and make history by being the first woman at this conservative Christian school to teach in the Bible department. I will have an office down the hall from Mr. Andrews and we will spend our days sparring, debating, and learning together in the chastity and sobriety that befits teachers of holy scripture.

*

There are still no women teaching Bible at my old school, ten years later. Mr. Andrews is long gone, sacked at last for a thousand small transgressions that culminated in the ultimate sin: The denial that the Bible is without error. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect he may have also started to let on that he was queer-affirming.

I knew it would happen one day, that the school was too small and ordered for minds like Mr. Andrews that glittered with provocative energy and a taste for tumult and inversion. But I clung to the hope that the school--where I first learned to question my presuppositions and remain open to transformation and fresh vision--would be flexible and generous enough to accommodate Mr. Andrews’ shifting shape.

It was as much a dream for myself as it was for him. I told myself that he was more of a loose canon than I, which was true, but dishonest.

I was certainly more self-controlled than he. I’d been taught the womanly art of self-suppression since birth. But I knew that if Mr. Andrews was ever exorcised from the community, it was only a matter of time before I would be, too. If his unruly body felt like a threat, the increasing fear of mine would only escalate.

I would let myself out quietly by the back door before it all came to a head.

Unfinished Gods

I’m not sure that anyone will read this since it’s about four times the length of your average blog post, but I intend the first chapter of my book to be something like this. If you do read it and it piques your interest, can you do me a favor and let me know? Would you want to read what comes next?

Unfinished Gods

My body knows it’s awake, nerves peeling the insides of my stomach.

The sun warms my face as I step off the train and a mild breeze moves to cool it. Above me, the Saturday sky stretches wide with golden-blue air.

The muscles in my neck are tight, wondering if they belong in this mellow suburban morning. My eyes and skin take in the calm and grow bewildered–my senses can’t make sense of it. The apprehension in my core persists, confusing all my meanings.

I see red trees and slumbering brick houses with windows dark and still. A squirrel scurries in the branches. A waking bird chirrups.

Down the road, a neighbor fetches the morning paper: a gentle yawn, thud, click. Heels scuffing against the peeling sage porch and creaking down the steps onto gruff asphalt.

Behind me, the train starts to chug and hiss, and I turn to watch as it pulls farther away from Philadelphia, its bold whistle piercing the air. The town sighs, turns over in its bed, and falls back asleep.

I know something will happen today, but I don’t know what. There will be a vision, but whether the spectacle that meets me is a beauty or a horror, I don’t know. This blank canvas is its own terror.

Brandon is there on the platform to meet me. He bends to give me a hug. He is a good eight inches taller than me, a fact I’ve never grudged him because he’s older, too.

Older brother, taller brother. These patterns of association make sense to the child’s mind, and though I am almost twenty-one, I am still a little girl. Old, big, strong. Young, small, weak.

But these categories are starting to fall apart. Brandon cannot protect me, that this is too big for both of us. Sometimes there are no shields, only healers to tend the wounds.

We walk the few blocks to his apartment, the second floor of a dusty blue Dutch colonial house with low ceilings and uneven, creaking floors. A few of its closets now open on to walls and dead-end staircases, remnants of the days when the house was once whole, before it was divided into apartments for rent.

We ascend the narrow stairs to the second floor, and I wonder who owns this house now. What stories lie dormant in these walls? Does the owner know them?  How many bodies have come and gone in those rooms–writing themselves into the door frames and ceilings and floors–words that lie silent because there is no one to read them?

Brandon turns the front door knob and ushers me down the narrow hall, past the closed bedroom and bathroom doors, and into the small kitchen.

My sister-in-law, Celia, has the kettle on and is setting out mugs for tea. This is Brandon and Celia’s first apartment and first year of marriage. Older, taller, married first. Coupled and in love before I have even been asked on a date.

The others arrive: Mom, Dad, and Dora. The whole family squeezes close around the lacquered wood table.

But where is Matthew? Years later, I will forget that my thirteen-year-old brother is not here with us.

Of course Matthew was there. We were all there together, my mind will lie to itself. We were all there to bear witness to the words read aloud to us that day. Together, we received a revelation from on high.

But, no. Matthew is not here.

When I am reminded of his absence that day, my chest will constrict at the thought of how many years passed before Matthew learned the details of what was revealed in that borrowed blue house in North Wales, Pennsylvania. I will feel heavy trying to imagine what he must have conjured in the gaps. I will think of the apparitions that must have overwhelmed his aching little heart. What gods turned and reeled and tormented him in that empty space?

I will go on to interrogate my memory to elicit the truth. I will wonder whether we had mugs that day and if I smelled the scent of tea. Did my mind supply these details later to make the scene warmer, more palatable? Did we drink tea or did we gather around an empty table?

But memory is not a hard image; it’s unbaked clay. The mind remembers a fraction of what transpires, working over the fragmented images.

We did not eat a meal together, I will tell myself. This, I know.

Everyone seated at the kitchen table, Dad pulls out the typed letter from his front shirt pocket and unfolds it carefully.

As Dad reads, I notice that the kitchen window opens onto a zigzagging, black fire escape. What would happen, I wonder, if I were to lean over, pry the window loose from the sill’s ancient, sticky paint, and climb upward, downward, anywhere?

It isn’t a long letter. The content is concise and methodical. There is a dense, successive rhythm to it, moving from one era in our parents’ marriage to the next with the sparse precision of an ancient regnal chronicle. It is the family annals of over twenty years condensed into two pages.

But this letter isn’t one of the royal annals. It doesn’t have the customary summary statement near the end of the account: the author’s concluding assessment of the monarch’s reign after his death. Today, we are the authors, the judges. We are the all-seeing eyes peering into our family history, assessing our parents’ marriage at its end.

Dad reaches the end of the letter and lifts his eyes to look at us. “I’m sorry,” he concludes, his voice breaking. “I’m so sorry…” He starts to cry.

I stare at his baby blue eyes as if seeing them for the first time. They are clear and vivid, washed bright with tears. The thick cloud hovering about his eyes has dissolved into a flood of crystal drops.

I feel a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles–you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years.

I feel a river rising to my startled eyes.

From my eyes the thirsty and unguarded drops burst forth in a storm of tears like winter rain.

The waters spilling down my face. My arms around him, holding him as I have never dared hold him before. The past is swept downstream. The future is pictureless.

The hunger pains of my girlhood gather to a point, cut through me, end me, and disappear.

We are here: face to face. My eyes are opened and I recognize him.

And he vanishes from my eyes.

*

I have not seen my father since he appeared to me that day of the divorce announcement.

Our bodies still inhabit the same social circles at birthdays, weddings, and holidays. We exchange sentences about news or the busy nothings of our lives (but not religion or politics). Gift cards and calendars and mugs pass between us.

One Christmas, Dad gives me a biography of a singer I liked as a teen. The next year, he puts on one of her soundtracks as we cut up vegetables for salad at Christmas dinner.

“Let me know if you get sick of the music,” he says.

I can see that he is trying to work with the patches of distant memory. What did his daughter like when last he checked? What can he recall from the days before his powers of observation waned and he drew deeper into his work?

I accept it with a sense of defeat. What harm can these offerings do me now, these tokens of memory loss?

My memory of that momentary appearing looks more bizarre to me as the years pass. I think I believed that the end of my parents’ marriage would be the beginning of a new era. I thought it meant we could all stop pretending that our house was whole. The cracking foundations revealed, we could tear the edifice down and rebuild it.

But time passes. Some things change, but many remain the same. Carry on, then. As you were.

I try to peer at the vision of that day without feeling the shame that crowds it now, trying to remember the lightness of my body, the generosity filling my lungs, the catharsis soaked with rich pain.

Some days, I can conjure the lightness of it. I am a sighted god then, seeing and seen.

But seen by who?

The days carry on without acknowledgement of the history between me and my father. He does not remember the long absences interspersed with sporadic anger and excoriation. Or, if he does remember, he shows now evidence of it.

But this has been his way for as long as I can remember. Let’s not go there. Don’t make a fuss. No need to bring that up, it will only make a ruckus.

I think ruckus is my only salvation now. The silent things, the invisible gods bearing us up, need to be named. Why do we return day after day to the altars of gods we do not know?

Most days, I cannot remember the sense of reality coursing through my veins that moment of my father’s appearing. I feel like the medium of Endor gazing in terror at the figure she’s called up from the dead. Is it the prophet? Or is it a god? Who is the old man wrapped in a robe?

Did you really believe that things would change? the voices spit. Naive little girl. This is the way things are. Don’t meddle with the actual.

I have that recurring sense of grime that’s visited me since adolescence. In a flash, I’m back in all those places when I tried to talk to my father about how I perceived his demeanor. I thought maybe if I could just lay it all out in cold, rational terms, he’d see. But it always ended to the same way: me crying, feeling skeevy. And Dad calmly explaining why I had no idea what I was talking about.

In my dreams, this tension is resolved. I’ll be walking in a public place–a flea market, a store, a street corner–headed nowhere in particular, just away. Dad is following me. I walk faster. But he’ll catch up to me, I’ll turn around, and we’ll have to talk.

And when I turn, his face is not what I expect. He isn’t angry. He isn’t critical. He isn’t gaslighting me. He wants to understand. “What’s wrong?” he asks gently. We talk. I explain. And he gets it.

And then I’ll wake up hating myself for how obvious and readable my dreams are. I may as well have a flashing neon green sign on my forehead: WOUNDED.

I know this nauseating shame I feel isn’t my fault. The sour grapes eaten by the fathers churn the stomachs of their children and send them retching into the ages.

Why do I keep revisiting that day to keep that excruciating vision alive? I want to push it out of my mind, to pretend my wounds were not stripped naked, my traumatized heart raw and radiant.

And yet, I return to it. I know I was there. Or was I?

Was I seen? Who sighted me? And who or what did I see that day?

That splinter of memory digs into my skin and reminds me that gods are never finished. Gods are fluid animals and therein lies the wild pain of hope.

If gods can bleed when pricked, their blood can clot, scab, and form new tissue beneath. When one god refuses to show itself in dreams or Urim or prophets, another will rise up to meet me–a sudden radiance breaking across our sighted faces.

*

What gods arose to meet me in the wake of my father’s turned face? Too many to name, though I am trying with my rudimentary tools to sculpt the faces of a few.

I know the language of deity will sound strange to many ears. It often feels foreign to me even though it’s my native tongue.

I grew up in religious communities where human and divine faces coalesced. We had no language to talk about god except in human metaphors and earthly images, much to our chagrin. But the converse was also true: We did not know how to talk about ourselves without divine framing.

On paper, our theology called for strict separation between the “way of god” and the “way of man.” But divine-human apartheid turned out to be difficult in practice. God as separate, other, and supreme came at the expense of our humanity.

Our holy scriptures told us that we had been made in the image of the invisible god. But what did god look like? Without this tangible visage, how could we know who we were?

And so we committed a cardinal sin: We imagined god. Into the emptiness of the divine face, we poured ourselves. It was a matter of survival, of self-preservation. The earth was destined to perish in the fires of judgment, and along with it our mortal bodies. But if we could write our features into the immutable heavens, upload ourselves to the cloud, something human would remain once the earth had been swallowed by divinity.

In this world, paternal delight and dissatisfaction were indistinguishable from those of the divine. My story might have been a cut and dried case of good old fashioned patriarchy if it hadn’t been for this. Not that patriarchy is ever simple, but religious patriarchy has a unique twist.

No matter what human authority you have truck with, there’s always a higher divine authority–a trump card, if you will. If you can somehow get ahold of that trump card–make a case that the human authority is going against the divine–you can undercut that son of a bitch. Even if he doesn’t believe you, you’ve started to carve your own image of the world, of the divine. When god is everything, you just might be able to tell the human authorities to go to hell.

The flip side of this is that–until you find that trump card, and sometimes even after you do–your world is still defined by your proximity to and pleasuring of a divine authority figure with an infinitely malleable face.

Divine-paternal dissatisfaction and disappearing was the genesis of my world.

In the beginning, god raised a skeptical eyebrow, shook his head and turned his back on all he had made. Blasted, bumbling humans. Couldn’t get anything right, could they?

I was born, like any sentient being with a modicum of self-awareness, with the intense desire to meet faces that looked on me with deep, abiding satisfaction.

Is that a big ask, you think? I don’t. Because I believe in this world. First and foremost, I believe.

There. I thought my exit from formal religion meant I was done with dogmas and creeds, but there it is: Credo ergo sum. I believe, therefore I am, which is (to be more precise) to say: I imagine, therefore I am. I dream, and in the dreaming, I live and move.

The story of a god turned, deity hiding from me because of a condition with which I was born–this myth is no longer working for me. It’s damned us all to eternal wandering–we humans roaming a world that isn’t our home, and our deity skulking forever outside of it.

The story of the wandering Jew has its own historic complications, but at least a material end is in view. In most versions of that tale, a perpetual sense of homelessness is cast as a condition that needs to be changed, and external circumstances are to blame for each diaspora.

This is a story you can work with. You can envision a better future and work to change external circumstances. You can participate in the transformation of the world.

But I grew up as a wandering evangelical Christian, and here the condition is internal, a matter of the heart. The problem is always inside you, but you can do nothing to fix it because you are matter, and the material world is evil. You cannot effect your own salvation from spiritual homelessness.

This story’s supreme dissatisfaction with materiality divested me of agency and the ability to dream. I, along with the rest of the human race, could do nothing to change the deity’s disgusted expression. It meant that the rare moments in which I did feel at home in myself–the sense of love, connection, wholeness–this was a perpetual condition brought about by sin. These were fragments of glory my eyes could not fully see until I was removed from this earth.

I drank in the myth of the eternal wanderer. It was the answer to the riddle of my bones: Do I belong here? Why, no. No, darling. No body belongs in this world. Haven’t you heard that sin is like yeast, spreading to the whole of our flesh? No, we can’t cut the cancer out. The execution of our flesh is our only hope.

You’re dying already, don’t you see? Better to die under the father’s knife and make satisfaction. Hush, now, hush. It’s alright, darling. Your brother’s made a deal with daddy. You won’t have to go like this. Daddy will take his favorite boy instead, he’ll die for the whole family. Then we’ll all be pure, ready for glory. We’ll shed this vile skin and head on home.

In the beginning, god created the heavens and scorned the earth.

It may be foolish to start the retelling of my story here, lingering under the eye of a disapproving god. But my wound has not disappeared even though I tell myself divine dissatisfaction is a fantasy. Fantasy is how we inscribe ourselves in the actual: all my dreams are real.

I must dream again, re-member the world that meets my senses. I remember and am remembered, therefore I am. When I fade from memory and memory fades from me, I slip from the realm of myth and into the warm earth to rest among the flowers. I am scattered and recollected.

Here, in the heart of the open wound, the temple of my mind, I remember that I was and am looked at with pleasure, with love. I remember that I am the mother of all the living, that from the delight of my eye the world rises to meet me, and that I am made by its gaze.

I remember that no image of the past is absolute or definitive. The invisible god must be forged anew. I smelt this ore into ingots and beat the silver flat. I carve a visage of tamarisk wood and smoothe silver over its jaw, mouth, cheekbones, forehead. Into its sockets, I set stones of lapis blue. Its eyes dazzle and dance.

Tomorrow, I will smash this god and return to my smithy.

And yet even now I know that my childhood was full of many gods that gave rise to many stories. I imbibed many worlds at once, stories that contradicted each other, but nonetheless coexisted.

The darkness holds in itself infinite possibilities, worlds uncreated.

I believe in these worlds, which is to say I dream of them. My eye is caught by their splendors, all the colors and sensations that I cannot yet see.

The Animal: A Poetry Experiment

To those of you who have grown up in (or experienced) evangelical purity culture, I have a poem for you—and a favor to ask. First, I’d like you to read this draft of the poem. Then, I plan to break all the poet rules by cluing you into a little of what I was trying to get at. If the poem resonates with you, I’d like to know why, and if it’s related to what I was actually trying to depict. Thanks, friends!

*

The Animal

The animals pressed up against my skin.

I measured feather, fur, and scale,

arranging their flesh as it met my senses.

I stroked their spines and sides,

wrote on each of them a name, 

tracing their movements and habitats.

*

There go the beasts that creep along the ground,

and the fish that dart and spin through the waters.

And there: The silvered dragon that bursts from the sea,

and the winged bodies that pump and glide across the sky.

*

I felt the brush of an animal I could not name,

its warm breath rising and falling across my shoulder.

I turned my head, but saw no feather, fur, or scale.

*

God? I tasted the name. 

God. I gulped it down,

and my bones became like water.

*

I lifted a hand toward my neck

to search its face, but touched

no cheekbone, mouth, teeth or fang.

*

I felt its eyes on me and the air

between us thinned and fled,

leaving thick flesh, bone within bone;

the dirt, dry and weary, kissed my pores

and became clay.

*

My lungs lurched for wind

as my hip tore from its socket

and my throat became a desert.

*

The tongue of the animal I cannot name

stuck to my jaws, and its mouth sucked

the dust.

*

What was I trying to do? On Facebook and on my blog, I’ve talked about how the "Jesus is my boyfriend" or "god is my spouse" marketing in evangelical purity culture encouraged a sort of disembodied sexuality, especially among girls. It cultivated a divine eroticism by framing god as a spouse/lover, prizing a kind of verbal or textual intimacy with the divine over and against sexual relationships with flesh-and-blood humans.

As I wrote earlier, if an invisible, all-present deity is your spouse and you communicate primarily through writing or speech, your sexuality is mediated largely in non-bodily ways. As evangelical teens, we knew porn was verboten because it was visual and human (looking at porn meant you'd basically cheated on your future spouse). But there wasn't really limitations on the eroticism of the text as long as god was the object of your affection.

The flip side of this is that bodily, human attraction becomes the antithesis of your divine relationship. A human partner is acceptable for procreative and sanctifying purposes, but kind of a rival to god. You can't love them too much or be too attracted--or really anything that could make god jealous.

In this poem, I was trying to tease out some of the emotional implications (sensations?) of a disembodied divine eroticism, without necessarily making a clear judgement call on how/where sexuality intersects with religion or the divine (or whether it should). If this poem hints at something you feel (or have felt) within or in the aftermath of purity culture, I would be interested to know.