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.