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:
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.
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.
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.
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.