If you told 14-year-old Brian that he would run a website called Queer Theology, he would not have believed you.

If you told 14-year-old Brian that he would create a magazine which sometimes, unironically, juxtaposes gay strippers and Bible verses, he would not have believed you.

If you told 14-year-old Brian that his entire family would not only vote for Question 6 in favor of marriage equality but routinely start conversations with strangers about LGBTQ justice, he would not have believed you.

14-year-old Brian lived in a country where gay people could be arrested for having sex, where they could not get married anywhere. 14-year-old Brian went to a church that rarely talked about homosexuality because it was so clearly a sin it needed no discussion.

If you told 14-year-old Brian that he would get on a bus and travel across the country to Christian schools which actively discriminate against LGBT people to start conversations about those very policies, and the theologies that support them, and that in the wake of those visits some of those schools would change their policies, he would not have believed you.

But if you ask 30-year-old Brian to look back at his life, he can hardly imagine a different path.

You see, Christianity at its core is about believing the impossible:

that God is incarnate in a peasant, that Cesar is not Lord and the Empire is not all-powerful, that death is surmountable, that a mustard seed of faith can move a mountain or an Empire, that the first will be last and the last will be first, that powerful are weak and the weak are powerful, that God is not on the side of kings and emperors but the poor, oppressed, and dispossessed.

So then, when the cracks began to appear in the version of Christianity I had been taught and had adopted for myself, it should come as no surprise that what I built from its ashes shares a common core.

The queer movement is about believing the impossible too:

that millennia of violent policing of gender can be overturned, that romantic lives which were once criminalized can be celebrated publicly, that our shame is not forever, that we can make it better for ourselves and for those around us and after, that enormity of gender dysphoria can be overcome, that our families can be torn apart and rebuilt again, that we can survive rejection from those closest to us.

A leaflet was distributed in NYC Pride in 1990 which began,

“How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother, sister that your life is in danger:  That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act.

You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary.

There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence.  It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words.  You should by all rights be dead.  Don’t be fooled, straight people own the world and the only reason you have been spared is you’re smart, lucky or a fighter.”

That unfortunately rings true today like it did 26 years ago.

Most of the earliest followers of Jesus were killed and even still today following the call of Christ puts you at risk: it takes peacekeepers unarmed into war zones, it inspires nuns to beat upon gun turrets as they seek to literally beat our modern swords  into plowshares.

The Christian movement should have been killed with it’s leader, but it was not. It sustained some slaves in the US as they escaped from & resisted white slavers, even ones who claimed the same Bible; it inspired young men to refuse the draft to war; it birthed the Catholic Workers; and it encouraged and inspired countless more individuals and movements in the intervening two millennia.

I am sometimes asked about the validity of “gay pride.” It’s just a part of who you are, you wouldn’t be proud of having blonde hair or hazel eyes or being left-handed.

I’m not sure I know of a time someone was beaten to brink of death and left for dead on a fence in Wyoming for being left-handed, I can’t recall the last time someone with blonde hair was imprisoned for defending herself against a violent attack, I don’t think anyone with hazel eyes has been subjected to therapy to change his eye color.

Queer people have been ravaged by violence, and AIDS, and shame, and neglect and we have lost too many—God damn it we’ve lost too many to senseless violence and suicide and accidental deaths and not loving ourselves enough to go on living.

But we are here and we are living and we are thriving.

We are parents and siblings and orphans. We are CEOs and minimum wage workers busting ass to survive. Today, we’re showing not only our personal resilience but also our collective political power as we overturn the laws the queerphobes hoped to silence and shame us and shut us down with.

I am proud because every part of the person I am today is tested and hard won. I’m proud because queers for decades and centuries before me struggled and died so that I might live in a better world.

In the early 1980s when AIDS was decimating the gay community and around the time I was born, the idea of legal marriage was literally inconceivable for almost everyone. We will see nationwide gay marriage by the end of my lifetime if not by the end of this year. We still have a hell of a long way to go—marriage won’t solve most of the problems affecting LGBTQ people—but we can say this:

• It’s no longer pathological for us to love each other
• It’s no longer criminal for us to fuck each other 

(But it is still criminal for some of us to pee!)

If we can see all of the impossibles that we’ve already achieved, it’s my hope that we can then set our sights on new impossibles and be amazed as we usher those into existence too. So that in 25 or 50 or 100 years someone can look back and be proud of the work that we started for them. So that they can say

• It’s no longer justifiable for us to kill each other
• It’s no longer expected that many of us will go hungry and thirsty
• It’s now possible for us all to live long healthy lives
• It’s now possible for us to be united with our families across borders and live in the lands of our choosing
• It’s now possible for all the sick to be treated, all the needy provided for, all the homeless housed, all the prisoners set free

Being queer means that I am in some small way connected to a movement for justice that stretches backward in time and will continue on after I’ve gone, that includes Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde and Sylvia Rivera and possibly even Joan of Arc.

I don’t think history will remember my name but I know that I made a difference in the lives of the students at those schools I visited, in the lives of my parents and my family, in the lives of audiences that stumbled upon my YouTube videos, upon every person who has written in to Queer Theology (email us or drop at ask on Tumblr!).

And I’m honored that being queer means I’m part of the same movement of all the other queers out there, leading lives of greatness and simplicity, thriving and surviving.

I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m damn proud of it. 

Photo by Damon Dahlen/Huffington Post

A few days ago, a follower on Tumblr asked,

I’ve been avoiding the church because I live in a developing country (not many church options) and the church that happens to be there is very anti-homosexuality and anti anything different than conventional. I drifted away from the church and God for a long time but I’ve found my way again and now I’m coming closer to Christ. To make this letter short(er), I want to ask, in the Holy Week, what can I do from home? There are services at church but I get very anxious and start crying and want to leave or feel suffocated. Do you have any passages I can read to strengthen my faith? Feel I’m not alone?

We do! And I thought you might want  some resources to queer up your Holy Week, too.

So here’s a roundup of 10 articles, podcasts, and even a digital magazine:

• Lent as a body honoring practice? – article
• Getting over the fear of death – article
• Jesus steals a donkey! – podcast
• Why do we do this? Maundy Thursday – podcast
• CRUCIFIXION (RESURRECTION) – digital magazine
• An empty tomb – podcast
• Unlikely witnesses – podcast
• Easter 2017 – podcast
• Palm Sunday & Holy Week 2017 – podcast
• Walking Toward Resurrection – ebook & audiobook

What are you doing to observe (or not) Holy Week this year? Let us know in the comments!

Every Sunday morning was the same. I’d walk into the senior high room at my church in Bethesda, Maryland to find twenty to fifty odd other high schoolers milling about before class began. We’d catch up on the past week (or in most cases, on the few days since we’d last been at church). If a big event was coming up—a retreat, a party—we’d jam on our excitement about that. True story: in 10th grade, I was grounded once and my punishment was to not be allowed to go on the winter church retreat.

When class started though, it was the same. The senior high director or the youth pastor or the teacher for our grade level would stand in the front of the room, read a handful of verses from the Bible, and then tell us what they meant. We nodded and took notes—usually on a pre-printed paper that already had the questions that would be covered typed up on it. Sometimes someone would ask a clarifying question or two. And then that was it, we now knew a bit more about what the Bible said—and by extension what was important to God.

There’s something deeply comforting about that. At times, I wish I could go back to a time when the answers to life’s big questions were cut and dry. But as I grew—and as my faith evolved—I discovered that many of the things I was taught and the beliefs I held aren’t helpful, and in some cases are harmful.

One of my favorite verses is 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Test everything, hold fast to that which is good.” When I was just beginning to ask myself if I was gay—and to wonder what that might mean for my life and my faith—this verse was a life rope. At first, even asking the questions felt scary but knowing that this verse was in the Bible empowered me to ask them.

I remember how utterly terrifying it was to even consider maybe possibly adjusting my beliefs a teeny tiny bit. It felt like a betrayal of God. The Christianity I knew was so uniform I had been convinced that if I thought “Hey, I’m not sure that the Bible is right here” or “What if God doesn’t want this for my life” or “Well are you sure it means that? I think it means…” I was not a real Christian, I had betrayed God, and was on the road to hell.

Eventually I got over that and was able to trust that maybe just maybe changing some of my beliefs about God, Christianity, gender, and sexuality was morally OK, but even still I had hangups. I felt like doing so was some sort of political betrayal. I wanted to show the world that I could be gay and an evangelical Christian. Or to prove that gay people aren’t promiscuous and are monogamous. I took pride singing the same worship songs I’d always sung, about lining up so many theological points with folks who are anti-gay (except the “it’s not OK to be gay” part, obviously).

I knew God wouldn’t send me to hell for believing differently, but I still wanted to be that same Christian I’d always been. Just a gay version.

Eventually, I came to realize that doing so was a disservice to myself and to the God that I wanted to follow. There’s no glory to be found in clinging to an oppressive, theologically inaccurate belief system just because it’s what I’ve believed before, or because politically powerful people believe it, or because the juxtaposition makes an interesting story.

The Bible is right and wrong on many things. Sometimes it is bold in its affirmation and inclusion of women—praising them as elders, leaders, and prophets in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. But sometimes it’s deadly wrong, treating them as no better than property. Sometimes it’s right on sex and sexuality and sometimes it’s wrong.

We say that Christianity is liberating and life-saving for many but not for everyone and that’s OK because that is the righteous thing to say.

We acknowledge the beauty and goodness in the diversity of gender identity and expression because that is part of our basic reality and to do otherwise is a slight against humanity and creation.

We celebrate the many ways that families are formed—married partnerships, single parents, blended families, polyamorous relationships—because when people come together to love and take care of each other, that is a good thing.

When I let go these limiting beliefs about God and Christianity, I didn’t do so to be contrary or to turn my back Christianity, I did so because they were holding me back from the Good News of the Gospel. I had to let go some of my deepest held beliefs so that I could discover a Christianity that was even deeper than I’d imagined.

I thought that questioning these beliefs meant letting go of “real” Christianity but the irony is that the theology I hold today—the theology that we teach here at Queer Theology—is more rooted in the Bible and in the saints throughout the ages than my faith has ever been before.

Further reading…

To Understand the Bible, It Takes More Than Simply Being LGBTQ