The closet is a lonely home

Growing up religious, the realization of your queerness is also the realization of betrayal. It will be argued one of two ways; you are either betraying God, or He is betraying you. Either way, you lose.

Being Brought up as a devout Christian the discovery of my sexuality was one riddled with angst, shame, guilt, and profound internal conflict. In a school where it seemed as if people were gay for “the fun of it”, I could not and wished that I would never have to unpack this overwhelming difference between what I had been taught was inherently wrong and what I felt. I was a person ensnared by the webs of guilt and shame having deviated from the “divine order of creation”.

Who was I to blame when the only option was to play the cards dealt? In Christianity, we are told that God knows everything about you, from your first breath to your last, and if it is indeed true then where can I place this burden of shame and anger, if not with the Creator who seemed to condemn people like myself greatly.

In “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot”, he asks “Why didn’t you make me good enough too… so that you could’ve loved me?”[1] I see myself in him. If I, as a human being, were bound to sin from the start, why couldn’t I have been created not to bear this extra burden?

I joined high school as a devout Christian; a person who had given their life to Christ and wholly believed in the Bible and in the salvation of all sinners. Momentarily, all that I knew was turned to its head when I first realized that I was in fact in love with my best friend. The kindness I experienced was otherworldly and I was deprived enough of love in my life that I inevitably pursued that kindness in the form of desire. It was fluttering heartbeats, stolen glances and secretive touches ignorant of the difficult path that would be before us.

On the day that I realized that I harboured all these wrong feelings, I wept. It was a Sunday and I was in church, surrounded by people singing hymns of love but I could not share the love I had. I could not be myself. Like a scorned child, I wept week after week as a result of the cognitive dissonance that had been created from the obvious difference between my religious beliefs and this innate and carnal longing for a person that I should never want. It could not have been clearer in the moments following, that queer was a synonym of wrong, gay a synonym of sin. A daughter turned into a disappointment, a classmate turned into a foe, a friend into a disgrace and a human into an abomination. While I cannot pretend to have faced clear rejection and ostracization since I never came out to anyone, I can without a doubt state the fact that there is no greater condemnation than that which comes from within. It was from then on that I thought better of death.

"A daughter turned into a disappointment, a classmate turned into a foe, a friend into a disgrace and a human into an abomination"

Am I to believe that this being that we call “God” loves me as I am, or am I to follow the clear findings that show that since he is the creator of all he indeed created me like this? Defective? One not worthy to be in His presence? One forced to turn away from the being I once swore my life to, simply because I am only human and comparatively smaller.

Where does divine dichotomy in all this? On one hand, the Bible criticizes homosexuality, while on the other hand, there are whispers of love, inclusion and compassion.[2] Whenever Christians encounter people of a homosexual nature, they are quick to read Leviticus 18:22 “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; It is abomination”. Am I not deserving of the love taught by Jesus? Am I already doomed to an afterlife of damnation because of my “soiled and disgusting nature”?

What is my true identity? Can I be gay and Christian or are these two important aspects of me forever going to be in conflict?

References 

[1] Guirgis, S. (2005, p.186). Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 

[2] Walsch, D. (2005). The Complete Conversations with God. Putnam Adult.