The Book of Queer Prophets

24 Writers on Sexuality and Religion

Ruth Hunt

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780008360092
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008360078
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

'A fascinating and thoughtful exploration of faith in the modern world. If you're wondering why it matters and how to make sense of it, read on.' – Clare Balding

Is it possible to believe in God and be gay? How does it feel to be excluded from a religious community because of your sexuality? Why do some people still believe being LGBT is a sin?

The Book of Queer Prophets contains modern-day epistles from some of our most important thinkers, writers and activists: Jeanette Winterson tackles religious dogma, Amrou Al-Kadhi writes about trying to make it as a Muslim drag queen in London, John Bell writes about his decision to come out later in life, Tamsin Omond remembers getting married in the middle of a protest and Kate Bottley explains her journey to becoming an LGBT ally.

Essays from: Jeanette Winterson, Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, Amrou Al-Kadhi, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Garrard Conley, Juno Dawson, Rev. Winnie Varghese, Keith Jarrett, Jay Hulme, Lucy Knight, Tamsin Omond, Erin Clark, Michael Segalov, Jarel Robinson-Brown, John L. Bell, Mpho Tutu van Furth, Karl Rutlidge, Garry Rutter, Rev Rachel Mann, Jack Guiness, Dustin Lance Black, Ric Stott. Afterword: Kate Bottley

LAMENTATIONS

JEANETTE

No Woman No Man No Cry

I was brought up in the Pentecostal Church. That’s old-time religion where the Bible is the Word of God, there’s a Heaven and Hell, there’s Right and Wrong. There’s Male and Female.

Fundamentalism of any kind – Jewish, Christian, Islamic – is big on the binaries. Black and white religion is simple to understand, because you are not expected to think for yourself, and this is just as true for those Jewish men who study in Yeshiva, interpreting and commenting on the scriptures, as it is for young men in the Madrasa, and for those evangelical Christians who sit in Bible Study.

The purpose of the enquiry is not to open the mind but to keep it closed. The fanaticism that is a part of fundamentalism of all and every kind, is necessary to keep the mind barricaded against questions or doubts, to reject the opinions of others, and to hold fast to the pure righteousness of your own belief and practice.

At its extreme, fundamentalism wages war on so-called enemies of faith, and history is a long catalogue of religious wars, many fought in the name of Christ. At present, the world must live with the horror of Islamism, and its brutal and mistaken view of jihad.

In my view, White Supremacy is also a religion – a modern-day secular religion with all the identifying marks of totemic fundamentalism: fear of the stranger, intolerance of others, including the views of others, narrow-minded prejudices, meetings of the faithful behind closed doors, misogyny, mind-control, willingness to use violence. Increasingly it has its prophets and its go-to texts to justify its views and behaviour. Whenever there is gun carnage, the screwball is doing it to ‘purify’ or ‘avenge’ the awfulness of the world. These men, (overwhelmingly men), are of course ‘patriots’, just as fundamentalists are ‘god-fearing’. (Whatever the god.)

I can understand why people want the world to be simple; Black / white / right / wrong / rich / poor / old / young / female /male, these are easy labels. Until the twentieth century the whole world was run on such easy to read binaries. It was unjust, unfair, and ultimately unrealistic.

The world-changing power of Feminism cannot be overestimated here. Feminism was, and is, at the core of changing the way men and women understand the world. Big statement? Yes. My reason? Feminism challenges the Father of All Binaries: Male / Female.

Separating biology from gender seems to me as important an achievement as splitting the atom. If we are not determined by our biology – except as the social construct we call gender – then everything – and I mean everything changes.

Once biology is not your destiny but your toolkit in life – the basics to get on with the job – the man-made ideology of ‘separate spheres’, with women at home and men out in the world is dismantled. As a socially imposed fiction that woman’s realm stuff was always bonkers because women without wealthy husbands, (most women), worked on farms, in factories, in service, down mines, as prostitutes, as well as running the home and managing the children.

The fight for women’s equality has implications far past the male/female myth. Discriminating against women is the core discrimination. Once allowed and justified, it is easy to justify all other kinds of discrimination. Black people. Jewish people. Poor people. Mexicans. Gay people. Trans people.

And I was thinking about when I was young and growing up in the church, and about a moment that deeply affected my own thinking. I read the Bible every day. I must have been 15 or 16, and reading Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (3:28): ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.’

Paul didn’t have much time for feminism – he didn’t want women to speak in church, and in that respect he followed his own orthodox Jewish tradition. But in this passage he understands a fundamental truth – or rather he delivers a fundamental insight, without realising the implications.

There is no binary. Binaries are impositions. Binaries are labels. Binaries are false. In spirit we are made of the same stuff.

Why then do human beings feel compelled to make other human beings suffer for being superficially different? Gender, skin colour, sexuality.

Why do many men still believe that a penis is a super-power? Why are we racist? Why is there still fear and loathing of gay people? And more recently of trans people?

Jesus said that all of the law, everything we need in order to manage ourselves and others, is contained in two commandments: To love God, and to love our neighbour (Mark 12:30–31).

There’s a bit more to it because Jesus didn’t do things by halves. We are to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and we are to love our neighbour as much as and in the same way as we love ourselves.

That means the gay guy upstairs. It means the Polish family down the street. It means the trans kid at school. It means the utterly awful bigot who snarls at us when we walk past holding hands.

A lawyer asked Jesus about the love-my-neighbour business and Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10).

You know the story. A guy gets beaten up and robbed. He’s lying on the street. A priest comes by, he’s busy thinking about God, so he takes no notice. Another man, a pillar of the community, sees what’s happened but he has a conference call in ten minutes, so he crosses to the other side of the street.

Then there’s a man from Samaria – really that’s as bad as being a gypsy back then, can’t trust them, thieves, benefit fraud and so on. The Samaritan crosses the road, takes the man to an inn, gets him bed and board and calls the doctor, leaving extra cash for whatever is needed. Then he gets on with his day.

So your neighbour is the person who needs your help. Your neighbour is the person you’ve never met before. Your neighbour takes up your time and you get no reward. Your neighbour costs you.

*

It’s no wonder many Christians never read the Bible. Where in ourselves do we find so much love that another binary disappears: The binary that is Them/Us?

Where in this story is the Christian country that sells weapons to repressive regimes?

Where in this story is the eviction of families in Palestine?

Where in this story is Hungary’s recent criminalisation of anyone who helps a refugee?

Where in this story are the Bible-belt evangelicals who support President’s Trump separation of children and parents on the Mexican border?

Where in this story are boat-loads of men, women and children turned away from life and hope?

They say you can use the Bible to justify anything. I don’t think that is true. If we are all made of the same stuff. If we are not fundamentally divided the way fundamentalists love to divide us, then how is possible to justify discrimination against others?

The Church used to manage gay people by telling them they couldn’t have sex. I always thought this was straight people’s revenge on the fact that they didn’t have sex.

Lust is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fair enough. To reduce another human being to an object of desire, or to see other humans as sex objects only, narrows the imagination. Temperance is an under-rated virtue. Commitment also requires a certain amount of restraint. I am not an advocate of monogamy as the only way. Monogamy causes at least as much misery in the world as its opposite. Human beings are always looking for solutions, and we are all different. In the 1980s gay men in clubs and bars, gay men promoting visibly different lifestyles, challenged monogamy – and a lot of people got frightened by that. AIDS must have been a huge relief to self-righteous churchgoers, tangibly able to justify their discomfort. THEM/US was real after all. They got sick.

I heard this kind of talk too often. I also had to do a lot of thinking of my own about sex / lust / monogamy / open relationships / commitment, and so on.

And this is the problem. Or rather, the problem is that problems require independent thought. Einstein said that the mind that created the problem isn’t the same mind that can solve the problem.

We have to be able to change our thinking.

Fundamentalism is the polar opposite of an open mind. Gay people used to be told not to have sex so that no one would have to confront the problem of gayness. Gay people could be celibate – which the Catholic Church has always thought of as a good thing for everyone.

And anyway, in the bad old days, no sex before marriage meant that gay people obviously couldn’t have sex ever.

Gay marriage has caused such a lot of trouble because it requires some thought. The best bet for fundamentalists, religious or secular, is to rush back to their favourite binary: MAN/WOMAN.

Only binaries can get married and give birth to other binaries.

Non-binaries might … Oh, well, marry their dog or their fridge.

In Christ there is neither male nor female.

It’s only going to get more complicated as we form attachments with non-biological life forms we have created. Yes, the robots are coming, and believe me, if you could fall in love with your teddy bear when you were 5 years old you will be able to love a bot.

Human/non-human. What will that mean in the coming world?

At present, as far as I can see, religion is failing in its duty to provide moral and spiritual leadership.

Moral is the love your neighbour bit – and as we have seen that includes your gay and trans neighbour – and no, you can’t pretend their sexuality is separate. I mean, all that love the sinner hate the sin rubbish. Loving someone of your own sex is not a sin. If God is Love then Love is of God.

Do I wish the Church of England would stand up to its evangelical wing here and abroad? Of course I do. Not least because the evangelical wing defeats the instruction of the First Commandment to love God with heart soul mind and strength. God is not a binary. God is One.

Spiritual leadership would recognise that.

In any case, I have never yet met a fundamentalist of any creed or kind who wasn’t also a male-supremacist, and that includes those brain-washed women who believe a dick is a special communications system between a man and his god (actually they are right, but it’s small caps all round).

I don’t know any person who has struggled with their sexuality who hasn’t suffered for being different. I knew I couldn’t be in the church and be myself. Myself was more than my sexuality, but my sexuality was part of my mental and emotional development. No one should be asked to give up a part of themselves. And in religious terms, what is the point? We give everything or nothing at all. All of me means all of me – that is the way of the spirit.

*

Of course it bothers me that there are white supremacists and ideological bigots who are also gay. Peter Thiel of PayPal regrets multiculturalism, and the extension of the franchise to women. He was brought up by Christian fundamentalists and has retained much of that mind-set.

Milo Yiannopoulos, who has said he would cure himself of his gayness if he could, and that trans people are mentally ill, is nothing but a poster-boy for hatred.

There is still amongst some gay men, contempt for, if not a deep dislike of women, and there is still among some lesbian feminists, an Andrea Dworkin-style separatism that I can understand, but ultimately gets us nowhere.

We live in the patriarchy, yes. Religion is overwhelmingly patriarchal, yes, we are only one hundred years into a fairer, freer society in the West, and nowhere near that all over the globe.

Our sexual choices, if they can be called that after millennia of conditioning, must include acceptance of the other – my straight friends, my men friends, the gay guy I don’t much like, the silly straight man with the magic dick. The fact that some religious folks think I am a sinner.

Some people are gay, get over it, is a great slogan. Some people are women, some people are black or brown. We share one planet, and if we don’t get over our differences soon, global warming will finish the lot of us, or there will be a world war.

Spirituality and sexuality are not a binary. We need to be inclusive with ourselves so that we be inclusive of others.

I’ve come to realise how lucky I was. I saw the light in my mother’s black eyes and the Church’s blind ones.

DUSTIN LANCE

Mustangs and Mama Dragons

I don’t remember his name. I mostly remember that he was older, and a thief – my big brother’s friend who lived five houses down from ours in San Antonio, Texas. I was six years old. He was ten.

We were dirt poor, recently abandoned by the Mormon man who had met, then married, my mostly paralysed mom on his mission (likely for a Vietnam draft deferment). He had performed the minimum effort necessary to give her the three children she’d dreamed of, and promptly ran off with his first cousin when the threat of the draft was over. We never saw or heard from him again.

There I was, one of three boys being raised by a devout Mormon mother who’d narrowly survived the ravages of polio as a child, couldn’t walk on her own, had never driven a car and never had a job, and many a night we went to bed quite hungry, but dared not complain.

So when that ten-year-old boy down the block stole my only Christmas present, a toy Ford Mustang that had been red until he tried to conceal his theft with a piss-poor black spray-painting job, I stood incredibly still, watching him walk away from our house toward his own with my toy treasure in hand. I was standing so very still because a strange new feeling had just landed in my gut. No, it wasn’t anger. It was a different kind of jab. The kind that felt divine and terrible all at once. Because, as it turns out, he was my very first crush, and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why someone I adored so would injure me in this way. Still, I felt magical little butterflies burst from their cocoons to dance in my stomach. But they did not survive long at all – not like they might have for a straight kid. Thanks to my devotion to my mother’s faith, my butterflies would endure a second metamorphosis. And when they emerged again, mere seconds later, they were no longer bright, beautiful and lighter than air. They were dim and heavier than lead: they had become shame and self-loathing – weights I would have to carry through the most formative years of my life.

Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, the name Church members today prefer to the nickname ‘Mormon’), is not one singular experience. For me, there were three distinct strands: our immediate community, the wider culture and the LDS doctrine (and those tasked with enforcing it). The first two are what most LDS folks define their devotion by. The last is a doctrinal wall defended by an army of white, mostly older, male voices. Most Latter-day Saints will never come into conflict with this third strand, but if you’re a queer kid, or a woman with interests beyond childbearing and rearing, the LDS doctrinal defence brigade will come for you in tangible, oft-destructive and deadly ways.

As a boy, I loved being a part of our community. Like most ‘good’ Latter-day Saints, we were six-days-a-week churchgoers, meaning we built our entire life around the Church and its activities – whether that be Sunday services or participating in our church’s Boy Scout troop. The cookouts, the picnics, the jamborees. The Fourth of July pancake breakfasts with red, white and blue toppings.

When our father abandoned us with a paralysed mom, we never had to turn to the state for help – a state that may well have determined that my mother was incapable of raising three boys on her own. Instead, envelopes filled with cash began appearing in our mailbox when rent was due or groceries ran low. We later learned that this much-needed, anonymous support was collected from our fellow congregants. All our relationships, both work and personal, were tied up in our church community – its warmth, its familial nature, its generosity. Only much later would I discover the danger in this design.

Pulling out a touch wider, I grew up surrounded by a second experience: a well-defined LDS culture – one that held hard work, perfectionism and the promise of an eternal family at its core. We aspired to help build a world that put the Golden Rule above all else: to treat our neighbours as we would like to be treated. Generosity was key to our community – lend a helping hand was our motto. And the saying, ‘put your shoulder to wheel’ helped guide our work – a callback to the determination of our pioneer forefathers and foremothers. This notion led to my mother’s favorite guiding principle: ‘if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right’. An idea that sprang in part from the belief that this life is a test that we work hard to pass in order to find our way to the Celestial Kingdom. If we were to spend eternity in this highest level of LDS heaven, surrounded by the family we built here on Earth, no half measures would do.

With these as our guiding principles, it’s not hard to understand why so many outside this culture describe Latter-day Saints as ‘so freakin’ nice!’ I loved being a part of that – part of a church’s effort to bring kindness, compassion and empathy to an all-too-often brutal world. So in the immediate community of our church I felt very much at home. But by keeping us all so busy with church activities – morning, noon, night and six days a week – our community and its ‘kind’ culture was all I really knew of my childhood faith. It was my only foundation and safety net, and by design – a design that still proves dangerous if not deadly for far too many young people born into the Church of Latter-day Saints

The trouble for me, as evidenced by my boy-crush and the quic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for The Book of Queer Prophets
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Visions
• Lamentations
• Revelations
• Vocations
• Prayers
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Footnotes
• Author Biographies
• About the Author
• About the Publisher