The Courage to Be Queer

Jeff Hood

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781498221917
• eBook ISBN: 9781498221924
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

God is Queer. In a world of normative paradigms, God will never fit in and nor should we. That twitching and itching for something more will consistently be present until we step out of our closets and into the Queer. The Courage to Be Queer is about the wildness and beauty of an indescribable and uncontainable God. What is the Queer calling us to be? We are to be the ones shouting for justice. We are to be the ones dancing for freedom. We are to be the ones dreaming for hope. We are to be the ones... In the midst of the spectacle of it all, there will be those observers who hear the knocking and lean in. Will you open the door?

1 / The Queering

I can remember the first time I heard the word “queer.” I was eight years old. A bully and her followers on the playground told everyone I was queer. The reasons for the comment were based on the way that I gelled my hair, the way I seemed to know the answers when the teacher asked questions, and the fact that I frequently hung out with a black kid, my best and only friend. In this encounter, the truth of relativity was revealed. The normative constructs of the individual oppressor, and those the individual can convince to follow such constructs, often create that which is accepted as normative or oppressive. My pastor and parents told me I was created in the image of God. I believed them. I realized in this moment of bullying that normativity was being pushed in order to take something from me, something granted by God: my queerness or, better yet, the core of who I am. This is a story of the struggle to discover the will to resist that impulse and instead embrace God’s queering. This is an interpretation of my self from a Queer perspective.

Colors

Stark red blood oozed down my face from the gash in my forehead. Everyone was so excited to meet my new baby brother that they accidentally hit me right in the middle of my forehead with the car door in the rush into the hospital. Despite the gash, I excitedly pushed through the stitches and the doctoring to hurry into the room. I put on a nightgown and held Justin. My three-year-old self didn’t know what to call what I saw lying there, I just knew there was something unique and different about this child. I think in that moment I began my journey of recognizing and appreciating the queer.

Throughout my childhood, I always loved squinting my eyes to see the kaleidoscope of different colors that came through the brightly colored windows at church. I would contort my head back and forth to see colors dance and pretend that I was in the colors and the colors were in me. Believing that there was something magical going on, I just knew that I was the only person in the world who could see it. I was closest to God in those moments. In the magic and mystery, I knew that I was real and that I mattered. Why do we stop squinting and playing with light? Why do we embrace the normative and shun the queer so easily? I think I was convinced that I needed to grow up.

For a considerable time in my early childhood, my voice sounded like a girl’s. When it came out too strong, my parents would tell me not to talk like a baby and that there were consequences for people who sounded like that. I didn’t think I sounded like a baby. I thought I sounded like me. From a very early age, I learned that there were normative gender roles I had to fit into and that I needed to adapt to in order to survive. I was led to believe that adapting my voice and life to the expectations of others was a part of growing up. I wish no one had taught me that.

Regardless of the fact that there are similar paintings in churches the world over, I couldn’t take my eyes off that old painting of Jesus lovingly embracing a wide diversity of children. Other kids played with the dolls, crayons, and plastic gadgets and gizmos, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that painting. From the way everyone close to me talked, Jesus was the one sending most of the world to hell. The painting told a different story. Jesus wanted all the children to come to him. I wanted to run to the Jesus surrounded by children, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Jesus who was regularly frying people to a crisp. Everyone at church said that these two Jesuses were the same. When I allowed myself to get lost in the painting, I knew better. With every glance, I developed a theology of the painting, and somehow I knew that there was nothing special about a Jesus who destroyed everyone he disagreed with. I was slowly being drawn toward a Jesus who loved everyone. I always wanted to go to him. I did each time I stared at that painting.

“Are you Jeffrey Hood?” the woman asked. I didn’t know what to say. By first grade, I knew enough to know that you should be everything except yourself. Being the person God created you to be would only get you disciplined and hinder your success. If you could be like everyone else, then you might have a chance. I remained silent and waited for whatever was next. “Is this him?” she asked my teacher. “Yes. That’s Jeffrey Hood.”

The woman escorted me down the hall. Due to overcrowding, I was being placed in the classroom of the newly hired first grade teacher, Ms. Ellington. I loved her. Throughout my first day, Ms. Ellington came by my desk to check on me and make sure my day was going OK. I was glad for the switch. I thought Ms. Ellington was much kinder than my first teacher. When I left class, I was excited to tell my mom about the activities of the day. There was some timidity in her response. I didn’t know why. When I encountered my grandfather screaming about my new “nigger teacher,” I found out.

I didn’t know my teacher was black until I was told. Barriers were erected between my teacher and my friends at school based on the color of our skin. I didn’t want it to be like this. I resisted the normative racial boundaries. When the time came to study the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I was all in and recited the last paragraph of the “I Have a Dream” speech to my class. Ms. Ellington made me student of the month. In the juxtaposition of these moments, I knew I was doing something queer and different with Ms. Ellington. I could feel it. I felt like I was being pulled away from the normativity of racism I knew I wanted no part of. Sometimes queerness acts as a life raft to save us from those who love us the most.

Lines

“Line up!” “Who wants to be the line leader?” “Lines keep us safe.” “Don’t step out of line!” From very early ages, lines become a major part of our lives. We are taught that life is about learning to follow the person in front of us. Our desire to follow the person in front of us is solidified by our desire to one day be the line leader. We are taught that there are dangers to stepping out of line. If we break the line, then we are putting the rest of the line in danger because the authority is distracted when they have to come and correct us in order to secure the line. There are consequences to stepping out of line. Time-outs, letters home, detentions, and other disciplines remind us that we will be punished for such a transgression and keep us from stepping out of line again. The vast majority of people get the lesson early on and stay in line for the rest of their lives. I don’t think that this is how God intended it to be. Lines don’t keep us safe. Lines keep us normal and therefore sinful. I feel like I have been battling lines my entire life.

Gender lines were enforced very early on in my childhood. People started to look at me funny when my mom took me into public restrooms with her. I got tired of the stares and began to cry when my mom wouldn’t let me go to the men’s restroom. The pitch of my voice was very high for much of my childhood. Family and friends encouraged me to stop talking like a girl. Through depictions of violence and helplessness, cartoons and movies enforced the idea that women are weak and men are strong. I realized that gender was important to our society and that part of staying in line was staying in your gender line. I felt queerer than that.

“Do you want to go to the toy store?” my grandmother asked. What kind of question is that for a child? I jumped up and off we went. I remember going into the store and found myself bored with the rows upon rows of action figures and baseball cards. I wanted to try something different. So I left my grandmother and went over to play with the dolls for a minute. I found one I really liked and was sitting there pretending like the doll was talking to me when my grandmother came around the corner. “What are you doing? You are a boy. This is embarrassing. Get up! We are getting out of here!” My grandmother’s words both startled and offended me. I didn’t know what to make of the situation. I do now. In a world where any slight alterations of gender can get you killed, my grandmother was trying to protect me. Unfortunately, she was unable to understand that the Queer God who created me to be queer in the Queer God’s image loves me enough to constantly call me to come out of normative lines and play with whatever toy I want to play with.

Something happens as children grow into the many early gender lessons they are taught: the lines we have drawn come to fruition, and children spend years claiming they hate what they perceive to be the gender opposite of them. We organized my second grade class by the genders that were taught to us. There was the Boy’s Team and the Girl’s Team. From kickball to checkers, the lines were drawn and we stayed in sync to perform our gender roles. As the year went on, tensions built. Finally, the heads of both teams decided that we needed to have one big battle to decide the whether girls or boys were better once and for all. The date was set for the end of the year. Everyone planned feverishly for the playground encounter. When the day came, everyone was in his or her place, and thirty boys and girls went at it in the middle of the playground. There was pulling, pushing, snatching, and grabbing. I still wonder what the teachers on the playground must have thought when they saw it happen. Ultimately, everything was broken up, and we were all left to look at each other with a strange feeling that what had just happened was really dumb. I feel now that what is even dumber is a normative world that teaches us to create and enforce strict gender lines with violence. I think I fought and did all of this to prove that I was a man. I wish someone had simply told me it was OK to be queer.

Sunday schools are often about teaching you the stories of the Bible. Ours existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to get you saved and make sure it stuck. I can remember years of classes filled with the teachers praying for our salvation and teaching us to pray for our own. Whenever anyone prayed the prayer of salvation and got baptized, the class celebrated. For some reason, I resisted much of the charade of it all. I guess I just didn’t think it wasn’t real for most people and I didn’t know why our teachers kept pushing so hard. When I started attending the adult service with my parents, I quickly found out. Hell was on the tongue of every minister who entered the pulpit. The shouts from the pulpit were a constant juxtaposition between anger and grace. We were told that God loves everybody—unless you rejected his advances, and then God was ready to throw you into a fiery burning pit for all eternity. Our God taught us to stay in line at the threat of pain. My home was similar.

Mom and Dad were very young when they had children, and we grew up with them. In both of the homes they grew up in, violence was a way to let out frustration and punish. My mom struggled greatly under the weight of unrealistic expectations and often responded violently and abusively toward her children. I remember living for many years as a child suspended between what I knew was overwhelming love and the threat of violence. I learned to see women as having tremendous power to hurt me. I stayed in line most of the time because I didn’t want to be the object of someone else’s frustration or someone who needed punishment. I thought that both God and my parents would love me if I stayed in line. Somewhere in my soul—even in the midst of all this—I had an inkling that God had created me to do more than just hold a place in line.

The movie Dirty Dancing played on the television. I found the film to be a highly sexual tale of youthful rebellion and discovery. I had never seen anyone move like that. I developed an erection as the colors and people danced across the television screen. I had no idea why my penis had just done that. I was more interested in the screen. My father saw me sitting there and started making jokes about my erection. I did not know what to do. Embarrassment set in, and I ran to my room. I was taught early on that my sexuality was something to be embarrassed about.

Mom was always very suspicious of the sex education offered at school. I was not allowed to attend the earliest classes. So when schoolmates made penis and vagina jokes about what they learned, I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt odd and out of place. When Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Magic Johnson came out as HIV-positive, I had to figure out what was going on. Neither one of my parents would tell me, so I asked one of my older friends. I found out all about sex over a conversation about AIDS. When I told my mom I now knew about sex, she got upset and called my buddy’s parents.

Mom wasn’t able to keep these conversations about sex away from me for long. My closest cousin had just had a baby. My cousin was not married, and most people in our family did not find out that the baby was multiracial until she was born. Most of my extended family responded very poorly to the news. In the midst of all of this news, I do not remember having any positive thoughts about sex. I thought sex was what got you in trouble, not a queer part of who God created you to be in the first place.

The birth of my multiracial cousin got me thinking. With all of this talk about white and black people, I began to wonder how many people there were in the world who did not fit into the racial dichotomy I was so accustomed to. I began to look around. I realized that ours is a world of many different colors and races. When I inquired about the origins of these racial identities, one of my black teachers told me, “Son, we all have a little bit of everything in us. People matter because they’re people, not because of their pigmentation.” Right after he said this, I realized he was stepping out of line and that I wanted to step out of line too. Later that day, I told one of our family friends that I thought having the confederate flag on the Georgia state flag was racist. “Are you going to tell me you’re a faggot next?” I had no idea what a faggot was. I did not have to wait long to find out.

One of my Sunday school teachers was a kind man who did not fit the fire and brimstone mold. Each Sunday he would gather us in a circle to sing songs about a God of love. He was the sassiest man I had ever known, and I loved him. I never had to worry about him loving me. Slowly, I began to realize that this man was acting out what he thought God was. I found him to be beautiful. Later, he was elected a deacon and placed in many leadership positions in the church. Near the end of elementary school, the metaphorical shit hit the fan. My beloved teacher came out as gay, was kicked out of our church, and moved downtown with his boyfriend. Both of my parents were shocked. When I asked what it meant to be gay, my parents explained that it was two men or two women who have sex with each other. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “Gay people probably go to hell,” one of them sharply retorted. I knew then and there that this was one area I could not step out of line on. I wanted to go to heaven, so I did not question them any further.

Images

Death is an odd part of life. Though death is coming for everyone, no one really knows how to explain it or what to do with it. I realized when a distant cousin died that people will do whatever it takes to explain away an early death. “They didn’t take care of themselves.” “I bet they were on drugs.” “Didn’t they have a heart condition?” These types of statements filled the air at my first funeral. Regardless of the cause, I realized when I looked at the casket that death was a normative part of life I was not interested in experiencing. I found it terrifying. I also didn’t think there was anything queer about dying. I th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Queering
• Chapter 2: The Queering of the Old
• Chapter 3: The Queering of the Queerest
• Chapter 4: The Revolution of the Queer
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Benediction
• Bibliography