Category Archives: LGBT Christian

5 Thoughts on Shifting Conversation Away from the Culture Wars

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We know many people who are surprised that we chose to become part of a Christian tradition that takes a conservative approach to questions of sexual morality. We’ve shared in previous posts that to us, LGBT issues are not the most important theological considerations when compared to other points one might explore when deciding where to attend church. To our way of thinking, questions of LGBT rights don’t even come close when one views the broader range of traditional Christian tenets related to Christology, sacraments, scripture, ecclesiology, and so on. We do view moral formation as imperative for living into the fullness of our Christian tradition, but have never been ones to choose a church primarily because of where a particular tradition stands on questions such as whether same-sex couples can be married. However, we’ve observed that in both our current and previous Christian traditions, depending upon the parish there can sometimes be a tendency to focus conversations about the Christian life exclusively on culture war issues. We think this approach is enormously problematic because the Christian life is about so much more than a list of thou-shalt-nots. Some people fear that shifting conversation away from the culture wars means ignoring morality altogether and adopting a relativist mindset where all kinds of behavior are equally acceptable. We disagree strongly with this perspective and believe that moving beyond a culture wars framework of morality is essential for discussing moral issues within Christianity and sharing Christ with others.

We’ve found that in conversations with people who are interested in Christianity, emphasizing central concepts from the Gospel is especially important. The Gospel is good news and presenting it as anything less is harmful. We can mistakenly believe that the Gospel is easy to understand and live fully because it has been given for all people. But if we stop and think more deeply about the life of Christ, how could we reasonably infer that anything about his way of interacting with the world was easy? The Gospel invites us to orient our whole lives towards Christ, and doing so is a daily challenge for most. Shaping one’s life as Christo-centric necessitates giving over one’s whole being. This is the lifelong task of every Christian, and giving so much attention to culture war issues in conversations about Christianity reduces being a follower of Christ to obeying a list of do’s and don’ts’. Focusing on the good news of the Gospel does not mean sugarcoating its message or the difficult parts of following Christ. It does not mean hiding your Christian tradition’s teachings about LGBT issues or other controversial matters, or pretending that these teachings are unimportant.

We’ve learned that when engaging in conversation with people who disagree with us on one matter or another, it’s essential to maintain a welcoming posture and recognize that all people who seek Christ are encountering him in many different ways at different times in their lives. Everyone is on a journey, and none of us knows where other people have been or are headed. As Christians, our encouragement should help point other people towards Christ. Often, we are unaware of other people’s processes when making moral decisions, or what they may or may not be working on with their pastors, priests, or spiritual directors. When our bishop visited our parish a couple of years ago, one of our fellow parishioners asked him a question about Christians who are lax on moral issues. Our bishop responded by telling a story about a person with a complicated orthodontic problem who had changed doctors. The new orthodontist examined the patient and viewed his x-rays, but couldn’t understand why the previous orthodontist had approached the patient’s problem in a particular way. At the same time, he also recognized that without a full record, he had no idea what the previous orthodontist had to work with when first meeting this patient. It’s the same with Christians and their spiritual fathers, the bishop reminded us. None of us know other people’s circumstances fully because we cannot be completely aware of everything someone else is discussing with his or her own spiritual director. Therefore, it’s best to avoid making judgments about another person’s journey to Christ.

Experience has taught us that when moral issues do arise, conversation about morality is much more meaningful and productive if anchored in the Gospel. Sometimes when responding to the question, “How should Christians live?” we fail to teach new Christians and children anything more specific than, “Be nice, do the right thing, do what God asks us to do, and don’t do the things God asks us to avoid.” It can come off almost like a set of middle school civics lessons: these are the laws we have to obey because something bigger than us says doing so is necessary for the good of society. However, the Gospel suggests that there is much more to being a Christian than following rules. In most Christian traditions, moral expectations are understood as rooted in the message of the Gospel. If a person is curious about what your Christian tradition teaches on sexual morality, it might be helpful to anchor the conversation in the account of the wedding at Cana or Jesus’ response to the Sadducees about who will be married at the Resurrection. Through our own conversations with Christians across the ideological spectrum on culture war issues, we’ve come to see that civil dialogue is much less likely to happen if one defaults to, “God says that gay sex is a sin and marriage is between a man and a woman,” or “God loves everyone equally including LGBT people,” without a further explanation rooted deeply within the tradition.

Furthermore, we’ve found that it’s rarely helpful to focus solely on moral prohibitions and fail to discuss moral permissions. When most non-Christian people think of Christian morality, then tend to jump immediately to things Christians can’t do. As Sarah discussed once before, sometimes even lifelong Christians are inclined to define morality in the negative. If you were to ask a large group of people how they think conservative Christian traditions counsel LGBT members, most would probably answer, “They tell them that gay sex is a sin.” Upon pressing further into what those traditions say that LGBT Christians should do, the majority would likely say, “Avoid gay sex.” Eve Tushnet has described this as a “vocation of ‘no,'” and highlighted the damaging effects of such an approach. Regarding other behaviors that conservative Christian traditions consider sinful, rarely have we encountered such strong, “Don’t do that!” messages. Rather, we’ve heard many more conversations about what Christians should do. In the case of, “Thou shalt not kill,” Christians don’t wag fingers and beat people over the head with commands of, “Don’t kill! Don’t do it! Avoid killing because it’s a sin!” Instead, we hear homilies about love, and we help each other toward developing greater love for all humanity. We increase respect for the lives of other humans by learning to love, not by repeating the prohibition against killing over and over again. It’s important to emphasize the moral permissions of discerning vocation because the purpose of vocation is to call us toward Christ. Focusing on “Thou shalt not” implies that life in Christ goes no deeper than avoiding sin.

Lastly, one of the most significant lessons we’ve learned from living in the midst of the culture wars is that it’s dangerous to lose sight of one’s own journey to Christ by devoting all of one’s energies to telling others how far they are from Christ. Matthew 7:3 asks us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?” This verse is quoted out of context frequently by folks who wish to argue for a moral relativist position. As a result, some people dismiss this important piece of Christian teaching. It’s far too easy for any of us to see our brothers’ and sisters’ faults more readily than our own. This doesn’t mean that we can never rightly identify instances of sin in other people’s lives. The point is, it’s not our job to make assumptions about what may or may not be going on in another person’s life. It harms our own spiritual lives when we make such assumptions and allow ourselves to become self-righteous as a result. It’s spiritual poison to devote time to discovering whether another person is sinning so that we can tell ourselves, “I’m doing better than he or she is.” The Prayer of Saint Ephraim ends with the entreaty, “My Lord and King, grant me the grace to see my own sin and not to judge my brother.” While we might be tempted to tell someone else what he or she should be doing to live a holy life, we must remember that it requires a mighty divine work for us to conform our own lives to the pattern of Christ.

Living a Christian life requires that people give themselves wholly to the call. Christ calls us to follow him in hopes that we will one day be able to reflect his image and likeness fully. We do not pretend to understand everyone else’s unique situations, but we are always happy to pray for others that God will guide them towards the Truth that is Christ himself. Relative to our own formation, we know that we’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We’d be curious to hear if you have other strategies from shifting conversations away from the culture wars, and we always welcome your feedback on our writings in the comment box.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

From Persecution to Conversation

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This post is our third contribution to the What Persecution Is series that we are exploring with Jake Dockter at The Great White Whale. This series explores faith, gender, sexuality, race, culture, and identity. We’ll be posting one post a week for this series over the next several weeks. We’d love for you to join the conversation. Please let us know if you’re posting any related content on your own blog, so we can talk with you.

Many conservative Christians perceive that traditional Christianity is under attack by the LGBT community. Society is rapidly changing. Technological advancements spark new moral and ethical quandaries. Religious demographics have also shifted considerably in the last twenty years, reflecting an increasingly pluralized environment. Traditionally believing Christians may fear being steamrolled in the name of progress without having a chance to integrate Christian beliefs fully into the decision-making process. They might experience different kinds of intolerance on an individual level as they discuss their Christian beliefs with others. It’s not terribly uncommon for Christians with traditional beliefs and practice to be dismissed as old-fashioned, out of touch, and even oppressive. Because so many other places in society have changed, some Christians in more conservative denominations see themselves as the last outpost in the culture war. Some employ metaphors suggesting churches moving away from hardline conservative stances have been invaded by various cultural cancers.

However, when people are constantly on the lookout for evidence that a cultural cancer has invaded their Christian tradition, anything can be perceived as a threat. As Sarah was recently told by a very conservative friend of a friend, “We have to kill the cancer before it kills us!” If a rainbow flag appears in the window of a nearby business, people at the church might talk about the neighborhood’s decline. If a pastor gives a homily on sexuality, many congregants perk their ears to notice the slightest deviation from acceptably conservative rhetoric. If an obviously identifiable LGBT person darkens the doorstep of the church building, people can focus an enormous amount of energy on ensuring that the “right” people continue to give the “right” answers. It does not take long before any LGBT person can feel as though he or she is seen as nothing more than a tumor to be excised.

In contexts where churches are on the lookout for invading cultural cancers, celibate, LGBT Christians can face a barrage of tests designed to prove that they are indeed the enemy of traditional Christianity. These tests run the gamut of continual questioning of what a celibate, LGBT Christian believes about marriage and sexuality, exhortations to live a life that is above reproach, expectations that the LGBT person achieves absolute perfection in the arena of sexual morality and all other areas of the Christian life, and demands that the celibate person say nothing positive of expanding legal protections for LGBT people or point out that non-celibate LGBT friends actually can and do have virtues. Some people will go so far as to suggest that an LGBT person should not even describe himself or herself as LGBT. After all, shouldn’t a celibate, LGBT Christian be aware of the pervasive cultural cancers? Isn’t it reasonable that such a person should expect to have to overcorrect to compensate for his/her sexual orientation in order to prove himself/herself nonthreatening? We’ve experienced many people who think that we somehow “owe it” to the Church to demonstrate in unreasonable ways that we’re faithful in our theology, that our way of life together is harmless, and that we have no intention of rocking the boat within the parish.

Many people demanding reassurance from celibate, LGBT Christians will reference their own spiritual journeys of feeling like refugees from their former Christian traditions that became more liberal over time. These people are quick to assert that they lost their church homes when their former denominations started having conversations about LGBT concerns. They can’t bear the thought of losing yet another congregation to the spreading perceived cultural cancers. However, these people do not realize that many celibate, LGBT Christians have also lost our spiritual homes and constantly fear losing any place in our congregations. Seemingly, these people refuse to see that one reason a celibate, LGBT Christian might be celibate is that he or she has an earnest desire to live into the fullness of a particular tradition’s teachings on sexuality. Moreover, conservative straight Christians frequently show unwillingness to have conversations with celibate, LGBT Christians to establish relationships on a more personal level. They seem to have zero appreciation for the reality that celibate, LGBT Christians constantly face being ostracized within every Christian tradition; safe places for LGBT celibates are few and far between, and that only becomes truer as more denominations transition toward liberal sexual ethics and denominations that do not change their sexual ethics show increasing fear of any LGBT presence.

We’re tired of conversations that constantly focus on how the gays persecute the Church and how the Church persecutes the gays. We, like many others we know and love, feel torn. We care enough about what our conservative friends have experienced to know that they honestly do feel persecuted by the LGBT community. We’re not interested in silencing their stories. As much as we have been hurt by cisgender, heterosexual Christians, it is challenging for us to admit that virtually everyone on both sides of this debate has experienced some form of persecution. Nonetheless, we need to begin talk about the ways Christians mistreat each other over these issues if we are to make any progress towards Christ together. We must remember that God invites all to draw near to him. If we cannot acknowledge authentically the wounds that have been inflicted upon both sides of this culture war, then we will not be able to see the Church as a hospital for all those who desire to see the Great Physician.

To open the discussion, we have some questions we’d like to ask conservative straight Christians. If you believe that the Church is Christ’s Church and the gates of hell shall not overcome it as the Scriptures tell us, then why are you so afraid that LGBT people are able to destroy the Church? Have you ever wondered what it means for you to have a sexual orientation and gender identity? Is your first instinct upon engaging in dialogue with an LGBT Christian to make assumptions about his or her sex life or to start preaching celibacy? If so, why? We look forward to reading your comments. LGBT readers, you can also feel free to fill the comment box with questions you have for conservative straight Christians.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

On Being Different

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A reflection by Lindsey

This week, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on my experiences growing up. As a kid, I was different. It was rare for me to find places where I perceived that I fit. No matter what the metric, there were ways I frequently experienced a strong sense of otherness. I constantly looked for opportunities where I was like the other people gathered, and by the time I hit fifth grade, I realized that these opportunities required that I travel outside of my typical geography.

You see, early on, I realized that I was smart. I was that nerdy kid, incredibly enthusiastic about seemingly random things. When I discovered science camps at my local university, I was in my element. Finally there was a place where it was okay to be that geek.

Consistently being different is hard, especially when we live in a world that values conformity. I think nearly every adult can identify acute places in his or his childhood where, no matter what, feelings of difference were a constant companion. Feeling different can be excruciating. I remember some of the questions that used to run through my head when I was younger: Why must I salivate over logic problems instead of waiting with baited breath for this week’s basketball games? Why would I rather bury my nose in a book than chat it up with the “cool” kids? Why is it that I can’t wait to get home to do my science experiment instead of play video games? And yes, I would have used the word “salivate” to describe my relationship with mathematics.

Regularly, I use concepts of otherness when discussing my personal comfort with using LGBTQ alphabet soup to describe myself. To me, LGBTQ simply indicates that I experience the world differently than cisgender, heterosexual people. To make sense of cisgender, heterosexual people, I try listening to them describing their experiences. However, the more I learn about said experiences, the more convinced I am that mine are different. I’ve accepted that there is an overwhelming majority of straight, cisgender people around me. But, just as science camps afforded me a place to relax and be myself, spend time around LGBTQ Christians gives me yet another space to experience a deep sense of belonging.

With some frequency, I find myself wishing that more conservative Christians could appreciate my desire for room to relax and just be me. When I was a kid, I learned that virtually every school had smart kids. The way to get a bunch of smart kids together was to create opportunities that acknowledged how our smartness could be used to create community. Similarly, I believe that it’s absolutely true that virtually every church has LGBTQ Christians. It’s worth creating space for LGBTQ Christians to gather, to have an opportunity to feel less different and more at home.

I remember the huge sense of relief when I walked into my first Gay Christian Network conference in 2008. All of a sudden, I was with 200 other people who were like me! However, I almost couldn’t work up the nerve to go. I had heard so many conservative Christians completely bashing any and all LGBT organizations. If these organizations claimed to be Christian, then they were certainly distorting the truth of the Gospel and merely parroting what itching ears wanted to hear. I didn’t feel like I had any space whatsoever to affirm an event like the GCN conference as a good thing. I have since attended five GCN conferences because GCN is one of the few LGBT Christian organizations that has any space to walk alongside me as I journey alongside Christ. To be sure, it’s only one space, but it is certainly a space where I feel an absolute sense of being at home.

In many ways, I felt that same sense of home when I first went to science camp. As I have grown older, I have heard many arguments about why schools should stop providing programs to gifted students. While I’m confident places like science camp will continue to exist, I hope every student has somewhere at school where he or she feels a sense of being accepted. Why are we so quick to tell people who find themselves in a minority demographic that nothing can be done in their backyards to help them feel more at home?

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Some Thoughts about “Third Way” Churches

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A reflection by Lindsey

As I’ve been hanging around Twitter, I’ve seen a number of people asking questions like, “What does it mean to be a Third Way Church?” The question comes after a Southern Baptist church in California decided to adopt Ken Wilson’s approach to questions of LGBT people in the Church. Wilson proposes a Third Way where the hallmarks include “welcoming and embracing” LGBT people rather than adopting an “open and affirming” position. From what I can tell, many of the Third Way churches are trying to shift thinking found in Evangelical churches. It’s worth noting that Wilson’s book is arguing for a different approach than a Roman Catholic documentary by the same title. I have a soft-spot for what Wilson is trying to do because Wilson pastors a Vineyard church. In college, I used to attend a Vineyard church before coming into my current Christian tradition. A significant number of my close friends identify strongly with Evangelical traditions, and my reflection here should be read as coming from the perspective of an outsider musing on different things I’ve observed.

Culture war issues invite binary thinking. Many commentators say, “You either affirm gay marriage or you don’t,” or “You teach homosexuality is a sin or you don’t.” Within the binaries, I think it’s fair to say that there is no middle ground. However, I am no stranger to the conversation about LGBT people in the Church. I’d posit that approaches like Third Way and Generous Spaciousness are trying to move people away from asking binary questions about LGBT Christians. In the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t had any time to actually read Ken Wilson’s A Letter to My Congregation yet, and I don’t intend to describe his exact approach in this post. Nevertheless, I think Third Way approaches are becoming increasingly common.

Many evangelical churches have a Third Way style approach to questions of baptism. Whether a particular congregation would prefer to perform adult baptisms, many churches argue rather strongly for the idea that a person should only be baptized once. If a person has grown up in the church and was baptized as an infant, many congregations accept the newcomer through a letter of transfer. Some churches ask every newcomer to meet with the pastor, choosing to acknowledge a new member through a public affirmation of faith. Churches that strongly prefer adult baptisms frequently perform infant dedications or adopt a posture of quietly looking away when parents visit a church associated with members of their extended family to have the child baptized. Equally, it’s common for churches that have infant baptism to wait for parents to make a decision about whether and when a child should be baptized. There’s generosity in giving people space to discern their timing.

Relative to questions of LGBT Christians, I think many Third Way evangelical churches consider the status of various newcomers to their communities. Has an LGBT couple been married in another Christian tradition? Is civil same-sex marriage available in communities around the church? Does an LGBT couple have children they want to raise in the Christian faith? From what I can see of authors advocating a Third Way, these authors would say, “Let these families come and participate in the life of our church.” The communities generally strive to maintain uniform expectations for everyone in the church. If membership requires serving on a ministry team, then LGBT families are welcome to serve on a ministry team. If pastors ask people to participate using their various gifts and talents, then the pastors consider everyone’s gifts and talents. If the church has a newsletter that gets mailed, perhaps the church includes the names of everyone in the household on the address label. The choice to receive everyone who comes through the door with open arms seems to be a driving motivator of churches to adopt a Third Way approach.

Third Way approaches to certain issues do seem to be remarkably viable over the long term, at least in certain communities. I lived in England when I worked towards my Master’s degree. As such, I was invited to attend services at a lot of Church of England parishes. I was rather amazed at how the Anglican church takes a Third Way approach to the elements of communion. I remember attending one service where the person on my left was a strident defender of the belief that the Eucharistic elements became the body and blood of Christ while the person on my right thought the wafer was a poor substitute for Passover bread. Personally, I was experiencing a huge deal of cognitive dissonance. Things started to click together when the celebrant offered the Eucharistic prayers that had contained wordings very similar to the following:

“Accept our praises, heavenly Father, through thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and as we follow his example and obey his command, grant that by the power of thy Holy Spirit these gifts of bread and wine may be unto us his body and his blood…

Wherefore, O Lord and heavenly Father, we remember his offering of himself made once for all upon the cross; we proclaim his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension; we look for the coming of his kingdom and with this bread and this cup we make the memorial of Christ thy Son our Lord.”

In the wordings of the prayers, the theology was communicated as body and blood AND bread and wine. It seemed to me like the people on my right and on my left were self-selecting what parts of the prayers to pay attention to. As I queried different celebrants, I consistently heard answers that the English people had quite enough of Protestants killing Catholics and vice versa, and that the current approach allows people from different perspectives to worship together peacefully. These clerics thought it was admirable to bring previously warring people to the same table and to have a wide tent. While I can see where these clerics were coming from, I was still inclined to look at the situation more than a bit cross-eyed and would posit that most Catholic and Orthodox believers would resist this line of reasoning. One challenge of Third Way approaches is that they compel Christian traditions to determine where there is and is not space for disputable matters.

Suffice it to say, I do think Third Way churches are welcoming a great deal of liturgical soul-searching (for lack of a better word). How do these churches understand marriage? Might they take an approach of answering questions in the particular (i.e. Should we extend our blessing on these two men to share life together?) rather than saying, “Yes, we absolutely affirm the rights of all LGBT people to get married in our church.” Would a pastor consent to officiating a service held in a venue other than the church? Might the church adopt an approach of providing LGBT couples with legal counsel to navigate different ways of recognizing the relationship? Does the church want to dive deeply into exploring visions of celibate vocations that can be truly life-giving? Would the church consider crafting rites to allow people to enter a celibate vocation?

Here at A Queer Calling, we’re constantly talking about the need to help LGBT people discover truly life-giving vocations that empower them to live into the fullness of the Gospel. In my opinion, churches seeking a Third Way are trying to transition from a legal binary of “Yes/No” into a more holistic view of Christian discipleship. I think churches with a traditional sexual ethic do well to look at the fullness of their traditions in an effort to move beyond mandating LGBT people to a “vocation of No.” I also think that churches with a modern, liberal sexual ethic might consider listening to people seeking guidance in discerning vocation. As an observer looking in on the conversations, it seems like many people with a modern, liberal sexual ethic would say that LGBT people should be able to marry without providing any support to LGBT people who want guidance about living a celibate vocation. Likewise, many people with a traditional sexual ethic would say that all LGBT people should either be celibate or enter into opposite-sex marriages without considering the question, “What if a legally married same-sex couple came to my church, encountered Jesus in a real way, and sensed that God was asking them to grow in faith within the context of my Christian tradition?”

I’ve been in communities that I regard as Third Way communities. The Gay Christian Network works tirelessly to ensure that LGBT Christians feel welcome, independent of their conclusions on sexual ethics, providing support to LGBT people with both traditional and progressive sexual ethics as well as those who are still grappling with the questions. As a community, we’re committed to doing life together. Different people make various decisions about what to do in certain situations. However, we also know that every invitation to share life together is considered independently. Passing on one gathering does not mean that a person won’t be at the next. Despite differences in how we approach sexual ethics, we know that we’re diverse in just about every other way imaginable as well. For all of our diverse approaches, we hold in good faith that everyone is interested in growing towards Christ wherever he may lead. I think the community continues to exist because the people gathered constantly assert that as long as we all focus on Christ, we’re going to get even that much closer to living our lives in accordance with His will.

To be sure, there benefits and drawbacks to a Third Way approach. I completely agree that there are some issues where it does not make sense to try and work towards a Third Way. Even in this post, I shared that I am absolutely uncomfortable when communities try to take a Third Way approach to what happens to the Eucharistic elements. However, I do think that there are issues where it can be absolutely beneficial to take a Third Way approach. When communities take a Third Way approach, I see them saying, “You know, as we’re listening to the Holy Spirit together, we seem to be raising many different kinds of pastoral considerations. It’s worth moving prayerfully and humbly towards Christ in the midst of all these questions. We can be okay that we all feel like we’re trying to find our way in a fog. Let’s commit to remaining a community together as we focus on Christ and trust Him to guide us along the way.”

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Speaking of Sexual Trauma

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A reflection by Sarah

It’s never easy to talk about sexual trauma. No matter how often a related story appears within national, international, and local media, no matter what we’ve learned from child protection trainings, no matter how regularly we’re exposed to it in a culture saturated with sexually-charged messages, this is a topic that makes almost everyone uncomfortable. And that’s because most people haven’t the foggiest clue how to talk about it. I’ve been broaching the subject for years within my own circle of friends, slowly challenging my comfort zone, including more people in the discussion, and I still don’t know the best way to talk about it…especially within the context of LGBT issues.

Where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, people didn’t talk about sex. It wasn’t considered appropriate for polite conversation. I came into puberty knowing virtually nothing about sexuality, and most of my peers weren’t much better off. And I’d venture a guess that almost no one–not even our parents–had any idea how to recognize the signs of sexual abuse. I was taught that sex offenders are suspicious, shadowy figures who lie in wait for children who wander away from their parents, that “good” people–especially those who are active in the local community and church–can never be predators, and that old men can’t be held accountable for sexual touching because they might be senile so their actions don’t count as abuse. My parents brought me up to believe that once I entered puberty, it was my responsibility to watch out for men who weren’t able to keep their hands to themselves. I simply had to understand that most of these men weren’t raised properly and might not be able to handle seeing a pretty girl who was beginning to develop at a younger age than average. If a man was a close friend of my parents, he certainly didn’t fall into this group. Any suggestion that such a person might be unsafe was categorically unbelievable. And most of all, if anything ever happened to me, I was never to tell a soul other than my parents–who would be the sole determiners of whether I was telling the truth–for fear of making waves in the community and gaining a reputation as a loose young woman. I was 23 years old and nearly overcome by PTSD before learning that everything I thought I knew about sexual abuse was a falsehood.

Central Appalachia is not the only area where such things happen, and I am not the only woman who has had such an experience. More to the point of today’s post, I’m not the only lesbian or the only member of the LGBT community who has survived sexual trauma. Yet we can’t seem to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t sound nice. It could be used to discredit LGBT people. The discussion could be used to discredit liberals, or conservatives, or feminists, or anti-feminists, or affirmers, or non-affirmers. So on rare occasions when we do discuss LGBT survivors of sexual trauma, we’re good at building agenda-driven walls around the ways people are permitted to share their stories.

Yesterday morning, I was rereading our review of The Third Way. Specifically, I was reflecting on the story of sexual abuse shared by Julie, one of the documentary’s interviewees. Julie claims that her lesbian sexual orientation is linked to the fact that she endured sexual trauma as a young girl. She makes clear that after being abused, she began to view men as perpetrators and wanted nothing more to do with them. In our review, Lindsey and I discussed Julie’s story as one example of the film’s ex-gay undertones, and we stand by our criticism that overall, The Third Way privileges an ex-gay narrative while ignoring the diversity of celibate LGBT experiences. But regardless of the documentary’s shortcomings in piecing together a more comprehensive metanarrative, as an individual, Julie has a right tell to her own story as she understands it. She has lived it, and it would be absolutely unjust for me to say that I know it better than she does. It would also be unjust for another person to force me, or any other survivor, into Julie’s framework for understanding possible intersections of sexual orientation and trauma.

Speaking of sexual trauma as an LGBT person requires walking on eggshells. Our stories have political capital, whether we want them to or not. In my experience, the broader LGBT community expects survivors to defend the idea that sexual abuse rarely, if ever, is a determining factor in one’s sexual orientation. On the other extreme, most of the conservative Christian community is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that if an LGBT person was sexually abused at some point in life, surely that must be the cause of his or her sexual orientation.

A survivor with a story like Julie’s will inevitably face the criticism, “Your story is harmful to all other survivors in the LGBT community! Studies show that there are just as many straight women as lesbians who have histories of sexual trauma.” A survivor who is confident that his/her sexual trauma was not a causal factor for sexual orientation will face the opposite criticism: “You’re in denial. Prove that the abuse is unrelated to your orientation. Until there’s proof that sexual trauma never impacts sexual orientation, your story isn’t worth discussing.” Those of us who have chosen celibacy are accustomed to getting blasted equally from both sides, with conservative friends arguing that the trauma caused our gayness and liberal friends assuming that the trauma is our reason for being celibate. Not to mention that on top of these stigmas, we face all the same stereotypes and judgments (i.e. attention-seeking, it didn’t really happen if the perpetrator didn’t go to jail, we’re at fault) as do straight survivors.

Speaking of sexual trauma should not have to be re-traumatizing. Nor should it have to be like a multiple choice exam where you get 100% for bubbling in all the correct answers. I have no interest in being someone’s political pawn, whether inside or outside the Church. But I’m very interested in beginning a conversation about sexual trauma that invites all LGBT survivors to full participation. If you believe your sexual trauma is totally unrelated to your sexual orientation, if you see those two life experiences as completely intertwined, if you think the two might be related but you aren’t sure how and would like to explore further, or if you’ve never even considered the question before, we’d be honored if you felt safe to share more of your story with us.

It’s time for others to stop using narratives of sexual trauma in an effort to discredit LGBT survivors; it’s time for others to start listening to survivors telling their own stories. The last thing an LGBT survivor needs is to walk on more eggshells. The constant politicization of narratives regarding sexual abuse means that any LGBT survivor who opens up at all about his or her own story faces a loaded cannon of criticism. This post is our initial attempt at saying we’d like to change the tenor of the conversation. We’d like to foster a hospitable place here at A Queer Calling where survivors can know that all stories will be heard.

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