Queering out of religion

Queering out of [[religion]]

I’m in Fitzroy on a Sunday morning and everything is quiet. It’s July but the sky is clear, the air breezy. The last party goers are trampling home and empty cans line the street. My stomach feels twisted. I walk, hoping that the church is on the next side street and I haven’t got the wrong address. I start to wonder if this is a stupid idea, but I turn the corner and sure enough I see the cathedral. High Anglican, with sturdy bricks and spires. I pass through its wrought iron gate and a garden with a winding path. At the entrance an usher greets me, slips me a service bulletin and I find a spot in a pew by myself. No one joins me but I notice some curious, smiling glances directed my way. The light in here is dim and filtered through the high, stained glass panels. There’s an organ and a grand-looking altar. I sit quietly for a while as people – mostly with grey or greying hair – file in and take their seats. I feel the vastness of the space press against me. I feel my resistance. I hear shuffles of feet echoing. The service begins and I find myself rising in muscle memory with the congregation as the priest enters with the cross bearer and the worship hosts. The priest walks with a chalice of incense and we sit down again, in familiar rhythm. The haze billows up with the [[organ chords.]]

<a href="https://ibb.co/tHPFvDr"><img src="images/portrait.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Black and white illustration of a small child and a baby" border="0"></a> <audio controls> <source src="sounds/slidetwo.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> In one of my earliest memories I am sitting on the carpet of the church community room next to my baby sister. She is in a laced baptism dress, hair slick with anointing oil. There’s a photo framed of us like this together, but I remember being in that body, inside that photo too. My blurred impressions and borders of myself all began there in amorphousness, in the womb of this building. I emerged from those rhythms of song and silence and [[yellow tinged light.->leaving faith]]

When I left faith, it was not because I was queer. I left because if I had stayed, I would have suffocated. I grew through and then out of it. I needed the distance to see where I’d come from. I was brought up Lutheran – an old Germanic denomination of Christianity. The religious lineage in my family runs long and deep in all directions. My Lutheran maternal grandfather arrived here from Germany after the Second World War, and my father comes from the Wimmera in Western Victoria, from Gromiluk land, where we can trace our family back to the Lutheran emigrants who colonised it in the 1830s. My parents met on a youth camp and sent me and my siblings to the Lutheran school that my mother went to before us. Every Sunday I saw my teachers in the pews, and my closest friends were all from youth group. It’s hard to describe to other people what it was like to be so intensely ‘churched’ but until I was eighteen, I didn’t know anything else. My childhood was spent sitting in the sanctuary hall listening to murmurs over microphones and the endless turn of thin, paper pages; crouched on the carpet in Sunday school watching re-enactments of Bible stories; going to lunches and picnics with quiches, casseroles and family or visiting far away cousins and their congregations where my uncles were pastors. Religion and faith community were wrapped around me so entirely, pressed tight and warm, [[safe and insular.->apple]]

<a href="https://ibb.co/tHPFvDr"><img src="images/apples.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Black and white illustration of an apple slowly being eaten" border="0"></a> <audio controls> <source src="sounds/slidefour.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> In my teenage years, the idea of sexuality was mostly preconscious to me. In youth we only mentioned sex when we talked about marriage. On one youth camp, our pastor brought out a crisp green apple and passed it among us, asking each of us to take a bite as a way of conveying the wholeness lost each time you had sex with a new person. That whole period of adolescence is cryptic in hindsight. My feelings toward boys gradually became visceral, stark and obvious. The moments with girls were harder to interpret, easier to bury in the charged awkwardness of puberty, in locker-room embarrassments, learning to change crop tops under shirts, discomfort and fascination in bodies as they morphed beyond my control. The idea of having a sexuality in an individual sense seemed lewd to me; inconvenient at the most. I decided not to have one and buried myself in schoolwork. I felt alienated from my feelings. I find them hard to locate [[even now.->thirteen]]

I was thirteen and excited to leave the overcrowded Sunday school room and join the youth downstairs in the ‘underground’ when it happened. The youth had a hip and cool counter-culture, a Christian idea of insurgency and resistance. For three years we attended a confirmation class called Head to the Heart (H2H for short) and met every Friday night and every Sunday after church to eat dinner together, share our highs and lows of the week, read the Bible and sing. In one of these sessions we were singing and I was sitting cross legged next to one of the youth leaders. We were singing and my gaze fell on her breasts and then jumped away. It was enough time for her to notice. She stared back at me hard and I felt hot shame rise up in my throat along with another incomprehensible feeling. We never spoke about it and I didn’t have the words to be able to. I could recite the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Doxology and the entirety of the Bible’s books in sequential order, but I didn’t have the words to describe [[that moment.->confirmation]]

On my confirmation day I stood at the pulpit in front of all of the people I grew up with, the families who nurtured me, and all of my peers. My English teacher from school stood proudly in the pews, as did my music teacher, our organist. My grandparents and godparents travelled across the city and state lines to be there. My friends and I wore white robes and stoles decorated just the week before with the craft supplies and hot glue gun from the youth room, heady smells of hormones and pizza in the air. We were full of anticipation. We had spent three years growing our faith and identity together and on that day we would finally ‘graduate’ this milestone. I read my first public confession. It takes a long time to get through the speeches, along with the usual liturgy and music. We confessed the creeds, confirmed our baptism and formally become members of the church. We were met with standing applause, handshakes and hugs. Afterwards my family hosted a big lunch at our house with barbecued meat, salads, cake and gifts. I felt fully loved and [[contained.->fish]]

<a href="https://ibb.co/tHPFvDr"><img src="images/necklace.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Black and white illustration of a fish necklace" border="0"></a> <audio controls> <source src="sounds/slideseven.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> I was given a cross with a verse from Ephesians, a necklace with a pendant shaped like a fish, a pocket devotion from my English teacher. I was given a family tree Bible, a pocket Bible, a student Bible and a box set audio narration of the Bible in its entirety. I felt overwhelmed, with love and belonging overflowing, my doubts stuffed [[furtively away.->high school]]

When I finished high school, I felt adrift and restless. The structures that held up my life were suddenly pared back, the whole world agape. I craved independence, felt the need to prove myself. I worked for a year in a minimum wage job and then left for Canberra to study. My parents helped me find a new church home, a Lutheran congregation in the suburbs. I moved into a college and started going to a student-run Bible studies group. We moved through the Old Testament book of Kings at a trudging pace. Everything was going to plan, and I was uneasy about it. At the same time, I got to know someone in my philosophy class named Tom. We met every week for coffee and to talk about the readings and soon started dating. The first night we spent together, we just slept in the same bed. In the most literal sense. After some time, they came out to me as non-binary and queer, and in between readings of William Paley and Pascal, the rest was a natural untangling. I stopped going to church. Separated from the husk of my upbringing, new ideas flowed freely over me. I craved them. I began to feel angry and alienated about how small my world had been before. I didn’t really know what I was doing with my degree. My old frameworks for understanding the world fell away and I began to question my reasons, my values. I fell hard for Tom. It was a distraction, but I’d never felt more connected to someone. We dated for two months. Then we broke up, jagged and sudden. I felt disoriented. I dropped out. Soon I was twenty-one and I was pretty sure I wasn’t straight. Nothing made [[much sense.->communion]]

<a href="https://ibb.co/tHPFvDr"><img src="images/communion.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Black and white illustration of a communion cup and bread" border="0"></a> <audio controls> <source src="sounds/slidenine.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> [[continue->melbourne]]

I returned to Melbourne that spring before the semester was over. I joined rehearsals for the Christmas church choir with some friends and the older members of the congregation. On Christmas Eve we performed. The sanctuary was airless, and still, and filled with a warm mass of people. I sang a solo in ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ in a trembling soprano. I felt like I was floating over the moment, in ritual and motion. The reverence was an instinct that I felt but could no longer fully inhabit. During the service I watched from the back as the seats emptied and the choir, my family, and the congregation filed over to the altar to kneel and take communion. I felt at home there but with a new sense of hollowness, echoing in my throat; I knew I couldn’t belong here anymore, and this was a part of my life I needed to slough off. It was only after I shed faith that I had the mental room to explore anything else about myself. In the process I successfully compartmentalised my life. It was easier for a while. I became angry. I wanted to demonise Christianity, the lack of choice I felt I’d had, being moulded into a person I had never chosen to be. I had conversations about intersectional feminism and progressive politics every day at university, while back home the Lutheran church was still debating whether women could become ordained pastors. I was angry at the church for its anachronisms, its suffocating presence in my life. My parents were upset when I told them I no longer wanted to go to church and quietly stowed away their disappointment. I hated disappointing them in that way and, in turn, was angry that disappointing them was necessary to live [[my own life.->queer circles]]

As I became more comfortable in queer circles, I still didn’t always feel known or seen. I could laugh with queer friends about the terrors of their catholic school upbringing, empathise with their time spent closeted in single-gender schools, the only girl in attendance. They gave me their condolences in return. Quietly though, I struggle to reconcile myself before and after faith. Had I really suffered, or was I complicit? I felt alienated from experiences I had thought of as sincerely spiritual in my teenage years – the idea of going to church three times a week, spiritual retreats every school holidays – all of it felt strange and extreme. I was ashamed of it. I found it hard to trust those previous feelings of safety and belonging and meaning. I understood the church’s oppression toward queer people, and its acceptance as haphazard at best. I thought I had belonged there, I thought I had felt loved. I felt guilty for having been loved. I knew I still was, but I didn’t know if it was despite or because of my identity. The old me had found beauty in the compassion of Gospels, the poetics in ancient Greek. I still found them beautiful – was I allowed? I knew the wholeness of connection, of having a common mission, of being raised by an extended family of people. I felt like I had been lied to. It felt too much like cognitive dissonance to know that I was supposed to be a child of God, but that as ‘born in bondage to sin’, any misstep would disqualify me. I knew a whole vocabulary of Church, corridors of theology in my mind, an architecture, a cultural heritage engrained physically in neurons, in bodily memory, in my genetics. What did I do with that knowledge, that body now? How did my feminism, my queerness speak to it? The postal survey rolled through and vitriol raged all around me. People were hurting. I resented the Lutheran church’s official statement of rejecting marriage equality, I resented its politeness, I resented myself for having loved that world of people, for continuing to do so. I fell into a disorientating [[juncture of self.->whole]]

<audio controls> <source src="sounds/slidetwelve.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> It has taken a long time to feel more whole. I’ve moved into a share house of queer people. I keep up connections with old church friends. I’ve learned that I can love my past self for who she was, and that I could love myself for who I am now. I don’t think I ever gave up a sense of the numinous. Now, I feel spiritual at a protest, or at a club, and in churches. I am moved by Handel’s Messiah. I no longer feel the need for permission to name and classify [[this feeling.->church service]]

After the service at St Mark’s Anglican church I move out to the foyer where people greet me warmly. I meet a young British couple who make me a cup of tea and offer me sandwiches. They tell me they are academics and we chat for a while. I tell them about growing up in church and that I’m here because I heard their parish priest on the radio. They introduce me to Father Stuart Soley. I tell him that I heard his interview about being an openly gay priest on Triple Bi-Pass on Joy FM (the LGBTQIA+ radio station), and I know that about one third of the congregation is part of the queer community. Father Stuart seems pleased to know that this is what brought me here. My acquaintances inform him that I grew up Lutheran and he smiles warmly and says, Oh, that’s more of a pared-back tradition isn’t it? And I say yes, we don’t have such high ceilings and this whole incense situation. I wave my arms about and we both laugh. I compliment the organist and the quartet who sang so well before the Eucharist. I don’t tell Father Stuart about my solemn, closed in feelings, but I think he senses them. Then, a man in his late thirties joins the throng. He’s telling us about how he’s been having trouble getting his Thai boyfriend’s bridging visa extended. I’ve never heard this kind of conversation in a church before, and I listen quietly as voices lengthen and lull and speak of the politics outside this hall. When I tell the group that I’m a writer they mention the church book club. They’re reading this Christian scholar; they say he’s a nuanced and progressive thinker; I must come along and join them sometime. I tell them that I might, but that I have to go home now, and they bid me a warm farewell. Father Stuart walks me to the entrance and asks if I might come back. I say [[I’m not sure.->cross]]

<a href="https://ibb.co/tHPFvDr"><img src="images/cross.jpg" style="max-width: 100%;" alt="Black and white illustration of a cross" border="0"></a> <audio controls> <source src="sounds/slidefourteen.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Your browser does not support the audio element. </audio> I went to St Mark’s like a doubting Thomas, casting out for proof. I needed to know that a faith community could exist where queer folk like myself were embraced entirely. And I got what I needed: evidence that let me deconstruct the dominant cultural narrative of where queer folk and Christians inhabit space and how. I’ve lived in these two disparate worlds of the Christian church and the queer community, and I now know them both intimately. They live in my head, sometimes at war, but more often these days they hold me up. I have reached a sense of incompleteness that is comfortable, resolved for now in lack of resolution. I live in a homeostasis, cycling through and back to my beginnings sometimes, but I didn’t get absolution from a church. I don’t want it. I’ve found fragments of my own peace; those broad islands of people and places between, comfort knowing I am fully held and contained, and [[free.->pre drinks]]

I’m on the way to pre-drinks before a space-themed, queer warehouse party called Unicorns. All of the queers I know are going to be there; it’s become a ritual, a calendar event. I’m hobbling down a badly lit street in black pumps, a diamante-encrusted leotard, and silver hotpants. I left my friends at the restaurant because I felt uncomfortable being seen in my outfit and now, I feel even more vulnerable. I get to the house where we are drinking before the party and I find Kian. They are sitting with an enby named Erin. I tell them both I felt scared and had to walk really far from the restaurant alone and Erin says they’re glad I’m okay and it’s hard being femme in public. They both offer me white wine and we drink and talk. Then Josie, the friend who is hosting us invites me outside where some trans girls I know are smoking and talking about the meaning of everything. Someone makes a joke about Unicorns being like gay church. I laugh a little too hard when I hear this and return inside to Kian and Erin, cheeks glowing from the wine, giggling and chattering. Erin gives me their number and soon we are walking down the same street in a cheerful rabble towards the warehouse. Inside we disperse and join the hot, heaving mass of bodies. All around me people are adorned in glitter and silver and lycra. I laugh and wave as I catch sight of my housemate, who has styled himself as a cyborg vampire in a rich, red satin cape. I weave through the clusters, these constellations of people I belong to. We become an illusion of jagged stop motion through shuttered strobe. I feel myself become a part of the crowd, and inside the throb of lights and haze of smoke, [[I feel endless.->portrait]]