Gays, Germans, people of faith, and other identity soup

By John G.

Here in Berlin, one of the free rags for queers, Siegessäule, recently ran three short portraits of queers and spirituality. For a link to the text, only available in German, click here. Just for a brief overview, the three portraits covered three different faith traditions from two different perspectives. The first is by a queer bear who visits two Buddhist meditation groups, and the second and third are profiles of religious converts, one from Catholicism to Islam and one from atheism to Christianity.

I found the three pieces to be very interesting because they not only span three religious traditions, but also three different ways of incorporating queer and religious identities into one’s life: two different forms of integration and one form of separation. It is this incorporation of identities that I want to focus on in this post.

In the queer bear’s exploration of Buddhism, he often finds that he is unconsciously cruising his fellow meditators. The gay Muslim who is profiled largely separates these two aspects of his life. And the gay Christian lesbian tries to find a worship community that accepts her and her partner as members. Ultimately, I find integration more compelling than separation, and while I am not going to fault anyone’s religious beliefs or sexual identity, I think that its important for queers of faith and spiritual queers to address how our spiritual/religious and sexual/gender identities intersect (or don’t).

Personally, I don’t believe in trying to separate one’s different identities, spiritual/religious, sexual/gender, racial, political, national, class, abled-ness etc.  We experience the world through all of them, and the interactions between these identities as we process our experiences, make us as individuals greater than simply the sum of our identities. Thus, I feel an affinity for the bear who finds himself cruising his meditation group and the lesbian searching for a queer-affirming congregation. The cruising bear is a brilliant demonstration of how we are all of our identities wherever we go. Just because we are in a spiritual/religious setting doesn’t mean we can turn off our sexual desires (or aspects of any other identity). I enjoy his reflections all the more because he’s not just honest about his desires, he owns them.

Meanwhile, the Christian lesbian faces the problems of being out in a tradition that is not always affirming.  While the meditating queer bear doesn’t explore acceptance of queer identity within Buddhist and other meditation groups, he also only visits queer-focused groups.  The Christian lesbian, however, has to deal with acceptance. Her first church wouldn’t let her teach Sunday School because of her sexuality.

While others on this blog (and I) have complained at length of queers of faith constantly being portrayed in the context of division, I think that recognition of the hostility we experience in some communities is necessary in any dialogue of what it means to be queer and spiritual/religious.

Lastly, the portrait of the gay convert to Islam flies right in the face of my beliefs about identities.  This man lives the separation of his sexual and religious identities. He states that while Islam is largely seen as homophobic, there is really nothing in the Koran against except the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is virtual identical to the version in the Hebrew Bible. But rather than think of reconciling or integrating identities, he sees them as separate, claiming that it doesn’t matter who he’s attracted to when he is praying or studying the Koran. I can’t help but feel this is shortsighted. Indeed it probably doesn’t matter who you are attracted to when you’re in prayer, but what about when you’re out in the world? One doesn’t cease being Muslim when one steps outside the mosque anymore than one ceases being queer when one enters it.

Ultimately, I think that trying to separate identities only reinforces existing power structures, when a truly queer agenda would seek to undermine them. Trying to not express one’s identity as sexually deviant or gender transgressive to the norm only reinforces the deviance or transgression of one’s behavior. To pick on straight people, to not express, embrace, and incorporate one’s queerness in a religious context only reinforces straight aspects of religion that are assumed to be normal, or worse, integral to the religion.

No one asks straight people to leave their straightness at the door, but many straight people claim that their straight identity has little to do with their religious identity. However, the experiences of queer people like the queer bear and lesbian Christian above show that we all take our sexual identities with us into places of worship. Being queer allows us to see how much of normative religious identity is formed by a straight identity.  We owe it ourselves and our straight coreligionists to share our insights. If we don’t we’ll always be outsiders and straight people will not be able to see the prejudices that they’re totally ignorant of. It not only takes the biases out of religion, but helps people in power to see how identities they take for granted interact to give them power.

Comments

[heather]

can tell that was a good article just by reading your review. very interesting, thanks!

[sacramento pete]

[comment removed. comments should be relevant to the article/post or something on-topic]

[sacramento pete]

My apologies for the last post. Just wanted to share a queer supportive publication that's just hitting its first year anniversary and maybe not widely known.

[icarus]

hi!

one of our bloggers just posted a question about Buddhism and gender, and i thought you might have some really useful contributions. if you want to check it out, the post is at: http://quenchzine.blogspot.com