Being proud saves our lives
Happy Pride! This June, it is even more important to celebrate queer and trans people.
Last month in Philadelphia, a team of us, led by the Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT Interests, hosted Fabulous, Fierce, and Sacred, a conference dedicated to queer joy and celebration. We met with the purpose of creating a community, honoring our elders, remembering where we came from, and simply having queer joy together. It was a beautiful conference and I hope there are many more.
Coming together to celebrate who we are is such an important part of queer existence. For so long, and so commonly, we fight just to be recognized as human beings. We fight for our dignity. Oftentimes, we are met with such resistance that the fight for the bare minimum is exhausting. It can feel draining and deflate our hope. For many queer people, especially when we find ourselves isolated, that hope to fight depletes quickly. It can be hard to keep going. For some of us, that means we crawl back into the closet. Or we lose the will to even come out. For others, the results can be much more dire and can lead to self-harm.
Christians, probably more than any other group, are a main reason for the cloud of shame that keeps queer people from being proud of who they are. The intense homophobia and transphobia that is woven into the Christian tradition and community is unmistakable, and it is even more pronounced today. Christian Nationalists are in power in the U.S. and are codifying laws and policies all across the U.S. that seek to harm already very vulnerable people.
We need to all do our part in countering this wicked segment of Christian Nationalism. The same Christian Nationalism that threatens migrants, Palestinians, and a whole host of others preys also on queer and trans people. We need to center queer and trans experience in all of our activism, not as an afterthought, but as a central aspect of them. Too often, I hear that queer and trans affirmation is not a primary concern, that it is a distraction, or worse, it threatens the wide coalition we want to build against Trump and his ilk. In fact, some blame queer people for Trump winning the election!
What a shame it is to sideline queer people for the sake of political power. Our dignity and protection cannot wait—neither can other vulnerable people. We need to do it together, and we can do it together.
And it isn’t just policy that we need to confront. For Christians, it is our very theology and churches. We know that queer folks with a religious upbringing are more likely to kill themselves, than those without. The burden for affirmation and celebration is one that Christians are very much responsible for. Part of the repair and repentance that we need to engage in is a full-throated embrace of queer people. More than mere tolerance, we need to repent and divest from our bigotry and move toward true celebration.
I was heartened on Sunday when at church we draped our worship space in rainbows and we repeatedly honored queer people throughout the service. Tears of gratitude from our queer folks (including this pastor) flowed at what felt like something that might never happen in a church building.
We need to do more of that. There isn’t time to spare, either. There is no room for equivocation, there’s no room for long-winded discernment processes that queer people shoulder the burden of, there’s no room to divert Western homophobia and transphobia onto the Global South. All of that is wasting time, and time that may be very limited. Christians need to take a side and do so decisively.
We need to see the genuine danger queer people are in and act now to change it. For so many of us, the issues that plague us are not only political, but also psychological. Love, support, and joy are a crucial counter to this psychological distress. This means advocating for physical and mental health care for queer people. And more than that, it means including queer people in our lives, naming their presence, their important to us, and being proud of them.
For me, that’s what Pride is about. It’s about celebrating the disenchanted and the down-and-out, and offering them the dignity that their elected officials, their religious leaders, and even their families won’t. Being out and proud is an act of resistance and an act of resilience. It is life-saving and life-changing work.