Last year I penned my first essay about the wonders of queer joy, coming out publicly as a bisexual woman living in Texas. The essay was well received, first by my Pastor Katie Hays at Galileo Church and then church friends and the readers of this honorable magazine. As the essay made the rounds among the wider online community of queer friends and allies, I couldn’t believe my good fortune, my blessing. Here I was, a now openly bisexual woman who had taken a conscious and intentional risk to share one of the most personal things about myself. My hopes in sharing the essay were twofold: that it would be a reclaiming of my own sacred voice and that other queerly beloveds would feel encouraged to risk sharing their most authentic selves with themselves and the world too. Because that truth is still true today, even a year later: God celebrates our queer sexuality as something that is good, true, and beautiful.
After my essay was published at the end of June, I was thrilled that my words had resonated so well with others. It was as if I’d stumbled into a beautiful mountainside, maybe La Luz Trail at Sandia Peak near Albuquerque where you take a cable car up to the top and hike through impossibly tall evergreens and crane your neck to view the breathtaking valley below. I was on top of the mountain for a short while, relishing the newfound freedom of being openly queer in the public sphere. Suspecting there might be trouble, I reflected on my choice to come out through self-reflection, meditation, and honest, heartfelt conversations with close friends. I thought I was prepared, and of course like all of us, I was still shocked when the betrayal came.
When we look at scripture, we observe a stunning pattern of holy risk through the ages, don’t we? The Creator has chosen, time after time after time, to partner with humanity in bringing about the Light of the world to us, and our call is to offer that Light to others and to this beautiful living earth. Countless others have risked their lives to follow the call of the Holy, like the women at Jesus’s tomb who told of his rising first, determined disciples like Peter and Paul, and many unknown saints who risked their lives to become who the Divine called them to be. We the queerly beloved know heartache and risk intimately; many of us have tasted rejection, abandonment, abuse, and even death for being different from what our institutions command us to be.
A few weeks after the article ran, someone in my innermost circle severed the bonds of our close friendship because of a theological difference in the article, and to say I was devastated is a vast canyon of understatement. Days later, my partner and I drove out to east Texas for Independence Day where I walked among lonely country roads and piney woods, crying out in anguish because no one, not even Jesus on the cross, welcomes the fresh pain of separation and abandonment. I descended into the valley of suffering last July, the expansive glory of queer freedom gone, at least for a little while as I grieved my loss and questioned if it had been a mistake to share the way I did.
That weekend brought me face-to-face with what it means to follow Jesus while you become your most authentic and queer self among others who would rather silence you. Because I’d received harm from someone I loved who was also in “the fractious, writhing body of Christ” as Sara Miles writes in Take This Bread, I stopped going to church altogether. Church friends noticed my absence and checked on me, and I was grateful for their kindness. Even in the darkness of the valley, I took long walks with my partner at a Dallas nature preserve for healing and rest. I found nourishing forms of psychotherapy and other spiritual practices to heal my wounds, which took much longer than I would have preferred. Scriptures remind us that stillness helps, and so I sat a lot in quiet and in rest, reminding myself that good things are born even in darkness. In early spring, I climbed out of the valley and back up into the mountain, discovering the freedom of choosing myself.
And here I am a year later, more alive with queer joy than ever before, even with the bitter losses of last year. More comfortable in my own skin, I proudly tell others I’m bisexual, coaching LGBTQIA+ youth as a licensed EMDR psychotherapist and volunteering at church events. Even amid the current setbacks we face as a people, I’m more hopeful and determined than ever about guiding our youth into trusting that God loves them and that their sexuality is a queer and beautiful thing.
One of the most marvelous things about queer joy is the recognition that the valleys are not nearly as lonely as I feared they would be. From taking a break from church, I found spiritual seekers in other traditions and forged rich relationships with them, discovering there is so much more we have in common than the so-called differences that stand between us. Throughout the human family, there are many queerly beloveds who long for a just and kind world, just like we do too. And when I returned to church, I was welcomed back into the fold warmly, church friends celebrating my arrival, my belonging affirmed.
Even in the shadowy valley, I experienced the Spirit moving where She wills, creating beautiful connections with new friends at church and elsewhere who welcomed me into their hearts, confirming what we the queerly beloved know to be true too: after heartache, there are always more friends to be made as long as we stay open to all possibilities. And the One who gave birth to mountains and sea and sky, to you and me, gives us the courage to receive that intimate and healing love from others who will celebrate our queer and beautiful selves, just as we are.
