I’m going to ask you to join me for a short journey in a time machine.
The year was 2018 and I was running a multi-issue perzine called “caro”. I was just beginning to discover the Side B community and was on the tail end of reconciling my faith and sexuality and politics. As my introduction to this collective space, I want to share a few essays from The Femme Issue series that never saw publication. These pieces contain the nucleus of my Roman Empire; the ideas that refuse to let me go. What follows won’t be purely from 2018, of course, but filtered and edited through the person I am now 6 years later.
In that case, maybe I’m not inviting you for a journey in a time machine, but a journey through memory; memory that’s been recontextualized, refitted, and refracted until a new picture is formed. Whichever path we end up on through whatever landscape this journey takes us through, I hope you’ll find that this new picture made from old memories and musings gives you something new to think about.
Do you know what it’s like to be so afraid of something inside yourself that you can’t even think about it? Can’t acknowledge even that fear, because to acknowledge the fear is to acknowledge that there is something to be afraid of. Can you imagine fleeting edges of thoughts, the slight rise of an emotion, being pushed down, swatted away, and wiped clean in less than the blink of an eye, never to be recognized except in the absence of memory? Can you imagine being angry and sad and hurt all the time and only being able to understand a little bit of why?
This was what I was experiencing before I acknowledged to myself that I was attracted to women as well as men. Abruptly leaving jobs, organizations, and friendships whenever things got too close, and unable to process my reasons for doing so. Truly wondering why I was hurting my friends and myself that way, and never coming up with an answer. To be honest, even though I don’t have the same mindset, the habit of stepping out of friendships before they get too deep is ingrained and I have to fight against the impulse just to be able to make friends. Trust is so hard.
I can't explain the exact moment I moved from "I'm straight but I have weird feelings sometimes that I'm going to pretend never happened," to "I'm bi, I am also attracted to women as well as men, this is a part of me and it's okay." Probably because it happened so slowly that a single moment can't define it. Some of it was gentle probing from the few friends and family members who could talk about these things. Some of it was having to confront bi/homo/transphobia in others head-on, and knowing that I couldn't do so while not investigating those biases within myself. Some of it was just being tired of the mental and spiritual gymnastics.
I am a pastor’s kid (PK). I’ve spent most of my life deeply involved in Christian communities. But from 2010 to 2015 I attended church only rarely, usually for special events at my dad’s church, the one I grew up in, or interchurch events. This was a huge change for me.
While it wasn’t the main reason behind my lack of participation, one of the issues I started to wrestle with when I was by myself with God was my sexuality and the Church’s response to sexual minorities.
My siblings had been coming out for a while and from 2010 to 2012 we lost touch with most of our friend group because of it. At the time I was still a not just theologically but socially and politically conservative Christian who felt that my siblings were making bad choices, but I could also see the hypocrisy in how my siblings and other queer people were treated in comparison with everyone else who was claiming to be straight but also doing things that we all considered sexual sins. And I was just beginning to acknowledge to myself that I too wasn’t straight, though I mostly kept this a secret and tried to pray it away.
To be honest this is an old story shared by many people that you can search for and find on many blogs, podcasts, and in a few dozen books. I was in denial until I couldn’t be and wondering the whole time if the God I served would love me at the end of this reckoning.
I had already spent most of my teens looking into other religions and philosophies, testing my faith and beliefs. My siblings’ answer was to turn to other spiritualities and belief systems, but as much as I tried to make myself comfortable with that idea I couldn't change the fact that I actually believed that Jesus was who the Gospels claimed him to be, and that while my understanding of scriptural interpretation had become far more nuanced than the “plain reading'' hermeneutic I’d grown up with, in the end I couldn’t make the argument that pursuing sexual relationships with women was an appropriate use of my sexuality. Christianity was it for me. Jesus was it for me. So what was I going to do?
I think I thought acknowledging that I was attracted to women would be the end of me. Who would I be if I became the Other that my community was so afraid of? Would I have friends? Family? Even if I married a man, who would I find that I trusted with this new queer self? What if my convictions about what Christian marriage looked like were wrong and I was sentencing myself to a life of loneliness? What if my convictions were right and I fell in love with a woman? Would I be able to hold onto them? If I was open to celibacy–if I wasn't going to accomplish all the very heterosexual and gendered milestones I’d planned on and dreamed of, why was I born? There was so much uncertainty on the other side of denial and very little guidance on how to navigate it. The only thing I could imagine was the worst case scenario: me being lonely and alone, cut off from familial community, spiritual community, and queer community alike, no matter which path I chose.
If I am honest the other side of denial was *an* end. I had to reconcile my view of myself with the reality I had been running away from. That I was one of those people I had been taught to fear. I had to reconcile myself with the reality that the pain and fear I had been living, I had also helped inflict on others. There were (and still are) deeply embedded viewpoints about gender and sexuality that I had still have to let go of. It *was* the end of me, as I understood myself.
Reaching "the end" of yourself is scary and I still haven't fully reconciled all parts of who I am (Black Southern Woman) (Christian) (Bi Femme). The fear of myself and of who I am yet to become hasn't actually subsided. But there's a hope, and a joy, and a community that is more attractive than living in stasis and denial. I am rebuilding.
Thank you, Johana-Marie! I related to so much of what you wrote...