Anna-Marie McLemore
I have a theory:
Every theater geek has their own theater dream. Maybe it’s restaging Cinderella in the 1920s. Or redesigning the costumes for the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Or being the first genderqueer actor cast as the Emcee in a national production of Cabaret. (Just three of the ones I’ve heard.)
In my teens, mine was probably either a role in the ensemble of Riverdance, or getting to design an elaborate lighting concept for a friend’s original script (in case you’re wondering: tendonitis, and we never quite found the budget for that production).
But before that, in grade school, I had a dream role. And it wasn’t Juliet or Velma Kelly or even the Lilac Fairy in Sleeping Beauty.
It was the Virgin Mary.
Since the first Christmas pageant I ever saw, I wanted to kneel in front of that manger with my head bowed, playing the girl I admired most. A girl I’d read about in the Bible for as long as I could read. I wanted to wear the blue cloth that signaled her purity and loyalty of heart. (A few years later, when a history-obsessed friend told me how expensive blue cloth had been before modern dye processes, I would wonder how la Virgen had come by it. Had the angels brought it to her? The wise men?)
When I was old enough, and when I heard there might be a Christmas pageant I could audition for, I got up the courage to tell a teacher I wanted to try for it.
She laughed.
Not cruelly.
More like I’d made a charming joke, the kind of thing adults like to quote children saying and then laugh over.
“Oh, honey,” the teacher said. “Do you really think you’re right for the part?”
Was it because I was too short?
Was it because I still had some of what my tías called my baby fat? There was a white girl who liked to poke my stomach and tell me how I’d never be pretty because I’d always look like a little girl. (This same girl would later get a school award for Christian kindness. I learned early that if you had blond hair and blue eyes and a sweet smile and just the right number of freckles, there was much the world would give you.)
But then, as I looked around at the posters and Bible illustrations and nativity figurines, a dim idea of what the teacher meant buzzed around me like a mosquito. I noticed something I had faintly registered before but was really looking at for the first time.
They were all blond.
The Marys around me were all blond.
Whether she was praying her song or journeying to Bethlehem beneath Christ’s star, Mary was always blond. In the prints where she bowed her head, her hair glowed as a seam of gold beneath her blue veil. And when her eyes were open, when they widened with the wonder of seeing the angels, they were two flecks of brilliant blue.
The Jesuses, too. In paintings of Him praying. In drawings of Him being baptized by John, a dove on his shoulder. Even in nativities where there was enough of the baby’s hair grown in to suggest the color. He was always blond.
Except, somehow, when He was on the cross.
Only in the moment of His deepest suffering did artists consider He might have walked this earth as a dark-haired, brown-skinned man. (In depictions of His resurrection and His reappearing, on the other hand, He is shown, as though by magic, blond again.)
I was not right to play la Virgen not because I was too young, or too short, or even because of my baby fat.
I could not be Mary because I did not have the right colors.
I thought this, even as I was surrounded by the godly women of color in my family and my community. I was not good like them, I thought. I did not have their sacred hearts.
They were good, but I had to be made good. And I wished and prayed with everything in me for God to make me a girl blue-eyed and blond enough that I could not only play Mary in a Christmas pageant but could grow to have a heart like hers.
If I wanted to be good, I would have to work against my own colors, the ones that teacher had laughed at. If I did this, I thought, I could grow up to be the kind of Christian woman and Christian wife I dreamed of being one day.
Christian wife.
Those two words seemed like two things I could aspire to, no matter what color I was. They seemed clean, uncomplicated.
At least they did until I realized that my heart was different from those girls’ at school in more ways than I ever knew.
As a teen I fell in love with a boy who had been assigned female at birth, a boy who would later transition to living the gender expression that was true to him, not the one the world told him to live.
I loved him. I saw this transgender boy as a child of God.
But I couldn’t give myself the same grace. My queerness only added to the distance I felt from God, distance born that day I first prayed to be a girl painted in golds and blues.
I didn’t speak of those paintings and figurines I’d seen growing up, with their luminous yellow hair and their eyes that looked like drops of the ocean. I didn’t speak of the moment when I had realized that the light off their halos was not enough, that the gold had to grow from their heads too.
So I don’t know how that boy knew.
But one day, no warning, he asked, “You know Jesus wasn’t really a white guy, right?”
I looked at him. We’d been drinking beer we were too young to have on a roof we weren’t supposed to be on, watching the kind of Los Angeles sunset that comes in violet and gold and gray. It had been a rare moment of quiet with us, watching that sky. I liked him so much that when he didn’t talk, I almost always would, too nervous to let the space between us grow silent.
For him to break that quiet was as rare as a rainstorm over the city.
“What?” I asked.
“I know it’s the way all those Renaissance painters show Him, but He wasn’t,” the boy said.
He had the grace to pretend he was just discussing a fact of history or science, something I might be interested in but not a thing that had plagued me for years.
“Weird, isn’t it?” he asked, still watching the sunset, taking a swallow from the bottle and then handing it to me. “We see all those paintings and we take it as some kind of fact that he was white even though it makes no sense.”
I nodded, like I’d already known all that and we were just making conversation. I would not admit my ignorance to a boy I liked this much. I had kissed this boy on lighting scaffolds. He had snuck me after hours into the dark theaters where he worked. Still, I had never told him about the role I’d wanted most growing up.
But then I did some research. I looked up articles. I took out books from the library. And I came to understand the distance between the story those paintings and nativity figurines told and the historical Jesus who lived on this earth.
Jesus had dark hair and brown skin.
He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned boy at His birth and during His youth. He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned man during His time as a teacher, during His baptism, at His death, and in His resurrection.
He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned man, not just in His death and suffering, but in His life and His glory.
He was no more like those pictures than the boy I loved was like the cis male husband I once thought I was supposed to have.
It would take a long time to accept myself as the queer Latina girl I was. It would take a long time for me to forget the sound of that teacher’s laugh, or to let go of my instinct to believe that saints were spun out of blue and gold. But recognizing two men as they were—embracing my love for a transgender boy, and my reverence for a brown-skinned Jesus—left a seed in me that would grow roots in the years after.
It let me see la Virgen de Guadalupe as she appeared to Juan Diego, her arms full of roses. Juan Diego was a brown-skinned man, and la Virgen told him, as many times as he needed to hear it, that he was a child of God. She showed him in so many flowers, blooming impossibly out of season, that his tilma could barely hold them.
It let me understand myself as a child of God, including, not in spite of, who I was. And it made me sure that no one else—not teachers, not painters, not the world—gets to draw the boundaries of where God’s light reaches.
My mother and father worried that facing the world as I am would destroy the faith in me. It almost did. I heard, over and over, You are too different; we do not want you. I heard it from those who tried to tell me God would not love me as I was, and I heard it from those who tried to tell me there was no God. But the faith I learned from my mother and father, and from my whole family, stayed with me when the world yelled the things those nativity figurines had whispered.
My husband and I now attend a church that welcomes anyone who draws near the light its stained-glass windows cast on the sidewalks. I love my church home. I love their accepting spirits and their open hearts.
But the pull toward the kind of churches I once knew has never quite left me. Even knowing they wouldn’t accept me or my husband, I still feel it.
Sometimes I find myself at the steps of those churches, knowing a little of my heart is just inside the doors. Because even if the church I’m waiting outside may never welcome me, there are others like me.
Maybe I can’t change what would happen if we crossed the threshold into those churches. But sometimes, finding those who are like you, exchanging those looks of You too? is enough. It helps us understand that we are not alone. That together we can find church communities that will welcome us as God welcomes us. That yes, maybe a little of our hearts will always be just inside those doors, but God is the one who gave us those hearts.
They are ours to take with us.