When I came into the bar in drag, kind of hunched over, they told me, “Be proud of what you are,” and then they adjusted my tie.
—LESLIE FEINBERG, Stone Butch Blues
Have you ever read a book that changed your understanding of yourself, of your place in the world? That’s what Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues did for me. A fictional memoir of one butch’s life from the late 1940s through the 1980s, the story rocks back and forth from brutal accounts of raids and bashings to extraordinary moments of courage and tenderness.
The book challenged me to look at my own prejudice. Coming out in the 1980s, I inherited an arrogant disdain for butch/femme culture. It was common then for white lesbians who were involved in the feminist movement to disparage what we perceived as an aping of the oppressive heterosexual gender roles that we sought to escape. Ours was a shame-filled response, the result of having been similarly disparaged by mainstream feminism in the 1970s. Feinberg’s book put human faces on what to me had been merely labels.
I was surprised just how much of myself I saw in her characters, in their need of each other, in their determination to survive with as much integrity as they could muster. The world they inhabited was the one I would have inhabited if I’d been born twenty years earlier; the bars that were home for them would have been mine, too. Feinberg’s book was a gift, a legacy. I read it and felt claimed by people I desperately wished to claim back.
In 1993 Feinberg held a reading at Judith’s Room, a women’s bookstore in the West Village. I had to go. I just wanted to be in the same room with her. After the reading, I had to stoke my courage to go up to her. I think I was trembling as I reached out to shake her hand. She looked me right in the eye, generously encouraging me. “Thank you for writing this book,” I said. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know . . .” I struggled to get the words out. “I didn’t know that we were a people, with a history.” She thanked me, and I turned to go. When I hit the sidewalk, tears spilled. I stood there for what seemed a long time, crying, shaking, caught up in an experience that I knew I would remember the rest of my life.
Leslie Feinberg gave me one of the most important gifts that one gets from community. It is the same gift that the butches in the bars taught her protagonist, Jess, as they lovingly straightened her tie: the knowledge of self that comes from belonging to others.
“We see you. We value you. You are a part of us.”
These messages are bedrock for other messages that are crucial to a healthy conception of self: “Know who you are. Be who you are. Be proud of who you are.”
Queer identity may be discerned in relative isolation, but it comes to life in community. That is where we find mentors and friends, teachers and fellow travelers, who help us discern how to live this life and what values to uphold. That is where our identities are not only validated, but celebrated. And in that potent mix, which has always felt to me like the very essence of love, one finds liberation. The LGBTQ communities to which I’ve belonged have inarguably improved my life, every one of them. The people I’ve found there have made and still make the risk and the danger bearable.
Because most queer people are not born to queer parents, we have to go looking for people who can help us understand who we are, who can teach us about our history. Our signature spaces have historically been bars and bookstores, places where we could find each other, relax, hook up, relate, and learn. Given our relationship to scandal, it makes sense that our earliest gathering spots were bars, places where people congregate under cover of darkness to imbibe beverages that are marginally illicit, supposedly off limits to children. Independent bookstores are also often provocative places where people gather to discuss literature, politics, science, art, and other essential dimensions of human experience. Like the salons that once were home to queer intellectuals, bars and bookstores have long been havens for us. We now have a robust network of community centers, political clubs and organizations, and even churches and synagogues—which is a good thing, especially for people for whom a bar is not a healthy place to be.
The point here is simply that we have always needed spaces to exist, places where we become visible to others. Forming community has always been a primary impulse for us. That may be true for all or most people, but it is particularly important for queer people who need to find one another in order to know ourselves as queer people.
“Adoption” is the word that signifies people who are not related by blood but who have claimed one another as family. Lots of people, not just queer people, use the word “family” to indicate a very close connection. But “family” has particular significance for queers: for a long time, it was a code word by which gay and lesbian people acknowledged each other as gay. “Don’t worry, she’s family,” someone might have said to allay fears of exposure or homophobic abuse. Claiming familial connection is particularly powerful and important for people who cannot take for granted that their families of origin, their biological families, will embrace them.
Queer community is like that, for many of us. Globally, it includes millions of people. But it is also local, personal, intimate: a network of relationships between individual human beings who need each other, who care for each other, who are home for each other.
Maybe you have had an experience of that kind of connection grabbing your heart unexpectedly. It happened to me again just recently when I stumbled upon a paper written by my younger son. Leo is a smart, charismatic little guy whom my former partner and I were exceedingly fortunate to meet when he was just eight weeks old. He needed a home, and we scooped him up, laying claim to this gorgeous child with eyelashes to melt your heart. The adoption went through six months later.
The paper I found was in his school bag. I’m guessing it was part of his school’s lead-up to Mother’s Day. On the paper were sentence-starters like “I love my mom because . . .” and “The thing I most like to do with my mom is . . .” The final sentence began, “I know my mom loves me because . . .” In his eight-year-old scrawl, Leo had filled in, “I am her son.”
Now, for most kids, that might be an obvious response: “Duh. I’m her son; of course she loves me.” But for a kid who is adopted, there’s no “duh” in the equation. To participate in an adoption is to become intimately aware of the fragility of human connection. If you have experience with adoption, you know: you learn not to take for granted the continuity of even the most primal attachments. Stories about adoption almost always involve hard realities—biological parents who made excruciating choices; various kinds of personal or familial brokenness, illness, death. Many kids who are adopted begin absorbing these truths at a young age. But with luck, those same kids also begin learning at an early age to choose, consciously, the families into which they have been received. Lots of adoptive parents can tell you some version of the story I just told, of that moment when they knew they had been chosen back, when they heard their child declare quietly but clearly, “I am yours; you are mine. We belong to each other.”
The experience of familial brokenness is familiar to far too many queer people. I am one of the lucky ones blessed to have nearly unequivocal support from my family of origin. But even the fortunate few like me are only one or two degrees of separation from heartrending stories of familial rejection and violence. Our community has in recent years begun to pay deeper and much-needed attention to the plight of homeless and runaway youth. Our concern for these kids is personal. Studies estimate that as many as 40 percent of homeless and runaway youth are LGBTQ.1 Many of them are children and very young adults who were thrown away by their parents or who ran away to escape emotional or physical violence. Many, many queer people either were one of those kids or know someone who was.
Queer people don’t take for granted the idea that “family” is always healthy. Thus the metaphor of family helps qualify the caliber of those individual connections within our community. Like any family, we don’t always get along. We don’t always treat each other well. We don’t always like each other. There are family members who are abusive; there are family members who refuse to acknowledge their familial ties; there are family members who enjoy tremendous privilege and keep it to themselves even as they watch others struggle mightily. And at the same time, there are family members who are extraordinarily generous. There are family members who pay attention to familial identity and call us all to account. There are family members who model graciousness and compassion and fierce love. We know what it is to be proud, in a good way, and we know what it is to feel ashamed for not living up to our own expectations of ourselves.
And as in a family, we know that it is important to keep the relative health of the entire family in view. This matters, because queer people can be abused by communities themselves. You can see this along intersectional lines: lesbians of color being rendered invisible or worse in communities dominated by white women; my own experience being casually dismissive of the life-or-death struggles of butch/femme culture; young people struggling to have their gifts and contributions recognized by older queers; battles between LGBTQ people whose ethnic or national allegiances conflict. Bisexuals are assailed for not being gay enough; trans* women and drag queens collide in an effort to name themselves and claim their respective turf; trans* rights disappear entirely from federal legislation designed to end employment discrimination against LGB—uh, let’s just leave off the T, shall we?—people.2 We sometimes disagree about the direction our movement should go. The title of this book—its use of the word “queer”—will be unsettling and even offensive to some people, especially to older people who once upon a time had that word spit at them in the midst of chronic, caustic assault.
These kinds of disputes can easily escalate to a point where an individual or group feels not just unwelcome, but oppressed by an entire community that exists under the mantle of LGBTQ. This happens. The pain is just as valid an experience of queer community as are experiences of empowerment, encouragement, and love.
So what can be said about LGBTQ community that is true? What can be said that Christians can appreciate?
We know our need of each other. Not all the time, or in every single circumstance, but overall. We need to have access to other queer people, to queer spaces, to queer thought. We need it for safety, but not just for safety. We also need it to know ourselves. We need it to know love. We need each other for basically the same reasons that people need family. And in the same way that people need family, we don’t just need each other a little. We need each other deeply. We need each other to our core. Some people feel this need more strongly than others; but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was fully content to be an orphan.
For queer people, community is the crucible of our ethical lives. Precisely because we need each other so much, we set high standards for our behavior vis-à-vis ourselves and one another. Deliberation about the most pressing ethical issues that a queer person confronts is often informed not just by how the ethical decision affects that person or the people closest to that person, but also by how it affects the community and other queer people more broadly.
This is not a call to be aware of “how it reflects on us” when people behave a certain way. That impulse, that fear, is certainly alive in our communities, and you can hear it in our discourse. But many of us know that respectability is suspect, and our suspicion does sometimes win out over the temptation to join the ranks of those deemed socially respectable/acceptable. We have made real strides over the decades in recognizing the damage we have done to one another by trying to create a public impression that feels less threatening to the dominant culture. We have long been blessed by strong voices who call us back to remember that our ability to stir, confront, and survive scandal is one of our gifts.
When lived out with integrity, the ethical impulse of our communities is not a demand for respectability, but rather is a call to authenticity. That is why, bottom line, participation in community life is at the heart of LGBTQ experience. We need community; it needs us; it is us.
Participation in community life is also at the heart of Christian experience.
The Christian emphasis on community is a vital part of our Judaic heritage. Long before Israel was a modern nation, Israel was a people who possessed a visceral understanding of their identity as a family created by God, chosen by God, living in covenanted relationship with God. Jesus altered the basis for membership in that community but continued to emphasize its importance when, at the Last Supper, he blessed a sacred meal and identified its key components—bread and wine—as his body and blood. Today, “the Body of Christ” is an evocative phrase that refers both to the sacrament of Communion and just as importantly to the community of people—the global church—who are fed by it.
Jesus inaugurated what we now call Christian community. He had the vision, but the apostle Paul was the one who had to figure it out, explain it to people, and help it take root.
Paul, for all his faults, put his shoulder to that rock and pushed over the course of decades. Paul’s workload was magnified by the fact that he was taking this message, rooted in Judaic thought, to people all over his known world. The brilliant Paul, a scholar of religious law, fluent in both Greek theology and Roman ideology, was a gifted translator, nimbly conversing in terms that both Jews and Gentiles—non-Jewish people living under the Roman Empire—could understand.
Early in his work, Paul was on fire. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was an amazing, vivid encounter that rocked his conceptual world.3 As he rebuilt his worldview, he began to see certain truths with crystal clarity. They weren’t theological abstractions to him. Paul had just seen these truths play out in the events surrounding Jesus’s execution and resurrection. For Paul, these events were recent. They were real. They communicated a message that was urgent.
What was that message? This is a crucial, foundational question. In the conventional Christian narrative, Christianity is a radical rewriting of the covenant between God and Israel in which Christianity supplants Judaism as God’s “light to the nations.”4 Progressive churches tend to wriggle uncomfortably with the unavoidable implication that Christianity is an improvement on Judaism designed to replace the original, a sort of Judaism 2.0. Many of us know instinctively that something is wrong with this conclusion. How do we proclaim a bold gospel that doesn’t disparage our spiritual parent, the tradition of Judaism?
Brigitte Kahl, a German Protestant minister and biblical scholar, argues that Paul’s message was much bigger, more radical, and much more practically important than a theological or even cosmological tug of war between two competing notions of Judaism.5 Kahl states the obvious: the big player in Paul’s world, the entity that was affecting absolutely everyone, was Rome. To justify its imperial domination, Rome promulgated an ideology of dualisms, of oppositional binaries, in which Rome was the great and powerful Subject/Self. According to that cosmic order, Rome was superior to and thus correct to impose its law upon less militarily powerful people, all those Object/Others, exacting all the tribute and deference that an occupied people customarily provide to their imperial overlords.
Key to that Roman mindset was the idea that Caesar was divine, which is why Rome considered it an act of sedition and not mere blasphemy when the earliest Christians declared that “Jesus is Lord.” With this statement, early Christians denied not just Caesar’s divinity but also the ideological justification for the empire. They announced that they were called to follow a God whose law is based on love and on raw courage, not on enmity and fear; a God who endured violence rather than perpetrated violence; a God who stood with them and called them to stand together rather than dividing them; a God who fed them rather than stealing the bread from their children’s mouths.
The tension between Roman ideology and the message of Jesus as Christ was obvious to Paul and to people in every territory who were struggling under the weight of Roman occupation. It so permeated the air that it had to have been part and parcel of the message that Paul was delivering. Kahl argues that in all the letters where Paul talks about law as a force that enslaves, he is not talking about Jewish law; rather, he is pointing to Roman law, and to the binary-based, Self-versus-Other ideology that undergirds it.
Thus Paul perceived in the Christ event not a spiritual evolution (from Judaism to Christianity) but a cosmic battle in which Caesar manifested a lived ideology of fear and violence.
In this schema, Paul’s mission had very little to do with reforming Judaism and everything to do with proclaiming the good news of Christ in order to break Rome’s growing hold on the world. But he faced a challenge: Paul was bringing to non-Jewish people a message of liberation and hope that was founded solidly within Judaism. And the people of Israel were truly a people, a tribe, related to each other by blood, who had been called by God. How could non-Jews participate in this sacred relationship with the God that Paul and his people knew and worshipped?
Paul repeatedly uses the word “adoption” to refer to an individual believer’s relationship to God. The first use is in his letter to the Galatians, immediately following one of the foundational rupturings in Christian scripture. He writes:
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. . . . God sent [Hir] Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of [Hir] Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.6
Paul’s message astounded first-century people living under the boot of Rome: You are now free, he argued, a child beloved by God, who has claimed you as a parent claims a child. The God of Israel—who was also, to Paul, the God who anoints Jesus as Christ—this God does not want you to be enslaved, held captive, constantly afraid.
His reference to Abraham points to the identity of Israel as a people bound by kinship. As intimate as this language is, it is the language of community. Paul is explicitly transgressing boundaries that exist between tribes and nations, inviting people to enter into a new kind of relationship not just with God but also with one another. In this arrangement we are no longer Self-against-Other, but Self-with-Other: siblings in a family characterized not by internecine warfare, but by deep care.
It is one thing to say that Christianity is and must be queer. To read Paul is to understand that authentic Christian church is and must be queer. The church itself must be a place where binaries are examined and challenged. This is especially important when the binaries involve power dynamics or inform our ability to claim kinship with one another.
In exactly the same way that community is the crucible of queer ethical lives, community is the crucible of Christian ethics; and recognizing the inherent queerness to which our faith communities are called is crucial to understanding the ethical path that Christianity sets before us in community, as a community. Just as in queer community, the call to Christians in community is not to respectability, but to authenticity.
How many churches today emphasize relationships of mutual respect and rigorous love even among their own congregants? Lots of churches encourage people to be nice to one another, and many, many churches provide extraordinary support to members of the congregation who are struggling. I honestly don’t know how my younger brother and I would have survived my mother’s death had members of our church not stepped up heroically to be present to us, and literally to house and care for us. That is all extremely important and right in line with Jesus’s and Paul’s teachings. But it is not the same thing as demanding an ethic of honesty, accountability, and hard love when a community is in turmoil or disagreement. It is not the same thing as expecting people truly to examine themselves and listen closely to oppositional others when there is dissension. It is not the same thing as resisting the impulse to create factions, to lobby behind other people’s backs. It is not the same thing as demanding that people with decision-making authority make those decisions transparently rather than behind closed doors.
When did we lose the authentic message that Paul was proclaiming?
These changes took hold over time. Christianity changed in myriad ways when it became the imperial religion under Constantine early in the fourth century CE. The church stopped being a persecuted sect, which would have been a sea change for devout Christians. Inexcusably, collusion with Rome empowered many Christian leaders to become persecutors of others: Jews, pagans, and those deemed heretics. But the changes were not merely about status. The message itself changed. You see, Paul’s message was working. Christianity was a threat to Rome, as it was and still is a threat to any coercive power when it is lived authentically. Once Christianity became the established religion of the empire, the church simply couldn’t preach what it had been preaching. Paul’s message began to be manipulated. The guiding ethical message of Christianity was badly warped at this point, and we never got it back. Kahl argues that “Paul more or less fell prey to a major ‘identity theft,’” which now requires us to reexamine what Paul was trying to say about Self and Other, male and female, and law as a potentially coercive force. She concludes that centuries after Damascus, “Paul underwent a second ‘conversion’ in the Christian imagination, one that turned him posthumously into the mouthpiece of the very imperial order that had originally executed him as enemy and Other.”7
What we lost is precisely the impulse to rupture dualistic, militaristic, oppressive binaries.8 Before Constantine you have a church that is intentionally queering notions of self and other—both within the community and externally in the world they inhabited. After Constantine the church abandons the political side of this mission, and stops doing some of the most important internal work as well: the work of recognizing ourselves as members of an adopted family.
Christianity was never meant to be a religion that was handed down from one generation to the next, unselfconsciously, like a piece of property. But today that’s exactly how the church gets treated: like property. In some churches, the “property” is theological: doctrine that is set and rigidly maintained by people with ecclesiastical power. In some churches, “property” has a more literal meaning. The Episcopal Church, for example, was once the affiliation of choice for affluent people. Wealthy families poured money into grand buildings, gorgeous stained glass, exquisite linens and silver. Now, I am as enthralled by the “beauty of holiness” as anyone, and there are few things I love more than Eucharist celebrated in a breathtaking setting. The problem is that it gets too easy for people who have invested that kind of money into a church to feel that they own the joint and can dictate what takes place there. That’s privilege at work, and it creates a dynamic that runs directly counter to the dynamic that we are supposed to be living as Christians.
Paul says that we are heirs, but Christianity is not an inheritance that yields monetary gain or any kind of social privilege. In fact, Christian inheritance moves in the opposite direction, calling people to give up their stuff rather than squirreling it away. Christianity is a relationship with God and with other people. It is the kind of relationship to which one commits oneself deliberately, determinedly: a chosen family.
That is what the church aspired to be in its early days, back when Paul was traveling all over the Mediterranean forming little communities of faith. He told a story about Jesus the Christ coming to earth, preaching, being targeted by Rome and Roman collaborators, and being executed by the imperial death machine familiar to every one of Paul’s listeners. The idea that Jesus had come back from the dead—had beaten the crucifix that everyone so thoroughly loathed—would itself have seemed unbelievable, raising both eyebrows and hopes. That he did it without lifting a single weapon would have signaled to many that this was indeed God’s hand at work. A God who would have done all of this would have caused jaws to drop in surprise.
But Paul didn’t just try to tell people about Jesus, about God. Paul told people about themselves. When he baptized people, he echoed John the Baptist’s cry for repentance, helping defeated people perceive the role that they unwittingly played in their own oppression. The call to repentance in baptism includes the radical insistence that people have power—specifically, the power to turn away from the death-dealing ideology of empire and to move together in a different, life-giving direction. Pile on top of that Jesus’s basic posture of radical love and healing, and suddenly Paul was preaching a message that people were starved to hear. It was like the parable about the treasure hidden in a field.9 For people who were touched by this message, it became the most important thing in their lives. One may dispute much of what passes for history in the Christian narrative, but there is no disputing this historical fact: people who met Paul suddenly were willing to put everything at risk, including their lives, in order to be part of the movement he was forming.
And so people came together, their hearts guiding them into a new identity, a horizontal identity. Were they choosing it, or had it chosen them? When your heart has been grasped in such a way, it can be very hard to differentiate choice from calling. And in some ways it doesn’t matter. For us what matters is to notice that these people found themselves suddenly and dramatically on a path that is remarkably resonant with the path of queer virtue. They were caught up in a new identity, perceived from within, that was affecting all of their relationships, particularly their most intimate relationships. It demanded that they value themselves as children of God. It was an identity fraught with risk. Enormous courage was required to declare it—and not to deny it when the threat of persecution reared its ugly head. It was an identity that would have felt very much like being touched by God, a resurrection touch that would have smelled simultaneously of death and of rebirth, of wounding and of healing, of destruction and of salvation. It would have plunged every single person who experienced it deep into scandal. And it would also have brought people together, people who needed to live this new life in community.
The experience of the early church would also have been like LGBTQ experience in this way: people in the early church knew their need of each other. They needed each other so they would not be alone in this amazing experience. They needed to meet, worship, and share meals. They needed each other for some measure of safety, but not just for safety. They needed each other to know love. They needed each other to have some kind of home, some kind of family. And in the same way that people need family, they didn’t need each other a little. They needed each other deeply. They needed each other to their core.
Very importantly, they needed to know what this new identity would demand of them, what obligations it was going to impose. We have explored what it means to enter into a community that is fundamentally queer, charged with renouncing false binaries, characterized by horizontal identity: a community in which people know their deep need of God and of one another. What are the ethical obligations that such a community takes on? How might an appreciation for queerness help progressive Christianity understand itself and its mission? This is the question to which we now turn.