International day against homophobia

As its International day against Homophobia today. I thought I’d write a post that I’d been thinking about for a while

Recently I was googling stuff on stuff that was queer affirming christian spirituality and I stumbled upon the true freedom trust website and it shocked the hell out of me. Its a website for Christians who are “struggling” with their homosexuality basically. Its affiliated to the evangelical alliance which is the UK equivalent of the Southern Baptist Convention with the associated wingnuttery and social, political and religious conservatism (the church I grew up in was a member.)

It just makes me so sad and so angry that there are still churches sprouting this shit, that a beautiful, powerful, intrinsic part of people is just wrong, Unlike some ex gay organisations TFT are not so much about the cure but about controlling the “urge” which in practice means that people who have homosexual “urges” don’t have any close same sex friends, which I personally think is heart breaking.

As a woman who has “homosexual urges” (lol!) but has chosen freely to probably not have sex with a woman ever again I would die without my female friends and female connections, because for me same sex attraction isn’t just about sex or even just about sexuality. I would wither on the vine without female friends.

There are some really really disturbing sad testimonies on this web site that just make me want to cry, one woman is talking about how she had feelings for women but had a boy friend as well who sounds like an overcontrolling fuck wit but the fact he doesn’t seem to respect her boundaries doesn’t register with her at all

I tried to end it with him several times but he just persuaded me to carry on. I fell head over heels for my next door neighbour in halls (Jemma) … This time I really was smitten and I wrote about her in my journal. Mark found my journal and read it

Then this

My life nearly derailed in 1991 when I was 23. I met a gay Christian woman called Cath and very soon became attracted to her and the feelings were mutual. …When she kissed me I didn’t resist but it didn’t go further than that. I had such a mixture of emotions. I felt I’d come home, that I was right about my original attraction, and that this was what I had longed for. However I also knew this wasn’t what the Lord wanted for me. I’d saddened Him and I knew I could never enter a physical gay relationship, or an emotionally dependent one without offending Him.

Its so so sad that two people who loved each other deeply couldn’t be together, that she’d been told what god wanted for her, that this type of Christianity doesn’t take into account the cultural specificity or the translation errors of the scriptures. Or the fact that the bible is not in fact inerrant and that Paul (who wrote most of the passages that are used to prohibit homosexuality) was a rabid fundie with appalling gender politics.

The same woman did eventually get married to a man

James sometimes asks me if ‘I’m OK’ with my female friends and I try to tell him if they’re ’safe’ or not. God has blessed me with a circle of ’safe’ friends but I do worry what will happen if I meet someone I become attracted to.

Seriously if my partner policed weather I was attracted to any of my female friends I would flip my shit, If i want to tell him who I’m attracted to I will, if I don’t I wont, and he doesnt care any way, one of my friends who I am attracted to and who is attracted to me, when she comes to stay with me we sleep in the same bed, and he doesn’t bat an eyelid because he trusts me (my relationship is consciously monogamous) that just seems to buy into the whole “people who aren’t straight have to have no control over their sexuality” thing

Another woman writes of her “healing”

But I ran into difficulties. My childhood years had been traumatic with violent male figures and no male/female happy family life. All of my 20’s were spent in the gay scene. My ability to relate to family life, men, how to dress appropriately, was poor

Lots of the testimonies and articles insinuate that women have lesbian feelings because of abuse, if that were true wouldn’t there be way more lesbians in the world? and what does “dressing appropriately” mean?

And this one from a mother who thinks shes doing all the right things but is failing miserably

He told us how much he loved his friend, which was really hard for us to hear…My heart went out to him and we both affirmed our love for him. But we also made it very clear that we could not condone his choice of lifestyle. At one point I said the day would come when we would feel able to meet his friend. I asked Michael just one thing – if they stayed under our roof that out of respect for his Dad and me they would refrain from any homosexual activities.

This really sounds like my parents immediate response to me coming out, like “we love you but we have to point out how sin full you are being” and calling his partner his “friend” and pressing how they were such martyrs because they would be working so hard to get to a point where they could meet his partner (actauly after the initial coming out my parents didn’t contact me for 18 months but that’s a whole nother story)

On the next day I tried to talk to Michael about the pain his Dad and I were feeling and I asked what he thought we should do about it. He was honest and said he didn’t know. But he was confused as to why we couldn’t be happy for him, because he was happy now we knew. The physical pain I felt was awful – it was like a knife had been plunged into me, and a heavy weight applied to my chest.

yes because clearly your son deciding to be true to himself and maximise his life full fillment should cause you pain

And it just pissed me off that the church is so backward, so rejecting of LGBT people, so unlike Jesus would have been. How is it ever okay to reject someone who is seeking spirituality or to force them to shut down a part of themselves if they want to remain in a spiritual community.even many of the churches that are not seen as extreme are still homophobic, and growing up in an extreme church while being queer is a nightmare. when you finally do come out it doesn’t actually matter how accepting people try to be because your whole life they’ve been assuming you aren’t queer and telling you everything thats wrong and sinfull with being queer, (seriously when I was about 15 my mother told us she didn’t want us wearing red ribbons for world aids day because gay men had only themselves to blame.)

And too many of us still grow up in this, too many people kill or hurt themselves because the church makes them choose between their sexuality and their spirituality, to many people get rejected by their friends, their family, sometimes their entire community because they are being true to themselves.

However I also found this video on youtube which is awesome

And i discovered Whosoever An excellent online magazine for LGBT Christians

personal brain dump post

I’ve been neglecting the Internet of late, well not exactly neglecting it, I spend hours on it avoiding my life, I just neglect the bits where i could make connections, write and read stuff that matters

and It comes to me that I’m angry, I’m angry about so so many things both personal and political, but I don’t deal with anger, i swallow it down, literally I swallow it, I eat when I’m angry, and not good healthy life/body fueling food either, but crap, sugar and preservative laden crap,  and i drink caffeinated fizzy drinks, gallons of it, which I know is bad for me, the anger turns inwards as it always has done and I sabotage my body, my health, my life, my time, my relationships.

and I’m angry at so many things, I’m angry at the state of feminism, either complete apathy or the increasingly poisonous hypocritical siege mentality of the internet “radfems” and that although i have massive issues with them there is heartbreak at realising that they don’t want me, that they are edging me out because I am the wrong sort of feminist.

I’m angry that the only faith community I can currently access is full of whackjobs many of whom are anti everything I stand for and I don’t know what to do about that because I need a faith community but I also need people who accept me as i am without me hiding or lying about who I am, on a wider level I am angry that the message of Jesus has got so perverted that myself and people like me are seen as unacceptable. I also have major issues with much of christian theology generally but that’s a whole nother post.

I’m angry abut my family situation, that I was adopted by a pair of abusive fuckwits, because they were seen to be the epitome of middle class respectibility, that I needed to be adopted in the first place that society damaged my mother and grandmother so much that they were incapable of bonding, that my parents were so poor that my father went to prison for theft when trying to feed his family, that the holocaust damage my paternal grandmother so badly that she passed that damage down to my father and made him incapable of bonding with his children.

I’m angry that I have been so wounded by this patriarchal capitalist society that it broke my brain, that the after effects of rape and abuse will be with me for ever and make my life much harder than it would have been otherwise. that very possible my infertility issues are caused by the body trauma of these events, and while mostly I am okay about being infertile sometimes it does hurt and it does make me angry.

I’m angry that I live in an increasingly crippled body, which is no ones fault and something I need to learn to be at peace with but the fact that society ignores my needs is someones fault and it pisses me off.

My anger boils over till it freezes, till I am turned to stone, indeed petrified, cannot move, cannot act for fear of blowing a hole in the roof of the world, and what I want to do with my life gets abandoned in case the anger seeps through into it

I went through a phase about  five years ago where I learnt to channel my anger into an incredibly powerful healing force that really propelled me forward in my development but somewhere along the way (probably at uni, when I was working extremely hard to appear “normal”) I squashed it back down, sat on it,made it taboo again, but when I was acknowledging that anger, dealing with it, utilising it, that was the time in my life when I was my calmest, healthiest, most creative

I want to read more, I want to read and write poetry, I want to grow vegetables, I love cooking, I want to go swimming, I want to develop a deep meditation/prayer life, i want to learn to utilise my body in ways that work for me personally, I want to develop a more healthy sexuality, I want to do more practical political activism

One of the things about my anger is somewhere inside I think i have a thing going on that still thinks life should be about fairness, like the people who did the things to cause the anger should fix my life which is clearly ridiculous. It doesn’t matter who broke it or why it broke, no one is going to fix it for me, I have to deal with the anger and fix it the best I can myself.

Feminism and Christianity.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look* into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher)..

I went to church on easter sunday for the first time in a long time and the above pasage was part of the reading and the part I bolded really spoke to me. firstly the “Woman why are you weeping” really speaks to me. it feels not like an acusation but a comfort, a permission to greive.

The christianity I grew up in was savage the jesus in it was unregognisable from the jesus I belive in. the jesus of the gospels was a compasionate, thoughtfull, social activist who was always supporting and rooting for the opressesd and when I am thinking about that or reading mainstream christian literature that is at odds with that I often feel

They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him

What did they do with the man who loved women, tax colectors, protitutes, the disabled, the poor? they westernised him, sanitised him turned him into a middle class, mysognistic conservative. I do not know where they have laid him, he will never be where they say he is.

I want the real deal, I want the jesus who spoke truth to power. I want the jesus who gave a shit about hurting people, I want the jesus who came to teach us how to love.

And once again I find myself crossing boundaries, weaving together my feminism and my Christianity despite criticism and rejection from both sides. Christians are often opposed to feminism because they buy into the idea that women are there to serve men, they read the bible uncritically, it doesn’t occur to them that maybe Paul was wrong, they don’t know christian history and that actually women have been a really important part of the church forever not just as supporting characters but as priests theologians and mystics.

and mainstream feminism is very anti religion (except maybe for certain types of paganism) it tells me that all religious people are misogynistic, are anti women, and its true many are, but so are many doctors, and lawyers, and socialists and journalists. it doesnt take into account that actually most women in the world have some sort of religious affiliation, it doesn’t take into account that religion can be a liberating force, supporting and comforting feminists when they are working at the sharp end, it doesn’t take into account that people are messy and beautiful and the need for god(esses) comes from the same place as sexuality/sensuality and creativity,
Both sides tell lies and uphold stereotypes about each other often without ever having had a dialogue with those on the other “side”

I know sticking true to myself, to my principles, to my belief that both my progressive Christianity and my radical feminism are intrinsic essential parts of myself will be exhausting because of the misunderstanding and hostility I will receive from both Christians and feminists,