I’m Gay.
I like men; I pay attention to men; I spend more time — a little more than I would voluntarily admit — looking at pictures of men. My Instagram insights say 60% of the people I follow are men even though I think that figure might be under-reported. I like to think that pictures of men make my Instagram feed come alive and I am always looking for men to follow online. When people recommend movies to me, I do a quick check on Google to be sure the movie has a gay character, even he’s just a clerk at the school, gets to say only one line, never gets a boyfriend, or never lives a happy life. I just want to see a gay man on screen. Every day since coming out to myself and a few friends, I have approached each day with a deep sense of gratitude to be gay, and I’m not being pretentious. I am not just gay; I love being gay and I work so hard every day at being fabulously gay. About a month or two ago, I wrote in my journal how incredibly privileged I was to be gay. I would never trade my being gay for anything.
I’m also a Christian.
I spend a lot of my time reading religious material, laughing at Christian memes, hanging out with Christian folk, listening to ‘Christian’ music, speaking ‘Christianese’. I love to talk about theology; I read a lot of books about religion, about theology, about Jesus and I’m always seeking ways to deepen my religious experience. It means that I find most parts of the Christian culture life-giving. I love to be in church.
The worst part of these identities, however, is that I’ve had to embody both in a world that positions them in conflict with each other. This means that although I miss many of the Christian communities I belong to, being in quarantine without having to worry about showing up to Church services is such a relief. It means that I sometimes show up to Christian institutions that break my spirit, whose tenets I deeply disagree with, just because of the worship experience or the communal religious experience. It means that I often skip some songs when they come up on my Spotify shuffle because they remind me of, or are themselves, homophobic Christian organisations. It means I have very few friends because most of the friendships I spent the early parts of my adulthood nurturing have withered because they think my politics is wrong. And by politics, I mean that the belief that affirms gayness and homosexuality, and that Queer culture is rich. It means that random people show up in my DMs ‘praying for me’, or correcting me about a part of my theology. It means that very few people know what it’s like to be me.
But the problem is not with being Gay and being Christian.
It’s not uncommon that every now and again, someone starts a random tweet that often takes the form of “You cannot be Gay and Christian”. The person — sometimes gay, sometimes Christian — then goes on and on defending their point even when they are presented with arguments against their point. And every time I either I have to block the person, mute the person, or just ignore — which I hardly do.
A few years ago, I had gotten to crossroads — like many gay people do — trying to understand what it was I was feeling, how my body responds to men, what goes on in my brain when I see men. I had grown up believing that men reach adolescence and get attracted to women, they sometimes do wrong things like have sex because their bodies are charged with lots of sexual energy and they lack control. So, I thought I must have been such a virtuous young man — the typical Christian teenager — when I wasn’t bothered with women even when I had a lot of them around me. But again, and again the reality of this conflict as I grew older tugged at my heart. So I went in search of answers. What many people never know about that process for me is that I am fully accepting, fully affirming of my same-sex sexuality because of Christians who helped me out from my dead-end, because of Christians who provided me with resources, because of Christians who shared their own experiences with me, even when I didn’t want to be Christian anymore.
So, when the ‘you cannot be gay and Christian’ rhetoric suddenly finds its way again — like it normally does — to the centre of public discourse on Twitter, I — like many other gay Christians (and as an extension, gay people of all religions) — feel thrown under the bus, both by Christians and by gay people. Christians — and don’t you say not all Christians — insist that you cannot be queer and Christian. Gay people swear that once you’re gay, you cannot be Christian. I am both. And in those times, I find solace in the people like me, gay Christians who get it even though we are such a tiny population.
To insist that people cannot be gay and religious (and I don’t care what religion that is) is to throw them back into the closet again and again and again, regardless of who is doing it. I believe that it is abusive to demand that people let go of their sexuality to be truly religious. I believe that it is equally abusive to demand that people let go of their sexuality or gender identity to be ‘truly Christian.’
When gay people say that you cannot be gay and a Christian, I suspect that they still think deep down they believe that being gay is something bad, something unnatural, something less than. That it is impossible to have that, be that, and have any reverence for the divine. And when Christians say that you cannot be gay and Christian, I suspect that they have forgotten what it means to be Christian. To them, the Christian identity is something you do, you show, not something you receive as a gift. When people say that you cannot be gay and Christian, I believe that at the root of it is a warped idea of what it means to be either Gay or Christian. So, it’s not a God problem or a sexuality problem. It is, at its core, a people problem, an understanding problem.
Rhetoric like that is tiring, a false conclusion, an imposition, and even homophobic. And the people who get betrayed by that rhetoric, are the people like me, Gay Christians. People who are so drawn to, so compelled by the story of Jesus, the life of Jesus whom the trajectory of the Christian faith is drawn from and who are Gay or Bisexual or Transgender or Intersex or Queer or Asexual or Pansexual.
But, I keep braving forward, asking questions, finding Faith and love, searching for community. I keep asking questions of what it means to be true to my sexuality and what it means to honour God. What it means to be gay and what it means to be faithful to the love of Jesus especially in spaces that think I don’t exist, that don’t want me to exist, that would rather seek the end of my existence, that want me to conform. I don’t have any dissonance; I am not betraying any one of the two experiences. I even don’t see any conflict, and in fact, the question of how one reconciles your sexuality with your faith is a question I don’t want to answer. That question only exists because we made it to be.
I’m never not gay. And I’m never not Christian. And the idea that those two exist in parallel planes is more of an imposition than it is rooted in reality.
It’s why being a Gay Christian is tiring. It’s tiring not because of the weight of any of the two identities, but often because of the weight people impose on it, the meaning(s) it holds in the culture and the dogged belief of people who live exclusively in one of the two identities that both cannot exist. But I know that it can because it is the life that I live every day.
Olu Aremo is a ‘Tired Gay Christian’. He’s also an exhausted Nigerian creative. When he’s not thinking gay things, he’s thinking Christian things. Follow him on twitter @tiredgayxtian
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this Op-Ed by the Writer are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Rustin Times.
