How I Came to Support Queer People at Church

I was fifteen years old and went to high school in a smedium-sized town. My graduating class was somewhere north of 300 people, for reference. And that's because we were the county seat. It was a rural town with a massive wealth divide, primarily with transplants from the larger surrounding cities. 

I had gone to school with many of the same people in my class since elementary school. Many of them had bullied me since then, and were only beginning to grow out of it. I was also a martial artist and spent any time I wasn't at school in training because it was a better environment than being at home. I spent a lot of time teaching classes and beating up on men twice to three times my size.

One day, in an ADHD-driven impulse, I decided to cut off all of my hair. I was tired of trying to manage it under a sparring helmet. I wanted spiky hair like M!ssundaztood-era P!nk, which should've translated into some kind of pixie cut. 

Dear reader. That's not what happened.

I sat in the chair of a very old woman who had absolutely no vision of what I was talking about. Rather than admit she was out of her element, she just took entire sections of my long hair and cut them in random directions. Imagine if a toddler cut your hair in your sleep.

I spent the next two years growing my hair back out. And in the mid-Aughties, having hair that short on a girl was queer-coded. 

For the next two years, I was accused by everyone around me of being a butch lesbian. I didn't have to be queer to be bullied like one. I just had to look like one. And nothing I said was ever going to make it stop, especially since I didn't date anyone I went to school with. They had no proof I wasn't a butch lesbian, so that became my reality.

Because my hair was cut so badly, I had to let it grow out multiple times to even get it all back to the same length. Then I had to get through the mullet stage, which I struggled to do. And that entire time, everyone around me was treating this haircut like some queer awakening.

Everyone? YES. My own family started to believe it. That's how confidently incorrect people were about their "gaydar" in 2007—which were just queer stereotypes and poorly concealed prejudice masquerading as some kind of wisdom.

People say vile, disgusting things to you when they think you're queer. I know, because they said them to me. One bad haircut was all it took for everyone around me to begin dehumanizing me. People who had known me my whole life made my life a living hell believing a rumor they had spread.

One of the many times I went to get my hair fixed, there were two lesbians in the waiting area who saw me come out in tears because of how much I still hated my hair. They, thinking they recognized a fellow queer, tried to comfort me.

"It looks amazing! That should be your haircut from now on!"

In hindsight, this should be very funny to me now. I had butch energy so convincing, even actual lesbians couldn't tell the difference. But it's not funny to me still. It's from the period of my life where I lost all control over my own narrative and what was true about myself.

It took a long time, but eventually I started to think about my experience outside of myself. If this is what being a lesbian is like, why would anyone open themselves up to being treated this way over their sexuality if they didn't mean it? No one in their right mind would do that. 

Lesbians have to be some of the strongest people on planet earth, I thought. You'd have to be to endure how I was being treated. And at least when my hair grew back, I'd finally break free of this. For them, it was life. This thought made me furious, and that fury broke something deep inside of me.

No one deserved to be treated like this. And as long as I was around, no queer person in my presence would ever be made to feel the way I had felt in my most vulnerable years as a teenager. There were times I wanted to die, to cease breathing and walking around on planet Earth, because of how badly I was being treated OVER HAIR. They were making actual queer people feel like this every day. 

Not anymore, they wouldn't. Not while I was around.

As a senior, I had a small gaggle of band twinks that I was friends with from being in the musical and choir that year. One of them was frequently getting his chair in the lunchroom stolen by the biggest wrestler our school had. Every bit of 6'5" and 280 pounds. He was huge, popular, and mean. The way I yanked that chair away every time and put it back at the table for him, like I wasn't 5'1" and 140 lbs, made him scared for me. He looked at me like I was crazy. I was going to get myself pancaked! Over a chair!

"You don't have to do that," he insisted. 

What I couldn't articulate then was what I saw in his face every time it happened. The resignation that because he was (in his own mind) small, unimportant, and unworthy of any kind of respect because this is just how gay people are treated.

Because this isn't really about hair. Or chairs. Or clothing. Or bathrooms. Or sports teams. It's about who deserves human dignity and who doesn't. And anyone who has been there, who has had their dignity yanked from them, has no other way of looking at it.

I've been in the shoes of queer people. I spent years there, having my self-esteem ripped to shreds by shallow, vapid people who deal with their own lack of self-worth by torturing vulnerable people. Bullying makes them feel powerful. That's why they do it. It doesn't go any deeper than that.

I don't have the stomach to see this happening anywhere, but especially not at Church. Every single one of you know better. YOU KNOW BETTER. Your God is ashamed of you when you don't do better. Every single time. No God worth worshiping treats people this way.

I know, and can discern, the difference between the love of God and the hatred of men. If you don't have the moral clarity to understand that bullying is not love, that there is nothing of God in it, I can't help you. You've made God in your own image, and only you can fix that.

Affirmation and full fellowship for queer people is the only morally correct choice for any church claiming to be organized in the name of Jesus Christ. Anything less denies humanity and dignity to queer people as God made them. People who struggle to see that should try cutting off all their hair and accidentally passing for queer. See if you could survive how they're treated. See if you still think it's worthy of any child of God. 

Then, and only then, can you look me in the eye and tell me it's what God sincerely wants for his church.

Every person who tries to justify queer rejection in the church sounds like a mean, vindictive, obtuse child who never left high school bullying behind. A fifteen year old brat who never got their well-deserved ass kicking and it shows. There's simply nothing else to see.

Epilogue: No, I'm still not a lesbian. And there wouldn't be anything wrong with it if I were.