Vine & Fig

Yesterday, Vine & Fig facilitated another instalment of Reading Club. If you don’t know what that is: it’s an online intimate gathering of queer Catholics who read texts and discuss them. The texts are not always texts, but rather a wide variety of multimedia formats. Yesterday, we came together to “read” Pray Away, the 2021 documentary film that follows survivors and former leaders from the world of ex-gay conversion therapy. 

The stories that our community members tell about the experience of watching this film are — this shouldn’t come as a surprise — heartbreaking. One of the people attending Reading Club told us the one word they’d use to describe their experience was “desolation”, another could only think of “sad”. Many people nodded in agreement when someone else said their experience was cathartic: “In my family, the most important thing is to have no boundaries.” “My brother takes my ‘deviation from the Church’ as a personal insult”, replied another.

Seeing people just like us — trying, hurting, falling down, getting back up, normal stuff in the arena of life — move from self-negation to self-compassion was inspiring for all of us. Still, even with organizations like Exodus closing down because the leadership finally realized that “change [of sexual orientation or gender identity] is a lie”, our traumatic experiences with anti-queer (verbal, physical, psychological, emotional) violence remain.

The things we carry should terrify you. 

In reading today’s Gospel, the stories shared at yesterday’s Reading Club hit home with increased urgency. After all, the sins of the ex-gay movement are plentiful. In the arrogance of James and John requesting power from Jesus I see the fiery eyes of fragile Christians whose theological confidence evaporates at the thought that strangers live life differently. When I read Mark 10, I hear a resounding “Christian leadership is about service, not authority”, and I wonder, shaking my head and laughing-crying: where did it all go so very wrong? It’s a juvenile request, to want to rule over others, an unnecessary one at that, and yet that is the entire modus operandi of ex-gay perpetrators everywhere.

Looking at LGBTQIA+ individuals with the empathy we deserve, it’s easy for the world to see the damage that power-hungry Christian fragility can do. Being told we are an abomination leads to very serious mental health issues. Hearing that the word we’re seeking to describe what we’re seeing is “help” and not “violence”, those issues only deepen. We harm ourselves, we end our lives. We feel ashamed of who we are, and guilty because our loved ones keep telling us they hurt precisely because of who we are. These feelings dominate how we move through the day, how we study, how we work, how we love, how we engage with our bodies, and how we engage with the world. It’s a given for queer Catholics who live with those who missed the memo on not judging the lives of others.

There is another, covert, effect that anti-queer violence has on us: it brings deep injury to our spiritual lives. I don’t mean the obvious “it drives people away from the Church”, and I especially don’t mean “this is why the Church is losing its power”. Rather, I’m referring to the fact that most of us are forced to read the Bible with a set of trauma-stained glasses. I’m talking about the way ex-gay rhetoric teaches us we need more from life than we ought to.

When I read Jesus’ response to James and John, I have no head space to think of how servitude can make me a better person:

[...], whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant;
whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. 

Instead, I’m forced to remember the ways in which this exact request was made by people who did not have my best intentions at heart. I’m not the only one. Many of us queer Catholics are eerily familiar with what it means to be stripped of our autonomy, dignity, and hope. Good has yet to come from it. Imagine living in a family that detests your need for a space outside of their realm of scrutiny. Think, for a moment, about what it must be like to share Christmas dinner with a brother who, somehow, manages to make your sexual orientation his personal problem. That is bondage. 

“Go be a servant” is a commandment designed for people who think “feed the hungry when you could be watching Netflix” when they hear it. People who have survived anti-queer violence in the name of Jesus must wonder: what does this passage mean for me, when all I hear is “remember how you’ve been taught to hate yourself so deeply that you implode?” 

To me, this is the most depressing sin of all the ex-gay sins: anti-queer rhetoric actively sabotages queer Catholics’ ability to engage with Scripture, to long for spiritual growth, and to find comfort in the wisdom of Jesus. The exact reason anti-queer perpetrators give for wanting us to “better our ways” is the thing they actively take away from us. It is the dimmest of gaslights.

That’s why I’m extra proud of every single one of the people who find their way to Vine & Fig. It is a monumental thing, to be who other people say you shouldn’t, and to love what once brought you the deepest shame.