Laying the Groundwork
What are the experiences of LGBTQ+/SSA Christian women?
Why would a space like the Revoice conference be helpful to them?
Why might LGBTQ+/SSA women not be attracted to a space like Revoice conference?
To lay the groundwork for answering these questions, I want to focus on the experiences of Christian LGBTQ+/SSA women and look at the history of why it might be harder for them to reach out to a space like the Revoice conference. Let’s start by talking about privilege. Rev. Michelle Sanchez (Revoice Executive Director) puts it this way:
“Privilege is simply a way of referring to unearned advantage. There are many types of privilege, but we are concerned here with racial privilege. Most, if not all, societies harbor an invisible hierarchy in which some races, ethnicities, or cultures have historically held greater status than others… privilege is not something that only White people have. Unearned advantage comes in countless varieties. Esther’s story is a wonderful case study for this. Her story begins by drawing attention to Esther’s stunning beauty, which is a “privilege” in that she did nothing to earn or deserve it. She still had to decide, though, how to leverage that beauty—whether for selfish purposes or for some greater purpose. As a Black woman I have always thought of myself as disadvantaged, but I have come to understand I have privilege too. In fact, I have lots of it. I did nothing to be born into a middle-class family and raised in a neighborhood with well-resourced schools. And these realities bestow real advantages upon me in life, advantages that many others do not have.
The tool of intersectionality helps us identify and leverage the unique privileges we hold due to overlapping identities in different, ever-shifting contexts. When we view Esther’s story through the lens of intersectionality, we can identify her disadvantages as a woman and an ethnic minority. We can also identify her stunning beauty as the advantage that allowed her access to the most powerful people and resources in the land. We still read about Esther today because she chose to sacrificially leverage her privilege for the sake of her community.”
Intersectionality began as a legal framework for understanding the harassment and discrimination that people with multiple marginalized identities face. It was created by lawyer and theorist Kimberle Crenshaw in the 1980s to confront the way that American legal frameworks for identifying discrimination only recognized a single facet of a person’s identity that could be discriminated against. For example, in cases of workplace discrimination where qualified Black women were being looked over for job interviews, employment, and promotions, the argument investigated companies made was that because they hired a Black man and a White woman, they could not possibly be racist or sexist. Yet the same companies’ records showed clear patterns of discrimination against Black women in their refusal to hire or promote Black women who had matching and even superior qualifications for those roles. An adjustment was needed to legally recognize the clearly identifiable discrimination that was happening.
Other theorists found the term intersectionality useful for discussing not only workplace discrimination but also how privileges tend to work in society. They assert that by looking at how life has worked for people with multiple identities that are marginalized or underserved, organizations, communities, and even social groups can better address everyone’s needs and make a space that is welcoming for everyone. It is my hope that by applying an intersectional lens to the history of the sexuality conversation in the American Church, we can recognize how Christian LGBTQ+/SSA women are being underserved and begin to identify new ways of supporting their pursuit of Dignity, Discipleship, and Community.
Disparity in Communal Spaces
As of 2019 women make up 58% of the LGBTQ+ population in the U.S. Despite this, many secular and religious spaces meant to serve the wider queer community end up being majority male. This is true for Revoice as well, though not necessarily unique to this ministry. Revoice emerged in the space left when Exodus International closed its doors. Exodus International was a ministry network and conference aimed at LGBTQ+/SSA Christians, most often by seeking orientation change and/or gender conformity. Exodus and other individual ministries were also predominantly male spaces; one study found that almost 80% of ex-gay forum posters identified themselves as male.
Both Christian churches and associated parachurch ministries have long been mostly concerned with intervening in the sexualities of men when it comes to same-sex attraction. This particular pressure on men and anxiety around men’s appropriate masculinity creates a discrepancy around men’s and women’s involvement in ex-gay, reparative, and sexual orientation change “therapies.” For some, this can seem like a rare privilege that women have over men in the Side B community, but this privilege has its own drawbacks.
What I don’t want to do in this piece is debate the origin of gender inequality; better scholars than me of various schools of thought have delved into the psychology, historical, economic, biological, and theological underpinnings of why there is tension, struggle, and imbalance between men and women. What I think we can agree on is that discrepancies do exist and those discrepancies affect how women come to understand themselves as sexual beings.
It is often missed that whether women are LGBTQ+/same sex-attracted or not, the Christian world and the world at large has its own anxieties around women’s femininity, sexual expression, and the general purpose of women’s sexuality. Some of the specters that haunt the Christian conversation around women’s sexuality are the ways same-sex attraction may make women less appealing to men, the possibility that same-sex attraction may make women less likely to want to be traditional mothers and less likely to submit to male authority, and the possibility that women will be tempted by other women to reject the caretaker role that is traditionally expected. These anxieties stand in the way of acknowledging female desire and possible same-sex attraction.
Some of the experiences commonly reported in women’s affinity meetings at Revoice and in the recent women’s survey is how the heavy expectation/assumption that girls are straight, that they will be married, and that they will be biological mothers makes it more difficult for many women to discern their own desires and attractions. These assumptions naturally produce a lack of representation of non-straight women in media; if women aren’t sexual beings even in the most appropriate ways, they certainly aren’t sexual beings who desire that which is forbidden. The refusal to see women as sexual beings in many Christian circles not only hinders the development of healthy sexuality for married straight women, but also creates mental, emotional, and spiritual hurdles for women to recognize when they are attracted to other women.
Self-Knowledge and Discipleship
I personally experienced many of these hurdles myself, and the context of Blackness made the ability to understand myself as bi more difficult. Queer Black women were only ever depicted in media or recognized in everyday life as butch, as masculine, and as exclusively attracted to women. I was attracted to boys and am (relatively) feminine. When there were intense friendships or feelings of being drawn to women, there was nowhere to hang those feelings because I didn’t match Black frameworks for what a queer woman looked like. I wasn’t a stud or masc. There were wider versions of what a queer White woman could be (gay or bi, femme or masc)… but she was often urban and definitely not Southern and definitely not a Christian who loved Jesus… definitely not someone like me. There was too much separation between my own experiences and the generally accepted signposts of what a non-straight woman may look like for me to even seek discipleship in this matter. And to some extent, I think this is by design.
For women who were able to recognize same-sex desire in themselves and sought discipleship from churches or parachurch ministries, they would have found themselves in similar straits as the women of Revoice find themselves today:
much of the ministry not focused on their experiences,
assumptions of how attraction, desire, and temptation do or don’t affect them based on how it affects men and not on observance of women and their inner lives,
and a narrow sampling of role models on how to navigate a life of flourishing that may include either celibacy or opposite-sex marriage.
And that’s not even looking at the practical constraints, which my fellow writers will be exploring more deeply in later posts.
Why does any of this matter to Christians? Because inviting each other as siblings in Christ to live lives of flourishing, intention, and integrity all require knowledge of God, knowledge of others, but also knowledge of self, which the current approach popular in most Christian spaces to caring for sexual and gender minorities discourages. In my experience, lack of self-knowledge, especially in the area of sexuality, leads to shame that erodes our relationships with God and with others, repeated failure in the face of unexpected temptation, and depression, anger, and general stalling in emotional and spiritual growth. It is my hope that in facing these disparities with an intersectional lens, Revoice can grow its ability to help LGBTQ+/same-sex attracted women find Dignity, Discipleship, and Community in the orthodox Christian sexual ethic.
