I am a lesbian.
At a time when the very best thing for someone to do is to keep their head down and stay quiet, I have already proven I am not very good at self-preservation. For one, something about the way my brain is wired has made me someone who doesn’t have much of an internal censor that makes me think “should I say that?” until after I have already blurted it out. I was always the awkward kid.
For another, I have lived a moderately long period of life at this point, more of it lived than what is likely ahead of me, have made enough mistakes, and seen enough human behavior to develop my own set of ethics. For better or worse, I have come to a decision: it is more harmful to stay in the closet and pretend to be a good, surrendered, Christian widow who loves men vs being honest about the fact I have been attracted to women my entire life.
I came out of fundamentalist Christianity and have shared some of that in some of my comments, my live video discussing Christian Reconstructionism and Seven Mountains Mandate (there are more of those coming), and some of my posts. Their position is that all feelings/parts of existence of LGBTQ+ identity is sinful temptation, not a difference in wiring (though some even acknowledge that it is a difference, they just compare it to being born with the gene for alcoholism), and that the only ethical choice is to just not give into temptation. The problem with that, though, is that you are also repeatedly told, especially as a woman, that your purpose is to find a male “head” to be “over you” because, as a woman, you are not meant to be independent. Once you’re a single mother (my sons’ father left me for an 18-year-old when he was 35), the pressure is increased, with luminaries like Doctor Dobson assuring you that, if you don’t remarry and provide a good man for your sons to emulate, they will grow up directionless and struggling (my sons are both good men, even though they had pretty rough childhoods at times; I am grateful for that).
After my sons’ father left me, I eventually was courted by and married my last husband, who passed in 2020. This was my transformative relationship. He was an older man, and very much a believer in the “just don’t drink” theory of LGBTQ existence. If anything, he was a “pray the gay away” kind of believer. I finally admitted to him that I was a lesbian, mostly because of the way he loved me. He was the first person in my entire life that loved me unconditionally. He absolutely delighted in me. As our relationship continued, I began to feel very sad that I didn’t delight in him. I was dutiful, don’t get me wrong. I was a good, submitted Christian wife, with all it entails, but he didn’t get delight. He got duty. The longer our marriage continued, the more my wifely duty felt like a lie, and that absolutely crushed me.
He developed prostate cancer and lupron made some intimacy impossible, and he was inflexible enough that other things didn’t appeal to him, so I instead would spend hours stroking his hair, would rub lotion on his back, or just hold him to provide any intimacy he might be willing to accept. I still cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and cleaned up when his bodily functions began to fail. To the end I took care of him with every possible ounce of strength I could muster. I actually ended up in acute kidney failure a few days before he died, which frustrated me as much as it made me sad, because I had made so much preparation to let him die at home, and didn’t manage to last long enough to give that to him.
The years since, though, the feelings I had, of living a lie to him, coming out to him, they have made me decide that there is something incredibly harmful to the person who gets married to the closeted person who is staying closeted because of obedience. They are not getting an honest partner - if you want to borrow Christian parlance, they are “unequally yoked.” Intimacy as duty, without passion or joy, is practically the same thing as being a prostitute. As I have sat with all these feelings and examined them over the past several years, I have decided I cannot live dishonestly. I am a lesbian, and that is the end of it. The thing was, I still struggle to let go of Christianity, and people have moved on and many churches became LGBTQ inclusive, so I began visiting denominations that nationally are supposed to be inclusive…
…and didn’t see any outright acceptance of LGBTQ people after several months at the first one. Not to be deterred, I googled “LGBTQ affirming churches in my town” and went to the top answer. They were a large church with lots of small groups. I plugged in to a couple and kind of started watching for affirmation. After the previous experience, and knowing I was in a rural red state, I still decided it was better to watch. Again I saw nothing that really stood out as affirming. So this time I made an appointment to visit with the pastor. I asked him directly about their position on LGBTQ, and explained my history, and found out I had ended up in the same churches that I had grown up in. He praised my surrendered wifehood, assured me my husband was grateful that I did the right things in the eyes of the Lord, and assured me that a celibate lesbian was acceptable to their beliefs.
I had read once that lesbians dislike celibate lesbians even more than closeted ones. As I digested our conversation over time, I realized something pretty important, and if you are a conservative Christian who loves to discuss how much you love the sinner but hate the sin, please, set aside all that you “know” to kind of listen, please. Please read this whole thing and sit with it for awhile. I haven’t found a girlfriend. Though I joke about being a virgin lesbian, I can’t say whether or not I will. That is NOT the point.
When a church describes something so integral as who I am attracted to as an abomination, which is the most hideous, wretched possible sin in front of God, there is no way I can believe they would love me. When your leaders describe people like me as predators “grooming children” to somehow “convert them” to my “depravity,” there is no way I can enter the door of that church and believe that every smile, every word spoken to anyone, or worse, if I dare to speak to a child (I have a deep love of teenagers, having been one of the awkward kids growing up, and have plenty of now grown adults who can vouch for my good behavior, if you’re interested), I will be regarded with suspicion or pity. When I am described as sin incarnate, I cannot be welcome in that group. I’m sorry. I have lived among those kinds of churches long enough and heard the whispers enough to know better. There may be believers within that church who have changed their minds, but the church culture will still very much condemn the “sinners” they love.
So the church search is ongoing, but in this article the church is just the final catalyst to my publicly coming out. The pressures of the current political changes, where trans people have been erased and Project2025 has multiple points where it points to getting back to “the traditional family of one man, one woman…” I do not believe I have an option to be hidden. Our government is removing trans identity at a fast pace, and some language suggests their plan is to reframe it as a mental illness. Homosexuality was also classified as a mental illness in the early and mid-20th century, and the EO that allows local governments to civilly commit homeless people who are “mentally ill” and not able to maintain a home for themselves is alarming.
I don’t have a right to stay silent or hide anymore. I believe the most ethical thing is to be honest about who I am, rather than playing the role that someone’s church assigns to me. It doesn’t mean I am only a lesbian any more than saying I have hazel eyes means I don’t have a nose. Understand that I am a complex person when I add this to my description: I am a lesbian.