“My god! You’re like models! Gorgeous men! So much beauty for one girl.” she said.
The flamboyance of gays I was with gave her the obligatory patronizing smiles and “Yas Queens” one is expected to give a straight, white woman who compliments you. Try it. Walk up to any fairly friendly looking group of gay men and pay them a compliment and they will return with a variation of “yas queen” or “you go girl” depending on whether they watched The Golden Girls when they first aired or on later syndication on Lifetime.
“But not you. Not so much.”
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“No. Not you.” This woman who only moments before had bestowed such gushing adoration looked at me and called me Quasimodo, except in the most unimaginably bitchy way. Frankly, I wasn’t sure whether to burst into tears, or applaud. That is some serious shade. Normally, I can take a privileged white woman’s condescension. But this was done on a crowded Boystown street the night before the Pride parade. It cut me like a dull Venus razor.
I could take some of the blame. My friends are beautiful men. So much so that I avoid being in pictures with them when I can. That sounds odd or even sad, but they really are that pretty. I could have befriended uglier people, but who needs all that attention? It’s always better for an introvert to find peacocks who happily slurp up the limelight.
But my purpose is not to feel sorry for myself because my genetic lottery only paid me $5. My point is that I remember that moment vividly. I could recognize that woman even today. Her auburn hair, her pale, freckled skin, her sneer of a mouth. Ten years has gone by since that evening and I could paint a picture of it from memory. Anytime I feel like saying something intentionally hurtful, especially to someone who I barely know or don’t know, I remember this woman. She is my personal Gospel reminding me to do unto others because when you’re cruel to someone, they don’t forget it…even with a decade of therapy and Klonopin.
Gay men are notoriously unkind to one another and to themselves. We compensate for childhoods, adolescences and young adulthoods filled with inadequacies because we were not born straight. I was not born to tug on a little girl’s pigtails, or play catch, or play any sports really. Gym glass to most gay men is triggering. We found ourselves in a world where balls were suddenly not our strong suit. Ironic isn’t it? Instead, we sought safe harbor in the drama programs, in our AP English teacher’s classrooms, in the midst of other misfits who were not as skinny as they were expected to be, or not as smart as they should have been, or not as talented in the way everyone wanted them to be. These were the musicians, the artists, the writers, the nerds. It is not a coincidence that so many gay men and women find themselves later pursuing careers in a field akin to their high school experiences.
Pride for me has always been bittersweet. Celebrating both who I am and at the same time remembering how many people wished I had been someone different and in some cases me hoping that I could be. Gay bars bring on a full panic attack for me. Not because I hate crowds (which I do) or because I dislike gay men (which I don’t). Anyone who knows me, knows that I have worn glasses since I was 12. Without them, even recognizable shapes are an impressionist painting of colors. But in gay bars, or even at brunch, I take them off. I don’t believe in the adage that “boys don’t make passes at boys who wear glasses.” Slutty glasses are making a comeback. But like a horse with blinders, what I cannot see will not harm me. I can avoid seeing the faces that so often seemed to sit in judgment of me.
This has been a life long problem. The very first time I went to a gay bar, I was terrified. “What will they think of me,” “I’m not hot enough,” “Why did I wear these pants, they make me look fat.” And I know exactly why I am like this and still no matter how much I reason with myself or remind myself that I was wrong and still am wrong, I remain so unbelievably fragile. The scar tissue festers. So when a random nobody of a Lena Dunham-like woman publicly humiliates you during Pride weekend, that wound is ripped open and the decades of insecurities pour out like a Capri Sun poked with a fork.
Pride 2025 feels like a scab picked off a barely healed knee. Our community, that has fought for 56 years for the ability to simply exist and be happy in our own way, is caught in the cross hairs of a man, who funnily enough not only wears more make up than Ru Paul, but surrounds himself with weak, insecure, scared little men who travel with their own glam squads. Maybe in the more somber notes of this Pride, we can all pause and remember a moment in our lifetimes when someone was intentionally cruel or hurtful, and then hold that feeling with us long enough so that the next time we believe we need to say something or do something about someone whose lifestyle is odd to us, or whose hairstyle is terrible to us, or whose outfit is dreadful to us, or whose looks are frightening to us, or whose means of earning a living are beneath us, we can perhaps avoid needing to express our opinions and instead leave them be.
This Pride for me is unlike any other. I feel compelled to contribute little to the hate game and instead remind myself that not only am I a child covered in the bruises and scars of a turbulent life, but so also are most of the people I will ever meet. Be kind. We’re all hurting.
Shortly after the 2024 election, I found myself in Midway Airport in Chicago. I noticed something unusual, particularly for the liberal bubble that is Chicago. Milling about were a number of people sporting prominent and conspicuous Christian merch. There were t-shirts with giant crosses or just “Jesus Saves” emblazoned across them. I saw all manner of cross pendants -some in gold, or others covered in rhinestones. Parents, many of whom are dead set against their children becoming recruited or groomed by drag queens reading The Wizard of Oz to their kids at a public library, had dressed their own progeny in the same, blasphemous, way. They carried tote bags covered in the name of the Lord or bedazzled with yet again more crosses. One asks oneself where all of this stuff came from and who is making money from it, because I would be genuinely surprised if Tiffany at the mall kiosk where these people bought these insipid wares was running a charity shop.
In those weeks both leading up to and immediately after the election, the newly triumphant right began its victory tour. With not only the newly “liberated” Christians running amuck but with their Congressional leadership introducing all manner of religious legislative claptrap. First, a formerly pro-LGBTQ Republican representative, wanted transwomen banned from the House women’s restrooms on religious grounds and the self-called Christian Speaker of the House obliged making sure to cite his faith rather than his just being a bigot as the reason he came to this decision. This was to keep precisely one member of Congress from using the women’s restroom. Frankly, if that had been me, I would have just dropped my pants and peed in the cloakroom. We have seen Oklahoma schools begin placing Trump bibles in classrooms. (A dangerous and disturbing move since The Hitler Youth did the same thing with Mein Kampf). Aside from the ethical implications of placing a book produced by and directly enriching the pockets of the president, one might ask why a Bible would be necessary in a classroom at all. The right cites “religious liberty” and again everyone just nods their heads like they’re bobbles – empty, hollow, unthinking, tacky.
Religious liberty does not bestow the right of any one religion or any one religious sect to force its beliefs on others or on a national, non-religious government. I don’t care what kind of semi-remedial history class Lauren Boebert insists on teaching. If the Framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had wanted to found our country on the precepts of Protestant Christian doctrine- they would have just said so right off the bat. Instead, the founders expressly cautioned us about mixing the matters of state with those of religion. There are several mentions in both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that make it clear that this was the real intent of the Framers.
“But why,” ask the Christian right, “would the god-fearing Christian men who founded our nation do such a thing? Surely, anyone claiming otherwise is mistaken. This was meant to be a Christian nation.” To this I point out that the period just prior to the founding of the United States through a time shortly thereafter was known as “The Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason.” The men and women who came before had only decades earlier, lived through several centuries of political unrest all due to the question of religion. This was a Europe-wide problem. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in civil wars and uprisings in the wake of the Reformation and Counter-reformation. Billions of dollars in property were destroyed in riots over which sect of Christianity one belonged to or believed in. Millions of people were displaced from their homes. It was from these ashes that the men and women of The Enlightenment emerged and with them, a deep distaste for the comingling of religion and state. They had apparently learned their lesson.
If one were a thinking person, one might necessarily reason that any new country, formed after this mess, would be one that would attempt to avoid entangling religion at all and instead rely solely on pragmatic, secular concepts that while preserving private religious freedom also avoided the reemergence of a civil war based on religion. The American Experiment would take the ideas of The Enlightenment’s most prominent philosophers and apply them to this new form of democratic government. What our Framers intended was to build something entirely new – a nation uninterested in the petty and ultimately personal problems of religion, and instead conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal. They left problems of religion in the capable hands of pastors and reverends and in the homes of the private citizens themselves. It is the only explanation for the need of a “free-exercise clause” placed within the Constitution.
The Clause stated that Congress could pass no law preventing the free-exercise of religion. So a state or the federal government could not make a law that would outlaw the saying of the mass or quaking or passing out communion bread, or meditating or lighting a menorah, or a law that would force people under a dietary restriction to forgo that restriction and eat pork. As long as you were still able to personally and privately practice your religion, Congress was still free to pass any other law it wanted to within the parameters of the Constitution and courts. For example, precluding prayer in public schools. This is not a ban on personal prayer. If a child wants to say grace before eating or say a prayer before gym class, as long as they are doing so on their own and not forcing other students to participate, there is no issue. This is why the forced displays of the Ten Commandments or reading of the Bible in a public school is so egregious a violation of the principles and purpose of separating church and state. It is undoing several centuries of common sense, and good governmental policies avoiding the unnecessary entanglement of religion and public facilities.
This is where waters, once clear, have become exceedingly muddy. One of the more recently famous examples are the bakers who refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. Their argument is that state and federal anti-LGBTQ discrimination laws are an example of Congress passing a law that prevents them from freely exercising their religion. The Supreme Court, as weird as they are now, agreed with this flawed logic. First, entangling our secular court system with matters of religious doctrine is a dangerous precedent. The Court in this case would have had to have asked “What does the free exercise of the respondents’ religion look like?” This is problematic as a U.S. Court lacks jurisdiction in religious law or doctrine. And entangling a state or federal court with the belief system of a religion only sets up a future possibility of direct legislation of religious laws. (Hence the purpose of the prohibition of co-mingling church and state matters.) If a court can say what a religion does or does not believe, so too can Congress make a law specifically on the doctrine of that faith. Instead, a Court could only rely on that particular religion’s official creed of belief and regular established customs of practice. It could not extrapolate what free exercise meant to that particular baker. (More on personal religious practices later.) So does Christianity forbid an adherent, a follower of Christ, from providing a commercial service to an openly homosexual person? I know of no Christian sects or denominations with the lone, radical example of the Westboro Baptist Church, where a follower would be prevented from baking a cake for a gay couple based only on the Creeds or the Gospels.
I am not unaware that most Christians still adhere to the Old Testament prohibition on male-on-male sexual expression. But do the later additional teachings of Christ further prevent a Christian from interacting with or conducting business, trade and commerce with a gay person? I would argue from a religious and legal perspective it does not. First, Leviticus says nothing about gay people. It is only specific to the sexual act itself, that is anal sex, between two men. Second, Christ encouraged the interaction of Jewish people with all sorts of others that they considered unclean, or unworthy. He healed Jewish people, Romans, Syrians, Greeks, and Samaritans alike. His own Apostles were mostly fisherman who earned their money by selling fish at markets and these markets were populated by all sorts of people both foreign and domestic. So where do these so-called Christian bakers, caterers, photographers etc. find a law from Jesus that would allow them to deny goods and services, paid for in the national stream of commerce to people who in their own personal disapproval of a “lifestyle choice” (a lifestyle that would have been completely unknown to people living in the first century)?
Having a personal distaste for a gay couple because of what they may be doing in their bedroom, does not an expression of religion make. How one personally feels about gay people because your religion frowns upon the manner said persons engage in intercourse is irrelevant. Baking a cake for a gay couple in no way inhibits a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or any other religion from freely exercising their professed faith. Religions are expressly concerned with the activity and not with the predilection for engaging in that activity. So through slight of hand these allegedly religious individuals have been given an allowance to openly discriminate against gay people based on their personal assumption of a reality occurring within the privacy of gay persons’ bedrooms that may or may not be true.
This type of thinking invites serious and in all cases ridiculous scenarios that were neither anticipated by the Framers nor intended by them. For example, a right-wing Christian nationalist physician could refuse life-saving treatment to a gay person or a transgender person or even a person who in their opinion is a sinner thereby effectively murdering them.[i] Does this mean that we begin to get into the nitty gritty of what each faith teaches? Can a Muslim deny treatment to a Jew or a Christian because they are an “infidel?” What about an Orthodox Jewish person who decides not to resuscitate a Muslim? The logic employed by the Supreme Court invites nothing more than ideological pettiness. The kind of pettiness that Christ himself took issue with in the 1st century.
Religious liberty pertains only to your personal and private right to honor and practice your religious beliefs – in your home, in your car, in your church, and in your head. Religious liberty was never meant to supersede the basic laws of fairness that permeate the secular government or the secular marketplace. If you hang your shingle up outside, advertising your business as a public concern, partaking in tax exemptions, credits and write offs and participating in all those rights and privileges state and federal laws allow, you are not only acknowledging but also agreeing to the rules of the marketplace. If you find yourself unable to do so – then don’t get into business, at least not a business that would allow you to write off a lease or part of your mortgage because you work from home. This argument holds as well for the left as it does for the right. Those on the left in the course of business should not be allowed to deny goods or services to people that they ideologically disagree with. Doing so represents a great danger to our nation. We are not only split down the middle politically, but also split down the middle economically. We see this divide in the level of healthcare, education and leisure available to those in more left-leaning states. We effectively are transforming into two different nations. This kind of thinking happened before at the time of slavery and even after during segregation and it did not work. Economically, it was ruinous to Southern, Jim Crow states who saw a Great Migration of more than half of its workforce that they are only now just recovering from. Will we start seeing “straight only” or “Republican only” signs start sprouting up? This too is ridiculous and only further illustrates why we as a nation require a new kind of thinking about who we are and how we are to interact with one another if we are to succeed at all.
Our success begins and ends with each individual. All religions and psychologies agree that change starts only with the person first. One who is deeply troubled, hurt or traumatized cannot possibly help others or their community. Those of us in the middle or on the left of center have to lead the way to a more reasonable soul for our nation. It is important to begin to redefine or at the very least clarify the function of an organized government in the midst of a diverse nation. In order to even start this process, we must also define what the purpose or goal of life should be. I believe it is not our purpose while here to be a billionaire with a megayacht. God created humans for loftier endeavors. We we were created to find happiness. By diluting faith with politics and vice versa we begin to confuse the function of religion with the function of government. Faith is concerned with the hereafter. Government is concerned with the here and now.
In government, we cannot assume that every single person is a member of the same church or the same faith that lives in our neighborhood, our state, or our country. Even if we think our neighbors are Christian, or even if we see our neighbors in church every Sunday, it is still impossible to know what they truly believe or feel. When we introduce religion into government we begin to erode basic liberty. Our right to private lives and our right to life and the pursuit of happiness are given a back seat to a twisted reading of what religious liberty was meant to entail. By placing religious liberty ahead of basic, individual liberty, the current Court and their fans have deformed the purpose of the Constitution and the intent of the Framers. For it cannot be a logical conclusion that religious law and sentiment should be the sole principle upon which our national laws are founded. To conclude this, is to disavow the entirety of the Bill of Rights and means those first Americans who died, did so in vain. Replacing one form of illogical or unreasonable tyranny with another was not a consideration or an aim of any of those earliest patriots and it should not be one now. It is possible to live a religious life in the middle of a nation that, even in your opinion, is straying from the fold. Christians have been doing it for centuries almost everywhere else. This has been the rule rather than the exception for literally hundreds of years. Look to the Enlightenment’s vast array of philosophical treatises, rather than the Bible as the foundational set of texts that built our nation.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693 illustrate precisely what happens when a government becomes entangled unnecessarily with religion – people die. Here, the strange and superstitious Puritan community relied on their religious ideals rather than simple logic to put to death 19 people. In the end, the Salem Witch Trials became an embarrassment to those who participated and all but destroyed the tiny town itself. We see explicitly before us an example of what is to come. And it should alarm everyone, even those who enjoy publicly flaunting how good a Christian they are.
We have come a long way from the days when Americans were concerned with John F. Kennedy becoming President because the Pope might become the real ruler of America as Kennedy was a Catholic. Now, it is almost required to rule based on religion in many states and counties across this country.
The idea that by allowing things like gay marriage, or drag queens, or transgender protections, or abortion in some way exposes this country to possible disdain and a revocation of the blessings of God is a disgusting perversion of God Himself. If God were to judge this nation, we know exactly how He is going to do it. If Christians want to pick this fight, then I will use my own knowledge of scripture as my sword. Matthew 25: 31-45. In it we are told “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left.” It says that while all nations will be before God, it is on the individual basis that they will be judged. Each person unto themselves. He says to those assembled, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” The people on the right are dumbfounded and ask when did they see him in any of these terrible situations and Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, who are members of my family, you did it to me.” I will not continue quoting as it is well known that those who decided to be selfish, judgmental, greedy, petty bigots, did not fare as well.
If you are going to sit there and dare invoke your faith as a reason you are allowed to mistreat another human being, whether or not you think it is part of your religion, then you absolutely deserve what is coming for you. Because Jesus did not qualify the least of these as straight, or Republican, or male or female or transgender, or Democratic or clowns or any other sub-group of human being. The Christian faith was radical and dangerous because it, out of every other religion of its time, removed national barriers and allowed others to be good to their neighbors regardless of borders, or nationality, or religion, or gender, or slave or free status. It transformed thinking that you could only be nice to those who were exactly like you and challenged the early believers with practicing mercy and compassion to everyone. If this nation is to be judged on its ability to be compassionate within those parameters, I do not like where we are headed.
You can tell yourself all day long that you are a good, God-fearing Christian, but if you are incapable of even the smallest acts of compassion, Jesus needs to have a word with you. He’s either going to do it now, or at the end of time. If you are a Christian who is part of this bizarre and bastardized religious movement of hate, hypermasculinity, fear, greed and power, I would perhaps invest in post-apocalypse SPF. You cannot call this a Christian nation if the simplest precepts of the faith are not practiced. If you do, then either you are lying to yourself about what a Christian is or we are not, in fact a Christian nation. Either way, we are in a precarious position. Religious liberty has meant, does mean and will always mean, the right to privately practice your faith. If this is also not something you can live with, then how about one more Gospel quote. “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room, and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matthew 6: 5-6). If this is what a Christian nation is supposed to be doing, I fear we are failing. If this is what a secular nation should be doing, I fear we are failing there too.
[i] While I like being right, I do not enjoy being right in this case. As of the writing of this essay, the Department of Veterans Affairs, removed language from their discrimination regulations that explicitly prohibited doctors from discriminating against patients based on their political belief or marital status. While the VA has denied that this was the intent, why remove it at all?
