Episode 3: Deadly Sexual Sin #2 (According to the Church): Don't Be Gay
Jeremiah and Julia continue their series The Seven Deadly Sexual Sins, According to the Church, with the deadliest of the “sins”, as we were reminded over the weekend in Colorado Springs:
Don’t be gay.
Jeremiah and Julia discuss the different ways that the combination of “Don’t be gay” and “Don’t have sex before you get married” negatively impacted their development.
For Jeremiah, he struggled to have male friendships, despite his deep desire for emotional connection, out of fear that if he got too close, someone might shout, “Jeremiah’s gay.” Like many communities, the church struggles to separate sexual connection from emotional connection.
For Julia, “Don’t be gay” prohibited her from exploring all elements of her sexuality in same-sex and opposite-sex contexts, leading to a social presentation that was “juvenile”. She explains: “The really difficult part there is that hiding for the sake of my safety, hiding for other reasons also severely limited me.”
They close the episode by talking about two binaries that the church (and other institutions) place around queerness:
Either you’re gay or you’re straight.
Either you’re “born that way” or queerness was socialized into you.
Julia and Jeremiah discuss ways of broadening this binary. Check out their reflections on:
The Kinsey Scale, which Jeremiah uses to assess his own queerness.
Lisa Diamond and her sexual fluidity model.
The practice of naming sexual behaviors that are rooted in your sexual values rather than the social expectations of your sexual identity.
We will continue to discuss the impact of the church’s relationship with queerness in future episodes, alongside of the five remaining deadly sexual sins of the church.
Let’s heal together!