I know I don’t owe this story to anyone nor do you owe your stories to me, but I feel like expressing myself in this way matters now. This essay- my barely poetic paragraphs strung together over several months- has been my reality for quite some time, even if that doesn’t match my caricature you’ve saved in your head [or rather, the image I constructed and portrayed.] I hope you, my reader, won’t exit out of the page but will read to the end and maybe come to understand me a bit more. I hope this will lessen the tension that I am anticipating my “coming out” will cause. I pray that wherever my words find you- and no matter what capacity you may know me in that you give me a chance and the opportunity to live into the fullness of who I am.

I am queer. [The reason I identify as queer rather than as lesbian is that I truly was in love with one of the men I dated, and I’m not sure how that fits within an exclusively female narrative. The reason I no longer identify as bisexual is that I’m exclusively interested in being with women now and have been for some time.] I’ll try to explain-

When I was little, my mom says I befriended a woman at church whom I only referred to as the “Pretty Lady” because she wore brightly colored lipstick and floral perfume. Most of my friends were boys growing up because I didn’t like “drama” [aka I felt I was too sensitive to have close relationships with most other girls.] I used to ride horses and find peace within books and dreamt of becoming a nun in an abbey far, far away when I grew up.

That was before I learned that the way men view you defines your place in this world.

If you’re pretty, you’re valuable- but you can’t know you’re pretty, or you’re vain. If you’re smart, you’re infantilized- like Wow, it’s so cute to see women in STEM doing the jobs that should be men’s! If you appear dumb, even for one second, there will always be some man ready to explain things and take great pride in doing so. If you’re opinionated: you’re bossy, you’re unlikable, and you’re certainly not sexy.

I was a quirky, homely child with more imaginary friends than real ones. I would go to sleep at night under a pile of stuffed animals that each had their own respective names and personalities. I felt like I genuinely knew the characters and cast of High School Musical. [I still remember the hot tears on my cheeks after Vanessa Hudgen’s nudes leaked as I ripped her posters off of my wall. How could she do this? I thought, How could she betray me?]

My parents deduced that the Southern Baptist youth group in town would be better for me because I looked older than I was and our current Nazarene church combined middle and high schoolers. First Family was the name of the church I unironically met my first boyfriend at. He was taller than me [which was rare since I hit puberty at 9 years old and was 5'6" in the fourth grade] and that was pretty much the only thing I cared about. We would hold hands during church outings and throughout the sermon, I would trace “I LOVE YOU” into his palm [like I understood what such a thing meant.]

But Kaytlin, I can hear you asking, if you are queer, how could you “love” boys?

I knew I somehow deviated from the kids around me- that I experienced attraction and intimacy differently- but I also had this lovely story written and handed to me that sounded like a fairytale [albeit not the one that involved stallions or being in habit.] Being immersed in evangelical purity culture and the implications thereof could be an entire novel on its own*, but for me, I heard, “Wear this TRUE LOVE WAITS ring and don’t have sex so that God will bless you with a husband who will love you unconditionally and keep you safe.”

Wow! I thought All I have to do is remain abstinent and wait for God to bring the right man into my life.

“No man wants to marry a woman who isn’t a virgin!” I remember hearing in countless youth groups countless ways, “She has given away a piece of heart and now there’s less for her future husband and their children. Who wants that?”

A single white rose was passed through the crowd of sweaty hormone-fueled teens and after it reached the stage, it had not a petal left- just a crumpled mess of the beauty it was once was to demonstrate the point: If you go too far with a boy, you are damaged goods. The only way I could conceptualize my value was through the lens of patriarchy and religious abuse which told me that men inherently changed my value in one way or another, with or without consent.

Whenever I heard about “the gays” [the Sodomites, the heretics], it was almost always in the context of pedophilia and “sin.” My Girl Scout troop was allegedly disbanded once the national organization started allowing lesbians to be leaders. I wasn’t allowed to play soccer in high school partially because there were too many lesbians on the team.

I never thought I could be “a gay” because I wasn’t a pedophile and I loved Jesus. I mean, granted, I was still a child so being attracted to my same-age peers made sense, but I didn’t consciously believe I was a monster. Or maybe I did, and maybe that level of repression is one of the many reasons that I became so mentally ill. Whatever the case- I had no language for developing a romantic relationship with a girl in reality. Yes, there was Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and Natalie Portman in Star Wars- but they weren’t real people, they were TV people, you know? Not like the future husband I was going to have if I kept my purity ring on, my legs shut, and didn’t think about other girls’ boobs or how much I liked it when they joked I would be “the perfect boyfriend.”

My first [and only] gay friends were boys during those years. I was, admittedly, more judgmental of queer women likely because of my own internalized homophobia. I still believed what my church said: love the sinner, hate the sin. I truly believed that being gay was wrong because being gay led to molesting children like in Sodom and Gomorrah and molesting children was obviously wrong so it all made sense [until it didn’t.]

The first time I got called a f*ggot was in the 6th grade while I was playing on the boys’ soccer team [Zion, my tiny Presbyterian school, didn’t have a girls’ team.] We were playing a public school and as many women do while playing sports, I had my hair up and no make-up on. I wasn’t behaving homosexually per se, but I was stepping outside of what our culture has deemed acceptable for women even when those women are 12 years old.

“F*g!’ a kid yelled as he kicked the ball away from me. "Are you a transvestite?” another sneered. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t ~totally~ sure what either of those things was, but I knew they weren’t nice things to be called. Rumors began spreading through my rural town [as if my self-injuring** and fluorescent skinny jeans weren’t bad enough] and pretty soon, kids’ parents from Zion stopped letting them hang out with me entirely. I don’t know if they actually believed I was gay, or if they just instinctively knew I was different and that was all the reason to keep their children away from me. Regardless, this social isolation led to me switching schools after 8th grade following years of coming home crying nearly every day.

I’ve dated a lot of boys since my first Baptist 6th grade taller-than-me romance. Mostly, I was emotionally dependent on them for my self-worth and attempted to rectify my insecurities with sex [or as close as I could get to sex without actually having to remove my purity ring], with helpfulness, with nurturance, or whatever currency I had to offer. For me, relationships with men were primarily transactional. When I would see a handsome boy, instead of thinking, “I like him,” I would wonder if he liked me or how to make him like me. I drove myself mad trying to earn approval from men instead of asking myself what I wanted, how I felt loved, or how I felt cared for. I let myself be taken advantage of multiple times rather than attempting to disrupt the status quo and risk messing things up between my metaphorical future husband and me.*** If I didn’t acknowledge what was happening, maybe it wasn’t, I thought. I made sure to date boys that other girls found attractive and that my parents and church approved of. I liked it when their mothers would brag about me or the churches I was a part of would use me as an example of what a “godly young woman” should be.

I think I often loved the attention I got from being in relationship with boys and their friendship rather than being romantically invested in the men themselves.

I’m sorry to the people I hurt before realizing this.

I write this absurdly long monologue to say: Compulsive heterosexuality mixed with religious legalism kept me in the dark about my own sexuality until I was well into college. I actually had to resign from my megachurch job when they found out my beliefs [I never disclosed that I, too, was questioning my sexuality] and my undergraduate program had us all sign an Ethical Code that prohibited all sexual behavior outside of marriage [gay marriage wasn’t legalized in the US until my junior year, so.]

I don’t blame any particular person for my decision to not come out this publicly until now. I think if I had realized that I was queer in grade school, that the bullying I experienced, the religious OCD I developed, and my overall feelings of ostracization would’ve been intensified. If I had known I was queer while on staff at the church I was forced out of, my pain over that rejection and the horrible things I was told by people who claimed to be my spiritual family would’ve scarred me even deeper. I will still likely be unfriended or uninvited to family gatherings after posting this, but that’s okay. I’m finally at a point in my life where it is safe for me to be myself and I will never back down or apologize for that again. My parents are both strong allies now and many of my friends and their families are affirming of me [even when I show up decked out in rainbows and won’t shut up about Taylor Swift.] I believe that God loves me and created me**** just the way I am- with my love of lavender and Girl in Red. I believe that God loves you, too, even if you no longer love me.

*For more information on religious trauma/scrupulosity or purity culture, I recommend “Pure” by Linda Kay Klein and “You Are Your Own” by Jamie Lee Finch

**If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please visit www.twloha.com/find-help or call 800-273-8255

***For additional resources as a survivor of sexual assault, please visit RAINN.org or call 800-656-4673

****If you are interested in learning more about God’s unconditional love and affirmation of queer people, check out “Unclobber” by Colby Martin, “God and the Gay Christian” by Matthew Vines, and “One Coin Found” by Emmy Kegler.

booksquoteslife:

— Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones