Lately I’ve been thinking how normal queerness is. I know the root word refers to the strange or the odd, and yes queer is definitely odd in the sense of being a smaller, minority group. Also odd in the sense that each queer person is queer in their own way. But the longer I’ve pastored and lived and friended in queer community, the more it feels comfortable and typical.
I remember the day a parishioner called me back in 2014 and asked if I could officiate her and her wife’s wedding on the courthouse steps because the Arkansas Supreme Court had made same-gender marriages (temporarily) legal. That quick wedding was so very normal: it was hurried and simple like many weddings, and it was also eminently practical. They wanted to get down to Little Rock right away to get second mom on the birth certificate for their son.
Or last summer, when we hosted Queer Camp for the first time, we had a church full of about 90 LGBTQIA+ youth, and what stood out the most was how normal it all was. A lot of the same issues as any week of camp, the same emotions and minor dramas and major victories, but also, and this is important, a high level of empathy and mutual support one might not experience in a more hetero-normative camp week.
What I love about Pride week is that it puts glitter on the ordinary. That’s something religious community has also done forever. Everybody already knows that we exist, that there is existence. Religious life reminds us, “You’re alive! Isn’t that amazing!? What a gift!”
I guess some self-righteous religious folks criticize Pride week because it’s called “pride.” Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, after all. However, like all the sins, you have to kind of ask what counts as “pride.” Although excessive pride certainly is damaging in many ways, a lack of pride, demanded or compulsive self-abnegation, is equally problematic. You can sin by over-asserting yourself but we can also “sin” through self-abnegation or erasure.
The pride of Pride week is pride in the healthy sense of the term, not unlike the kind of boasting Paul engages in his second letter to the Corinthians. “If I am going to boast, let me boast in…” The pride of Pride week is a kind of protective glam performance. At Pride the community pushes the outer boundaries a little further out, shocks everyone a bit with just a bit more skin than is prudent, a proliferation of colors far beyond the ordinary, joy as an act of resistance.
Pride is adding the word “very” to “good,” as God does in the last day of creation when God creates humans. Pride is saying, “We are sooooooo good.”
Hetero-normative spaces also celebrate human joy and goodness, but with a bit in the mouth. I think about high school football games, for example. They’re a lot of fun, and we cheer the players and the band and the cheerleaders, and that’s all fun… and there’s also just this sense that you really have to be a straight man or woman to be part of it. It’s hard to celebrate non-binariness in such contexts.
Pride says, “We’d like to be in all those spaces, and not just in this one week, and maybe you could consider that our presence there isn’t intrusive, but extra glitter on an already awesome thing.”
I honestly think that’s a pretty solid summary of what Jesus was up to. Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God because he is the fully human one. Which isn’t to say that others aren’t also fully human, but rather that somehow in Jesus we get the fullness of God and humanity all in one package. Human plus extra. Human with glitter.
In this sense Jesus was clearly queer. I’ve written before about the questions we should have about his gender identity (he was born of a woman with no male involved, after all). And Jesus holding his sexual orientation close (we really don’t know his orientation) is a reminder that even in pride month people don't have to know everything about their own sexuality and they don't have to announce it to the world. It's OK to hold it close and even to be unsure what your orientation and identity are…
But it’s about the pride of it all. Jesus had a way of walking in the world not unlike the walk of a Pride parade, a way of moving that created more space for others to be fully themselves. A way of walking that glided right past or through the self-righteous religious haters who couldn’t stand his freedom. A way of walking that found him among sex workers because he believed they’d be entering his Father’s kingdom first, not last.
As always well said!