Nkechinyem Oduh, Contributor
My understanding of Christianity and the LGBTQ+ community has always been sort of this Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner affair. One just wants to live their life and the other has some weird obsession with taking the other down.
My queer ass sat in church twice a week every damn week, front and centre and swallowed a sermon of homophobia at least once a month for about 18 years. Now I’ve been told that biting my tongue all those years would have done irreparable damage to my psyche, but if I’m going to be totally honest it was really damn funny.
Imagine, a congregation of Christian youth all learning about “sexual immorality” for what must’ve been the eightieth time and you, a blossoming little bisexual sitting through it all, feeling like if you look at anyone they’ll be able to see the word “queer” in your eyes.
Which doesn’t make much sense when I think back to it, but as a 14 year old girl I sat there sweating for two whole hours, just whispering to myself, “I don’t even know what the gay agenda is.”
And it wouldn’t have been that bad if it wasn’t for The Encounter.
The Encounter was a four day retreat where they shipped a group of young sinners to the wilderness of Sarnia, Ontario to pray the gay away. I shouldn’t have even been there, at that point I had spent three years hiding my sexuality from my mother and the entire congregation of my Pentecostal church.
In the end, a scene from a film, Farewell, My Queen, did me in, where Marie Antoinette lays a small kiss on her servant girl. Never mind that the servant girl was fully naked, all that had to be seen by my mother was that kiss and no excuses of school projects in the world could have stopped her.
The Encounter really was just straight praying for four days with a dash of casting out “demons” and explaining that homosexuality is just confusion, but I had actually believed I’d been healed, for about an hour.
One glimpse of Nicki Minaj at the MTV Video Music Awards and I was firmly back where I belonged. You know what the weirdest thing was? I didn’t care. Girls were and are still hot, and spoiler alert, God made them that way.
No one wants to go to a pray the gay away camp, no one wants to be indoctrinated with self-hate over and over until you don’t know which way is up.
For some it was easier. Some of us were raised without a faith, without parents, aunts, uncles, pastors, and ushers to whisper tiny little lies about how sinful it was to love what you want.
How terrible it was to want better than internalized hatred. How selfish you must be to truly be yourself. And that isn’t to say those people weren’t valid in their struggle because they are.
But there’s this horrible thing that comes along with being raised with a God. It’s the tightness in your throat when you hold someone’s hand. The little voice that you swear sounds exactly like your mother saying, “how could you?” And it’s absurd that I cling to it, that it remains.
But I can’t help it. It’s just how I was raised.
