It was the day of New York City’s Pride March in 2017, and I had just arrived in the city from South Africa at the age of 22. I decided to attend an evening church service at a well-known megachurch because I’d heard great things about the services they held in the Hammerstein Ballroom. Standing in line to get inside, I befriended a student from Kansas and surveyed the people around us who were also waiting.
He talked about how being gay was a sin and how our “liberal and progressive society” was ruining the sanctity of marriage by legalizing gay marriage. I was stunned. I watched as those around me began nodding their heads and I heard the occasional “Preach, pastor!” The student beside me, the one from Kansas, didn’t move a muscle. Then, I watched as people from the crowd got to their feet and left the auditorium, some shaking their heads and others even crying.
I felt comfortable making passing comments about girls I found attractive and talking about dating women once I went off to college. Being bisexual was the most normal thing in the world to me, and I felt accepted by my small, close-knit friend group. Everyone knew she was a lesbian, and she was loved and accepted and hadn’t been shunned by our pastors. This hadn’t been her experience at previous churches, and she expressed difficulty in finding a church as welcoming as ours. The congregation’s acceptance of Natalie gave me the courage to come to terms with the fact that I had been created exactly the way God intended.
Becoming more open to the fact that I was not an abomination gave me the courage to start seeking out other Christians who were like me — queer people of God who didn’t want to “pray away the gay,” but rather sought to find safe spaces within church communities where they were able to exist as homosexuals because they were created in God’s image.
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