God is Queer: A Personal Confession of a Polemical Nature
From Vol. 5: On Queer Dharma
This article is taken from Tarka Volume 5, On Queer Dharma.
Volume 9, On Power, will be released later this year.
In many religious environments around the world, being gay, gender-bending, or otherwise queer is considered a surefire recipe for eternal damnation. If your local religion doesn’t have a fiery consequence waiting for you in the afterlife, then the quotidian rituals of bullying, ridicule, and torturous teasing are enough to make daily life a living hell. It is no wonder, then, that for many queer people, the very word “God” is a triggering one, a painful reminder of parental judgments and cultural norms that guilt, shame, and repress the non-conforming expressions of queer identity and same-sex desire. As a result of this, unsurprisingly and unfortunately (from the point of view of these reflections) many queer people throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, preferring, rather than the loaded word “God,” concepts like “divine,” “spirit,” or more generalized references to the “cosmos” or “universe.”
