queerness as worship

a little journal entry

“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’”

-Ocean Vuong

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it’s pride month and, as it does every year, my love and appreciation for my identity grows into something like worship. queerness has saved my life. maybe not literally. maybe i would still be alive and content if i wanted a husband and a two-story house with short, impossibly green grass in a quiet neighborhood, and two children and a dog that played together in our perfectly-kept yard. but my life would exist without meaning. i doubt that i have any truly profound words to describe my relationship with queerness, certainly none that have not been said before, but at times it does feel like i adore my queerness in a deep and visceral way that has never been experienced by another person. i am not religious at all. i think that, on paper, the concept of religion is incredibly romantic, but even my obsessive penchant for romanticism has not convinced me of its arguments. if there was anything in this world that could make me believe in divinity, however, it is queerness.

queer love, to me, is the purest form of the feeling. there is no element of transaction, or role-fulfillment, or biological function. the love is just love with no greater purpose. i love other women not for what we can do for each other or what we can produce for society, but just because i cannot help myself. i think that might be the foundation of religious faith in its simplest, basest form. others love God just because they cannot help but be entranced by His magic and i love women for the same reason. i can’t control the way their beauty radiates out of them and seeps into my skin, warming my insides like drinking magma might. this love feels monumental and radical and simple all at once. it makes me brave and cowardly and crazy and peaceful all at once. how beautiful it is to feel such complexity and simplicity exist side by side within me.

i feel my queerness reflected in everything. in nature and the way it exists so plainly and beautifully, in spite of all of our efforts to destroy it in favor of more efficiency, more productivity, more, more, more. i feel it in humanity and its creation of music and art and dancing, in its quirks and oddities and intricacies, in our ability to save and also destroy each other, in my connection with those who came before me. i feel it in our obsessions with ourselves and others and the way these connections make us laugh and cry and scream and tremble and moan. my queerness makes me a better person, a more attentive friend, family member, acquaintance, and stranger. my queerness and its divinity is the reason that i will sometimes burst into tears when the sky is particularly vibrant and it is the reason i wish that i could claw open my ribcage and present my bloodied heart to those that i love, watch them consume a part of me, wipe my blood off of their lips, and then beg them to allow me the same reverence. it is the reason that my love for myself and my loved ones and this earth and its creations simultaneously feels like an act of suffocating violence and delicate devotion. it is the reason that love feels a bit like worship and a bit like torture, instead of performance and transaction. it is the reason that “love” is a disappointing and inadequate word.

i have often dreamed of wandering into a church and throwing myself on its mildewy carpet and weeping until i melt into the floors. seeping into the building’s cracks and foundation so that i am no longer a human with bones and blood and flesh, but the act of worship and devotion. this fantasy is what makes me believe that queerness and religion are mirrors of each other. queerness allows this fantasy to feel less like reverie and more like reality. while i cannot disintegrate inside a place of worship and become one with its floors and walls and pews, i can think about the queers that came before me, whose names and faces i will never know and live my life honoring them through joy and love and adoration and grief and sex and parties and dancing and community. i can become queerness; i can embody its ease and its multiplicity; i can let it soothe me in its ability to bring me intense peace that i feel in my bones and i can let it challenge me into innovation; i can cherish its non-transactional love and i can worship at its alter. being queer has not kept my heart beating or my lungs breathing or my legs walking, but it has given me a soul.

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banner image: Saint Sebastian, Euan Uglow (1932-2000)

happy pride month! i love you! mwah!