I stay relatively out of touch with mainstream media, including TV, movies, and music, but recently, I heard about this upcoming reality TV show scheduled to air on TLC called “My Husband is Not Gay.” Apparently, it’s about Mormon families in which the husband acknowledges that he experiences sexual attraction to men, but has chosen to live in a heterosexual marriage because of his religious beliefs. A lot of people are upset about the show and want it cancelled, on the grounds that it presents negative messages to LGBQ people about queer sexuality and endorses the idea promoted in most Christian churches that homosexuality is a choice.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on voluntary celibacy as a valid choice for sexual people to make, especially in the form of choosing a nonromantic + nonsexual primary relationship, ever since I discovered the blog A Queer Calling. The writers of this blog are two self-identified lesbian women who are also Christians and feel that they are called to celibacy; they’re also a couple, whether romantic or nonromantic. They do not support gay marriage because it is, in their eyes, at odds with the Biblical definition of marriage. They wouldn’t marry each other even if they legally could. I’ve read through several of their posts, and I really appreciate their perspective on celibacy, friendship, family, etc. I myself am not Christian and don’t participate in organized religion, but I am spiritual, have religious family members, and am familiar enough with Christianity that I can find it truly fascinating such people like Sarah and Lindsay exist.

Most Americans, whether they’re straight or queer, don’t expect anyone from the LGBTQ population to be Christian. It’s common knowledge that Christianity is, for the most part, very anti-queer and holds a lot of false, toxic beliefs about queer sexuality and gender. Christian parents have done a lot of terrible things to their queer children: disowning them and throwing them into the street while they’re still underage, sending them to straight conversion camps, bullying them, abusing them, etc. So the story everybody expects to hear is that a queer person born into a Christian household grows up having a terrible experience, becomes an adult (if they’re fortunate enough to survive youth), leaves the religion and their family, and basically becomes an atheist or as good as—because Christianity and queerness repel each other.

But in fact, there are queer adults in this country who are Christian because they want to be, because they choose to be, because they really do believe in the Bible and Christ. There are queer youth who are Christian and have no wish to give up their faith, even though they know that they aren’t welcome in it as openly queer individuals. It may completely baffle nonreligious queer people, and obviously most straight Christians, but it’s true. You can have or want queer sex, and still have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Go figure.

There’s not a whole lot of resources or support for queer Christians. Anywhere. The Church mostly condemns queerness and otherwise ignores or politely dismisses queer Christians who go looking for inclusion in the Christian community while living a queer life. The secular world and mainstream LGBTQ population doesn’t acknowledge that queer Christians exist, or if they do, they can only question why anyone would want to be associated with a religion that hates queerness. Basically, the Church says: stop being queer, and the LGBTQ population says: stop being Christian. Queer Christians are left to figure things out alone, whether they choose to live as heterosexuals or live as queer people and still find some kind of acceptance in their religious community.

What I’ve noticed in comments left on news articles and links about this reality TV show is a whole lot of what I expected from the average, nonreligious sexual person: a lot of criticism about how the straight wives of these non-straight men are in denial, how could they want to be married to someone who doesn’t desire them, the husbands are just sexually repressed victims of their religion, it’s inevitable that they’re going to have gay sex outside their marriages, nobody should have to deny who they really are and pretend to be something they’re not, etc.

And the mainstream (nonreligious) LGBTQ population has made it very clear that they think choosing to live like a straight person when you’re gay or queer is a horrific catastrophe that’s only happening to these men because they’ve been brainwashed by religion to believe that homosexuality is sinful, and nobody should support or promote that idea, when a lot of queer people are still struggling with queerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, etc. As far as they’re concerned, these men never should’ve married women in the first place, and the only way for them to be free and healthy is to divorce their wives and have all the gay sex their hearts desire.

As an outsider to all of this—I’m not straight, I’m not gay or bisexual, I’m not romantic, I’m not Christian, I’m not an atheist, I’m not sexual at all—my opinion is at odds with both the heterosexist Christian community and the secular LGBTQ population. I find Christianity’s condemnation of queer sexuality and gender extremely toxic, oppressive, irrational, ridiculous, and devoid of any reason or even sufficient Biblical backup. I think it’s a travesty when Christian parents treat their own children like garbage just for being queer, and I think that Christianity’s political vendetta to make this country as legally dangerous and hostile toward queer people as possible is totally fucked up and inexcusable. However—I also disagree with secular LGBTQ people who are so quick to criticize and condemn the choices of these queer Christian adults who choose either to be celibate and single forever or to enter heterosexual marriages, based on their religious beliefs. I think that if you’re an adult who is independent of your parents and you choose to not only believe in your particular God and religion as it is commonly practiced but also to make lifestyle choices that honor your faith, there is nothing wrong with that, especially if it doesn’t cause you constant distress and you aren’t campaigning to get all the other queer people in the world to do the same.

I believe in freedom. Period. I believe that every person should get to pursue their own joy. Even though I’m not religious and disagree with a lot of what Christianity teaches, I can’t tell anyone that they should abandon their faith because they would be better off without it. I don’t know that they would be, and neither does anyone else. Spirituality is a very personal, intimate thing, and nobody can know what’s best for another person when it comes to spirituality, or anything else. While organized religion and Christianity in particular does a lot of damage to people, it also does a lot of good. You don’t have to look hard to find someone, even a queer Christian, who feels convinced that they are better off for having their faith than they would be without it. And it is a fundamental right of living in this country to believe in whatever God—or no god—that you choose.

I’m very skeptical of anyone who tries to simplify something so complicated as the relationship between religion and sexuality. A lot of nonreligious sexual people, straight and queer alike, are adamant that if everyone would just turn their backs on Christianity or any religion that seeks to control and deny sexuality, that their problems would be solved, and they would be exponentially happier, more at peace, etc. All these Mormon husbands have to do is give into their homosexual desires, and they’ll live happily ever after as liberated people. If Sarah and Linsday, the couple behind A Queer Calling, would just have hot lesbian sex all the time, they would be so much happier and more satisfied with their lives and each other. Throw off the yoke of oppressive religion, march in the gay pride parades, fly your rainbow flags from your car antennas, fuck anyone you want, and you’ll be happy!

I don’t think denying your sexuality for the wrong reasons is ever positive, but I’m not buying all of that. Forcing someone to be in the closet or to deny their sexuality is a violation of their freedom. But forcing them to have sex that they don’t feel comfortable with or to live a lifestyle they don’t even want is a violation of their freedom too.

You can’t pretend that you care about the health, well-being, and happiness of a person while ignoring or trying to excise a part of who they are that is extremely important to them: their faith, their relationship with God. Trying to convince them that their religion is bullshit and that being an openly and sexually active queer is the gateway to eternal joy isn’t actually the help they need. What they need is support in reconciling these two parts of them, these two identities they have.

The following are observations I’ve made in response to both A Queer Calling and My Husband Isn’t Gay:

1. You can truly love someone that you aren’t attracted to, even if it’s nonsexually and nonromantically, in a couple relationship and experience happiness and fulfillment in that context. I don’t know what the hell all these romantic-sexual people who criticize the gay Mormon husbands married to women are smoking, but I’m not seeing a whole lot of evidence that living happily ever after is as simple as coupling with someone you’re fucking and romantically involved with and pursuing a normative primary romantic-sexual marriage. That shit fails a lot. It makes people miserable, in fact. Why you think these gay men would have any more long-term, stable happiness by pursuing romantic-sexual relationships with other men than they might have in their straight marriages is beyond me. Furthermore, just because these men are not sexually (or romantically?) attracted to their wives, doesn’t mean they feel nothing at all for them. This goes back to romance supremacist bullshit that suggests friendship is innately inferior and unloving compared to romantic relationships: these men have very real friendships with their wives that likely include feelings of emotional attachment, warmth, appreciation, caring, love, etc, and none of that is invalidated by the lack of sexual and/or romantic attraction.

Throughout most of history, marriage was not about Romance or spending your life with somebody you’re hot for; it was about money, politics, raising children, and creating a stable, efficient work relationship between two people. Yeah, you had sex, but only because you were supposed to procreate. Nobody cared if you were attracted to each other or not, and nobody cared if you were in love. It’s an entirely modern notion that marriage is supposed to be some kind of paradise of romantic love and lust that completely fulfills both people emotionally, sexually, spiritually, and psychologically forevermore. Maybe that’s why so many people have fucking failed at marriage since 1900, and for every person who’s in a happy, long-term, monogamous romantic-sexual relationship in this country, there are at least 10 other ones that aren’t and can’t find any lasting happiness or satisfaction in romantic sexual relationships whatsoever.

Maybe people should consider the possibility that a gay Mormon man choosing to live in a heterosexual marriage has priorities and desires other than fulfilling his sexual fantasies. Maybe he cares more about his children or about experiencing the kind of nuclear family he grew up dreaming about or about belonging to the community that he is attached to. Maybe he is satisfied by having a partner and friend he can depend on, who loves him, and giving his children a two-parent home and seeing them happy and thriving. Maybe he is satisfied by the sense that he’s doing what he thinks is right and that he’s pleasing the god he believes in.

Would gay sex and gay romance be able to replace all of that in the big picture? Would it make up for all the struggle and pain he would inevitably create for himself and his family, if he decided to leave the Church and leave his wife and leave his kids and leave his community to go be an openly gay man? How can anyone know that, except for him?

Romantic-sexual people, whether straight or queer, are very attached to the fantasy they have of that romantic-sexual happily ever after, and they cling to it even when it fails them continuously over the course of decades, even though they all know several people who have also had no luck with that fantasy. They perpetuate the idea that this fantasy is the only way to be happy and that if you can find it, you’ll be all set for the rest of your life. But if half or more of you can be well into middle-age and still obviously have no idea how to make that fantasy a reality that works for you in the long-term, why should anyone follow your advice on choosing a lifestyle or building relationships?

2. Celibacy is a valid choice. Long-term celibacy is a valid choice. It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, or asexual. Celibacy is a valid choice. You are not obligated to have sex. Ever. Even if you experience sexual attraction, even if you have a sex drive, even if you feel a physical desire for partnered sex. Celibacy is always a valid choice. It is monumentally important that society starts to understand and accept that, because the well-being of asexuals and sex-repulsed gray-asexuals and sexual people such as queer Christians depends on it. Without the freedom to be celibate, the freedom to have sex is meaningless. It isn’t freedom at all. It’s compulsory sexuality.

And you have to ask yourself on a regular basis: who are you having sex for? Yourself? Or society? As far as I’m concerned, queer Christians having queer sex to please the secular LGBTQ population is no different than asexuals having sex to please sexual society: it’s all disingenuous, self-denying, approval-seeking bullshit. If you aren’t fucking for the joy of it, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Or at the very least, you’re doing it for flawed reasons. And the reward, if there’s any at all, is sure to be fleeting and hollow.

Sex is not a guarantee of happiness and satisfaction in life even if you’re allosexual! It’s not a guarantee of a happy romantic relationship, it’s not a guarantee of a successful marriage, it’s not some magical cure-all for your problems. And celibacy, if freely chosen, is not repression. There are a million reasons why a sexual person would choose to be celibate, and religious persuasion is one of them. I can’t imagine that anybody who experiences sexual attraction and desire on a regular basis would choose to become celibate lightly or impulsively, especially at this time in history. People who make this decision put a lot of thought into it over time, and they usually do it because they have a goal that is very important to them.

3. Which brings me to a significant point: some people care about God more than they care about sex, and there’s nothing wrong with them for that. They have a right to prioritize their spirituality, their religion, their faith, their relationship with God over their sexuality, over romance, over their lifestyle. You don’t have to agree with it, understand it, or like it, and you certainly don’t have to follow in their footsteps. But that decision to put their religious convictions over their sexual feelings is extremely personal and within their right to make, for whatever reasons they have. If you don’t support their right to choose celibacy or even to choose heterosexuality for faith-based reasons, you don’t support true sexual freedom, and frankly you’re not a true ally or friend to queer people, even if you’re queer too. A true ally and friend of queer people supports all of them regardless of how they live their lives, how they do relationships, what they value, and what their sexual practices are. Only supporting the LGBTQ individuals who routinely fuck people in queer situations doesn’t make you any better than only supporting the LGBTQ individuals who live like Normal romantic-sexual monogamous married with kids straight people. Doesn’t make you any better than the straight, homophobic Christians who only support LGBTQ people who renounce their queerness and live like heterosexuals just to please the Church.

Freedom for all really does mean freedom for all. Not just for who you agree with. Not just for the people who live like you do.

 

In my post on political lesbianism, I argued that sometimes a person can choose to build relationships contrary to their romantic and sexual orientations because that’s actually the path that serves their well-being the most. It’s the path that actually gives them the most happiness, not the least. I stand by that argument here, when it comes to queer romantic-sexual Christians.

If your heart tells you to leave the Church and live as an openly and sexually active queer person, then you should do that. If your heart tells you to be celibate or to choose a heterosexual partner, then you should do that. In any case, you’re the only person who can know what’s right for you, because you’re the only person who can feel your feelings. If it feels right, it is, and if it feels off, it is. Make your decisions accordingly.