Brian and I started QueerTheology.com in 2013. By that time both of us had been engaged in church work for years: Brian had completed the Equality Ride and done activism work at Christian colleges, I had finished seminary and been writing trans theology while preaching and teaching. We started QT in order to bridge the gap between the academic and the church. To make the academic accessible and to push the conversation away from the arguments about why or why not it was okay to LGBTQ+ and instead share the insights of LGBTQ+ people of faith. 

Over the next several years things felt like they were rapidly shifting. There were larger conversations about queer and trans equality, more denominations started ordaining queer and trans folks, the world (in some ways) became a little more open. 

But then, as 2016 and Trump rolled into 2020 and Covid it seemed like all of the progress that had been made suddenly… disappeared. And I’ve been musing a lot lately on what happened and why and where we go from here. 

The world isn’t linear, I understand that. I know that we don’t just solve a problem and then never have to face it again. But I had hoped that as conversations progressed we would manage to leave some of them behind, or at least a larger group of people would join together in moving forward, even as others were having the more basic conversation. 

Instead some days it feels like all of the work so many of us did in the early 2000s and up until 2016 was all for nothing. It got completely swept away in the tsunami that was 2016 and Trump. The huge waves of evangelicals leaving the church seemed to bypass the work being done and instead immediately created their own enclaves where they started over from scratch. And so instead of a movement of people building on the work that was already being done, we have a new wave of books, documentaries, and online personalities stuck in the so-called clobber passages. Again. 

It’s not that I begrudge these folks their journey and I understand everyone learns at their own pace and comes into the conversation at different times. I just can’t help but wish that people were more curious about tapping into the conversations that had already existed long before they left their church. Long before Trump was the last straw for so many, there were those of us leading the way out of evangelicalism. We were figuring out, with much less support, how to deconstruct our faith and how to build anew. We were figuring out how to be true to ourselves and love the Bible as well. We were figuring out what faith not shaped by evangelicalism could look like. And in that time so many people created some really incredible resources that built on one another. We built organizing movements and created beautiful theology and liturgies. We built communities and wrote books and sermons and recorded conversations with other people who were also building their faith. Brian and I were clearly a big part of that conversation, but we were by no means the only. 

And yet, there are so many folks who just didn’t engage with that work being done at all. It’s curious to me. 

One of the things I think about often is “what is my responsibility when I am joining a conversation/movement/practice already in process?” How do I catch myself up as best as I can? How do I not create more work for the people leading the conversation? How do I not ask the same questions that have already been asked a million times?

An example from another sphere: When I was first beginning to think about writing for television I attended a whole bunch of free webinars in order to learn the basics of not only the writing style but also how the industry worked. Before I had even attended the webinars, I had done some reading online. I looked up the difference between managers and agents, I googled “what is a general meeting”? 

But when I got on these webinars and they opened it up for questions, everyone was asking the questions I had already researched the answers to. After the third or fourth webinar with the exact same Q&A I stopped going. I realized I had done more work than others before jumping into the conversation. Partly that’s because I’m a nerd who likes research, but it was also because I wanted to understand this space and I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to be able to ask a more valuable question on the call; one that I couldn’t find out the answer to by googling. I wanted to be able to ask the questions that you’d only know from personal, lived work and experience. 

I think that has served me well in other spaces, too. A curiosity about what came before, a desire to get past the surface conversations, a questioning of myself and my own motives (and also my own awareness of how I might be able to add to the conversation). 

I’m not saying you need to read ALL of the books or google ALL of the things before you can enter into the conversation, but maybe reading one book or a couple of articles before joining a conversation already in progress would help to move things along. I think we have a responsibility to build and not continually go back to the beginning. 

Imagine the richness of the conversations we could have if queer and trans people didn’t have to continually be doing queer and trans 101 and talking about the seven passages used to condemn LGBTQ+ folks? Imagine what would happen if everyone interested in the conversation read one of the incredible books (like Mollenkott and Scanzoni’s “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?”) and took an online LGBTQ+ 101 webinar before engaging? There are so many more resources available now than there were when I was first coming out (I know because I’ve been a part of creating a lot of them). Information is so much more easily accessible. You can get books at your library, find free explainers online, the list goes on. 

I think especially now, as the conversation and momentum politically turns against LGBTQ+ folks we need people who want to be in solidarity with us to be able to do some of their own research so that we can do the very real work of fighting for our lives. 

We need conversations to be building and not circling. We need movements and work to be building and branching in new directions, not consistently going back to the drawing board. There is too much at stake to lose even an inch of the ground we have already gained. There is too much at stake to have to repeat the same conversations we’ve been having since the late 1970’s. Instead we need to be having new conversations, pushing into new directions, and building movements that will protect us even better in the coming months and years. 

In order to do that we need everyone to do their own work. To be curious about what they don’t know and to seek out the answers to the questions they have. To be willing to get it wrong, or be corrected or mess up in order to keep things moving forward. 

There are people who have been building knowledge and movements for decades; we need to listen to them, we need to let them teach us, we need to get out of the way and not slow them down. We can join the conversation and the movement at any time, as the new protest songs being sung in Minneapolis attest “it’s not too late to change your mind.” And yet, when we change our mind it’s also our responsibility to catch ourselves up because it’s we who were late to the party. 

So let’s be good movement collaborators and hold up our end of the work so those leading don’t have to circle back for us and lose momentum. There is too much at stake, there is too much at risk, we don’t have time to start over, we need to build.