Quakerism helped me realize I’m queer

Sitting still has never been my strength. Most of my life has been orchestrated to avoid stillness: I picked a career in politics for the constant stimulation of happy hours and endless meetings. In college, I stayed busy with internships and campus activities. My constant moving stemmed from a fear of what might happen if I sat still long enough to come to terms with the world around me. 

But this desire to constantly be moving would eventually come in conflict with my job. In 2015, I started working for the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a Quaker lobby based in Washington, D.C. I was prepared for the work of advocating for peace and justice, but I had limited exposure to Quakers. When I told my aunt that I got the job, she quickly googled: “What is the difference between the Amish and the Quakers?” I was raised Catholic, and suddenly being in a religious atmosphere that emphasized non-hierarchical structures and silent worship was a new experience for me. My experience of religion was, until this point, one of beauty and struggle. While Catholicism had gifted me with a calling to pursue social justice, it had also given me baggage regarding my own sexual identity. I had worked in faith-based advocacy for years, but it was ultimately working for the Friends that would help me accept the parts of myself that I had hidden. 

Friends, also known as Quakers, have a religious practice of sitting in silence to hear the voice of God, or the Light, that is inside each of us. At work, this started with a few minutes of silence before work meetings. I didn’t mind the silence, but as a Catholic, it was strange to be quiet as a form of worship. While Catholics do practise contemplative prayer, my experience of Catholics was through mass and the occasional rosary service. As I started travelling among Friends, I attended worship with them, too. There is no one way that Friends worship—sometimes it’s with a full hour of silence or sometimes with a message at the beginning and silent worship afterwards—but I knew I was not going to be able to get out of it while working for FCNL. I learned to accept it, and being around Friends who were releasing themselves to the silence gave me permission to listen, too. 

I had always questioned if I was straight, but I was never able to process the possibility that I wasn’t. In relationships with women, I found myself wondering if it was admiration or a crush and what the line was between the two. Even as early as high school, I worried that someday my life would be ruined if I was actually queer. Would I not be welcome in women’s locker rooms or be invited to sleepovers? My life, I thought, would be over as I knew it. 

I was in a straight, monogamous relationship when I was asked to attend a conference for young adults at a Quaker retreat centre called Pendle Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was prepared to do my job of recruiting young adults to lobby with FCNL; I was not prepared for a crisis of faith. 

The conference was small, about 40 people. We were separated into small groups to check in throughout the conference. In my small group, I met someone who gave language to this internal fight I had been having: spiritual trauma. I had spent most of my life questioning the Catholic hierarchy, mostly through my work at the abortion advocacy group Catholics for Choice and in my fight for women’s ordination in the Catholic church, but I never understood the impact this constant battle had on me. Hearing from others about their journey in faith, both positive and negative, I started to see that my faith journey did not have to be one centred around this fight. By the second night, I called an older Quaker mentor and cried as I told him about how I felt like I couldn’t be Catholic anymore. I attended worship every day for the rest of the week-long conference. 

On the last day, the memory of a former friendship surfaced in my mind: I knew I had feelings for this friend and would admit to myself that our relationship bordered on romance while lying in bed in my dorm during my college days. But it never felt like a possibility to tell her how I felt. I was afraid of what it meant to express those feelings to her, and more terrifying yet, how it would change others’ views of me. When she came to mind and I imagined being with her, I would stifle those feelings and convince myself that it was because I simply admired her. But in the silence of worship, on the last day of a very emotional conference, I felt at peace coming to terms with something I had never been able to speak out loud. It felt like God gave me the courage to acknowledge that I had loved her. I went back to my room and wrote her an email—one that still lives in my drafts, unsent. Recognizing the ways that my decisions to appear straight had caused harm to our friendship, I decided not to send it to her. There are consequences to the actions we take, and to bring up these old feelings when we had not spoken in years felt immoral. 

After the 2016 election, my boyfriend and I broke up after seven years of dating. I was suddenly left without my main support system. Because I was still working at FCNL, it was easy to find Quaker resources to help me through this process. Quaker practice became central to my life because it offered an outlet for the chaos I was feeling. The Friends were my people, and I was grateful to have them while I was figuring out my sexuality, my faith and the role politics played in my life. Not all Quakers are queer-affirming, but I am grateful that the ones that I engaged with were. Because of this support, I finally felt comfortable being out as a bisexual person at work, in a dating context and in my religious community.

Quakers believe that everyone has equal access to God and that there is God in each person. Because of this, Quakers avoid hierarchical structures when possible. That means addressing professors by their first names, for instance, or solving problems through a collaborative process together. Seeing the ways Quakers challenged hierarchy helped me see the ways hierarchies existed in my own life. As someone who had mostly been in monogamous relationships, I recognized that my partners were my only support system. Seeing how Friends practised their faith in the community showed me that there were other ways to live my life beyond societal norms. It challenged me to look at the ways my own dating life had been engaging a hierarchical structure in being exclusive to one person. 

Quakerism, combined with my exploration of my own queer identity, helped me see the ways that I had been programmed to assume the traditional gender roles of our society. When dating other queer people, it felt like the manual for dating that I had developed in my head was suddenly in another language. If I was going to have to re-write the manual, I knew I had to release myself from the assumptions made by patriarchal and heternomative structures in our society. Christianity may have influenced some of the harmful forces in our world, but my relationship with God revealed to me the ways that these structures were human-made. 

I also started to recognize compulsive monogamy as harmful; it was built to separate me from communities I loved and created hierarchy in the relationships that I engaged with. When I started to practice non-monogamy, I could see the ways monogamy was pushed as the easier and more stable lifestyle. Even if I decided to only have one romantic partner, the active choice to not assume monogamy felt like a spiritual practice for me. It isn’t that Quakers as a whole practise non-monogamy—in fact, most are monogamous—but for me it gave permission to see relationship structures differently. In a pamphlet for the New England Yearly Meeting called Faithful Sexuality, the working group that worked on the pamphlet admitted that many of the members tried non-monogamy and it didn’t work for them, but that they could not come to unity on the issue of monogamy. This openness to new thoughts is one of the reasons I love Quakerism. 

By the end of 2018, I was feeling burnt out. D.C. is built to be a fast-paced game of happy hours and networking events, and it was becoming clearer that the way our political process operates is intentionally exclusionary and harmful. In every piece of legislation, I could see the cracks of where it would fall short and cause additional harm to people; it felt like we were constantly asking for crumbs when there was a massive hunger for justice. My co-workers and I dreamed of a world where every person who comes to the United States feels respected and welcomed, but instead we got excuses and old playbooks of activists who came before us on all the ways they tried and failed to fix our broken immigration system. 

I was also trying to wrap my head around living my life through a queer lens. It felt like I didn’t know what I was doing anymore when it came to relationships. I needed time to think and gain spiritual renewal. I received an offer to attend the Earlham School of Religion to study Quaker ministry, and after consulting with friends and co-workers, I decided to move to Indiana for seminary. I was afraid of being newly-out in the dating world as queer and moving to Indiana, which is not known for its queer-friendly policies, but I knew I needed to get away and spend time among Friends dreaming of a better world. 

In seminary, I learned that Quaker history includes people who were willing to look at the problems of our world and not just dream, but work toward solving them. I read about mystical experiences early Friends had that led to the faith I practise today. Margaret Fell, considered by many to be the mother of Quakerism, wrote one of the earliest Quaker pamphlets, called Women’s Speaking Justified, to make a biblical argument for women’s involvement in ministry while in prison for expressing her faith. At the same time, I recognized how I’d been living in a way that upheld a heteronormative life. There are Quaker communities today that reject homosexuality, but there is also a history of Quakers standing in solidarity with the LGBTQ2S+ community. One of the most prescient documents on sexuality in Quakerism was a pamphlet called Towards a Quaker View of Sex, written by a working group of primarily British Friends that was released in 1963. In this pamphlet, the authors shared a positive view of the LGBTQ2S+ community and set up a framework for other Friends to join in accepting queer people. One of the most quoted lines was that society “should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness.”

To be queer became more than just an umbrella term for the LGBTQ2S+ community; it became a call to challenge the ways our society values certain institutions because they uphold comfortable heteronormative behaviour. Recognizing that God did not make these structures in our world allowed me to see the beauty in the fluidness. 

Religion is often seen at odds with queerness, but Quakerism allowed me to accept the parts of myself that were at odds with society. Embracing queerness moved me to think beyond the structures in front of me, and Quakerism helped me to dream of what that world might look like. Intentional stillness can be a brave act because it puts a megaphone on the voice inside that can be uncomfortable. I continue to worship in silence, and while it is easier, the megaphone is often louder when I do. Releasing myself to stillness doesn’t only happen in Quaker worship—it happens in my thought processes in dating, in my decision-making processes in my life and in my relationship to the divine. It is still terrifying to be still or put down roots, but now I can see the beauty of what can be uncovered when you do.