‘There’s no such thing as a gay person.’
What would you think and say if someone said this in your hearing?! I ask because there are Christians who are saying this sort of thing today.
Cheekily I’ve thought of simply introducing myself to them: I am someone who has talked extensively about my life as a Christian who happens to be same-sex attracted, or gay. (I most regularly use both labels in the same sentence.) Surely my lifelong, exclusive sexual attractions to some members of my own sex contradicts the claim ‘There’s no such thing as a gay person?’.
Although, there is a sense in which those who make this claim could be heard to make a valid point from a Christian perspective. We meet no gay or straight people in the Bible, no-one who uses any of the modern LGBTQ+ identity labels. From God’s point of view, we just meet women and men created in his image but marred by their rejection of him. Same-sex sexual activity and lust are named as sinful, but there is no recognition of different sexual orientations, or any sense of individual personhood bound up with the pattern of one’s sexual desires.
I do think we sometimes unhelpfully forget that heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern concepts that first came into use in the 1870s, that being ‘gay’ was just a feeling akin to happiness until relatively recently, and that the LGBTQ+ labels are very new kids on the block. There was no such thing as a gay person.
There are even some contemporary non-Christian voices that might agree. The binary model of gay or straight is being rejected by many in both theory and practice: both gender and sexuality are being seen as fluid by some and the ‘queer’ label is often used to communicate an openness to a whole variety of different expressions.
I worry about how this sort of statement could be misheard.
Many readers will know people who might describe themselves as non-binary or trans and see this gender identity as more important than any sexual one. Others might regard talk of being gay as old-fashioned and unnecessarily limiting – they sleep with who they want to sleep with; love is love. Even on this website, there are stories of those who still describe themselves as same-sex attracted but are married to people of the opposite sex and have had children with them. Perhaps there is no such thing as a gay person anymore?!
And yet I do worry about how this sort of statement could be misheard. For far too long Christians in effect denied the reality that a very small percentage of people experience persistent and exclusive same-sex sexual attractions, and this communicated the idea that such experiences should not be talked about in our midst. We gave the impression that there were no such things as gay people in our churches, even if they might claim to exist in the world around us.
The result was that the experiences of people like me could be ignored in church life because we didn’t exist. You didn’t need to put any time into thinking about good pastoral care of people who weren’t there. The feelings of shame and isolation that resulted were never even registered by many churches. Young Christians who experienced same-sex attraction grew up thinking ‘There’s no-one else like me!’ until non-Christian voices gave them the language to describe their feelings and the support to cope with the consequences. Many left the church as a result.
Behind statements like ‘There’s no such thing as a gay person', there is often an understandable concern that young Christians are being encouraged by older Christians (like me!) to embrace identity language that is not in the Bible and could be restrictive. I get this. I would discourage a teenager from too quickly concluding that their same-sex attractions are as seemingly lifelong as my own. But in the constant policing of language by some I am concerned that we are denying young and vulnerable believers the ability to share what they are feeling and get the help they need from the people who will help them most: their sisters and brothers in Christ. I want young Christians to get help within the church, not away from it.
For many believers the life-saving role of Living Out has been to alert them to the reality that they are not alone: that there are such things as gay (or same-sex attracted) people within the church. That is a provocative statement that I keep wanting to make, even if it means contradicting other Christians.
