[Today we welcome Luke Babb. They graduated from Truman State University with a degree in English, and briefly toured Saint Louis University in pursuit of a Masters. They currently live in Chicago with their fiance where they write, participate in the storytelling scene, and work two jobs. This is their first work with The Wild Hunt.]
I have come out as bisexual, trans and queer, but I cannot come out as Pagan. Which means that this is something else.
I started to identify as Pagan (or, at the time, ‘Agnostic leaning Pagan’) in my sophomore year of college, during the same semester that I kissed my boyfriend’s best friend’s girlfriend on a kitchen floor. Those two events are separate, but the feeling of them is similar in my memory; a sort of inherited shame giving way to, not wonder exactly, but an ache like the gum over a tooth that wants to come in.
It’s entirely possible that, in other circumstances, I would have come out that semester. Instead, I spent five years tamping down on these new parts of myself, until the relationship I was in eventually collapsed from stagnation. Which wasn’t terribly surprising — most people find it difficult to maintain a relationship while playing an outdated version of themselves. I put my first altar up less than a month after my boyfriend moved out, began to date again — and all of the potential energy built up through four years of college exploded outward.
![[Credit: Mark Chadwick / Flickr]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/7754042184_199766caf9_z-500x335.jpg)
[Credit: Mark Chadwick / Flickr]
I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I know the outline of it. Mom, always concerned and just a little bit stubborn, asked me if I would start dating again soon. I had been single for almost six months, at that point, licking wounds I was only starting to recognize and dating casually, serially, exclusively women. So I said that yes, I would. Mom told me not to worry. I’d have plenty of time to find someone and settle down and get married.
With all the tact and clarity of someone who’s been stewing in their own juices for six hours, I explained that, since I was bisexual, there was a fifty-fifty chance I wouldn’t be able to marry them anyway. My father was silent. My mother was confused. And then, more quickly than I had expected, the conversation turned.
“Are you still a Christian?” Mom asked. She sounded scared.
I hesitated. “Well, Mom. I’m agnostic,” I said.
She remained confused. As I explained, I reminded myself that this was the easy option; nothing good or safe was going to come out of Actually, Mom, I’m Pagan.
We got to St. Louis eventually, but nobody enjoyed the ride.
I came out to my extended family a little more than a year later. It was a year in which I had built up enough momentum to realize it was going to be even harder for me to see the place I had come from, the place I was trying to speak to. Knowing this, I enlisted some help. I wrote up a Christmas letter and gave it to three or four straight friends to make sure that I wasn’t using too much jargon; wasn’t speaking in a way my family wouldn’t be able to hear. It wasn’t meant to be comprehensive—I talked about being genderqueer, about my new name and my relationship with my girlfriend, included a picture of us in black and white. It was meant to provoke questions, to start a conversation. It was meant to get them started in getting to know me as I actually am.
The people who read it beforehand thought it was great, with just one caveat. “Why,” asked Eric, who had helped me most in finding my own spirituality, “do you talk about going to church?”
“Because,” I told him. “I want them to listen to me.”
![[Photo Credit: Nick Page / Flickr]](https://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/16040506731_b3369d4fbb_z-500x375.jpg)
[Photo Credit: Nick Page / Flickr]
My family knows that name. They don’t know I’m Pagan. I’m all too aware of the need humanity has to pathologize people who are different, and I haven’t wanted my Paganism singled out as the damning source of my queerness. It would be such an easy leap. If I am Christian, they can’t say the reason I’m trans is because I gave up the church; instead I can be cast as the sinner, willful, prideful, lustful. Which is fine, in a way — it’s a story that, at its core, recognizes my agency. As long as I’m not “Satan’s mark,” easily confused and straying from the path, they cannot write me off when I tell them who I am. My family may not have liked what they heard when I came out as genderqueer, but I believe they did hear it.
I would like them to hear this too.
I would like them to hear any number of things, because even saying that I’m Pagan suggests a simpler set of beliefs, a simpler version of me than the true one. I would like to tell them that I haven’t abandoned the church where I grew up. When I leave, I find myself missing the study and the fight to be a better version of yourself that I find in the words of Christ. Solitary practice leaves me lonely, and there is some part of Pagan and Wiccan gatherings that still leaves me lost. I struggle to find a group where I fit; where I am not forced to choose between the God and the Goddess’ circle; where I hear the ceremony with my heart and my head and both are satisfied; where I am received with a welcome and seen in a way that I recognize. So I find myself going back to the church, where at least the ways it does not fit are familiar.
But all of that is complicated, and I have not trusted others to listen to it, and so I have stayed quiet. I have not explained my religion to my family, who still struggle with my name. I have not explained it to my queer friends, who have often been hurt badly by religion, or withdrawn from it for their own reasons. I have not explained it to my Christian friends, or my Pagan ones, for fear that each will see the existence of the other as a strike against me, as a reason for discounting me in other ways. Like all of us on the borders, I know how to be lonely—but that doesn’t mean I have to resign myself to it.
This is not a coming out story. There are certain things that cannot be divorced from their history and made contextless, and the phrase ‘coming out’ is one of them. Coming out is an explicitly queer action, one that carries with it the history of physical, emotional, and social danger that my elders have faced, that queer people still face every day. I have come out as bisexual and trans, but I do not feel like I can come out as Pagan. This is something else. This is flinging open the doors so that others can come in, and know me better.
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Your spiritual walk is an individual journey. We need to allow ourselves to feel safe enough to talk about what we believe with out prejudice force upon us by well meaning others.Don’t let other’s opinions of how you should relate to the divine stop you from that.
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“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same.”
…
“Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it may. And outlive the bastards.”
— Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
What Lois says. She’s an amazing woman, with good insight as to what makes a person who that person is.
Thanks for sharing your story. I came out as a gay man starting 30 years ago. As difficult as that was at the time, it seems incredibly accepted today. A lot of people seem much more upset by my veganism than my being gay.
My process of coming out as a Pagan has been much slower and complicated, and I still don’t really talk about with a lot of family members, co-workers, etc. But with my Pagan blog (under my name and open to anyone with a search engine), I write about my spiritual path. Earlier this summer, I was on an interfaith panel, when I spoke about my practices and beliefs to a mostly non-Pagan group for the first time.
good for you!
You’re going to find that the Broom Closet is every bit as stifling as the LGBT closet, and for all of the same reasons. People don’t respect people who refuse to own and live the core truths of who they really are. They don’t respect them because there is no compelling reason to do so.
Whether queer or Pagan, your enemies will hate you whether you are out or closeted, but in the case of the latter, they will have contempt – hate without respect, which is infinitely more dangerous. The closeted don’t need to be acknowledged as real people. In the eyes of their oppressors, the closeted have admitted the pathology of their “lifestyle choices”.
They might extend you revocable forbearance in the guise of “tolerance” out of pity or political necessity, but they certainly will not honor your natural rights because in their estimation, it would be absurd to do so. It would amount to creating “special rights” for those who have no natural right claims. The ONLY reason you have options in this world for marriage or employment or life itself as a trans, bi-sexual queer person is because those who came before you risked, and sometimes lost everything, by coming out of the closet. None of that work ever got done by people lurking in the false safety of anonymity. That is as true of the Pagan community as the LGBT community.
To look at the linkage in coming out between your sexual and gender identity and religion, consider this thought experiment: : Let’s say you hadn’t come out as trans, bi and queer. For the sake of family peace, you sucked it up, lived out your day to day life in your assigned gender, dated, married and settled down with a nice opposite sex straight partner you’re not really into but who’s solid and Christian and safe for family gatherings. Now let’s look through the eyes of the person you really love. They get you during the furtive last-minute booty calls at the hotel across town and maybe a weekend a year during a “business trip.” You’ll buy them whatever they want, but for God’s sake, don’t ever call or come to the house or let it slip that you know me if you see me out with the family. How long would you want to be that person for someone else in your shoes? If you’re a theistic Pagan, why do you suppose a Pagan god or goddess would want to play that role for you?
You’re maintaining a facade of Christianity in order to make your sexual and gender identity coming out more believable. Yet if all the facts came out, your parents would have every reason to question even that. If your core religious beliefs and practices are mutable, it’s just as plausible to them that your queerness and gender identity are also “just a phase you’re going through” that might get sorted out with time and the right guidance.
To the extent your religious identity has dimensions that extend beyond family dynamics to actual belief and practice, that’s your own to figure out, and I don’t pretend that journey is straightforward or easy. That said, this sounds like yet another case where someone is taking the Pagan label when what they really want is a pastiche of New-Agey, Goddessey socially progressive, Christian Protestantism without any dogma, hierarchy, firm commitments, sacrifices or hard edges aka Moral Therapeutic Deism.
From a journalistic perspective, this is a relevant piece because it highlights a struggle so many of us still go through. There is nothing about it that is really instructive or inspiring to me as a Pagan. I wish you well on your journey, and hope that you find resolve to take the journey all the way to a an authentic spirituality that fits you, whether that is Pagan, Christian, agnostic or none of the above.
There’s a harshness here that bothers me. And what feels like anger, tho not being explicit about the anger. Kenofken….all the “you” “you” “you” language feels like you’re standing in front of the author, stabbing an index finger in their chest while you talk. I want to say……let’s take a breath here. Kenofken, you’very raised some issues. ….can we have a conversation? Find out what is held in coom on and from that base go from there? And, bte, kenofken, why the anger?
Why the füĉk are YOU denigrating KenofKen’s very knowledgeable post by claiming it to be harsh, and angry. Everything you say looks, smells and feels like a deliberate mischaracterization of his very insightful and no nonsense post.
I found it to be very honest and excellent advice. Altering your identity to humor someone never accomplishes anything expect messing yourself up emotionally. It’s evocative of Franklin’s ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’
That was unnecessarily harsh. Dial it back, bro.
Why the anger? I would say frustration is the more precise term, but one arises out of the other. The frustration comes largely from our community’s tacit or at least ambivalent embrace of an idea – closeting – which I know to be horribly toxic and self-defeating. It has nothing personal to do with this author. It is a recurring theme. We’re offered this demonstrably bad idea and more or less expected to respond with “it’s all good, bro. Being in the closet is as valid a way of being Pagan as any other.”
I cannot accept that, and I’m upset because the consequences of that bad idea go far beyond my personal pique or any blog thread. Few ideas have been as thoroughly tested in human history as closeting. As a survival strategy for disfavored minorities, it certainly makes intuitive sense to try. Out of sight, out of mind, out of trouble. It’s been used at one time or another by every persecuted minority on Earth – Jews, Christians, LGBT, every disfavored ethnic group which ever had the opportunity to physically blend in with the dominant culture by changes in dress, customs, names, sworn allegiances etc.
Even in cases where physical anonymity was not possible – ie African Americans, attempts were made at what might be called a lesser form of closeting – subsuming one’s identity and aspirations for justice so as to seem “safe” and acceptable to one’s oppressors. It’s been tried – a lot, and by some people who are craftier than many of us and had much more to lose. It was tried for centuries on end in some cases. It has a perfect track record of failures resulting in a staggering death toll and innumerable millions doomed to diminished lives for generations longer than they might have been.
The author essentially tells us that historical patterns of cause and effect only matter when their implications are convenient (THAT I would argue is an American blindness rather than a Pagan one). We’re told that the act of coming out as queer cannot be divorced from historical context, but coming out as Pagan can be. Coming out as LGBT has a particular context to it, but coming out is in no way an explicitly queer action. It is a human action. If someone doesn’t want to come out as Pagan because they’re not personally ready or willing to do so, fine, but then own that. Don’t try to tell me that it’s not important.
This willful blindness to history and refusal to engage a bigger picture has real world consequences for our movement. We blunder about fighting this or that brush fire without considering the ecosystem. “We need more money to fight this workplace discrimination suit over here, and that child custody suit over there, and we can’t even draw a fence permit anywhere in rural America and the military won’t recognize us”…and on and on. We fight and re-fight the same battles. Why aren’t they giving us the respect we deserve? Why should they, if they only ever see one public spokesperson, one plaintiff and a team of lawyers in places where there are dozens or hundreds of Pagans? And for all that, what safety does the closet give you? In the age of social media, your margin of safety in secrecy is exactly one errant or malicious mouse click. That’s what you’re trading your dignity for.
This also upsets me in my capacity as a member of the larger community and a consumer of Pagan media. On every day of the calendar, we have plenty of serious, inspiring and challenging issues we could be discussing. We have questions of economic models and infrastructure and education and pastoral care. Our founding generation is leaving this plane by the hour, usually with no clear plan for preserving even a fraction of their wisdom or life’s work.
It’s not all bad news either. The one truly Big Idea our collective theologies have given the modern world – ecological sustainability and interconnection – is now accepted as a core cultural and political truth throughout the Western world and much of the developing world. We conceived what is literally the most forward-looking idea on the planet today, but when it comes to our own conception of ourselves, our heads and everything attached to them is still living in 1985. 2015, and we’re talking about how to “pass for Christian.”
We’re at the threshold of big things in this new century – things that arise from who we are and what we believe, and we’re standing there shuffling our feet and worrying about what might happen if someone “finds out” who we are. Yes, I will concede, that is damn frustrating to me.
I have had the privilege of knowing and working alongside a few of the founding generation of American Pagans. The late Alison Harlow, the late Gwydion Penderwen, the late Isaac Bonewits, the late Margot Adler, the late Victor Anderson disclosed their paganism at the times and to the people of their choosing. I never heard any of my elders say that it was the duty of a Pagan to be public. My elders did not disparage others for keeping their religious practices private.
I am a Witch, and half of witchcraft takes place in the dark. I am also a Thelemite. All any of us can do is discover our own true will and do it. We cannot know anyone else’s true will. Minding other people’s business is a distraction from accomplishing your will.
The application of Thelema to this matter is that the coming out that really counts is coming out to oneself. Recognizing one’s self and owning it. Once you know yourself, it’s possible to set aside other people’s expectations and figure out what to do with your life.
There are all sorts of ways to support community. Quiet acts of kindness and decency, the acts that are available to people who don’t have money or power or high status, are as important as political action. Without kindness and decency, politics destroys community.
Beautifully said, as always, Deborah!
Ease off, Ken.
Not everyone has the luxury of living authentically. I’m almost positive (“almost” because they were smart enough to be sneaky about it) I lost my last job because I’m pagan. There are people who have almost lost custody of kids because they were pagan.
This hypothetical guilt-trip you’re throwing down doesn’t help anyone, especially the OP. Dragging anyone out of a closet before they’re ready is unacceptable. You clearly have a personal stake in this kind of event, and I hope you work through it successfully, but don’t take out your frustration on others.
You got down to the core of my argument much better than I did: I argue that living authentically is not a luxury. It is an absolute necessity. Living inauthentically is not even living. It is existing at best.
I’m not dragging anyone out of the closet. I don’t know the OP and therefore therefore had no private information to disclose even if I wanted to. I’m not about outing anyone, although I would have no compunction about doing so in cases where hypocritical politicians conceal their identity while victimizing others for it.
What I am doing, and rather forcefully I admit, is refuting closeting as the proven failure of an idea that it is. It holds people in fear, grants enormous power to one’s oppressors and blocks all meaningful progress of both the individuals and the larger identity group in question. For all that, it buys absolutely no safety whatsoever. None. It is forfeiting your humanity for an illusion.
My key frustration is the willful blindness to the cause and effect relationships in civil rights history. We’re given the implication that it’s OK to come out as gay because now things have “gotten better.” They did not get better by laying low and waiting. They were made better only by the men and women who risked it all – and very often lost all by coming out when it was unsafe to do so. I cannot tell anyone else when they should find that courage or how much to risk when. They certainly have no obligation to me to do so. I’m just another putz with a head of steam and a keyboard, and we’re a dime a million. They do have an obligation to come out to the extent they expect or hope anything to get better.
You say you lost a job because you’re Pagan. I don’t doubt it. You say people have almost lost kids (some probably did for sure) over their religious identity. Well, those things suck. No question about it. What sucks vastly more IMO is the probability that your kids and grandkids will have the same experiences to relay. The ONLY thing that stands between that probability and a better reality is the individual decisions you and I and all other Pagans make today, and the cumulative effect of those individual decisions.
Luke, a Unitarian Universalist congregation might be a good fit for you. UU churches are structured similarly to Protestant churches and their activities include “the study and the fight to be a better version of yourself.”
the
study and the fight to be a better version of yourself – See more at:
http://wildhunt.org/2015/08/column-this-is-not-a-coming-out-story.html#disqus_thread The Unitarians began as a Christian denomination in the eighteenth century and have been part of the American religious scene since before Revolution; John Adams started as an Anglican and later became Unitarian. Since their merger with the Universalists, their theology is very broad: it encompasses eight sources of wisdom regarding the sacred. These sources include Christianity, indigenous and nature-centered religions, dharmic religions among others. I’m sure UU has websites that can give you more information about that.
Individual UU congregations differ on where they put the emphasis among these sources. Some resemble liberal Protestant churches; some are deist; some draw from all eight sources in an eclectic manner. Some host chapters of a Pagan group called CUUPs. There is a class about Goddess spirituality called Cakes for the Queen of Heaven that has been taught in UU congregations. UUs tend to be socially and politically liberal and relatively up to date on human sexuality and gender identity issues; I can’t guarantee what reception you will get from individual congregants, but their theology doesn’t say that there is anything wrong with you.
As with any religious group you might be considering involvement with, the best thing to do would be to attend a couple of services at the UU congregation nearest where you live. It doesn’t totally turn you off, talk to the minister and find out more.
What Deborah said. My in-laws are UUs, my belle-mère having had enough to do with Christianity for the rest of her life. She’s comfortable among Pagans, around here some of whom resemble Polytheists. She hasn’t met any Heathens or Druids that I know of.
I know several UUs of different, erm, theologies, gender identity and orientation, and they fit into their chosen congregations just fine.
I’ve seen a trans friend go through some of what you have. There are things she hasn’t told her parents, out of fear of losing her status as favorite child. As you’d expect, it causes a certain amount of stress and tension, and depression as well for her. Since I met her in 1999, we’ve been close–how many folk that you know like Breton folk-jazz? In many physical ways we’re opposites, but we took to each other very quickly.
May you acheive the best possible outcome regarding your spiritual choices/beliefs.
I think that instead of coming out, in opening that door, you’re welcoming in. That’s precious and brave.
Hi Luke,
If you’re looking to connect with people with similar experiences, I thought I would introduce myself. I describe myself as is bi-sexual, third-gender, four-eyed, and poly-religious. I live in Central Illinois, but make it up to Chicago a couple of times a year (usually for Brotherhood of the Phoenix rituals). My gmail is ianphanes.
Be well,
Ian
This is especially tender for me, reading this today. I had to block my father from my social networking for harassing and threatening me for my “sinful pagan” ways. It does hurt to feel rejected for something so personal as belief.