THERE IS A LINE between encouraging religions to reform and become more progressive, something in which I deeply believe, and leaving non-religious people behind, which has become a problem in Western queer spaces in recent years.
It’s not that I think that religious LGBT people shouldn’t be included in queer spaces. The problem is that within such spaces the attempt to be inclusive toward religious people is disproportionate and can be downright exclusionary towards non-religious people. Being an atheist in queer spaces means receiving far less encouragement and acceptance than being queer in atheist spaces.
I have had several personal experiences of atheist marginalization within mainstream LGBT spaces. When I volunteered for the No on Prop 8 campaign, the local dispatch center was a church. At on-campus LGBT events, many of the speakers were religious and talked about their god as if everyone present believed in that sort of deity.
The worst experience I had was at a local conference about mental health and LGBT issues. Fully half of the panels were about religion, and every panel had a representative of what was euphemistically referred to as “the faith community.” To their credit, the conference organizers included me as the token atheist. I tried to represent those of us LGBT folks who have been harmed by religion and want no part of it. However, I found myself the subject of subtle and not-so-subtle digs by my fellow panelists that went unchallenged by the moderator. The expectation was that I would agree with others’ “live-and-let-live”-style statements and accept the teasing I got for being an atheist lest I sound like an intolerant naysayer.
It is bizarre, to say the least, to sit in a room filled with LGBT folks and hear nothing but praise for religion and disdain for criticism of religion. Any mention of the homophobia in Christianity or any other religion is taboo or treated as unnecessarily hostile.
What I experienced locally seems to operate on a national level as well. A good indicator is the annual uber-conference of The Task Force (erstwhile the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force), Creating Change. Despite the fact that nearly half of all GLBT people nationwide identify as nonreligious, Creating Change has numerous sessions pitched to people of faith but few to none for the non-religious. Such a program design inevitably reinforces religious privilege without offering much in the way of secular representation. The panels strive to build the solidarity of the faith community, but where is the nonreligious half of the LGBT population supposed to find community?
Many in queer communities have experienced religiously inspired abuse, whether ordinary homophobia or physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. There are apostates from all forms of religion who feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in many LGBT organizations, as I did at university. There are atheists and believers alike with reservations about God-loves-the-gays theology who feel pressured to keep quiet. There are undecided people who feel put on the spot, forced to conceal their doubts. There are people who want to discuss religious homophobia without attaching endless caveats, or who just want to hear it acknowledged.
Just as I cannot decouple my feminism from my atheism, I cannot separate my radically political and anti-assimilationist queer identity from my atheism; gender and queer issues were part of why I doubted and eventually left Islam. Although homophobia can come from non-religious sources, the fact that much of it stems from religious beliefs is self-evident.
Why should we atheist queers have to capitulate to religious organizations and to the very institutions that have vilified, demonized, abused, tortured, and murdered us in the name of their faith? The ahistorical revisionism that casts Jesus as a queer ally and depicts religion as benign at worst and helpful to LGBT causes at best is factually dubious and exclusionary.
Heina Dadabhoy was a practicing Muslim but left Islam as an adult. She blogs at Heinous Dealings on Freethought Blogs (www.freethoughtblogs.com/heinous) and speaks on intersectional secular issues.
