The Religious Destiny of Our Tribe: Queer Gender-F**k Spirituality

When I was very young my parents taught me that our family were members of an exclusive club. As such we knew what was what! We knew what was good and knew what was bad. If we were nice, then, when our lives came to an end, the “very essence of who we were” would receive an invite to a fabulous party from a kindly old Father Christmas kind of a bloke. If not then we were toast!

If we could follow a few simple rules then lifetime membership was assured. Fine and dandy until I discovered that I was ‘intrinsically disordered’- still ‘loved’ by the membership as a transgressor but acknowledged to be engaged in unacceptable practices and headed for the incinerator. My crime? I was a male lover of men.

Sadly the faerie tale with the happy ending beyond the grave blew up in my face. The club waited patiently for me to do the honourable thing but I refused to crawl away in shame.

Instead I rejected the whole non-sense of it all and signed up as a Five-Star member of the club which dedicated itself to affirming the ridiculousness of every tenet of that exclusive club. There was no ‘good’, no ‘bad’, no ‘very essence of who we are’, no kindly old bloke, no party, no incinerator! There was a scientific explanation for everything and anything considered to be inaccessible to scientific enquiry was simply decidedly dodgy.

I managed for a few years until ‘the very essence of who I was’ began to feel ignored, neglected and undernourished. Unscientifically I identified this aspect of myself as my Spiritual Nature and set about looking at how to tend to its special needs. None of the popular exclusive clubs wanted to help me. I learned the technique of meditation and found that a state of mindfulness allowed some breathing space for what came next.

I began to see that to fulfil my potential I needed to find ways of exploring and developing BOTH my Spiritual Nature AND my Queer Self in ways that had, until then, seemed impossible.

I would need to manifest and become the religion I was seeking. And finally I would learn that my Spiritual Nature IS my Queer Self!

The word religion derives from the latin word religare which means to bind. It is only relatively recently in the history of western religion with its attacks on pagan earth respecting traditions and its slaughter of cat-keeping witch-faggots that queers have been demonised by religious groups

More enlightened ancient cultures used to recognise their sexuality and gender variant members as ‘two spirit’ or ‘walkers between worlds’. They were simply respected for their giftedness. From the margins it is second nature to understand conflict and heal it. Ancient queer priest-priestesses were afforded sacred roles in the creation of tribal ritual, which served in the re-binding of the communal spirit with itself and the divine. 

Let us all therefore reclaim our ancient heritage as Queer Spirit Warriors!

Let us joyously manifest Queer Genderfuck Spirituality!

May the Church of Queer heal the wounds of our global village!

A(wo)men