The shooting at Club Q happened in Colorado Springs this past weekend. I woke up on Sunday morning with the horror of the news. Saddened that another senseless murder has hit our community again. I laid in my wife’s arms and cried. Cried that it is this way and that the queer community has to suffer so much just to be ourselves.
I worked as a chaplain for years. People often don’t understand a chaplain’s work. Yes, we do pray with people and arrange for religious rituals like sacrament of the sick provided by a priest from the Catholic Church. Yet most of my work was the keeper of people’s personal and sacred stories. When people are ill or dying in hospice, they need to share their stories, to be heard, to be seen and to be validated. It is a need of the human condition.
Places like Club Q are the sanctuaries for the queer community. They welcome anyone who wants to come in. It is a place for our stories to be shared and validated. Besides private homes, they are often the only places for LGBTQIA+ to show up exactly as they are in all their fabulousness. When gun violence and murder happen at these places it is like our private space, our home, our place of worship is invaded by an evil intruder that we welcomed into our midst. If you struggle to understand this it is akin to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina welcoming murderer Dylan Roof into their midst.
Along with the sadness I feel deep rage at the ridiculousness of the pain my community has to endure. This LGBTQIA+ community welcomed me wholeheartedly when I came out at fifty-two years old. Like the Joni Mitchell song, I see the world from both sides now. I lived in the straight world for the majority of my life. I always had a queer lens, but did not identity it as such until I came out. It has come sharply in focus these last six years.
I lost straight privilege when I came out. What does that mean? To have formerly close family members be no longer a part of your life. To have parents, siblings and children reject or distance themselves from you. To walk down the street in utter safety with my partner and show physical affection. That I do not have to scan the room to see if it is safe to say that I am gay. To feel the energy in a room shift when I say that I am a lesbian. To come out over and over again every time I say I have a wife. I always do and it still feels like an act of defiance. AND my wife and I look like two older women together. I cannot imagine what it must be like for my younger queer siblings who have a different from the culture norm of self expression.
We live in a heteronormative society, meaning that everyone is thought to be straight unless proven otherwise. Some people in our LGBTQIA+ community have glass closets. Straight people know that they are “not one of us.” These queer brothers and sisters have navigated abuse, violence and bullying their whole lives, for simply being who they are. The cruelty of this is astounding and so unfair it takes my breath away. Can you imagine living your whole life this way? Never, ever feeling safe? My heart weeps for those of us who understand this so intimately. I know people of color understand this. I can only imagine what it must be like for those who experience the intersectionality of queerness and color.
Now the battle on women is won with the overturning of Roe V Wade, the far right is turning attention to the persecution of LGBTQIA+ people. They are starting with our most vulnerable members, our trans children. They are working diligently to make the queer community “the other” to make them less than human. It is a diversionary tactic meant to further divide our country and to create unrest so that a theocracy can be formed to supplant our democracy. Evil always needs an enemy.
A lament is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. Biblically they were often used by the prophets to express grief and anger at persecution. As a lesbian woman who now wakes up everyday next to my beautiful wife, I am still stunned how I am treated so differently simply because of who I love. I lament this for our beautiful community because our persecution and suffering is caused by other human beings that have such a narrow view of humanity. I am filled with sorrow, but I am filled with rage that we cannot just let others live in full expression of their personhood.
Lament for the Queer Community
How long?
How long until we are safe?
How long until we can “just be?”
With no judgment, no shame, no guilt, no “coming out” because it just “is.”
No dealing with “hurting” people when we are just trying to be ourselves?
How long until the world realizes that gender is just a construct?
That people are created to be all different ways?
That diversity is essential and necessary for humanity and a thriving society?
How long until people realize there is more than heteronormativity and we live in compulsory heterosexual society?
Have you heard of Comphet? If not, look it up.
Where can we go to be safe?
When our relationships are treated with reverence and respect?
And we don’t experience pain and rejection from family, friends and faith?
When is the world going to wake up and see the ridiculousness of treating its children this way?
How long people, how long?
– Rev. Anne-Marie Zanzal, M.Div
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