"That certainly reads queer to me."

BRADY ALEXANDER is a writer with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a contributing editor of Miracle Monocle, a fiction editor at the tiny journal, and an intern at Exposition Review. Their work is published in The White Squirrel, Miracle Monocle, and ThinkIR, and they’re looking for an agent for their novel/novella, Þ.

Below is Brady's speech given on May 25th at the Love-In Rally at Christian Academy of Louisville, in response to this middle school project. Click here to watch the speech on Instagram.

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My name is Brady Alexander. I’m a Christian, and I’m queer.

I grew up going to a Southern Baptist church. I was taught that LGBT people live in sin, and that homosexuals will not enter the kingdom of God.

I believed that.

Despite going to public school, I was living in ignorance. I told my gay friends, as I thought I was supposed to, that they lived in sin. That they were on a crash course with destruction.

Through therapy, I realize now that I was just a kid. Through self-compassion, I’ve forgiven myself. And later, I came to realize that I’m queer.

I know a lot of us here today are queer Christians, and feel not only alienated from our communities, but also by our very sacred text. And while it’s hardly explicit, I want to share two beautiful, loving, queer Bible stories with you.

If one is looking for a long-term, committed, same-sex relationship the Bible celebrates, we can look to Ruth and Naomi. After her husband dies, Naomi tells Ruth, her daughter-in-law, to leave her behind and find herself a husband. But Ruth never gave up on her. She didn’t ever leave Naomi’s side. The Bible says, instead, Ruth “clung” to Naomi: “Do not press me to leave you, or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God” (Ruth 1:16, NRSV).

If those words sound familiar, it’s because we use them in our marriage vows.

They’re some of the most gorgeous lines the Bible has to say.

Not only that, but the word for “clung” is the past-tense version of the Hebrew word for “cling,” the same in Hebrew as it is in English, a very interesting word used in the book of Genesis as well. There, it describes the relationship of Adam and Eve, like in this passage: “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:22-24, NRSV).

This passage is describing the creation of a new family. Ruth and Naomi do the same. They cling to one another, and in doing so, in feeling love for one another, they create a new family. And they are family, in part, through their physical intimacy: remember, Genesis describes each couple specifically becoming “one flesh.” That one flesh is dearly loved by God.

And, Ruth and Naomi’s love isn’t the only homosexual relationship depicted with compassion. I turn our attention to the books of Samuel, to the love between David and Jonathan.

Jonathan was King Saul’s son, the prince of Israel and heir to a paranoid and violent father. David, Jesse’s son, would go on to be the king of Israel and Judah, a beloved figure in Judaism and, like Ruth, an ancestor of Jesus. Their love is among the most passionate and immediate within the Bible. When Jonathan dies, David laments, “your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (1 Samuel 1:26, NRSV).

Of course, it’s possible that David and Jonathan love each other as friends. And this is the more standard Christian reading, after all. But that to me, just reeks of Achilles and Patroclus.

Let’s read more of the Bible to decide. First Samuel 1 through 5:

“When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. 2 Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. 3 Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul. 4 Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing and gave it to David and his armor and even his sword and his bow and his belt. 5 David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him; as a result, Saul set him over the army. And all the people, even the servants of Saul, approved” (NRSV).

Theologian and Methodist minister Ted Jennings has this to say on the matter: “As we have noticed, the attraction of Jonathan to David begins almost immediately as Saul is delighted in his new companion. This attraction is given extravagant expression. In the first place it appears to be love at first sight. We are told: ‘When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David’ (1 Sam 18:1). Is it something David has said? Not likely. For what David has said to Saul is merely ‘I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite’ (17:58). It is not something David has said. Instead, the reader's gaze has twice been directed to David's extraordinary beauty” (Jacob's Wound: Homoerotic narrative in the literature of ancient Israel, p. 25, 2005).

That certainly reads queer to me.

And the wonderful thing is, they all approved. All the people, even the servants of Saul, approved. How wonderful is that.

Only one person in the story doesn’t: and that’s Saul.

Saul, jealous of David’s popularity, later tries to kill him. He tries to gore him with his spear, and plots against him all throughout the books of Samuel. When Jonathan stands up to Saul on David’s behalf, Saul attacks his son through shaming him. The Bible says: “Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan. He said to him, “You son of a rebellious woman! Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness?!” —grave insults for the culture at the time (1 Samuel 20:30, NRSV).

As a queer Christian, it’s impossible for me to read this without thinking of the elders at that church I went to as a kid. Controlling, and afraid. Fathers oppressing their sons. Mothers oppressing their daughters.

These aren’t, of course, unbiased readings of the Bible. I read them very queerly, after all. I read them backwards, with Christ’s messages of love and peace baked in from minute one. I read them knowing that my readings will affect others, and that creating new, more healthy readings gives people the option to accept themselves within the Bible’s leaves.

Reading the Bible tells us more about ourselves and what we want from our own culture than it does about the cultures who wrote these words. And what I care about, as a Christian, is whether or not we’re walking with Christ’s teachings. Are we loving our neighbor as ourselves, as Jonathan loved David? Are we loving God with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our souls, with all our strengths, as Ruth and Naomi did? Are we emulating Christ, or are we emulating the oppressors of the Bible? Saul, Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar, Pilate. Treating some people as second class citizens with stripped-back rights at best, and as defects who are better to be tortured than accepted as they are at worst, are incompatible with Christ’s unending love and liberation.

If you preach love the sinner, hate the sin about my queerness, then you’re living in sin, not me. My love is not my sin, and you do not love me if you hate something this core to who and what I am. I am Brady Alexander. I am Christian. I am queer. And nothing anyone can do will stop God from loving me and blessing all the love I emanate. It will continue.

If you are a queer Christian, and your church doesn’t accept you, know that you, emphatically, deserve better. There are many churches who will love you just the way you are.

All of us, continue to speak out against oppression and intolerance. It is not okay, not in secular societies, and not in Christian ones.

And finally, I want us to forgive these people who continue to oppress us. Never to allow them power, and never to allow them to corrupt our children's hearts with hatred, but to still, after everything they’ve done to us and to our neighbors, forgive them as Jesus forgives us. Especially if they’re still young.

I used to walk the path of ignorance, including many terrible, violent ideas like homophobia. And it was love that helped me grow beyond that ignorance. And it was love that helped me realize that I’m queer. And it was love that helps me to forgive myself when I look back upon those days at the old Southern Baptist church in shame. And love will win, so long as we will fight for it.

Amen.

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I Am Not a Strong Black Woman

I Am Not a Strong Black Woman

You may not control all the events that happen to you,

but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

-Maya Angelou

The late, great American poet laureate and civil rights activist acclaimed audiences with her ability to unravel the complexities of womanhood, cultural disparities and the human condition through poems, essays, movies and television shows. Many argue Maya Angelou’s talent for capturing the essence of pain, grief, strength, freedom, and hope was the result of being a strong Black woman grappling with the effects of being raped as a child in the Jim Crow South.

Unfortunately, this argument and the ever increasing blanketed use of “strong Black woman” to describe any respectable Black woman in America, focuses and immortalizes the singular aspect of prevailing struggle while failing to acknowledge all of the phenomenal soft, feminine attributes we as Black women innately possess; thus negating any positive praise the assumed compliment could provide. As such, it is with great self-love, ancestral pride and conviction that I say, I am not a strong black women.

Before you go revoking my Black card or throwing me out to the proverbial pasture with the likes of Candace Owens and Stacey Dash, I know and have experience in the strength required to even make it to feminine adulthood while Black. A Georgetown Law study found presently and throughout this country’s history, Black girls are believed to be more mature, independent, and aware of adult subject matters to the extent where they need less protection, nurturing, support and comforting than their same aged white peers, (law.georgetown.edu). These damaging beliefs serve as an adultification that produces a lack of empathy for Black girls which shortens their childhood innocence and threatens their overall lives.

My childhood innocence came to an abrupt stop at the tender age of six, even though I grew up Huxtable Black in a two-parent household with a retired U.S. Army drill Sargent father and an active duty Lt. Colonel mother. Picture this, Alabama, 1989. All the kids on my street walked home from school together and one of the girls asked if I wanted to come over to her house to play, as we often did a couple times of the week.

I made my way two houses down to my friend’s house only to find her tall brown wooden fence locked from the inside and the unmistakable sound of giggling girls trying to quiet themselves as though they were under the cloak of invisibility. I knocked on the fence as hard as my delicate six-year-old hand could for what felt like an eternity. To my surprise, the voice of the mean girl that nobody played with anymore because we all moved on to first grade while she repeated kindergarten said, “We don’t play with n***ers”!

As the only Black first grader who lived on the street, I walked home bewildered yet inquisitive like any other child who tried to figure out the meaning of a new word without asking its definition. My mother, suspired to see me return from my play date so soon questioned my arrival, to which I nonchalantly asked what the strange and unfamiliar term meant. The next hour was spilt between my parents trying to explain 400 years of hatred and white supremacy while trying to hold back the tears of repeating a lecture they received entirely too early as well. After that intense hour of anguish and loss of progressive hope, years later the “sex talk” was a breeze.

I was one of the lucky ones though. My parents were able to protect me from the perils of adultification and over sexualization most Black female teenagers face by sending my sister and I to an all girls international college prep boarding school ran by St. Benedictine nuns for all four years of high school. Maybe it was the school’s mantra of “Preparing Young Women for Leadership”, or just the incessant scent of Herbal Essence proliferating the dormitory halls that softened my spirit. Either way, it was the first and only time I was free and comfortable enough to exist in my own femininity not as a girl, not yet a woman, (#FreeBritney).

I was comforted and supported as homesick tears fell down my face. Detention and other punishments were given to me for what I did instead of who I was and represented. I was gifted the ability of self-exploration to define what femininity meant solely to me and how to nourish the gentle, delicate, emotional realms of my beautiful womanly nature like a Disney princess singing in a forest with no need or reason to be strong.

That’s why I am so confident in knowing I am not a strong Black woman. I am so many other splendid characteristics that the need to be strong is as necessary as Prince Charming swooping up to take me away to a life condemned with male fragility and misogyny. I have no desire to be labeled as such because it is a dehumanizing tool of manipulation that weaponizes the experience and emotions of Black women.

Consider the way we as humans over fill anything we associate with being strong. We will sit on a smaller suitcase and break a sweat to zip it instead of just getting a bigger a one because the little one is strong, can handle the extra strain and the added convenience of not having to check a big bag. Everything is fine until you remove it from the TSA conveyor belt and the handle rips right off and becomes more of an inconvenience than the proper big suitcase. Now you’re in the airport cursing the day you bought the bag instead of taking responsibility for putting too much on it.

This is what it is like to be called a strong Black woman in America. The overfilled luggage did not over stuff itself just as Black women did not ask to be diminished with criticism and scrutiny while merely trying to exist. To make matters worse, the unfair and false assumption that Black women can handle whatever this country throws at them, only serves to then punish Black women when we resist and try to

change this narrative. Usually the long standing abuse, pain, exhaustion and lack of support this produces, naturally rise to the surface and we are then further reduced to the only other role Black women seemingly have in this country: The Angry Black Woman.

Hence why inclusion is so important. We all need the ability to determine the narrative for ourselves in order to preserve our peace of mind and mental health. Which is why it’s imperative to us all that we not only recognize and respect each other as individuals, not merely apart of a particular group, but also to rewrite narratives with an antiracist feminist approach. This includes having conversations with female POC and asking us how we want to be perceived. I do not speak for all Black women, but I can guarantee “strong” will not be in the top five or even ten adjectives used. We do not need to reduce ourselves to the countless unjust and unwarranted experiences we have no other choice to delicately overcome.

So the next time you see a bright-eyed Black girl simply being a child or a Black woman brimming with self-love and confidence, implore antiracist feminism rhetoric to your thought process. Push past any ideas that look to characterize her through the nation’s history and underserved negative stereotypes. Seek to understand her as she understands herself, whatever that may be, and give her the grace to take up space as who she is and not by the uncontrollable factors she was forced to overcome. Allow the Black girl to exist in the fleeting joy of childhood innocence. See that woman as the divine and sacred being that all women in this world naturally are at birth. More importantly, start a conversation and revile in the refined graceful elegancy you both share. I promise, you will not be disappointed!