By Emma Cieslik
When I was coming out of the closet, I was looking for someone—anyone—to share about their experience of coming out as a queer woman raised Catholic.
Any stories I found about reconciling queerness and Catholicism came from the perspective of gay white men. I could not find any accounts of Catholic women, nor could I find stories about deconstructing purity culture as a queer Catholic. But I knew—or rather, had faith—that I couldn’t be alone. So in 2021, I reached out to Bernie Schlager, executive director of the Center for LGBTQ & Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion, and asked if there were any archives, projects, or books that shared my own experience.
Schlager confirmed my suspicions: No such archives existed. But he invited me to begin the work of making an archive. I jumped at the suggestion. After all, I felt a need to find and hear other people’s stories, and I also had the skill set to conduct these interviews, having worked on oral history projects in the past. Maybe it was my calling to create an archive of queer and trans people grappling with their identity and how it related to Catholicism.
In 2022, I founded the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project. The purpose of this project is to record stories of queer and trans people who have some connection to Catholicism—whether they were born into it, converted to it, left it, or returned to it. So far, I’ve recorded over 100 interviews with LGBTQ+ clergy and laypeople who are proud to let the Catholic Church know that they exist, even if the church continues to bar them from being full members of the faith.
And as I’ve discovered, I am not alone in searching for queer Catholic stories as a way to find and affirm my place within this tradition.
As Justin Telthorst, a gay Catholic man who runs the LGBTQ+ Catholic ministry Empty Chairs, shared with me after his interview, many people reached out to him seeking stories of LGBTQ+ Catholics, but he didn’t know where to direct them until he learned about my project.
They’re not alone. Philip Calabro, a gender-fluid Catholic drag queen and employee of PFLAG, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, explained his own search for representation in his interview: “One thing I find myself doing pretty consistently is looking for other queer Catholics who are existing as queer Catholics because I want to know how they do it,” Calabro said. “Because I know it is possible. I can feel it.”
Like me, Calabro had faith that we were not the only ones navigating these identities. And what I will say after working on this project for five years is that learning how other people hold these two identities together only strengthens my belief in the importance of recording our histories and the transformative power of an all-inclusive gospel.
Often, anti-LGBTQ+ Christians claim that queer and trans people did not exist before the 20th century, or that modern LGBTQ+ inclusion or theology is shallow because it is rooted in cultural trends rather than the deep wells of the Christian tradition. But it’s less a matter of us not existing, or of there being no evidence that we have always been part of religious communities, than of certain terms only coming into use as society’s understanding of gender and sexuality expanded.
Sister Eva Lynn Goode, a nonbinary and Catholic Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, shared the following with me in their interview: “I come from a long line of queer people in church history, and I am blessed to continue that tradition.” They are not wrong. As I dig into contemporary queer Catholic histories, I’ve learned that there are many saints throughout church history whom people today consider queer and trans. These saints are recognized by the institutional church, but their queerness is not. Although they would not have known or claimed these terms, modern queer historians identify these saints as queer and trans ancestors who lit the way for LGBTQ+ people living today.
Perhaps the best example is queer Catholic author, teacher, and medievalist A.W. Strouse, who believes that their queerness cannot be separated from their spirituality. In fact, as they shared in their interview, being queer is a spiritual vocation.
“I don’t really see them as being distinct,” Strouse explained. “I think that being queer just saturates everything, and being a believer also saturates everything. And I know many people would find this sacrilegious, but I think that being gay for me is a spiritual vocation. I think that it’s my mission to love other queer people. And I mean, talk about loving your neighbor. If there’s anyone more destitute and in need, it is other queer people.”
LGBTQ+ Catholic lay minister and lawyer Yunuen Trujillo agreed that her visibility is an urgent testament to and a call to return to the gospel teachings of love and inclusion in her interview. “I think God made me an LGBTQ person for a reason, and I think that reason was to call the church back to its roots and to be able to show the church that we’re not supposed to be a church of power and dominance and exclusion, but we’re supposed to be a church of love and care,” she explained. “I think they fit perfectly, even though the church might not agree.”
For some people, their faith is only deepened by their identities. As they came to understand themselves more fully, they grew spiritually. In finding queer and trans spiritual ancestries, they realize and affirm the divinity and dignity in themselves—and connect more deeply with Catholicism.
In her interview, Madeline Marlett, a trans Catholic woman and board member of the LGBTQ+ Catholic organization DignityUSA, explained that she returned to the faith after stepping away from the church for a period of time. “It wasn’t until part of the way through transitioning that I felt like I wanted to reconnect with my faith,” she explained, “so that kind of brought me back into Catholic spaces, helped me find dignity.”
It’s one of the reasons many queer and trans Catholics I speak to are often very literate in church dogma and the catechism. After fighting against bigoted members of the church to live how they want and love whomever they want, they have a fuller understanding of gospel teachings and Catholic theologies of the body.
For transmasculine Catholic artist Elliott Barnhill, who creates icons of queer saints online, learning about the fields of queer theology and queer biblical studies was critical. “It’s really important for me in my coming out experience, my own acceptance of Catholicness in myself,” he said in his interview. “I have a very strong interest in the way that this fits together, that queer lives and deaths can be found in Catholic history and the way that echoes back to the present day. I believe that this history is a form of good news, and is a form of Gospel.”
It’s important to note that not all of the people I interviewed are still Catholic or align themselves with the Roman Catholic Church. The project is a testament to the diverse experiences of many queer and trans people raised in Catholic homes, communities, and cultures.
Documenting our queer religious histories and educating the Catholic church about its queer members is, on the one hand, a way to resist the homophobia in our tradition and, on the other hand, a way to honor the LGBTQ+ ancestors and contemporaries who have and are charting pathways forward inside and outside of the church. Their testimony brings attention to the harm that the church has caused, but it also brings attention to the fact that there are people committed to the church even if it rarely loves them back. For those who choose to stay, they live the gospel truth just by showing up as themselves.
Ultimately, my hope is that the Queer and Catholic Oral History Project will offer future queer Catholics what I didn’t have when I was coming out: an archive of stories to remind queer Catholics that we can change things and that we have always and will always exist.
Emma Cieslik
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