News
Christian Union perpetuates culture of homophobia at elite universities
Matt Bennet founded organization in 2002
The Christian Union was founded in 2002 by CEO Matt Bennet to fight what he saw as the secularization of top universities and to raise up a generation of global leaders with Christian values. Since it established its first ministry program at Princeton University in 2002, Christian Union has established chapters at all eight Ivy League Schools, as well as at Stanford University and Harvard Law School.
To most onlookers, the Christian Union appears to be a relatively benign presence on these campuses.
Christian Union’s Dartmouth College chapter, for example, until the middle of last year made waffles late on Friday nights to give to students walking home from Frat Row, and these “Christian waffles” made the group somewhat of a hit among the college’s partying community. Dartmouth Christian Waffles, which now operates independently of Christian Union, now makes the waffles.
Behind the Christian Union’s friendly aesthetic and glossy promotional materials, however, there is a sinister and well documented history of homophobia, and queer student members have felt the consequences of the organization’s fundamentalist approach to sex and sexuality.
In the wake of the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the Christian Union Magazine published an article titled “After Obergefell: What Can the Church do?”, describing the ruling as “egregious” and calling on the church to reach out to “those with same-sex attraction and gender identity confusion” and help them form a “Biblical view of themselves.” Under all of the coded religious language, this means, at worst, praying the gay away, and at best, celibacy.
On July 21, 2016, the Christian Union Magazine published an article titled “Christianity Can’t Be Stretched to Endorse Homosexuality,” directly in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla. Instead of mourning this instance of extreme violence against the LGBTQ community, the article launched into a defense of the organization’s non-affirming theology, arguing that a true Christian could never accept “gay sexual practices” while remaining faithful to the Bible.
This article is one of many on the topic of what the Christian Union calls “same-sex attraction” — even that phrase robs queer people of humanity and minimizes what it means to be gay — and all are available on Christian Union’s website for the world to see. However, the Christian Union is first and foremost an organization that engages with college students, and to understand the human impact of their fundamentalist theology, the Washington Blade reached out to several current and former Christian Union members about their experiences with the group.
Darby Aono, who graduated from Yale University in 2017, became involved in Yale Christian Union at the end of her freshman year. She was invited to the group by a friend from her dorm, and Aono’s interactions with the first ministry fellow she met were overwhelmingly positive. She continued to get involved with Christian Union, including joining a Bible study later that year.
“I was at Yale over the summer, and I was invited to their Bible study, so I started going to that. There were definitely suspicious things — not about queer stuff, yet — but at that time they did not have women in leadership roles, and it was understood that were would not be,” Aono said.
Valentina Fernandez is a current sophomore at Dartmouth College, and she shared that her experience with Christian Union at Dartmouth has been generally positive. But, similarly to Aono’s initial experience at Yale, Dartmouth’s chapter had an off-putting approach to gender.
Fernandez shared that everyone in the group was very welcoming during her first year, and as someone who was raised Christian but wasn’t very knowledgeable about traditions or the Bible, she was mostly there to find community.
“The reason why a lot of [sophomores], particularly girls, are not as involved this year is because apparently a girl can’t be president by herself — she needs to be co-president with a guy. And a lot of us were like, what?! I wish I knew more about that,” Fernandez said.
While the Christian Union’s approach to women in leadership was concerning for both Fernandez and Aono, it was when Aono started to question her own sexuality that more contentious conversations about queer identities started to surface within Yale Christian Union.
“I think it was maybe during my sophomore year, when I was like, oh, like, maybe I’m not straight. And so I would sometimes talk to my friend in my dorm who was in Christian Union, who originally invited me, and we would get into arguments about homosexuality,” Aono said.
“The party line of Christian Union at that time was ‘love the sinner, hate the sin,’ where we all sin, so we aren’t going to excommunicate anyone for feeling same sex attraction, but just don’t act on it. Don’t sin. I would say that was generally how people seemed to feel about it.”
Then, Aono joined a Christian Union book club, where they read Wesley Hill’s book “Washed and Waiting,” in which Hill advocates for gay Christians to live celibate.
“I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I will say I personally joined the book club because I knew I was queer,” Aono said. “A large part of the discussion was about how to acknowledge the fact that you experience same-sex attraction without acting on it.”
Aono described reading Bible passages in the book club about being gay alongside other passages about being a drunkard or a thief, and feeling a sense of deep incongruity between the two.
“I remember being in the book club and being like: Being gay just is categorically different than stealing. I don’t understand why those two things are listed together,” Aono said.
However, one of the most pivotal conversations about being queer during Aono’s time with the Christian Union happened in the wake of the Obergefell ruling. After seeing the articles Christian Union was publishing about homosexuality after the ruling, Aono reached out to Christian Union via email, asking them to stop spreading incorrect and harmful messages. This email is what got her a meeting with Chris Matthews, the ministry director of Yale Christian Union at the time.
“Somehow, the ministry director figured out that I had sent this email. And so eventually we ended up deciding to have a meeting. At first, we were just arguing about whether you could change the fact that you were gay. At some point, I basically came out to him as queer,” Aono recalled. “And he said, ‘I understand how you’re feeling, because when I was a teenager, I used to have sexual feelings towards office supplies, but I grew out of that.’ I didn’t even know what to say in response to that. I didn’t fight him, because I think I was too shellshocked.”
“I remember walking out of there and then having to go to a ‘welcome the freshmen to Christian Union’ event. And I was like, I don’t know how I’m supposed to go welcome some fucking freshmen after this,” Aono said.
While comparing being queer to being attracted to office supplies is a truly unique instance, moments of casual — and non-casual — homophobia are all too common in the Christian Union. This doesn’t mean that students don’t find meaningful community in the group, or that all of its members are non-affirming of queer people, but the organization itself has a long track record of unsupportive and sometimes outright discriminatory practices.
Harvard University’s chapter of Christian Union, called Harvard College Faith and Action, ignited controversy in 2018 for forcing a student leader to step down after finding out that she was in a celibate same-sex relationship. This led to HCFA being put on probation for violating the university’s anti-discrimination policies for student organizations, only to be re-recognized a year later, despite failing to disaffiliate from Christian Union as the college had required.
A recent Harvard graduate and former member of HCFA, who asked to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, recalled being caught off guard by how non-affirming the organization was.
“I became interested in HCFA because of some racial justice work that they were doing,” they said. “I didn’t expect them to be fully affirming. I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be.”
A few months after HCFA pressured the student leader to step down for being in a same sex relationship, they again stirred controversy by inviting writer and self-identifying former lesbian Jackie Hill-Perry to Harvard to speak with Christian Union in February 2018. While HCFA characterized this as an “internal” event, Hill-Perry’s presence on campus drew attention, and protesters bearing rainbow flags showed up to the event.
Princeton University’s chapter of Christian Union had also hosted Jackie Hill-Perry in February 2017, so the practice of Christian Union paying a self-identified “speaker to preach on the sins of homosexuality was nothing new.”
The recent Harvard graduate, who attended Hill-Perry’s Harvard speech, recalled the event and HCFA’s efforts to re-characterize it as an internal, scriptural conversation instead of an anti-gay public forum.
“It was very much spun as, she’s going to talk about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before he decided to sacrifice himself,” the graduate said. “The HCFA kept pushing the idea that this was going to be about this particular Bible story, which is a very important Bible story amongst Christians. Now, she did preach on that — and there was no program given before — but she very much preached on the immorality of same-sex relationships and how you can overcome same-sex attraction.”
Unlike Aono, who ended up talking with Yale Christian Union leadership about her concerns, the anonymous Harvard graduate recalled generally being ignored by HCFA leadership.
“I never got any meeting with any leadership. No one was pulling me into their office — I think they were just hoping I’d shut up,” they said.
Like this former Harvard student, the Blade also had trouble getting a meeting with Christian Union leadership. Almost everyone to whom the Blade reached out to for this article declined to comment.
Don Weiss and Noah Crane, ministry directors at Harvard and Dartmouth, respectively, both declined requests for an interview. Multiple Dartmouth students who are or were Christian Union student leaders, and neither the communications staff of Christian Union nor Tyler Parker ever responded to multiple requests for comment.
“I imagine a lot of people don’t want to talk to you because they were so incredibly damaged. I have no regrets — I’m glad that I brought this up because I have no idea if other people would have,” said the Harvard graduate. “I’m glad that people know that HCFA can be so harmful.”
State Department
State Department implements anti-trans bathroom policy
Memo notes directive corresponds with White House executive order
The State Department on April 20 announced employees cannot use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
The Daily Signal, a conservative news website, reported the State Department announced the new policy in a memo titled “Updates Regarding Biological Sex and Intimate Spaces, Including Restrooms.”
The State Department has not responded to the Washington Blade’s request for comment on the directive.
“The administration affirms that there are two sexes — male and female — and that federal facilities should operate on this objective and longstanding basis to ensure consistency, privacy, and safety in shared spaces,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggot told the Daily Signal. “In line with President Trump’s executive order this provides clear, uniform guidance to the department by grounding policy in biological sex as determined at birth.”
President Donald Trump shortly after he took office in January 2025 issued an executive order that directed the federal government to only recognize two genders: male and female. The sweeping directive also ordered federal government agencies to “effectuate this policy by taking appropriate action to ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by sex and not identity.”
The Daily Signal notes the new State Department policy “does not prohibit single-occupancy restrooms.”
National
I’m telling the scared little girl I once was it’s okay to feel free
This week is Lesbian Visibility Week
Uncloseted Media published this article on April 23.
By SOPHIE HOLLAND | At 13 years old, I remember looking in the mirror in my Toronto bathroom and thinking, “Yeah, I’m a lesbian.” At the time, I thought it was a dirty word. Thinking back, it could be because the first time I heard it was when a family member said, “I don’t know what a lesbian is, they are like aliens.”
And although I walked around in camouflage Crocs with a rainbow My Little Pony charm, plaid knee-length shorts and a shark tooth necklace (yes, these are all, in my opinion, stereotypically lesbian apparel!), I didn’t feel like I fit the mold. The longer I thought about it, the worse I felt, so I buried my feelings deep inside.
Now I am 25, and I have been out since I was 22. Three years ago, I never could have imagined that I’d be working for a queer news publication and celebrating Lesbian Visibility Week, an annual event meant to honor and uplift lesbian perspectives and highlight the hardships our community faces. To me, LVW is so important because, frankly, it has been an absolute shit show getting here, to a place where I feel love and joy most days.
I think back to the frustration of constantly being asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Of watching princess movies and seeing a broken girl only find herself when her prince charming arrives. I remember listening to music that was always about heterosexual relationships. I remember feeling left out in high school when, one by one, my friends got boyfriends.
I tried the boyfriend, and I tried really hard for it to work at a large detriment to my wellbeing. I brainwashed myself into thinking I was probably bisexual, which I told my closest friends around 16 and unsuccessfully told my parents at the same age. I was probably subconsciously using this as a litmus test of their acceptance and to soothe the anxiety I felt around my sexuality.
Learning to love who I am did not only come from me unraveling my internalized lesbophobia and dissecting the oppressive societal messages of heteronormativity. It came from meeting an awesome community of lesbians and queers. I found people who understood my worldview and who showed me the ropes. I no longer had to stutter over concepts like lesbian loneliness or my frustration with misogynistic straight men.
They all just got it.
Without this community, I am not sure if I could be as warm and confident in myself as I am today.
And while I still experience homophobia, like being spat on while walking with an ex in downtown Toronto or having a stranger yell in my face “Are you fucking lesbians?” in Kensington Market, the joy and love still outweighs the nasty.
So, as the sentimental dyke that I have become, I decided to ask a set of lesbians in my orbit — including my friends as well as Uncloseted staffers, board members and followers — if they would share a little bit about what makes them love being a lesbian. And now, I can share it with all of you. Here they are. Happy LVW!
Timi Sotire
Falling in love with her was a reset. I felt like a kid again, hopeful about the future. We’ve had to overcome many obstacles to be together, but I’d choose her in every lifetime. I was sick with a long-term health condition when we met, and hanging out with Sophia really helped me with my recovery after my surgery.
Bella Sayegh
Being a lesbian is one of the most beautiful things in the world. To be authentically yourself in resistance and joy is so special within the lesbian community.
Parker Wales
When I met Liv, I finally understood why almost every song is about love.
Gillian Kilgour
There is no connection quite as perfect as between lesbians, no one sees me like my lesbians do.
Chyna Price
There’s many things I love about being a lesbian. But here are my top three:
- There’s just a deeper understanding when it comes to being loved by another woman.
- The next one would be the sense of community, especially being a POC masculine-presenting lesbian. I don’t feel like I’m cosplaying as someone else like I felt like I was doing before I came out.
- There’s so much history going back to the 1800s on how we found and fought for our love. That fight makes me proud because it shows me … that we’ve [found] ways to express our love even when it was misunderstood, illegal and deemed as madness.
Hope Pisoni
Before I knew I was a lesbian, romantic relationships seemed suffocating — it felt like everyone would expect me to act my part in the meticulous performance that is heterosexuality. But meeting my spouse and discovering our identities together showed me just how freeing it could be to love without a script to follow.
Leital Molad
It was the joy of watching the New York Sirens defeat the Toronto Sceptres at our first professional women’s hockey game — surrounded by hundreds (maybe thousands?) of cheering lesbians.
Angela Earl
I spent years building a life that looked right. But I never felt settled, and eventually I started asking what would actually make me happy. Coming out was about more than who I love, it was letting go of everything I was told to be. The last few years have felt like coming home to a life that had been waiting for me.
Tali Bray
What I love about being a lesbian is what I love about being in love … the wonder and joy of “oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.” I love moving through the world with women.
Izzy Stokes
I didn’t fall in love until I realized that queerness was an option. My queer friends have helped me see so much more than I grew up seeing. I’m so proud of us, and I’m so grateful for my lesbian community.
Nandika Chatterjee
When I met my fiancée is when I started to feel most like myself. That meant loving myself for who I am and embracing my identity as a lesbian. I felt free in a way I have never before. That’s the long and short of it.
Liz Lucking
The love and joy of being a lesbian is getting to live the life I dreamed of but never thought I would get to have!
Reflections
As I read these beautiful entries, it’s not lost on me that we’re still living in a world where lesbians are more likely to struggle with maternity problems, fetishization, and compulsory heterosexuality — not to mention the intersectional pressures of racism from both inside and outside the queer community. That’s part of why, according to a 2024 survey, 22 percent of LGBTQ women have attempted suicide, and 66 percent have sought treatment for trauma.
So if you are a lesbian who isn’t out or doesn’t feel safe, I hope you read this and can glean some hope from these messages. So when you look in the mirror, you know that it’s okay to release the weight — which can feel so heavy — of a heteronormative world.
We still have a long fight until all lesbians can feel safe to be themselves, but this is a community that does not back away from the tough, from the joy, from being loud and from all the other things that it takes to start a small revolution.
Hell yeah, lesbians! Here’s to you.
*I am signing off with my cat on my lap and a pride flag over my head <3.
Cuba
Trans parent charged with kidnapping, allegedly fled to Cuba with child
Cuban authorities helped locate Rose Inessa-Ethington
Federal authorities have charged a transgender woman with kidnapping after she allegedly fled to Cuba with her 10-year-old child.
An affidavit that Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Jennifer Waterfield filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Utah on April 16 notes the child is a “biological male who identifies as a female” and “splits time living with divorced parents who share custody” in Cache County, Utah.
Waterfield notes the child on March 28 “was supposed to be traveling by car to” Calgary, Alberta, “for a planned camping trip with his transgender mother, Rose Inessa-Ethington, Rose’s partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington, and Blue’s 3-year-old child.”
The affidavit notes the group instead flew from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Mexico City on March 29. Waterfield writes the Inessa-Ethingtons and the two children then flew from Mérida, Mexico, to Havana on April 1.
The 10-year-old child called her biological mother on March 28 after they arrived in Canada. The custody agreement, according to the affidavit, required Rose Inessa-Ethington to return the child to her former spouse on April 3.
“Interviews of MV [Minor Victim] 1’s family members provided significant concerns for MV 1’s well-being, as MV 1 was born a male, however, identifies as a female child, which is largely believed to be due to manipulation by Rose Inessa-Ethington,” reads the affidavit. “Concerns exist that MV 1 was transported to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.”
The affidavit indicates authorities found a note in the Inessa-Ethingtons’ home with “instruction from a mental health therapist located in Washington, D.C., including instruction to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender-affirming medical care for children.”
The affidavit does not identify the specific “mental health therapist” in D.C.
A Utah judge on April 13 ordered Rose Inessa-Ethington to “immediately” return the child to her former spouse. The former spouse also received sole custody.
“Your affiant believes that due to the extensive planning and preparation exhibited by both Rose Inessa-Ethington and Blue Inessa-Ethington to isolate MV 1 and take MV 1 to Havana, Cuba, without notifying or requesting permission from MV 1’s mother indicates they are likely not planning to return to the United States,” wrote Waterfield.
The affidavit notes Cuban authorities found the Inessa-Ethingtons and the child.
A press release the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Utah issued notes the Inessa-Ethingtons “were deported from Cuba” on Monday “with the assistance of the FBI.”
The couple has been charged with International Parental Kidnapping. The Inessa-Ethingtons were arraigned in Richmond, Va., on Monday. The press release notes a federal court in Salt Lake City will soon handle the case.
The New York Times reported the child is now back with their biological mother.
“We are grateful to law enforcement for working swiftly to return the child to the biological mother,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak of the District of Utah in the press release.
The case is unfolding against the backdrop of increased tensions between Washington and Havana after U.S. forces on Jan. 3 seized now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
President Donald Trump shortly after he took office in January 2025 issued an executive order that directed the federal government to only recognize two genders: male and female. A second White House directive banned federally-funded gender-affirming care for anyone under 19.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year in the Skrmetti decision upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for minors.
Cuba’s national health care system has offered free sex-reassignment surgeries since 2008.
Activists who are critical of Mariela Castro, the daughter of former President Raúl Castro who spearheads LGBTQ issues as director of Cuba’s National Center for Sexual Education, have previously told the Washington Blade that access to these procedures is limited. The Blade on Wednesday asked a contact in Havana to clarify whether Cuban law currently allows minors to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
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