Opinions
The tumultuous relationship between queers and religion
One lesbian’s story offers a glimmer of hope

It was a hot, humid Sunday in the middle of July when my ex suddenly crossed my mind. Of course, it didn’t help that it was his birthday, just like it didn’t help that I was sitting idly outside the bar since our bouncer was running late. It all made the perfect storm for some tortured self-reflection.
Thank God (pun intended) Alexa walked outside in that moment. Alexa was a bartender, and I’m certain all our staff would agree her mere presence brightened the business. Years of bartending rendered her with a keen sense of reading people, so it didn’t take long for her to inquire what was on my mind.
So, I let it all spill out. I explained he was no ordinary ex, for he was the first person I truly fell in love with. I recounted our days on end enjoying each other’s company, and how it always felt so easy, and never like a performance. There was, however, a teeny, tiny problem that later turned into a big problem: He was closeted.
It’s a tale as old as time, I suppose — queer self-rejection in the name of religion. In this case, my ex grew up Evangelical, resulting in an existential crisis that broke both of our hearts. Perhaps the right question, though, is why was I surprised? After all, the queer relationship with God has always been tense for reasons so obvious I don’t need to spell them out here.
Despite being obvious, it seems backwards, doesn’t it? Weren’t anti-gay religious biases so last millennium? Yet if the 2024 election was any indication, the unfortunate answer is no. Today religion still serves as the backdrop for anti-LGTBQ legislation, policy, and rhetoric. In fact, I often see fellow millennials, some of whom I grew up with, profess religious beliefs on social media. Many are parents who fear LGBTQ inclusion being taught in schools so much that they now home school their children to shield them from it.
Because of all this damn religion, I sat there brokenhearted, reminiscing on the love I lost. Alexa, meanwhile, listened intently throughout, and once I finished she told me she could relate. When I asked how, she replied, “I used to be a worship leader.”
To say you could have knocked me over with a feather would be an understatement. How someone goes from that to a proudly out bartender at a gay bar was a story I had to hear.
“I was going through a really low point in life,” she started, “and I turned to God and to Christianity to help me out of it. I had a sense that I needed to give up my lifestyle and ways to follow what I believed at the time that God had for me. This included turning away from my identity as a lesbian.
“I played into a lot of rhetoric that I thought was good and pure at the time but was slowly killing me on the inside. This mostly had to do with my sexuality. I believed for so long that being a lesbian was a sin and I couldn’t be in a loving relationship with a woman and God at the same time. However, as I became more depressed and in turmoil over this, I prayed and fasted for the desire to be lifted, so I began to dig deeper.”
Already I could spot similarities with my ex. While I didn’t grow up religious, coming out was still hard. I couldn’t imagine the thought of mortal sin hanging over me as I tried.
“I was involved in a high control group that made me mistrust myself,” Alexa continued. “They were controlling in a subtle way that ultimately led me to fear. I think that queers learn not to trust their instincts when it comes to how they naturally feel. Specifically, certain groups of Christianity teach that being queer is unnatural and an abomination to God. Though the term abomination is also highly misused, we understand it to mean the worst thing you could do against God, so we learn to go against our nature and to repress our feelings and to fight them as an attack of the enemy (the devil).
“This causes you to lose a sense of autonomy and a sense of self. You no longer can trust yourself to decide what is good, or natural, or right. That mistrust can easily lead you down a road where others take advantage and take that authority over you. This is how we see religious leaders get away with abuse. Though this doesn’t just apply to queer people. This can happen to anyone.”
I had been so angry with my ex when he chose scripture over us. Alexa’s perspective made me realize how unnecessary that was, since he was already angry at himself. My thoughts also swirled to friends who grew up in strict religious households. Amid all the types of queer trauma, religious trauma is a different beast. The tactics used to manipulate young minds are harsh, and even dangerous.
We ought to wonder how far any religion is willing to go to fight homosexuality from within. If sexual abuse was uncovered in one popular sect of Christianity, it’s probably further than we think. These queers are often trapped by an institution so set on keeping them straight, it costs them their truest self. This, in turn, catapults them into a crisis so deep, not all escape.
But Alexa did, so I had to ask how.
“I studied more,” she replied. “I looked at the scriptures dealing with this and discovered that they’d been translated within an agenda and cultural context that didn’t match what I was dealing with. The story of Soddom and Gomorrah, the mistranslation of homosexuality in the New Testament, etc. I began looking at the Bible differently — as less of the exact words that God spoke and as more of man’s interpretation of the world and God. I don’t claim to be a biblical scholar but the more I studied the more I saw that I was placing unnecessary restrictions on myself for the sake of man and not for the sake of my relationship with God.”
This I found most fascinating — that Alexa found her freedom not by hiding her orientation nor by suppressing her spirituality but rather by leaning into both.
It’s easy to presume God and homosexuality are diametrically opposed, but that would be an oversimplification. I mean, look around: there are churches throughout D.C. embracing pro-LGBTQ messages. Instead of scaring queers toward or away from religion, perhaps we ought to give them space to embrace both.
Alexa explained it well: “I wonder sometimes if I like the God of the Bible. There are so many things He proclaims, requires, and stands for that I don’t morally agree with. Though there are many things I have learned from Jesus that I would say kind of correct some of that. The Jesus that fought for the outcasts and helped them. Who advocated for the poor. Who recognized that piety and character are not always synonymous.”
I now see queers closeted by religion differently. No longer can I consider them cowardly, for they experience the worst torture of us all: sinister manipulation breeding deep inner conflict. Not only does my ex not deserve my anger, but he also deserves my empathy.
I asked Alexa’s advice to queers experiencing what she went through.
“Let the pressure go,” she replied. “That’s easier said than done. Especially if your whole existence is tied up in it. However, you really have to ask yourself who you are, what you believe, and what you’re willing to live and die for. In my experience being closeted especially due to religious pressure is a silent killer. The stress your body goes through kills you from the inside and may ultimately lead to risky and deadly decisions. It can not only hurt you but those around you.”
She didn’t need to share details, since when I last checked on my ex, I learned he fell into hard times. As painful as that is, at least I know a happy ending is still possible for him.
A few months after our conversation, Alexa married the love of her life. In fact, she and her wife had their reception in the bar, so I had the privilege of seeing how happy she is. Knowing her journey made it that much sweeter.
And just last week, Alexa gave birth to their son. He’s a lucky kid, for he has two wonderful parents who love him very much.
Alexa’s story is an important one. It details the lengths religious institutions are willing to go to suppress homosexuality. It reveals the internal strife religious queers still experience. Most importantly, though, it’s the story of a young, queer woman who found strength in her queer self through her personal relationship with God. It’s a story I’ll keep close to my heart, especially at this time of year — one that provides that glimmer of hope I need now more than ever.
In other words, her story gives me faith.
Jake Stewart is a D.C.-based writer and barback.
Opinions
WorldPride begins — let’s hope it ends well
D.C. events kick off despite boycotts, Trump attacks

As WorldPride begins with Trans Pride on May 17,, we can only hope when it is over on June 9t we will all be raving about its success.
When D.C. first got designated as host city in November 2022, after Taiwan didn’t work out, there were initial estimates of 2.5 to 3 million people showing up in D.C. to party and celebrate. We talked about this 50th anniversary of Pride as celebrating five decades of advocacy, visibility, and unity, for the LGBTQ community in Washington, D.C., honoring the past, celebrating the present, and inspiring the future.
Anticipation was greatly tempered when Trump, the felon, racist, anti-trans homophobe, liar, and all-around SOB, won the election in November 2024. Then the planning became more difficult and stressful. But here we are and the excitement is palpable. The signs are up around D.C. and Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has been so great for the LGBTQ community, is walking a tightrope to keep D.C. afloat, never knowing what the felon in the White House will do next. To her credit, she is doing an amazing job keeping him at bay. But his vicious anti-trans positions, and his general homophobia, have put a cloud over WorldPride. His immigration policies have led countries around the world to tell their citizens to be very wary if they come to the United States. It is projected as foreign tourists stay away, the United States could lose $12.5 billion this year.
Despite all that, the people at Capital Pride Alliance, who are running WorldPride, have done a commendable job of putting together a program for everyone. From the Human Rights Conference, to the parade, to the festival, where Cynthia Erivo will perform. Shakira will be doing the opening concert at Nat’s stadium, and there are more superstars at the dance party at the RFK site, that should be the site of the new Commanders domed stadium by 2030.
But let us never forget all this is taking place at a time when the United States has a president who is creating havoc in the world and embarrassing us even among our allies. He is a liar and a grifter, a man who thinks nothing of putting people’s lives in danger whether it is sending people illegally to prisons in El Salvador, or creating a culture so nasty, a trans person takes their life in their hands just walking down the street.
He surrounds himself with people like Stephen Miller who wants to suspend habeas corpus, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, Elon Musk, who just got Trump to invite a bunch of racist South Africans to move here. It’s going on while we have a Secretary of HHS, RFK, Jr., who takes his grandchildren swimming in a polluted creek, and tells others to risk their children’s lives by avoiding vaccines. A president who has cut $800 million in grants from NIH meant to do research to save lives in the LGBTQ community, along with cutting grants and programs that have worked successfully to save people in Africa from dying of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and polio. This is what we are dealing with. Like it or not, this is the backdrop to WorldPride 2025.
Yet, if we give in to this horror, we make it even worse. WorldPride is a way we say to people here in the United States, and those around the world, we in the LGBTQ community are never going back into the closet. We are proud, we are smart, and we are valuable. We make the world a better place, and we will continue to do so despite the pig who occasionally sits in the Oval Office when he is not out golfing or grifting. We can never allow the gay Republicans who make excuses for him, the gay Secretary of the Treasury who has yet to speak out for his community, to go unchallenged. Their silence hurts us as much as the felon sitting in the Oval Office because as the Blade wrote, they are traitors. It is unfortunate, but once again the slogan silence = death has never been more real.
So, speak up, speak out, never stay quiet. Let the world know you are here, and you care. Your life is important and fuck them if they don’t understand that or value it.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers

When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.

A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.