Breaking the Buckles

By Rebekah Hertzberg, for more of her work visit her website.

“What would you like to work on today?” Dr. B asks after I settle into the antique patterned sofa.

“I don’t know.” I respond, a usual response for me until I decide to divulge my new goals and life objectives. My mind changes at every new meeting. We have discussed almost all of my plans for the near future, the future that will ensue in June once I obtain my master’s degree.

Dr. B and I share some experiences. We have both traveled abundantly and have both, during our travels, traveled to Israel. He suspects my Jewish heritage because of the spelling of Rebekah, not to mention my very German surname. We have spoken about my heritage at length on two separate occasions, at least spoken as much as my small knowledge of my heritage allows.

I tell Dr. B that I am an Atheist during my visit to him last month. I had already divulged my nonreligious nature during one of our first sessions, some nine months prior, after I relayed my childhood background that included confirmation in the Methodist church and attendance at an Episcopalian high school. I broached the subject myself, in the beginning, admitting not only my nonreligious preference but my sexual preference as well. I guess I was hoping he might refuse to serve as my therapist, and I would have the perfect reason to avert my personal issues.

When he did not refuse me service, I decided to continue meeting with him on a mostly regular basis. Dr. B works with his wife at Complete Counsel Associates. In the waiting room, there are numerous plaques, posters, and other religious propaganda and memorabilia. The business card I am handed by Dr. B for each of my follow-up appointments even has a scripture on it: Acts 20:27 NKJV, which when I looked up, reads: For I have not shunned to declare to you the whole counsel of God.

My current residence in Danville, Virginia should not go unmentioned. For someone who avoids church, religion emanates at every nook and cranny of this small city. Danville is part of the Bible Belt, and though mostly unimpressionable, I have noticed the plethora of churches and religious organizations in the city. As a lesbian living in a small conservative city, I tend to isolate myself. I abandoned religion long before I came out during my freshman year of college. My distrust of religion runs deeper than my sexual orientation: I just never felt comfortable in church, reciting scripture synchronously, singing hymns, and praying profusely. The fact that I am a lesbian and shunned by many congregations, especially in Danville, only intensifies my distrust.

To accentuate the Christian-minded community of Danville, I also have contact with a tattoo artist, who is involved in his own ministry, God’s Gift Ministries. He attends a local church and paints portraits of Jesus during an allotted time after the sermon. Despite our differences, he has been supportive of my zine, Fractal, for quite some time, purchasing ads and agreeing to display them in his shop, even when I had a picture of Obama on the cover of the November 2012 issue.
           
Coming into contact with people like my therapist and the tattoo artist is commonplace in Danville, and, although it has taken some time and inner strength and resolve, I support my religious and sexual preferences. It can be isolating to live in such a narrow-minded, conservative community like Danville. I share the perspective of the community (as narrow-minded and unsupportive) with the tattoo artist, and we share a love for art, though we differ on religious preference. I seem to be surrounded by an automatically infused Bible Belt landscape but accept myself and maintain a mostly content frame of mind.
           
I have actually lived in two cities noted as being “buckles” in the Bible Belt due to the number of churches and religiously affiliated institutions. I graduated from college in Springfield, Missouri, home of Evangel University (I went to Drury University), a city that is almost 88% Caucasian and only 4% African-American due to a lynching in 1906, where all three men were determined innocent of their alleged crimes.
           
I also attended college for a short period in Lynchburg, Virginia, home to Liberty University and the late Jerry Falwell, at what used to be Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (it is now coed and called Randolph College). I came out my freshman year. For now, my plan is to move to Nashville, Tennessee post graduation, and even though it is another reported “buckle” of the Bible Belt, I appreciate the culture of Nashville, albeit its Christian associations and Christian university, Belmont.
           
I am a secular lesbian, two traits that are not evident by my appearance. I look normal, act normal for the most part, and choose to present myself in a fairly conservative manner. While I can respect the nature of religious organizations and some of the people involved therein, like my psychologist and the tattoo artist, I will not change my own perspective to appease the consciousness of the sometimes seeming majority, which, given my current, prior, and future locales, is indeed the majority.

Queer Shaming by Religious based Abstinence Only Education

Secular Woman’s second article in the LGBTQ week Series

By Karin Weiss, read her blog Abstinence Only Recovery

I’ve been out as bisexual since 9th grade (14 years old). I was lucky that most people in my high school were accepting of it. There were only a few very seriously religious teens at my school, but, unfortunately, the curriculum of my abstinence only sex ed class was not so accepting.

First let’s talk about one of the extremely religious teens. I had a friend we’ll call Joe. When I was in 10th grade and he was in 11th we became very good friends. He liked to watch Star Wars and go hiking and read books. We started crushing on each other and decided we wanted to date. Then I told him that I was bisexual. I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I knew he was religious but it never occurred to me that one of my friends would be anti-LGBT. He was hurt by the fact. He wanted me to be straight because he couldn’t date someone with homosexual tendencies. He wanted me to go to church with him, and since I was a teenager with raging hormones I agreed.

Just before we started dating I had been realizing that I was an atheist. I was raised without religion and it just never occurred to me to put a name on it.

I got to know him and his family and saw that he got along really well with his parents. Now, he is currently in school to be a physician. His family looks like the American Dream, but I know from conversations with them that they believe that the human body has the ability to live for 900 years if the person lives Biblically. They believe that people can choose to be gay, straight, trans, or bisexual. Once Joe said “I’ve thought about dating guys and I find the thought disgusting, so I have decided to be straight”.

It took me 7 months to stop trying to be straight and stop trying to believe in Joe’s religion. I broke up with him when I realized that it was wrong for me to try to change who I was to be in a romantic relationship.

I think that a big part of why I put up with that relationship and denial of my identity was that my school used a curriculum of abstinence-only sex education which ignored or shamed LGBT students and taught religious views on sex as scientific and psychological fact. We were taught that even our “normal” sexual impulses were disgusting and evil, so if someone was LGBT they were even worse in the eyes of our health class. We were taught that sex is a tool for procreation within a marriage and that any other sexual activity would “destroy your reputation”, give you a disease, or make a girl pregnant with an unwanted child. LGBT sex was not mentioned, but it was implied that it was wrong because it did not produce a child and the partners could not be married.

I remember being in that class and thinking that I would wait until marriage to have sex whether I ended up with a man or a woman. Since it was a public school the instructors couldn’t tell us that sex before marriage would send us to hell, but they did make it sound like our lives would be a living hell of disease, depression, and bullying. Only after I graduated did I understand that the class was based on religious opinions about sex and completely devoid of real scientific information. In high school I still believed that if a teacher told me something was based on real science it was true. I didn’t have the presence of mind to research the information my teachers told me because I never doubted it.

I’m in college now and I’m still recovering from the shame about sex and being bisexual that I was taught by that class. Abstinence only education is horrible for LGBT students and straight cisgender students. It led me to deny my own identity for the sake of a relationship and it caused me much shame and pain in my sex and dating life later on.

Introducing the LGBTQ Article Series, Recognizing Pride Month

This week Secular Woman will be featuring stories on LGBT people and their experiences with the oppressive forces of religion. Many queer and gender variant people face horrific and relentless discrimination and hatred from their faith (or former faith), and often from their family who practices a faith which rejects them. Part of our vision is a world where secular values celebrate same-sex love and people of all gender identities and expressions.

The stories this week show how far we have to come as a society and the capacity of the secular, atheist, and humanist communities to embrace LGBTQ people and stand with them in their fight for equality and justice. It is our goal to share these stories with the expectation of increasing understanding in the secular community of the challenges gender and sexual minorities face and the importance of continuing to support their struggle for acceptance and equality.