Growing Up Queer in a Catholic School
I always joke to people who feel nervous about impending exams, assignments and interviews, “If you ever feel unprepared for anything, just remember that my parents sent me to Catholic school without ever having sent me to Church.”
Everyone has formative memories; the first time they encountered something that would later become a significant part of their lives. My first memory of Catholic high school was the double-whammy of bewilderment and embarrassment I felt as they asked us to do the “sign of the cross,” and I was the only one in the room who didn’t know how. My first memories of crushes, and the curiosities that come along with them, happened during pretend games with imagination-fuelled friends from the films and TV shows that I loved. They were almost always girls.
Catholicism and queerness are two parts of my identity that are unavoidable, but also almost irreconcilable. We learned the prayers, read the Bible, went to Mass and even watched as the Papal visit to the United Kingdom was broadcasted on a large screen at the local Racecourse. Nine years later, I’m only just beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, and I still have no idea what it really means to be a Catholic.
The first words that come to mind? Suffering, Forgiveness, Judgement, Love. They’re full of contradictions, just like my school was. They were a liberal institution politically and socially. They placed emphasis on a doctrine of care, understanding, and amity. Yet our education was wholly heterosexual. We spent weeks packing shoeboxes to send to children across the globe, but we never once talked about Pride. Conversations about gayness were limited to demoralizing class “discussions” about whether gay couples should be allowed to marry, adopt or use IVF; and sex education was entirely heteronormative.
But this story isn’t just about the bullying I experienced. It’s about the bullying I saw. The bullying we condoned when we let it go unchallenged. Queerness was a weapon utilized against people outside the school’s acceptable social circle, and it was inextricably linked with perversion. The meek, bookish girl who liked Lolita fashion was declared a lesbian because she had accidentally walked in on the thin, pretty blonde girl while she was getting dressed on a school trip. “It was the way she looked at me,” she had told everyone who would listen afterwards. The “fat” girl who had acne and didn’t wash was a lesbian because attacking the most vulnerable people in school never got boring for the top clique. If these girls weren’t ostracized enough, the queer label my peers attached to them was their death sentence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a year group of 250, there was only one person who risked coming out. He was quiet, intelligent, and no one noticed him. Until he was gay. Suddenly, his friends spread rumours that he had tried to inappropriately touch them. Boys refused to talk to him, just like girls refused to talk to other girls who were suspected of being anything other than completely straight. One particularly nasty teacher, an Irish woman who had once told me I deserved to be harassed if I ever talked to my bully, pulled him into her office and told him how inappropriate it was. That he was gay. That he was a pervert. How it was wrong. She still works there.
No matter how loving the school claimed to be, there was still a very strong message; being Catholic and queer was not okay. And nobody stood up to that.
But then, in some ways, being at Catholic school was just like being at any other school. Especially when it came to bullies. There were the girls who tripped me down the stairs. The one who wrote nasty messages on my coat in permanent marker. The ones who stole things from my locker. Sometimes they spread secrets you had entrusted them with, and sometimes they made them up just because they wanted to watch you get beat up by the tall girl who sat next to you in Spanish class. Usually, they left their scars and left you alone.
And then there were the others. The group of girls who forced me into the “pastoral” room, locked the door and ganged up, demanding to know why I had stopped hanging out with them. There was one girl in particular, another former friend who turned the resentment of broken “sisterhood” into vitriolic hatred. Perhaps I said “no” too much. I didn’t want to skip lessons and hide behind the school stage, light-up half-smoked cigarettes she’d found on the floor or spend lunchtimes in bathroom stalls, looking at pictures on her phone sent by 19 year-old-boys who didn’t understand what statutory rape was. Not long after escaping from that toxic friendship, I was being harassed with hateful text messages, confronted with nasty rumors, being sent links to Facebook groups set up purely to humiliate me and being shouted at in the middle of lunch breaks so loudly that adults had to intervene. By the end of the year, there were days I was so scared to walk home that I got car-lifts from sympathetic teachers.
The worst kind of bullying came from the people you thought you could trust. Teachers who took the side of the emotionally manipulative friend I was trying to cut ties with. The ones who claimed to have helped me deal with the worst bout of bullying, and then got mad because I had offered my former tormentor the same kind of forgiveness I thought my Catholic faith had taught me to be so generous with. There was the priest who picked on me in R.E lessons because I wasn’t as well-versed on the Bible as other students, and the people I admired. I watched as they got increasingly frustrated when I couldn’t make friends after my best friend was deported. I listened as they told me I would never make friends if I spent all of my time in the library.
I wasn’t a popular kid, but I wasn’t an outcast. I teetered on the cliff edge; and I think a part of me knew that if I were to be open about my sexuality, the balance would shift the wrong way. I was so scared that I refused to even question it myself.
In the span of seven years, I learned what it meant to be queer in a Catholic school. The bullying. The othering. The ostracizing. I’d known that I was attracted to girls since I was a child. But instead of exploring this, I spent seven years pushing it so far down that there came a point when I no longer knew it existed. It wasn’t that I was pretending to be straight — I was just genuinely convinced that it was the truth.
When I was 16, the school began to split up. Some went off to a local further-education college, and those of us who were more academic stayed on to study at our Catholic school, now a home. It was our first taste of being treated like adults. We had all grown, and the bullying all-but stopped. More people quietly came out, and for the first time I began to question the heterosexual label I had so rigidly forced myself under.
The revelation came at University. In my first year, I met other girls who were also beginning to question their sexuality. Girls who already knew they were queer. We spent long nights in the shared kitchens discussing it over hot cocoa. The word “bisexual” truly entered my vocabulary for the first time. In my second year, I was bold enough to join the LGBTQ+ society and began to casually tell my family, to talk about it on Twitter, online and in my writing.
Am I still a Catholic? That depends on who you ask. To some, it’s unthinkable to question the Church; to others, it’s encouraged. Some say you’re not a Catholic if you don’t attend Mass every Sunday (I still don’t), and some say you can’t renounce your Catholicism unless you formally defect from the Church. I don’t believe everything the Church says. Heck, I don’t believe everything in the Bible. But my experience with Catholicism has still formed a large part of my identity that I cannot let go of.
There are those in the Church who think I’ll go to hell just because of who I might fall in love with. I met some of those at school. There are those who think they’re better Christians because, while they still believe I’m damned, they tolerate and “accept” me (I met a lot of those at school).
And there are those who don’t judge. Who love unconditionally. There are Catholics I love and admire who also question the Bible, who are also queer. Those people alone help keep the flame of my faith from being extinguished.
There are people who don’t think I belong in the Church because I am bisexual; but there are also people who think I don’t belong in the LBGT community for the same reason.
It’s going to be a long time before I can truly reconcile these two important aspects of my identity. But I couldn’t be more excited to finally be discovering myself with the honesty I deserve, and have been repressing for so long.
