Community Stories: Growing Up LGBTQ In A Religious Community by Chris Brown

Monthly we share stories straight from the mouths and hearts from the Sanctus Community. This story comes from Chris Brown, suicide prevention trainer, LGBTQ+ mental health advocate and facilitator. This is her story….

I am a 43-year-old queer woman, and it surprised me recently to realise that even now, I still carry a modicum of shame about my sexual orientation — even now, after lots of therapy, working for a fantastic LGBTQ charity and teaching LGBTQ+ awareness training sessions as part of my work. This shame, which was seeded very early in my life, has long had an impact on my mental health.

I grew up in a Christian family attending a small Church of England church. The earliest messages that I heard about sex was that it was only allowed only in a marriage between a man and a woman — pleasuring yourself was a sin and seen by God as a selfish act. On top of this learning I was given clear, stark messages about ‘homosexuality:’ God ‘hates the sin but loves the sinner;’ people aren’t born gay but have made a lifestyle choice; they are called by God to be celibate but God may ‘heal’ them and help them to be ‘straight.’ I understood from all this that if anyone lived as gay, they would go to hell for all eternity and would be separated from God’s love and their families forever.

At 15, realising that I had some romantic/sexual feelings towards women, I was awash with guilt and shame which led to resistance and denial, and self-hatred. At this time there was a ‘revival’ movement in parts of the Anglican church which led to very fundamentalist, evangelical, Bible-based teachings. Feeling guilty about my feelings for women, I tried to find salvation several times over through being ‘born again’ at various church events for youth. This led to many cycles of religious euphoria, renewed efforts to remain pure in thought, and then the inevitable falling short which always led to me feeling consumed with guilt and shame. These cycles really came to damage my faith and filled me with doubt about a loving God. In my despair I spoke to church members who knew that I needed help with my faith; they were compassionate but reinforced the idea that all sex — even masturbation — is a sin unless in the context of a heterosexual marriage ordained by God.
The early learning I received from the Church about my very identity being sinful, wrong and immoral sowed the seeds for deep and profound guilt, shame and subsequent mental health problems.

For years I was too scared to tell anyone about my feelings towards women — in my late teens and early twenties I didn’t even dare think I might be lesbian; the most I could allow myself to imagine was that I might be a bit bi. However, I never had any romantic or sexual feelings for men. Starting at sixth-form helped me a little, as for the first time — I met a few queer people, but I was still trying to please God, as I believed that my very life (after death) depended on it. At home, in my family, I was really struggling with my faith, and with the Church, especially with the very limited roles that existed at that time for women in the church.

I would love to encourage any other LGBTQ+ people growing up in faith communities that a life of love, heaven on earth, is possible, and there is support for you — take good care of your mental health and ask for support: know that you are not alone.

I gradually stopped going to church and withdrew from saying grace at family meals. Leaving home and starting a new life at university was a major turning point for. On my first day, I was invited to come to the Women’s Group, where I met openly queer women for the first time in my life. They were ordinary, unafraid and open and it turned my world upside-down. A couple of weeks after that, I kissed a woman for the first time. I remember taking the night bus home through the city and seeing pubs with the brewery sign ‘Courage’ lit up in the dark; I took the word to heart and continued to see this woman for several months. In my second year, I fell in love for the first time in my life. When I came home for the holidays, my then-girlfriend was writing letters to me there, and I asked my Christian sister to hide love letters for me that came in the post when I wasn’t there.
Here, the burden of my guilty secret really started to take its toll on my mental health. For a couple of years now I’d been having liaisons with women, and now had a girlfriend with whom I was in love. Keeping all this from my parents made me feel so ashamed and dirty. I knew their position as we had discussed the issues before.

This hopelessness and guilt about living a lie really laid the foundations for the almost constant and repeated cycles of depression, along with frequent anxiety, that plagued me throughout my twenties. I would develop terrible tension headaches every time I went to stay with my parents and had a frequent lump of fear in my throat. I eventually came out to my parents when I could no longer bear to hide the fact that I was in love. Coming out was very hard and the pain of its aftermath contributed to further depression and anxiety. My parents made it very clear that they would always love me, but that my sexual orientation and behaviour were sinful and they would never approve. I was going against God’s will for my life and this would have consequences in the afterlife. As a result, for the first time in my life I accessed counselling at the university and gradually came to a terrifying decision. If I wanted any chance of happiness on this earth, of being in a sexual, romantic relationship with a woman, I’d have to turn my back on God. I felt desperately frightened about turning my back on God, but couldn’t allow myself to live a lifetime alone in the hopes of eternal life, especially when I’d come to doubt that a loving God would ask that of me.The subsequent grief and loss of what I perceived as the loss of my going to heaven, of divine love, of approval from my parents, of God himself were very hard to live with. Depression became a big part of my twenties, which were also coloured by a very difficult period of working front line in mental health services and also becoming a part-time caregiver for my increasingly unwell mother. The landscape of my life felt heavy, oppressive, dark and unendingly depressing. The light of it was a relationship that lasted for 6 years, with a woman who taught me to trust — a little — in God’s love for me, and that there was nothing unhealthy or sinful about our relationship. Even so, my anxiety never left me and remains with me still, with a diagnosis of General Anxiety Disorder. I firmly believe that the lessons I learned at a young age have been a major influence on my mental health. The belief, instilled in me as a child, that my very self was flawed, wrong and sinful created a constant tension within me. This was compounded in being at school during the time of Thatcher’s terrible Section 28, which forbid the promotion of ‘homosexual lifestyles’ and meant that no teacher could explain that some people are LGBTQ, and that’s OK. I felt that not just my faith community but the secular world too had joined forces to make me, and so many others, hate ourselves and feel invisible and ashamed. Impossible to imagine the difference in my life had I grown up with messages of inclusion, affirmation and love. I would have been saved so much emotional labour, mental health, money, energy and time. My heart breaks a little for all of us whose mental and emotional health has been damaged by growing up in such times and environments.

So, let’s fast forward to my early forties. I’m joyfully married to a woman I’ve been with for 10 years and couldn’t be happier with, and I have 20 years’ experience of working within the voluntary sector in mental health and suicide prevention education. Two years ago I started working part-time with an LGBTQ charity — and to my surprise, I came to realise through that work that I still experienced self-stigma in relation to my sexual orientation. This has been pretty much dissolved now through my work: engaging with LGBTQ communities and delivering LGBTQ-inclusion training in healthcare settings. My family is very supportive of me and very accepting of my wife who has been warmly welcomed into our family. Anxiety is still an almost-constant companion but I am learning to live with it through acceptance and working with it, rather than resisting and bracing against it. The queer community is another antidote to anxiety and shame and I am so grateful to my queer family for their support too.

Over time, I have come to my own way of feeling connected to God, to divine love, and feel more at peace as a result. The Church of England has been making some great strides towards LGBTQ inclusion and I can only imagine the positive impact on mental, emotional and physical health that this work may have on its membership.

I would love to encourage any other LGBTQ+ people growing up in faith communities that a life of love, heaven on earth, is possible, and there is support for you — take good care of your mental health and ask for support: know that you are not alone.

-Chris