This post is inspired by Pose season 3. This show is excellent, it really tells the stories of the LGBTQIA+ community so well. There are struggles I already knew but watching the show opened my eyes to the amount of privilege that I live in. Simple things like if I were to decide to get married today, I do not have to be afraid to go out and apply for a license. For those who are a part of the LGBTQIA+ community in many African countries, this is impossible, their lives aren’t as simple. Watching the show made me feel like they live a life of fighting to be counted as human beings with rights.

You may be wondering why season 3 pushed me to write this article, firstly it was extremely emotional but we see a lot more of Pray Tell’s story. He finds out that he has 6 months to live and decides it was time for him to go back to his hometown and right his wrongs. He wanted to talk things out with the people that he loved and when he arrives his mother is happy to see him. His two aunts show up and then he broke the news that he was dying. It broke his mother so much but one of his aunts was the typical Christian. She started going at him about getting saved and whatnot.

She said something that reminded me that I too played a part in making these people’s lives much more difficult. She said, ‘God made you, everything else is a choice.’ When I was still a  ride or die for the church, this was taught to us. I strongly believed that queer people were going to hell, that God loved them but hated what they did. I believed that a little prayer and fasting could ‘change’ them. I was loud about how they were sinning and deserved nothing for as long as they lived the way that they did. And if I am being honest, on most days I was jealous of how well they could strut in their heels.

How is it that the house of the Lord, the place of love could spew so much hate without batting an eyelid? The good news they spread says that being queer means you are broken, it refuses to learn or to listen. When we spoke about queer people it was with disgust and disappointment. We could pinpoint a queer person and be sure to separate ourselves from them as if who they were could be passed onto us by a simple touch. We felt superior and powerful. All that is based on a book written by human beings, hundreds of pages controlling how we treat each other as human beings.

There are still so many people who move the way I used to and it scares me to think about it. I have since grown but I did treat those people inhumanly and I did not realise how much I was scarring them. By calling them abnormal and making them feel like they did not belong, I caused them to hurt. I drove them into depression just because I was cishet. If we really think about it, it means nothing to be cishet or queer. Strip all of that away and what is left are human beings that deserve to be treated equally.

We enjoy the feeling of being in power so much we fail to practice the very love the bible claims we should be giving. The unconditional love that God and Jesus supposedly give us, the one that lives in us we cannot give. We have excuses for the flawed love we show when sexuality comes into play. It is absolutely sickening that we learn to love thieves, rapists and abusers but not people who are just living their truth. We want the queer people to ask for our approval and forgiveness because somehow they hurt us. How?

I am not a part of the LGBTQIA+ community so I cannot fully express what it means to be one of them but this blog post is to remind cishet people that the air you breathe is the very same air they breathe too. You will die and rot, termites will feast on your body the same way theirs will too. There is nothing amazing about you being attracted to the opposite sex, you are just as human as they are. Practice kindness and if that fails try minding your business and stop spreading hate. You have no reason to make the next person’s life difficult because you do not understand who they are. If you truly are Christian then the love we are asking for is one that doesn’t judge or spews hate. CIAO!