Being queer and Christian: why the Gospel is born in the margins

Text by Brandan Robertson* taken from Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table, publisher Castle Point Books (United States), 2025. Freely translated by the volunteers of the Gionata Project

I've always been a queer person, although it took me a long time to recognize It. even after i came out as a gay person, i still felt uncomfortable with the word queer.

Like many people, I grew up hearing it used mostly as an insult. Even today, in many parts of the world, it is perceived this way.

I remember the shocked look of the audience at a conference in rural England when I said that word: it was as if I had said something deeply offensive. That's how it is queer resonates with many people, even some LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asex) people.

Col tempo, però, mentre facevo i conti con la mia identità, studiavo la storia dei movimenti di liberazione delle persone LGBTQIA nel mondo e maturavo le mie convinzioni, ho iniziato a sentire che questa parola mi apparteneva davvero. Oggi mi riconosco profondamente come persona queer, tanto quanto mi riconosco come cristiano.

Anzi, per me le due cose non sono in contraddizione. Essere un cristiano autentico, una persona che cerca davvero di seguire la vita e le parole di Gesù di Nazaret, significa essere una persona queer.

Quando parlo di persona queer, non intendo soltanto una questione di orientamento sessuale o di identità di genere, anche se questo può farne parte. Intendo qualcosa di più ampio e più profondo.

Essere una persona queer significa vivere in tensione con ciò che ci circonda, rifiutare norme arbitrarie, inventare linguaggi nuovi, trovare spazi per respirare, parlare, fiorire. Significa resistere alle forze che cercano di reprimere il nostro vero io e che ci chiedono di conformarci a modelli che non ci somigliano.

Per me, essere una persona queer è una dichiarazione radicale di fedeltà alla vita. È scegliere di essere ciò che Dio mi ha creato, invece di ciò che la società, la comunità o persino la religione vorrebbero che fossi.

In this sense, being a queer person is something profoundly holy. It is affirming that God does not make mistakes, that our uniqueness reflects divine creativity, and rejecting the idea that limiting or suffocating this uniqueness can be an act of faith.

Experienced in this way, queerness does not only concern some people, but becomes a possible vocation for everyone. Following Jesus means not letting yourself be passively shaped by the world as it is, but letting yourself be transformed.

It is a change of gaze, of the way of thinking, of the way of being in relationships (...) learning to take off the masks that we have been taught to wear and to release the light that has often been covered out of fear.

In this profound sense, being a queer person means walking the same path as Jesus. Jesus was an uncomfortable presence, on the margins of the religious and political institutions of his time.

He questioned what was considered "normal", he resisted every doctrine that excluded, he chose to be on the side of people marginalized. For this reason, I would say that my faith has increasingly become a queer faith: a faith that is not satisfied with being accepted, but which dares to transform.

Over time i understood that the problem is not simply being included in structures that continue to do harm (...). The problem is that those structures, such as they are, often look nothing like Jesus.

This is why today I don't just dream of a place for queer people within traditional Christianity. I dream of a transformed, reformed Christianity, crossed by a spirituality capable of welcoming diversity as a gift.

Being a queer person, for me, means exactly this: not seeking the tranquility of conformity, but having the courage of fidelity to the Gospel of love. Even when this means being called heretical, inconvenient, exaggerated. Even when it means staying on the sidelines. Because it is often from the margins that new life is born.

This is where i speak from. as A queer person. As a Believer. from someone who has learned, slowly, that being yourself before god Is not a problem to be solved, but a vocation to live.

* Brandan Robertson is an American evangelical Christian theologian, writer and activist engaged in dialogue between faith, social justice and the inclusion of LGBTQIA people. He is an ordained progressive Protestant pastor and holds a Master of Divinity from the Iliff School of Theology (Denver, United States). He is the author of numerous books dedicated to the relationship between Christianity and LGBTQIA people, including True Inclusion (2018), Nomad (2019), Unclobber (2020) and Queer & Christian (2025). His writings are widely used in pastoral and ecclesial contexts engaged in inclusive rereading of the Bible.

Original text: Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table