The paradox of the cross for a Christian LGBT+

Text by ISH RUIZ*, published in New Ways Ministry (United States) on September 14, 2025. Freely translated by the volunteers of the Gionata project.

I grew up in Puerto Rico, Queer and Catholic, and it was not easy.
When I realized that I tried attraction for other guys, a deep crisis opened inside me.

All I had learned in the church and school told me that my identity queer was a cross to bring. I thought my task was to suffer because of this part of me and, despite everything, try to follow Jesus as I could best. For years I really believed it was so.

But over time I realized that I was wrong. My cross was not 'to be queer. The cross was another. I discovered it gradually: thanks to the therapy, the spiritual direction, but also dancing until late at night in gay bars, where the freedom of the body returned me a sense of life. I understood that the real weight I brought was the intolerance I met around me.

The cross was the exclusion generated by rigid theologies and outdated teachings. The cross was the racism that i even experienced in certain spaces, i who was puerto rican and with dark skin. The cross were those attempts, explicit or thin, of making me ashamed of who I was. that was the suffering I brought. that's my cross.

And then I discovered something that changed my life: my queerness was not a punishment, but a gift. A gift of Jesus. It was my own queer identity that gave me the strength to bear those crosses. He taught me resilience, he gave me creativity, joy, imagination, and the possibility of binding me to other people on the margins.

He taught me to stay solidarity with those who carry weights even bigger than mine. Far from being a curse, this gift has become life, a lens through which I could see Jesus more clearly.

The feast of the exaltation of the Holy Cross takes us right there, inside this paradox. The tool of torture and humiliation becomes a sign of victory and love. In the first reading, the people complain in the desert and are bitten by the snakes. God says to Moses to raise a bronze snake: whoever looks will live it.

A story that appears almost strange to us, yet anticipates the cross. In the Gospel of John, Jesus himself resumes the symbol: "As Moses raised the snake in the desert, so the son of man must be raised, because whoever believes in him has eternal life". What brings death becomes, raised, a healing tool. And what had to humiliate Jesus becomes a source of salvation.

We know this paradoxical logic well, we queer people. We have been told too many times that our identity is shame, curse, too bad. And we often ended up believing it.

But when we learn to welcome who we are like sons and daughters loved by God, then our life becomes a sign of grace. When we raise our joy queer, what others have refused becomes a source of healing and gift for the world.

St. Paul says it with words that touch me deeply: Christ, despite being in the condition of God, has emptied himself, made himself a servant, he humiliated himself until his death, and to the death of Croce.

His life shows us how to live our humanity in fullness, how to rejoice in what we are and, even in the face of death, remain firm in love to be reborn to new life.

This is why today I can say: Jesus is queer. I don't know if it were in a sexual or identity, and perhaps we will never know. But surely it was in the most true sense: he lived outside the box, he was misunderstood, excluded, put to the margins by the religious authorities of his time.

He challenged the oppressive logics of power and purity, and showed us that the love of God does not bend to the criteria of human respectability. To say that Jesus is queer means recognizing that he knows what it means to live on the margins, and that he knows how to transform that marginality into grace and salvation.

Here is the hope of the cross: do not enhance the suffering, but to call it for what it is - unjust, cruel, the result of systems that crush.

The cross reminds us that that suffering is not the last word. The last word is the resurrection. It is life. It is love. Exalting the cross means proclaiming that God is capable of transforming even this into new possibilities.

And for me this translates into a simple certainty: my queerness is not the cause of my suffering. Rather, it is the gift of the spirit that allows me to resist and transform the wounds of exclusion, racism, shame.

My queerness binds me to the mystery of the cross, where the love of God meets human pain and opens it to streets that I would never have imagined before.

*ISH Ruiz is Assistant Professor of Queer & Latinx Decolonial Theology at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is the author of the volume LGBTQ+ Educators in Catholic Schools: Embracing Synobitity, Inclusively, and Justice and Cornerstone Co-Curator: Sacred Stories of LGBTQ+ Employees in Catholic Institutions.

Original text: The Paradox of the Cross and the Queerness of Jesus