All Those Who Are Not Pure Must Be Denied: An Argument for Religious Conditioning Being Bullshit

I’m watching Queens. I’ve been waiting to watch this show forever, for an entire show to be about Black women calling themselves “Nasty Bitches,” to be on Primetime slots in Canada, is pretty fucking huge, especially since Black women are the most under-represented women in this country.

In one scene, Jill is told by her Catholic priest that she can’t accept the eucharist, specifically because she has come out as gay.

I grew up in a world where it was expected that I want to get married to a man, in a church, after confessing all my sins to grown-ass men who have no problem protecting centuries worth of pedophiles, rapists, and sexual abusers, because they are divined by God, to tell me whether or not I am worthy of getting into heaven.

About six weeks ago I posted on Twitter that I might be gay, and the more that I think about it, the more that I realize it might be true, but not because I am genetically predisposed to being with a woman. If I am gay it’s because the person that I might fall in love with and marry one day might be a woman or a trans person, I don’t know, because I’ve never been allowed to explore MY sexuality in a way that makes ME comfortable.

I’ve spent my whole life, being abused into being with men, without being given a choice about who I wanted to be with, and now I am 38 years old, realizing that I might not be the person that everyone wants me to be. I’m okay with it.

I’m okay with falling down, making mistakes, and trying to discover who it is I am supposed to be, but I am not okay with the world thinking they have a right to tell me who to be, because they read my blog, or talk to me on Twitter. This is especially true when it comes to men.

I have a platform that is designed around being yourself, but if at 38 years old, you don’t entirely know who that is, or what it means to be yourself, how do you teach others? You take it one day at a time.

More and more, even though I still smoke weed and have the occasional sip or ten of wine, the narcotics anonymous steps are coming in handy when it comes to holding myself accountable, often publically. It also helps to get me to organize my thoughts. I’m not saying everyone should do the steps, I’m just saying they help.

Somewhere in a big city, or a small town, a woman, or even a man, is thinking that she or he, they or them, aren’t good enough to be themselves. Because everyone in their community is telling them, you, that who you are, isn’t good enough.

It’s 2022, everyone on Earth is a little gay or a little bisexual, and you aren’t to be shamed for thinking about two beautiful people making love, or pile driving each other into insatiable insanity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, the WRONG part comes when someone tells you and continues to try to condition you to believe that finding happiness in this hell hole, means giving up eternity so you can suffer for the crime of being happy.

I remember how many of my girlfriends back in the day were in such a rush to “settle down,’ to have roots, before they’d learned to fly. So many of them are like me now. Watching Queens on television instead of being a Queen in real life.

We get stomped on, beaten down, and treated like crap because it’s easier to stomp on the ones that love you, than it is to support their dreams and vision for the future.

It’s easy to convince women who are Queens, to listen to the conditioning, then it is to set them free, but what if we want more than that? What if we want to start dating women? What if we want to start dating men? What if we want to stop putting a label on every single thing we do, and every relationship we have because honestly we just don’t know which one fits yet?

Where do we start, what do we do? How do we get started? Where do we find the self-confidence to make the leap and take the risk and find ourselves so that we can be the happiest version of ourselves?

Stop watching Queens, go be one.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall