(Ukah, 2021: 87). Asakura (2017) found that queer-identifying youth examined and assessed their physical, social, psychological, and financial safety in each context and made intentional decisions about coming out. In the face of violence from family, in schools, and in communities, those who are resilient are able to assess their ability securely to navigate different contexts and to negotiate the expression of identity. This can be compared to ‘code- switching’, a term used by multilingual people who switch back and forth between languages depending on the current environment (Asakura, 2017: 7).
religious communities that ignore issues of sexual identity on the assumption that all attendees are cisgendered and heterosexual, though less overtly hostile, are still harmful as they include heterosexist microaggressions. According to West, Van der Walt, and Koama (2016) the bible- based heteronormativity of Christian churches dictates what is normal, placing a moralising emphasis on what the body should do. Anything that falls outside these parameters is stigmatised as hypersexual, promiscuous, or deviant. It is possible that the differences in religious observance between queer-identifying people and heterosexual cis-gendered people reflect variance in religious communities regarding rejections and affirmations of queer- identifying people. Some religious communities explicitly affirm queer identity, others denounce it as sinful or immoral, while others ignore it completely. In Christianity and Judaism, the Old Testament scriptures in Leviticus (18:22; 20:13) are said to describe homosexual relations as an abomination, while new testament scriptures in the Pauline Epistles (Romans 1:26 – 28; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10) are said to condemn queer relationships (Shurts et al.., 2020).
The sacred scriptures of Islam supposedly also forbid same-sex relations (Hendricks, 2006).
Shurts et al.. (2020) found that these messages lead to an internalisation of religious negativity inducing individuals to struggle with an internalised homophobia. Some participants of the study by Shurts et al.. (2020), Assessing the Intersectionality of Religious and Sexual Identities During the Coming
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Out Process, plead with G-d or another higher power to help them change, and felt betrayed when the change did not occur. Lewis (2003) found that beliefs about homosexuality vary according to religion and the intensity of religious feeling; his findings suggest that Jews are the most accepting and born-again Protestants the most disapproving, along with those who attend religious services frequently, pray frequently, and say that religion is very important in their lives.The suffering is not only experienced from society, but as Lewis, Derlega, Clara and Kuang (2006) write, acknowledging that you belong to a group that is considered to be abnormal and sinful may have both physical and mental health consequences. Therefore, normalising queerness and expressing a queer identity is always in the context of social stigma (Lewis et al.., 2006). If one identifies as a specific gender, then is required to function within the dominant heterosexual norms of that gender then failure (Phejane, 2020) to abide by these norms limits the extent of belonging (Butler, 1999) so that marginalisation and discrimination can encourage conduct that is unfair and inequitable (Woods, 2019). It is not always possible to declare queer-identity through speech, therefore West et al.. (2016) challenge us to consider bodily presence as a performative utterance of one’s queer identity. Livermon (2012, p300) writes in a similar vein::
‘Black queers create freedom through forms of what I term cultural labo[u]r. The cultural labo[u]r of visibility occurs when black queers bring dissident sexualities and gender nonconformity into the public arena. Visibility refers not only to the act of seeing and being seen but also to the process through which individuals make themselves known in the communities as queer subjects. Ultimately visibility is about recognition since it is only through the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings. How that recognition occurs varies and includes the range of sensory perceptions including sight, but also important for my argument, sound in the form of speech acts, public pronouncements, and the act of listening.’
This visibility is policed and is costly as it comes with the risk of being recognised as defiant of the heteronormativity of blackness. Thus, the visibility of QPoC is not only about the acceptance of difference in a black community, but is about defining blackness in a
transformative manner, thereby creating the liberation promised by the Constitution and reviewing the possibilities and limits of post-apartheid South Africa and the salient difference between citizenship and belonging (Livermon, 2012). Boe, Maxey, and Bermudez (2018) argue that racial and queer identity are more salient to those who do not identify with white, male, heteronormative, dominant society. Furthermore, that QPoC experience disconnection from queer communities because of the influences of systemic racism (Boe et al.., 2018).
In a Christian normative context, social stigma can often translate into violence, which can often be justified and tolerated, and religion is used in some measure to condone such acts (Reygan, 2016). In the study by Crockett et al. (2018) which looks at the influence of religious upbringing on identity development and same-sex attraction, it was found that some participants view rejection by religious communities as rejection by G-d. Participants also felt that they needed to make a choice regarding their religious community: and had to either denounce their sexual identity or to abandon their religion in order to embrace their sexual identity. Those that left their religious communities spoke of their religion with anger or distain, while those that remained spoke of their sexual identities in shame-based language (Crockett et al.., 2018). Winder (2015) found that being gay and flamboyant about it was seen as reprehensible; and a participant was cited who described how, instead of condemning acts of violence towards a gay family member, judgement is made of the victim by suggesting his eternal damnation in hell (Winder, 2015). Sibisi and Van der Walt argue that these experiences of judgement and exclusion led QPoC to find alternative spaces of worship that ‘move [their]
queer Christian bodies from the margins of Christianity to the centre of worship without being forced to conform to gender binaries to become visible in the presence of God’ (2021: 67-8).
A sense of community is fostered from within these religious spaces which leads to feelings of
being loved, valued, and cared for because of shared norms of altruism and reciprocity and of common beliefs about suffering (Sherkat and Ellison, 1999).