When I realize that my one-year anniversary with my boyfriend is on Easter Sunday, I text Merray. “That’s … a lot,” she jokes. Both of us had grown up Christian: me Chinese Baptist, her Coptic Orthodox. She texts me about her girlhood Easter dress: an empire waist baby-doll top with cap sleeves. It made her disdain her breasts because she saw herself as one of “the Boys”. We’re both queer. We have since left the church, but still talk about God. Now in our 30s, we have slid back into some version of our childhood spirituality, but would sooner meet the Holy Spirit on a dance floor than at a church. Consider us lapsed atheists.
When I was teenager, gay and closeted, I remember church leaders marched against gay marriage up and down the California suburbs. I found the Book of Romans cheerless: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and “For the wages of sin is death”. Even Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, that the desire to commit adultery was as sinful as actually committing adultery. So there was no getting around sin. Yet I believed I was young and innocent, and I did not deserve death. There had to be another way. One day, I would move to New York and become an atheist. I thought it was that simple.
