Day 6 - Did you face any problems regarding religion?
I had long suspected the Christian god didn't love me. I was raised Methodist with forays into Lutheranism and Baptist churches. We were Premillennialists, firmly believing in the Rapture. I was fairly convinced God would forget me, regardless of my faith.
When I realized I was bisexual, I was horrified. Now I knew why God hated me. Gays were destroying the country. They were killing real people with their disease (this was the 80s). They were undermining families and making a mockery of them by pretending to get married in "commitment ceremonies." As if two men could really love each other! They even made us lose the Vietnam war!
As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I went to a church whose primary difference with Westboro was "We're NICE people. We don't use that dreadful word and we don't picket on corners."
I later used this in the novel Alive on the Inside.
So I hid for years. I buried myself in the most sex-segregated, strictest fundamentalism I could, hoping if I was devout enough and worked hard enough, and bred enough God-Warriors to take back the country and never, ever thought about girls, I would become a real woman and God would maybe forget the gay part and let me be saved.
It didn't work. We began drifting out of fundamentalism around 2000, and I searched. I tried mainstream Christianity, Cambellian Christianity (The Monomyth, using Christian metaphors), agnosticism, pantheism and finally Hellenistic paganism.
The gods of my ancestors, Nuada andFreyja, never called me. Hera did and Hermes did.
It has been interesting but never easy.
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