Pauline
My name is Pauline. I never thought I was straight.
I didn’t even realize I was queer until I was in college and had left my parents’ house, but looking back – there had always been something running under my fascination with and fixations on girls.
Pronouns: she/her
Photo of Pauline
I grew up in a household with Korean parents and a dad who was a pastor in a Korean immigrant church. My faith and ethnicity have always been firmly tied together, in a way that’s hard for me to separate even now. But my faith and sexuality always seemed at odds, especially when attending a Christian college. In myself, they were more or less the same – queerness was who I was, and being a Christian is what I chose to be – but I constantly heard messages that you couldn’t be a Christian if you were gay. I tried to leave God, and she told me I was loved. I was needed. The spirit always stayed with me, a balm over the hurt that was coming from the conflict in the church and everywhere else I looked. So I chose to stay too. God loved all of me, not despite any part of me – all.
For a long time, I was very alone in this slow reconciliation of the basic truth of who I was and the love that I deserved. I always had queer friends, but at the time I seemed to have friends who were either queer or Christian. Some of us didn’t know we were both back then, and it’s pretty glorious to see where we are today. It took me a long time to come out to my parents, much longer after I came out to myself, but they have been loving and supportive for the most part, in a way that I could not have imagined.
My community is everything to me now. As someone who is queer and Asian and Christian, seeing that reflected around me is a true joy. I have a voice that deserves to be centered. When churches deny the connection and abundance of God’s love that queerness brings to faith, they deny God themselves – and that is a loss. My faith is now an actual, literal rainbow of different and changing perspectives, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
To young queer Christians, or anyone reading this: be safe, but never settle. You deserve something beautiful, in which you can be all of who you are. You can always change, and there will always be a God who loves you for all your simplicity and complexity too. Reach out and ask for help. You can ask for the love you deserve. Anyone who says that you can’t be more than one thing is wrong, and that’s on them. The life ahead of you is infinitely more exciting than anything they can imagine. Love yourself first, even if the church tells you it’s selfish. I wish you every happiness in this life. I wish you the best kind of love.
Photo of Pauline
