Queer Christians, Muslims, and Jews on Television: A Closer Look at My Dissertation

By Delaney Couri

My dissertation looks at the ways that queer and religious characters on screen grapple with their sexuality and religious identity. In every job application I have filled out in the past few weeks, I have talked about the importance of getting my dissertation work into the world. I have not written much about it here because talking about queerness and religion in a Texas A&M affiliated space felt a bit odd... But my dissertation topic is not too controversial or too graphic or too gauche to be talked about in public. Instead, it needs to be talked about, written about, and engaged with.

The mere existence of queer and religious individuals shocks some people. There are those who subscribe to organized religion and think that religion and homosexuality are completely incompatible. This positions my dissertation as a logical fallacy, as there is no way to be a faithful member of organized religion and also maintain a “homosexual lifestyle.”

Other individuals who identify as queer also think that religion and homosexuality are completely incompatible. For them, my dissertation is a logical fallacy because there is no way to be truly queer and hold on to an outdated and oppressive institution like an organized religion.

A third group of individuals sees no problem between the two identities, while yet another doesn’t care at all and thinks that everyone should just live their own life and stop talking about it.

Wherever you fall in these groups, my work is important to read, hear, and talk about because queer Christians, Muslims, and Jews are out and about in the world and face unique challenges because of their identities. The way I am trying to spark these conversations is multifaceted. I have worked in different fields, attended different religious events, and worn my own identity on my sleeve in conversations with others. In this blog, I intend to share a little about my findings as yet another way to further the conversation surrounding queer inclusion in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities.

During my research, I discovered that queer Muslims, Jews, and Christians on television are always shown as feeling a tension between their queer and religious identities. For some characters, that comes from family pressures, while for others it is religious authority. Either way, each character has someone in their life that assures them they must be straight if they are to truly follow religion. As a queer Christian person myself, I find this argument untenable. Every day I walk around as a queer Christian and my characters simultaneously enact their religiosity and queerness, too.

Of all the characters I studied, my favorites were the ones who pushed back against the systems that told them they did not belong. In particular one character, a Muslim mother, struck me as especially affirming in the way she encouraged her son to live as his authentic self. Her casual invocation of divine presence acting in her son’s life showed the ways that queer individuals onscreen can be openly loved and accepted. Another character who I found inspiring was an aspiring rabbi who queered binaries everywhere they went. This  character refused to be held back by institutional religious binaries and actively worked to remake sacred Jewish rituals to match their body and lived experience. The last character whose experience I fell in love with was a gay Black male who worked to change his church from within. Unfortunately, when he argued for full inclusion of his queer body, his religious community rejected him. This reality displayed on screen is painful, but the character’s response was empowering as he set out to make his own church with support from his God. Characters from all backgrounds, gender identities, Abrahamic religious traditions, ages, races, and sexualities fell into this broad category of characters who combined their religious and queer identities to mark themselves as fully queer and fully beloved.

While these characters are the ones who impacted me the most, my research also found that some characters had a harder time fully integrating their identities. Some of these characters chose to embody queer identities in queer spaces only and religious identities in religious spaces only. In other words, they hid their sexuality from their religious counterparts and hid their religious identity from their queer friends. This group of characters provided me with the most nuanced analysis, as the traditional “coming out” narrative can be empowering, but is also not possible or even desired for all queer individuals. Learning the ways that immigration status and race molded the potentiality for queer and religious acceptance challenged me to think deeper about what I know about the United States and the ways that it falls short of acceptance for all. I related heavily to one of the characters in this chapter, a gay white Midwestern man who throughout the course of the show found and lost his Christian identity time and time again. Another character, a lesbian Muslim woman, also ended up inhabiting this liminal space as a way to maintain her safety in a homophobic and Islamaphobic environment. These characters ultimately found love, hope, and acceptance through their intimate relationships and prove that being queer and religious is not a one-size-fits all identity, but rather an ongoing process of self-acceptance.

The last set of characters I studied chose not to reconcile their queer and religious identities, but rather to hold firm to their beliefs that the two could not be held at the same time. While these characters were displayed on screen as making this decision for themselves, they did not push or force others to do the same. These characters were not my favorite to write about because I worried about the ways that their stories could be used to validate distrust toward their religious community or the queer community broadly. However, they too have something to say about the realities of the pressure to choose that many queer religious individuals are faced with in reconciling their identities. What I do appreciate about these characters is that they were represented as not universalizing their beliefs, meaning that neither one tried to change the other, as one chose to maintain ties to religion and one did not. The relationship between these characters and their identities shows that organized religion is not for everyone and that some individuals choose to walk away from systems that have harmed them in the past.

Taken together, my dissertation and my life work represents a journey of heartache and joy. Religious and queer communities are both some of the most close knit, authentic, loving kinship groups that I have encountered both onscreen and in my life. When they come together, there is joy to be found, but all too often when they collide heartbreak soon follows. That is why this work matters. Because, even though my dissertation is about televised representations of gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, non-binary, and transgender Christians, Muslims, and Jews, I am doing this work on behalf of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, non-binary, and transgender Christians, Muslims, and Jews that I know and love in my own life. If you’ve read this far and you are a queer Muslim, Christian, or Jewish individual who has ever struggled with your faith and sexuality, I see you. Know that you are represented onscreen as fully human and fully loved. If you are not, but you identify as religious or queer, consider who is and who is not invited to the tables you sit around in your life. Then ask yourself why that is, and what you can learn from these televised representations of queer and religious identity.

My dissertation, though not as methodologically flashy as a STEM project, matters. Getting this work into the read world matters. After all, when a character declares that the Abrahamic God is on the side of queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals, the results can be lifesaving.