This is the opening paragraph from the paper I presented at MCC’s “Who Are We Really? Re-engaging Sex & Spirit” Online Symposium on Thursday, October 15, 2015. [Download Full Paper]

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. Looking upon the Holy Trinity of my faith heritage, Roman Catholicism, I do not believe this patriarchal image of God, or Imago Dei in Latin represents a true image of God for queer people. Marcella Althaus-Reid refers to the holiness in Heterosexual Theology as being always the holiness of the Other.[1] With the marginalized being seen as the Other by the dominate segment of a society, I agree with Althaus-Reid’s notion and believe that we queers need to find the holiness within a queered image of God. Queer people require something spiritual that is also seen as the Other. In this conversation, it is my intention to create a bridge between the traditional concepts of the Holy Trinity and with the queer world in which many of us live and thrive.[2]  I will explore queering the Holy Trinity. It is not my intention to destroy the Holy Trinity or dress it up in sparkly rainbows to make it seem queer. Through my prophetic delusions that some might call heretical, I propose a way to queerly look at the Holy Trinity, to create a more personal image of God for a queer cis-man like myself. I will explore the influences of the BDSM community[3] and the drag culture as well as the use of metaphors in this conversation. ^[4] I will begin queering the Holy Trinity by discarding the word ‘Holy’ for the remainder of this conversation.

[1] Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (LONDON: Routledge, 2003), 154

[2] Mary Donovan Turner, The God We Seek: Portraits of God in the Old Testament (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2011), 121.

[3] Bondage, Discipline and SadoMasochism

[4] Merriam-Webster – Metaphors are a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.