Rainbow Theology. Patrick S. Cheng
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Boston; Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts; Metropolitan Community Churches Theologies Team; National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance; Queer Asian Spirit; and Society of Christian Ethics. I am grateful for a 2012 summer fellowship awarded by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning that partially funded my work on this book.
In addition to the persons and communities mentioned above, I am grateful for the friendship, support, and inspiration of the following queer of color theologians, religion scholars, and allies: Victor Anderson, Margaret Aymer Oget, Rudy Busto, Monica Coleman, James Cone, Shawn Copeland, Miguel De La Torre, Aman De Sondy, Kelly Brown Douglas, Orlando Espín, Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé, Horace Griffin, Jen Harvey, Renée Hill, Zayn Kassam, Eric Law, Benny Liew, Leng Lim, Irene Monroe, Su Pak, Laurel Schneider, Roger Sneed, Emilie Townes, and Traci West. I am also thankful for the ongoing friendship and wisdom of Faith Cantor, Kitt Cherry, Jessica Greenleaf, Kim Leary, Mary McKinney, Christine Pao, Amy Revell, Joe Robinson, Tom Shaw, Bob Shore-Goss, Geoffrey Tristram, Renee Ward, and Pam Werntz.
As always, I am grateful to the wonderful folks at Seabury Books, including my editor, Davis Perkins, and his colleagues Nancy Bryan, Mark Dazzo, Bill Falvey, Ryan Masteller, Deirdre Morrissey, Lillian Ort, Lorraine Simonello, and Laurie Westhafer.
I give thanks to my family, including Deanna Cheng, Andrew Cheng, Abi Karlin-Resnick, Jordan Cheng, and Noah Cheng. Last but not least, I could not have written this book—let alone pursued my vocation as a theologian, seminary professor, and ordained minister—without the steadfast love and support of my husband, Michael Boothroyd, and our dog, Chartres.
When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s, I looked forward each year to the annual network television broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. My favorite part of the movie was when it transitioned from black and white to dazzling Technicolor. The first part of the movie, when Dorothy and Toto are in Kansas, was shot in black and white. After Dorothy and Toto are transported over the rainbow, however, they step out of their monochromatic house into the multicolored hues of Munchkinland. Dorothy is greeted by Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, and Glinda urges the Munchkins to “come out, come out, wherever you are.”1
Somehow I imagined that my own coming out process as a gay man would be just like Dorothy and Toto’s transition from black and white into Technicolor. After all, gay men loved The Wizard of Oz and even called themselves “friends of Dorothy.” That is, I would be transported from the closet—a monochromatic black and white space—into a fabulous rainbow-colored space that was the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (“LGBTIQ” or “queer”) community.2
Unfortunately, my coming out process as a gay man was far less fabulous than I had imagined. This was due in large part to the fact that I am also an Asian American man. I quickly found out that to be a person of color within the LGBTIQ community posed its own set of challenges. When I came out of the closet in the mid-1980s in college, I thought I was a unicorn. That is, I thought that I was a one-of-a-kind mythical creature because everyone I knew in the gay and lesbian community was white, and everyone I knew in the Asian American community was straight.3
Not only did I not know other LGBTIQ people of color, but I was actively excluded from parts of gay culture. When I went to a gay bar in Washington, D.C., with my white gay friends from college, I was asked to show several forms of identification, whereas my friends were not.4 And once I was allowed inside the bar, I felt completely invisible. Nobody talked to me or said hello. So much for being “somewhere over the rainbow.” I was stuck in a monochromatic world.
1. Never Quite Getting to Oz
In some ways, the experience of LGBTIQ people of color can be characterized as never quite getting to Oz. That is, those of us who identify as queer people of color are often stuck in the liminal space between Dorothy and Toto’s monochromatic house from Kansas and the Technicolor hues of the Land of Oz. Although we may have been transported over the rainbow as a result of coming out of the closet, we are never able to walk out of the black and white doorway into a truly rainbow space—that is, a space in which the multicolored hues of our bodies, sexualities, and spiritualities are appreciated and seen as beautiful.
First, queer people of color never quite get to Oz because of the racism that we face from the predominantly white LGBTIQ community. In addition to experiencing the historical practices of exclusion such as multiple carding by gay bars, we are often rendered virtually invisible by the LGBTIQ media. For example, in 2011, Out Magazine released its fifth annual “Power 50 List” of the fifty most powerful people in the LGBTIQ community.5 Of the fifty names on the list, only two persons were identifiably people of color. Furthermore, both were Latino men, which means that there were no African Americans, Asian Americans, people of Indigenous descent, or women of color on the list.
Second, queer people of color never quite get to Oz because of the queerphobia6 that we experience from predominantly non-queer communities of color. For example, many of us are rejected by our biological families because of our sexualities and/or gender identities. Unlike our straight and cisgender7 siblings of color, LGBTIQ people of color are often unable to turn to our families of origin for support when we face issues of racism either inside or outside of the LGBTIQ community.
Third, queer people of color never quite get to Oz because of both the racism and the queerphobia that we experience from many religious—and especially Christian—communities. That is, many conservative Christian communities are toxic sites for LGBTIQ people of color in which the mutually-reinforcing oppressions of racism and queerphobia converge. In particular, this dynamic can be seen in the context of the marriage equality debate in which the religious right has actively used racism and queerphobia to prevent the enactment of same-sex marriage laws.
With respect to racism, predominantly white religious groups such as the so-called National Organization for Marriage (NOM) intentionally exploit racial tensions by pitting people of color against LGBTIQ people. For example, a confidential report by NOM was leaked in March 2012 that explicitly argued for a strategy to “drive a wedge between gays and blacks” as well as Latina/os.8
With respect to queerphobia, religious leaders such as Bishop Harry Jackson, an outspoken African American pastor from Maryland who is vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage rights, have articulated a false dichotomy of race on the one hand vs. sexuality on the other hand. For example, Jackson told a conference of the religious right in Texas in July 2012: “We need to steal back the rainbow. We can’t let the gays have it.” Jackson continued by proclaiming: “We’re the rainbow coalition. We’re the army of God.”9 According to Jackson, people of color are the “true” children of the rainbow. However, this ignores the fact that there are LGBTIQ people of color who are both queer and of color.
These divide-and-conquer strategies of the religious right are particularly reprehensible because not only do they exploit racism and queerphobia for political purposes, but they ignore the existence of LGBTIQ people of color. Contrary to what Harry Jackson and NOM may think, there are in fact millions of people in this country—not to mention around the world—who are queers of color.10 And queers of color are already members of the very “rainbow coalition” that Jackson and NOM are trying to appropriate for their own goals.
In sum, LGBTIQ people of color never quite get to Oz. We are excluded from both the LGBTIQ community (because of racism) as well as communities of color (because of queerphobia). And we are caught in the middle when the religious right pits the LGBTIQ community against communities of color (because of both racism and queerphobia).
2. Goals of the Book
This book is written within the larger context of the exclusion and silencing of LGBTIQ people of color. Accordingly, the goals of this book are twofold. The first goal is to lift up the writings by LGBTIQ theologians of color and to break the silence with respect to such writings.