“I grew up in a very religious family. I was raised by my grandparents who are conservative white evangelical Christians. They weren’t like most homophobic people, but they made it clear that it’s not okay with our religion to be gay. Sometimes I would hear things like, ‘Gay people go to hell’ or something like that. When I was really young and wasn’t really exposed to the LGBT community, I had a really hard time understanding and articulating a lot of the feelings that I had regarding liking both boys and girls growing up. And I was just thinking, ‘Whatever.’ But as I grew up, I started to understand more about what it was that I was feeling. I tried to suppress it a lot for several years. I struggled a lot with trying to balance between religion and how I felt. So it wasn’t until I was 16 or 17 that I really acknowledged and accepted it.
What helped me a lot was this one book about religion. I really struggled with my religion and my bisexuality because I went to a Jesus camp that made me have an emotional moment of, ‘Maybe I do believe in God.’ But that book was talking about observing religions from a more scientific sense. The origins of certain things. How things came to be. And it was also talking about homosexuality and the Bible. It talked about how things are not set in stone. There are a lot of interpretations. You can’t take these things at face value because there are always issues with translations and things like that. And I realized that whether I believe in God or not, I can still identify with this religion and not be terrified about going to hell.”
— Simone Velasquez (she/her), 22, woman, bisexual.
