Queer Youth Suicide as Disruptive Revelation of God

Preface

God keeps showing up/coming out in disturbing places that take our bodies into unimaginable grief within seemingly perverse distillations of divinity, disguised as debacle. As it is still early in this place of terror and trust, ¹ we remain knee-deep in the indecent and head-long in the savagery of human freedom when the sacred cannot be sustained. Marcella Althaus-Reid reminds us that disruption is our diaspora; in theology, she says, it is a sense of discontinuity that brings revelation (2008: 76). We must then remain vigilant with our memories of disruption, perhaps learning, not so much to construct a theology of the remnant, or even of the disappeared but to perform our dignity, queering it back into God, especially in and through our deaths. So I ask for your indulgence as I mix up realities that the queer community faces in my nation and perhaps in many of the places where you call home. ² I remain fixed to this array of ‘disruptive practices of love and sexuality’ to locate how we might bring our divinely queer bodies to bear on this impossible place of indecency and luminous grace from those days after the beloved 49 were taken from us, knowing of course, so many more are not named or remembered in candlelight and remain invisible to us. The Incarnation does not forget and it will not forsake you.

Setting a Context

I have always been wed to a God who relishes the body, especially my body that rarely fit or knew itself as graced within my larger tradition of Christianity; at times I mistook despair for repentance and suicide became a meaningful way to navigate this failure of Incarnation. Fortunately, Incarnation resisted such onslaughts and remained viable but not always visible to me. In this way Incarnation has always been a scandal – that is its strength and dereliction. This God who has romanced so many of us refuses to let go of our succulent flesh as the site par excellence to take refuge, to rise into all the wondrous ambiguities and fluidities of human embodiment as the preferred vehicle of divine delight. Yet as we all know too well, to paraphrase Althaus-Reid, when ideas about transcendence and the holy enter into our midst, the body is abandoned – or worse – simply denied, desecrated, left in despair disguised as repentance or damned by the demand for decency.

This ‘domesticated’ theology, Althaus-Reid says, has made of God an idol, divinely and dangerously hetero, imprisoned in the closet of theologies of orthodoxy. ‘God is the first casualty in theology if God becomes a puppet of heterosexual ideologies’ (2000: 97). My work then in light of this is to expose the killing of God within us – deicide in our current day – put upon young Queer bodies when driven to suicide. In these places of terrible agency, I hope to interrogate those sites of bodies-scorned-into-suicide as a platform for divine coming out, a radical exposure of grace, divinely receiving what we have marred. Our failures to live the Incarnation become a rupture of the Holy within time and history, but our young ones, give their very lives in hopes of reclamation of the divine in them and in our world. In these acts of queer youth suicide we are given a truly contorted depiction of the voracious viability of Incarnation especially when no longer visible to us and vitiated into mutilation by hetero-normative structures of domination in church and society.

As with other historical instances of attempted deicide or forced surrender of the Holy, those who resisted or fought back with their very lives are known in our larger traditions as martyrs. Even instances of suicide have been recognized as openings into martyrdom when those acts were committed in resistance to the inevitable onslaught of desecration or vitiation of one’s location in God. ³ Suicide as a site of faithfulness reminds us, horrifically, of the power of the body; even here it retains an elegance and exigency in matters of faithfulness. Our church history has long extolled this blood of the martyrs as its seed of new life. ⁴ Martyrdom also has long been recognized as a legitimate and honorable way to disrupt the structures of sin; here however, the structures of sin ‘lie at the center of the traditional way of doing theology’ (Althaus-Reid and Isherwood, 2007: 15).

While queer youth suicides fit well into this larger history of how martyrdom has functioned historically with the tradition of Christianity, ⁵ I see the need to indecent these actions on the part of queer youth for deeper glimpses into the praxis of bodies loved and treasured by the Holy, as fierce portraits of divine coming out as well as distinctively Queer witness to this God. Saturated in the scandal of Incarnation, their deaths, causalities of heteronormative idolatry in daily life, clearly illuminate ‘primal structures of sin’, where we see degradation of ‘the generous outpouring of incarnation which was signalled by the man Jesus as the birthright of all’ (Althaus-Reid and Isherwood, 2007: 97).

The glut of this demise demands an indecenting of raw proportion, calling all of us out to rise up, outraged, sorrowed, ready and responsive, to these inchoate instances of queer suicidal claims on the Incarnation, demanding nothing less from us than to gather the fragments of the divine in our midst. Young (Leelah) Josh Alcorn’s ⁶ death-seared, suicidal demand situates us in a communal praxis that must destabilize us and what we think we know of God: ‘My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s f***ed up” and fix it. Fix society. Please’ (Alcorn, 2004).

Clearly we f***ed up the promise of Incarnation for Leelah and so many whose names and stories are not recorded or remembered in our sacred litanies of martyrs. Her sacrifice remains in the gaps between divinity and humanity, perhaps playing an indecent redemptive role, waiting on our response. This too is a disturbing ‘eucharistic ethos of scandal’, about the ‘dividing and reuniting of the body divine to our bodies’ (Althaus-Reid, 2004a: 160). We cannot know God without also knowing Leelah’s claim on the Holy. Christ is given to us in thousands of bodies, broken and blessed, not around our denominational altars, but in the streets, in our clubs, our homes, and the deep places of queer embodiment, where the divine-body-in-flux between life and death demands new sacramental recognition and praxis.

This queering of martyrdom and indecenting of its witness, offers a fleeting portrait of a God who redeems through scandalous kenosis; a raw redemptive emptying within stigmatized sexual and gender ‘migrants’ – perhaps at their most abandoned – in plural, performative avenues through seemingly impossible equations of sustaining presence and power. This construct also opens a path of holiness into the last journey taken by our queer youth, saturated with embodied agency, expressing a visceral strategy of resistance, performing their most primal and sacred relational needs for the Holy. It is an ultimate, agonized expression of the promiscuous pathos promised to all in the Incarnation. As such, it fits well with how God remains faithful to all of Creation in the divine struggle to survive heretical heteronormative dereliction constructed in God’s name. This ‘bodily-grounded divinity’ ruptures into what Althaus-Reid speaks of as indecent exposures into excess. She alludes to a clear excess of anguish but also something that exceeds the limits of our memory or capacity to carry it. (2000: 206) Clearly we are unable to carry this raw excess, giving us too much death from the margins, narrated in daily dirges of dying, in perverse ‘interstices between the place of God’ and our queer bodies (2004a:159).

Two Other Prominent Theological Voices Responding to Excesses of Death

To locate this indecenting in a wider theological spectrum, I look to two other theologians whose familiarity with the apostasy of massive death in their countries creates a legacy of solidarity that demands new practices of divinity and humanity, embodied in the believing community. First, I offer a perspective from the late German feminist radical theologian, Dorothee Soelle. Deeply marked by the generations-deep trauma of the Holocaust, committed by mostly Christian persons in her nation, she lived a radical theological mandate of the dead, those millions so wrongfully taken, directing her into a deep and dense portrait of an Auschwitz God. ‘My attempt’ she says, ‘to do theology is marked by an awareness that I live after Auschwitz’ (1999: 30). She was known for her inexorable authenticity in what she named the ‘radical this-worldliness of Christianity’ and its assertion that theological reflection without political consequences is blasphemy. She also knew the indictment of loving Bach in a land of torture. ‘I need the shame about my people, I do not want to forget anything, because forgetting nurtures the illusion that it is possible to be a truly human being without the lessons of the dead’ (1999: 17).

How might the lessons from the daily deaths of queer youth take us into more lasting transgressive spaces that irrupt into a redemptive agency ‘post-Pulse’, especially fighting for/among all those who identify as transgender, half of whom attempt suicide before their 20th birthday? ⁷ In this space of longing and grief, Althaus-Reid’s methods suggest a way to capture the indecent within their last powerful assertion of self in suicide. Here, I search for a God that is capable of holding onto each of these individuals in their last vestiges of human agency while society, religion, even their families, contorted them into an offense against God. In this space of dying, suffused with impossibility, I present their deaths as larger religious speech-acts (performances if you will) of resistance within profound dynamics of trauma and persecution. ⁸ In particular, I will pose these narrowest of places within their subjectivity, wringing out all the soft spots of resilience and repair, insisting on a deviant strategy of representation with the divine, a God who redeems through scandal. In these young queer deaths, we are given a theological praxis both indecent and fiercely articulate, full of divine intimacy that reads like enigmatic equations of Presence, Absence and Tenderness. ‘The magnitude of the current crisis of the world requires Christological kenosis and postcolonial suspicions, as well as courage to produce a different theological praxis among the excluded’ (Althaus-Reid, 2008: 76).

Soelle’s insights offer a way to stand in the midst of obscene excesses of death by continuing ‘to love life, even when analysis has run its course and all that is left is to count the victims. To love life also where it has long been condemned to death, even from its very beginning, is an old human ability to go beyond what is’ (2001: 282). Here the work of our commitment to the Incarnation is to never acquiesce, but to ‘insist through their suffering that nothing become lost’ (2001: 149). In all places of injustice and misery, she says, we can see ‘how Christ restores the insulted dignity of men and women and makes them capable of action and suffering, where they were previously only the passive victims of what was done to them’ (1981: 65). Soelle reminds us that the cross is a historical reminder of terror, erected by the pharaohs of history but it is also a divine response to that terror, expressing love of justice, love for the endangered and a radical embrace of all aspects of the threatened life of God among us. Ultimately, this is part of the call put on all Christians in how we live our resistance in light of the meaning of the cross in history. It moves us into an expression of creative disobedience where we must put ourselves on the side of the damned of this world, knowing this is where Christ remains. In this power of Incarnation, she asserts that one is so borne up by God that s/he does not fall outside of God, even when s/he has felt abandoned by God (1995: 96).

Interestingly, both Soelle and Althaus-Reid play with the language of coming out within the divine and amongst us suggesting a complex trajectory of agency where we dare to name ourselves in this space of never falling outside of God. Could this be a metaphor for Incarnation itself? Outing as Althaus-Reid describes it approximates a method, a way to locate oneself and one’s people within this space of Incarnation, while damned in history. It encompasses a strategy of telling or speaking our bodies as ‘a moment of triumph by the individual who changes a political position from being a victim to becoming an assertive person’ (Althaus-Reid, 2001: 64). These actions of taking charge, re-assembling our shattered and denied identities also describe what functions indecently as anguished efficacy within queer youth suicide. Their assertion of self, held in God, is not lost or forsaken and reveal us back to ourselves.

Another theologian familiar with the wretched landscapes of death and torment is Latin American liberation theologian, Fr. Jon Sobrino who insists that the God of life must be proclaimed from the most anguished places of death. Like Althaus-Reid, he insists that theology must be done from the materiality of the lives of those pushed to the furthest edges of our communities. During El Salvador’s civil war and the government repression that followed, tens of thousands of mostly ordinary poor persons were massacred or simply starved out of existence. This massive scale of death and oppression requires, he says, a rethinking of martyrdom, where a theology of martyrdom is not just an option for the poor but an option in favor of the victims that carries with it an option against their persecutors (2003b: 111). I relish this insistence within his theology that locates the resonance of the voice of the victim with us precisely in how we confront those who continue to sustain or perpetrate these persecutions. Leelah Alcorn’s voice issued a clarion call in this regard.

Sobrino reminds us that to seriously analyze martyrdom is to rethink God (2003b: 120) and to see the ordinary poor/ persecuted persons as crucified peoples. Their deaths demand it. They are often anonymous and innocent ones who unjustly bear the burden of sin of others that annihilates them he says, little by little, first in life and then in death. (2003a: 10). This too describes the reality our queer youth face. We do not, however, know what to do with crucified peoples or dead queers; they both hide and reveal the mystery of God. They also make us uncomfortable since their deaths are a witness to how we have failed God; it requires that we see how our histories produce victims in our embodied sins against them, as well as recognize divine insistence and Incarnation amongst them. (2003b:145) Silencing these deaths, refusing to honor them is the sin of our whole humanity. Sobrino is quite clear that the salvation of the entire people is at stake here in how we respond to these many unnamed and often anonymous dead, these martyrs of humanity. For him, the efficacy within this rethinking of martyrdom is to name them in ways that are consistent with, and expressive of the love God has for them (2003a: 16–17). We can do no less for our queer youth.

Like Althaus-Reid, he directs us to be with those our world disposes of, not just to confer dignity upon them, but to hold out the saving power within their deaths. Their deaths, must he says, become our call to conversion. Victims of this world are, Sobrino says, ‘sacraments of God and the presence of Jesus Christ amongst us’ (2001: 8). He reiterates for us how victims become mediators of grace to us, the living, both through their deaths, as well as the through the witness they give in how to be faithful to the Incarnation. He makes an important distinction here: their martyrdom is not in defence of the faith or even living out the demands of Jesus. Rather it remains a simple recognition, a crying out of the tormented value of their lives, a literal mirroring of the absolute embodiment that Jesus incarnated. This is true also for queer youth at that precipice of suicide where the unbearable burden made of their lives crystalizes into a final articulation of resistance or as Soelle might say, creative disobedience. Their deaths must also become our call to conversion, both to confer dignity on the dead while also learning to look for a saving power within their deaths. Our queer youth who die in indecent martyrdoms not only reveal the unmistakable value of their own lives as part of the incarnating love and life of God but reveal a persistent and pernicious practice of exclusion that functions as a form of deicide.

Indecent Martyrdoms: Our Cathartic Fall into God

Situated in a different place of excess of death than that of Soelle and Sobrino, I too am making a radical claim on the efficacy of Incarnation within these too frequent and often anonymous deaths put upon queer youth. The embittered history of condemning queers to death has deep and vicious roots in our societies, begun and sustained, at least in the West, by religious ideas and practices of Christianity. I refer to this history of persecution that continues today as the scourge of salvation, one that hurts and harms us body and soul. W.C. Harris in his recent work on Slouching Towards Gaytheism, has chronicled well, myriad ways that Christianity is responsible for what he calls a constant barrage of ‘religiously galvanized disgust’ that embeds the lives of young queer persons in hectoring invective, constantly allowing queer personhood to continue to be publicly contested in such a way our very humanity is always at risk. ‘Even with no active bullying queer youth are bombarded with signs of their unworthiness, abnormality and their “doom”’(2004: 149).

The normative tradition of Christianity has constructed us to be an offence against God, wicked, obscene and then simply criminal, justifying death and if possible expunging us entirely for nearly 1500 years of its history. ⁹ Once the death penalty was no longer exacted, we were simply imprisoned for life, castrated if male, raped if female and up into my own lifetime, lobotomized or given electric shock treatment. It is a shameful sexual anthropology of damnation where queer persons discover, in the words of Rev. Lynice Pinkard, queer scholar and minister in the US black church tradition, how fatal it is to worship a God who does not love you. For many queer persons, such worship becomes a barbarous bartering for salvation.

In this contemporary catacomb of witness, I am excavating something those in the social sciences name suicidality of queer youth. Here I excavate the religious significance of queer suicide that parses together the dead bodies of queers, against a backdrop of normative theological teaching that functions violently, demonstrating anti-gay bullying as an extension of religious persecution. Rather than problematize the high numbers of queer suicide as an expression of queer pathology or even a tragic construction of humanity, I pose how religion and society have constructed being queer into a trauma to be resisted and survived. Reclaiming queer subjectivity in this place of desecration is deeply directed into a corporeal pathos within the divine, prompting perhaps a raw kenotic reality of divine displacement. This offers far more than a simple expression of resistance to the normalizing practices of gender-confined hetero-normative domains/regimes of religion and cultures. We are given a deeper, more terrifying glimpse into what Althaus-Reid speaks of as kenotic event – almost a spilling of God all over the place and even God becoming dispersed, emptied of glory, and filled with the fully human pathos of our young ones whose last experience of the word becoming flesh was bound into their dying. How do we make room for these jarring depictions of Christic presence aroused in the dying agency of Queer Youth?

Walking these theological places of trauma, in places of intense pathos and pain, uncovers a divine articulation that compels awe and anguish, raw assertions of riotous grace, opening almost unbearable passages into the unspeakable and intimate articulation of God’s Scandalous Presence, a queer hermeneutic of divine agency and indecent martyrdoms. To begin this journey into tormented embodiment that is put upon those who are differently designed as queer or sex and gender transgressive, I begin in another kind of embodied location that is rarely spoken of and seems to stand outside any efforts to theologize it: the carnage of 9/11. I visit this place with trepidation and raw respect, not seeking exact parallels but with recognition of unresolved grief, excessive deaths and glimmers of connection.

Every year in my country we re-visit the horror that was unleashed upon us in what is simply known as 9/11. In a well-known piece, published in Esquire magazine in 2009, journalist Tom Junod eulogized what became known as the falling man:

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floor collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building… For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself….

Some who look at the pictures see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else – something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end….

From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called “jumpers” or “the jumpers”, as though they represented a new lemminglike class…Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent…

Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall…

Allow me to bring these deaths very carefully into this larger discussion to demonstrate what some name as heroic forms of suicide. When we dare to speak of this reality, it is not uncommon to hear language of courage, of rebellion, or resistance, and quiet dignity. For those who are religiously oriented, there were tales of heavenly visions, angels, and other messengers of God. To make sense of nearly 200 people choosing to jump into their deaths, some clung to the possibility that it was not an act of despair but one of divine in-breaking, jumping – or as Mr. Junod reminds us – falling into the arms of God. Their suicidal agency haunts us still, indicting our hearts into places of terrible loss, both unfathomable and urgent.

I have no need to dispute any of these hermeneutics of embodied grace, or dispel the possibility of the Holy being capable of finding each of these individuals in their last vestiges of human agency, choosing godliness in ways those of us watching just can’t fathom. In fact, I find this a compelling portrait, even more so from a Christian place, that insists upon Divine capability and action in and through human flesh, even tortured, dying flesh. Again I return to the power of Soelle’s insights, holding out the possibility that those jumping men and women were not just passive victims to the insanity/cruelty all around them. Somehow in their choosing of death, they were trying to set free the power of God, they too were claiming the Incarnation in defiance of the demonic, another instance of terrible excess of death and dying.

I get inarticulate when I see the juxtaposition of the seeming puniness and futility of that one life falling head-first when set against the enormity of visible evil unleashed against him. I do, however, see an integrity in the choice of suicide made by hundreds of unnamed individuals on 11 September 2001. I know without thinking that this ‘falling man’ was somehow hallowed in the giving of his life in suicide. So too our little ones, our queer youth who are surrounded by structures of the demonic (primal structures of sin) frequently goaded with savage insistence into death by others, marked by insidious daily trauma, giving them seemingly no way to either assuage their sorrow or affirm their value. What if we apply this lens of enigmatic and provocative agency, where one with seemingly no other option, chooses to fall into God, finally free and hallowed? Surrounded by death, they make a choice for a different world, a different possibility of being so borne up by God that no one can fall out of it, ever! Given such excess of queer death and indecency, we need a collective memory of holiness with its own subversive suicidal dynamics of excess that is capable of sustaining divine substantiation.

Moreover, I think ‘the falling man’ iconography reveals a thicker, more complicated agency within suicide that helps identify not only divine agency and substantiation among the fragmented selves of queer youth, but also provides a way to more accurately eschew suicidality inscribed on queer youth. Australian scholar, Rob Cover, in his stellar work on queer youth suicide, identifies how the persistence and construct of heteronormativity actually create the conditions that make suicide thinkable for queer youth. This cultural construct identifies an entire demographic as being prone to suicide, as if it is an ingrained part of their personhood, or identity, or worse, an expression of pathology (2012: 4). Queer youth especially, according to Cover, grow into vulnerable and stigmatized sexed and gendered identities that result in ‘in-articulable forms of selfhood’ (2012: 89). In effect, they are rendered unliveable.

Suicidality does not belong to us though; it is a construct and reality created by the normalizing gaze of heteronormative society that defines queer persons in terms of this absolute vulnerability, ultimately, identifying us with death and dying, literally framing our lives as unliveable in all its tragic flavour. Rejecting the typically tragic and almost inevitable ways that queer youths are pathologized in these suicidal acts (including he says, the ‘It gets better’ campaign), Cover reminds us that we are not vulnerable because we are queer; we are made vulnerable and shamed by the dominant social and cultural habits of thought. Constant citations of defect or depravity put upon queer bodies creates a norming of discourse that aligns being queer with the greater, almost tragically expected, likelihood of dying young. In response to this normalizing pathology put upon queer youth, Cover poses suicide as ‘an articulation of a performative self’ (2012: 10) that is seeking alternatives to the unliveability that is inscribed upon them. It is a disruptive embodiment of freedom. Their refusals to persist in desecration is not their failure but ours. Their deaths are an indictment and clarion call to look again at the subjectivity enacted in these last actions; their choice of how they die is an absurd and atrocious performance of their value by refuting the cruelty given to them, refusing to live if that means they must renounce who they are. This shifts the reality of queer youth suicide from a victim-blaming mentality to the larger social and political forces that conspire to assault queer life. Their deaths give witness to the justice denied them.

Rob Cover is not alone in his work of repositioning queer youth suicide as profound instances of resistance. In a recent study at Harvard University, Michael Sadowski worked with queer youth in terms of their memories of resilience. One of his findings among those he studied, some of whom had made suicide attempts, confirmed that a central aspect of queer identity involved some element of resistance (2013: 13). He also listened to how those who had survived suicide attempts characterized them, not in terms of despair or even sadness but more as a kind of coming to voice or an extreme expression of their relational needs (2013:41). At times those attempts functioned as a way to give witness to their real selves (2013:154). It offered them a way to communicate the unsayable, and come into a more articulate sense of self.

‘Queer is a word of resistance’ (Sanders, 2013: xiv) Revd Cody Sanders reminds us that we cannot afford to talk about our lives and our deaths using the dominant culture’s language and ideas. He suggests queer acts of suicide are not the result of bullying nor are they examples of tragic subjectivity. Simply put, queer youth are victims of a comprehensive culture of violence that marks the queered body as an appropriate target through larger social and theological discourse that denigrates all queer lives (2013:117). This reframing of suicide as deeply fragmented expressions of agency, self-worth, and freedom, opens a new appreciation for what Althaus-Reid alluded to as displaced love knowledges (2003: 4). What remains now is how to read these fragmented expressions of a knowing love in such a way they are made radiant and revelatory of a God who somehow comes out with us into these places of scandal.

‘The God who has come out, tired perhaps of being pushed to the edge by hegemonic sexual systems in theology, has made God’s sanctuary on the Other side’ (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 4). Althaus-Reid’s allusion to the Other side fits well with queer experience of embodied exclusion within these places of excess death. As such it remains a multivalent reality, open to multiple places and instances of Divine encounter from the margins. This includes that margin or gap of space between life and death, perhaps revealing fragments of queer mystical defiance and divine determination from within the grasp of the demonic display of the unlive-ability of queer lives. Here divinity performs a kenotic movement by holding open the gaps initiated in their dying leap, falling into God. Such destabilizing trajectories of divinity sculpt indecent martyrdoms into scandalous instances where our precious queer youth come out fully and for the last time. Their fall into God announces a provocative re-assembling of one’s denied identity, asserting the urgency and unmanageability of Incarnation. Sealed in martyr’s graces, they illuminate God’s witness to the demands of flesh, even when forsaken. Are we ready for this kind of Incarnating God?