If church is a place to see and be seen, the internet is a cloak to hide in.
Like for many queer folks, the world wide web acts as my Aleve and allergen, a lurid den I can visit and exit whenever I please. Having grown up as an outsider — or, as my sociology classes taught me, a “deviant” — the internet has become my strange stephome. Its appeal to the LGBTQ+ community is clear enough: in it we can seek connection, love, and culture, all without having to leave our homes and endure a potentially hostile society.
In its dark corners, I have confronted body image issues by comparing myself to what a friend terms DWGs — Dangerous White Gays, or, attractive, magnetic, and self-centered minxes; basically if a Sagitarrius collided with a supernova — while also seeking said men out on dating apps and then masturbating to their profiles when they ghost a conversation but left their pics behind.
But as a gay man, the internet has been more than a merry-go-round of pain and porn; it has also gifted me an online community of writers to admire and follow, helped me discover queer cinema, taught me about LGBTQ+ life when school didn’t. I grew up believing “gay” was a bad word, and the first time I learned about AIDS was on the front page of a newspaper that featured a dead man and the disease’s tie to the LGBTQ+ community. I turned to the internet to learn more instead of verbally inquiring, lest my precociousness seem suspicious.
As for films, sure, I could have gone to Blockbuster way back when to rent Brokeback Mountain, but why take the risk of encountering homophobic employees? Netflix let me stay safely in my room and reconsume that breakout film — and then, knowing me all too well, suggested I watch some indie called Weekend that my mall’s AMC would never have screened. Maturing in this digital sphere, I began to think the internet was the only safe space where one could experience, watch, or express queer affection — and feel welcome.
Which is not how church used to make me feel. I grew up Catholic, cantored the Saturday evening masses, and then went to a Jesuit college. At that point, it was no longer required (read: highly encouraged by my family) to keep attending mass. But ironically, many of the students who worked for Campus Ministry at Boston College were gay. I remember a senior noticing this trend as well, saying, “Doubt is the father to faith.” She wasn’t wrong, and I kept drinking the grape Kool-Aid.
Some months after graduating I moved to New York City, where being an out Christian can feel like seeing sweatpants at Saks: not unwelcome, but certainly a curiosity. I’ve worked in New York for five years now, and in those first few if I wasn’t using the internet to find new gay TV shows like Please Like Me or go on dates with men who did not, I was, to my surprise, googling for a place to attend church. Working a day job at a desk, writing on my laptop at night, and scrolling through Twitter on my commutes between those two activities, maybe I just wanted a sacred place to unplug.
How fortunate that I discovered St. Lydia’s: a queer-affirming dinner church in Brooklyn. Founded by Pastor Emily Scott, the church operates not with pews but instead tables; Lydians, as we call ourselves, gather weekly to share a meal, as the early apostles would, chatting with our neighbors before diving into scriptures. So while the church is in many ways highly progressive — we begin each service refraining, “You are very welcome here,” deconstruct the toxic ways in which the Holy Family has been whitewashed, and have, to distance ourselves from the iconography that may evoke hurtful church experiences, created a “cross” of a table with four chairs around it — St. Lydia’s actually returns to Christianity’s roots via the communion of a holy meal. But in the time of COVID, this meal-sharing now exists exclusively online.
Zoom gatherings mimic our regular dinner church structure, but it’s much more DIY: instead of a volunteer congregant cooking a meal for the evening, we each bring food to eat and bread to break before our screens. Instead of lighting our neighbor’s candles, we bring our own votives. But one element holds fast: when it comes time to discuss how we are feeling, we share stories, not opinions, because Jesus too shared stories.
