I’ve been thinking this week along some of the same lines as Rachel’s post from yesterday. I’d like to add a few thoughts to hers, starting on the subject of religion but then generalizing.

Last week I went to a panel discussion on queer youth and religion where one speaker, Professor Mark Jordan, talked about the concept of exile. Religion typically exiles queer youth, he said, either permanently or, in the case of even quite liberal Protestant denominations, by saying “Go away and become who you are, figure out your sexuality, and come back when you’re an out-and-proud adult and we’ll make room for you.” Along the lines of Rachel’s plea to make things better now, Jordan said the church had to figure out how not to make exile from religion a condition of growing up queer in the church.

Certainly I experienced coming out as, partly, a journey of exile from the religion I grew up in and, to a lesser but important extent, from my family and from my geographical and class origins as well. Despite the experience of many queer youth today, despite Times articles about being out in middle school and so forth, the coming-out-as-exile model is still the experience for many, many young people. In fact, it’s the model behind Dan Savage’s campaign. I listen to his podcast sometimes while I’m at the gym and I’ve heard the calls he takes from queer kids living in stifling small towns who are afraid they will never be able to express their sexuality or even be free from physical threat or emotional abuse or coercion. The pain in their voices sometimes stops my breath.

Pain is part of what this exile is about. As we hear about each suicide by a queer young person, we remember that these tragic deaths are just the tip of the iceberg of pain experienced by queer youth. Young people are taunted, bullied, assaulted, rejected by friends and family, and threatened with damnation for exhibiting sexual or gender nonconformity, and it all hurts. And to get away from the pain, it makes sense to run away as soon as you can.

But there’s another contributing cause to the exile, I think. Jordan and another panelist or two talked about how churches, all except maybe the Unitarians, do basically nothing about educating or talking to queer youth about how their sexuality — that is, their sexual desires and expressions — can be an integrated, even celebrated, part of their religious lives. I would suggest this is just a specific instance of a much more general issue.

One way to think of the issue is this: Different disempowered and/or minority groups have different features — some similarities and some differences. Women, for example, are oppressed as a group despite comprising slightly more than half of the population, while many other groups are oppressed in part because they are minorities. LGBTQ individuals (treating them as a single class here) are different from members of most other minority groups in that they’re almost always born into families that are not members of the same group. Queer children have straight parents and straight siblings, for the most part. (This is something we have in common with most people with disabilities.)

This analysis is not meant to compare hardships of different oppressed groups but merely to illuminate a particular feature of queerness. A girl usually has a mother to teach her how to survive as a woman in a man’s world; an African-American child usually has an African-American family and community to offer support and help in dealing with racism. But queer kids usually don’t have this kind of familial and community support. And the often-“invisible” nature of queerness as difference can compound this lack of support.

Another reason to go into exile, then, is to find your own people, your tribe. There may be secrets and skills for living as a queer person that you can only learn from other queer people, perhaps living in an urban mecca or going to a certain type of university. A sort of “queer nationalist” perspective might say that for this kind of reason, queer kids will always have to leave their families of origin, even if they are not subjected to the abuse and pain that mark the worst of the experiences of queer youth today. And of course, some degree of pain might be simply inherent in the situation of growing up queer in a straight family of origin.

(For all the pain I experienced growing up queer in less-than-supportive circumstances, I really value the perspectives and strengths that exile has given me. That’s probably the subject of another post.)

I’m optimistic, though, that exile per se isn’t a necessary part of the experience of growing up queer. We can make it possible for queer young people to grow up and learn about their own differences without becoming cut off from their origins. But this requires, I suspect, a wide-ranging societal conversation about sexuality and gender that has barely begun. And, just to get back to where we started, most organized religion in the United States is actively hindering this conversation, and thus continuing to hurt queer kids.