Drafted spring of 2026.
Revised June 3 and 24-25, 2026.

For many queer people, religion is a source of trauma that is often a barrier to embracing their sexuality and identity. I consider myself profoundly fortunate because I had the opposite experience. I mentioned in an earlier essay that I frequently had a sense that God wanted me to be a queer woman.

For me, being a Quaker, a religion that emphasizes curiosity, openness to new experiences, deep listening, and embracing social justice made it much easier for me to embrace and ease into my nascent queer identity. Here is a list of the many parallels (this list got so long I’ve decided to split it into multiple parts, stay tuned for Part 2 and maybe even more):

All of us are on a journey of some kind:

Quakers talk all the time about being on spiritual journeys. I can’t speak for all Quaker meetings, but mine in particular has a wonderful practice around sharing spiritual journeys during our “second hour” (sort of like our post-worship coffee hour programming). The way we do spiritual journeys is like if you gave an oral history to a very supportive audience about how you arrived at being a Quaker and an overview of your own spiritual practices and beliefs. Since most Quakers today are “convinced” Quakers (i.e., converts, as opposed to those born into being a Quaker), there is an understanding that there are often many factors that shape how you arrived at being a Quaker. Sometimes Quakers even joke about people who “don’t realize they are a Quaker yet.”

Going through a late in life/late bloomer shift into queer identity is absolutely one of the most intense journeys one can be on, and I’m really grateful to have the language, experience, and humility derived from the concept of spiritual journeys to apply to this part of my life.

You are the ultimate authority over your identity, but praxis and community is a huge part of developing a flourishing identity:

This one is a little tricky but I am going to do my best to articulate it. While there is a form of membership in Quakerism, you do not necessarily have to officially join a monthly meeting as a member in order to “be a Quaker.” As I’ve previously written, formally joining a Quaker meeting as a member is a thing you typically do following the development of a Quaker identity (even those born into a Quaker meeting often still apply for membership as an adult). You then discuss this next step with others to determine your readiness for being a member of the meeting. In fact, prospective members are sometimes advised to attend a meeting for a year before applying for membership. A Quaker clearness committee for membership is not a kind of final authority like a Catholic priest. It is a group of peers who collectively share time and space in discernment with you about your readiness to assume membership in the meeting and the responsibilities it entails to other Friends.

Officially applying for membership is an important part of most Quakers’ spiritual journeys, but it is neither the beginning nor the end of that journey, nor is it even a requirement to be a Quaker. Many Quakers are very involved with faithfully attending their local meetings, and contribute significantly to the life of the meeting through donations, service work, and spiritual care, without ever actually joining as an official member. Ultimately their praxis is what makes them a Quaker, not whether they have officially applied for membership.

However, this does not mean that living a “meaningful” Quaker life means going it alone. I always side eye the Quaker-curious people around the internet who ask if they can be Quakers without ever attending a meeting or doing anything with other Quakers. Being a Quaker is not a vibes-based religion, it is a religion rooted in collective experience and practice. Quakers generally share an understanding that to live a Quaker life means to be in community with other Quakers.

To me, this idea that no one can declare whether you are a Quaker or not, but that there is also a cultural expectation of developing your Quaker identity within a collective context, is one of the most obvious parallels to what it means to be queer. Only I could answer the question of whether I am queer based on how I felt it to be an accurate description of both who I am and the future I want. And just like there is no final authority who will declare you queer, to embrace a queer identity is also something that I think is far more easily realized within community. I am really glad that I started developing my queer identity by prioritizing attending queer events and spaces, committing to learning about queer history and culture, and leaning on my existing queer friends and making new queer friends before I started dating women for the first time.

Importance of community support and collective friendship:

Since unprogrammed Quaker meetings typically do not have paid clergy, the only way our meetings function is that we all share responsibility for every aspect of its operations (pastoral, financial, facilities management, education, socialization, etc). Quakerism has always had at its root a radical vision of friendship (hence our name, the Religious Society of Friends), and we commonly refer to one another as Friends. It’s precisely this lack of hierarchical authority in favor of the radical equality of friends, and heightened shared assumptions of collective responsibility (you think librarianship or academia has too many committees? Try being a Quaker!!), that make me feel like being a Quaker is the only religion I could ever faithfully embrace.

I also suspect it is why unprogrammed Quakers were way ahead of most other denominations in terms of not just accepting but embracing queers (I’ve found material from the Ohio Lesbian Archives indicating my local meeting was supporting local LGBTQ concerns back in the 1970s, and there have been Quaker LGBTQ advocacy efforts going back even further). Of course Quakers, like queers, can be insular and cliqueish and are not immune from prejudice. But at their best, both Quakers and queers take the profound responsibility and power of friendship seriously in a way that late stage capitalism and patriarchal/heternormative ideas that privilege romance and the family unit over other forms of relationships simply cannot.

I am sometimes in awe at how busy Quakers are, serving their community in a million different ways and I feel the same way about a lot of queers, especially queer women. It is not lost on me that queer people are particularly prevalent in service-oriented professions (like archives and libraries!) I love being a Quaker for the same reason that I love being queer, because both unapologetically envision a world that is centered on community and friendship, and engage in multiple prefigurative practices to nudge us towards that vision.

This is a free post, but many of my posts are paywalled. If you’d like to go ahead and buy a subscription now to support my writing, you can click the button above. $25 a year helps pay for my cat’s portion of the monthly rent. This newsletter has now crossed more than 100 subscribers! Hugs and kisses to the 35 folks who have already upgraded their subscriptions. I truly appreciate your support :) HAPPY PRIDE!!! 🏳️‍🌈