Drafted spring of 2026.
Revised June 3/24-25, and July 2, 2026.

Read Part 1 here. This got so long that there will be a Part 3. Thanks for sticking with me!

A history of marginalization:

Quakers have a history of being a dissenting religion, but unlike many other dissenting religions, early Quakers didn’t seek to consolidate state and religion (the closest example might have been William Penn’s Holy Experiment, and even that recognized diversity of religious thought from the jump). Ever since George Fox, Quakers have had a complicated relationship with the state, sometimes actively working outside or against it, and sometimes working to effect change within the structures of the state.

Because Quakers have never sought to consolidate power at a large scale or grown its numbers to a hugely influential political or religious bloc, this means that Quakers have always had both a historical narrative as well as a lived experience of living on the margins. This is not to say that Quaker groups and people across time have not been profoundly influential. The history of the Underground Railroad, women’s suffrage, and Vietnam War era draft resistance were undeniably shaped in very real ways by the participation of Quakers who, forgive the term, punched well above their weight.

Joining a religion that has survived on the margins for hundreds of years in many ways primed me for the transition of adopting a queer identity. Just because the world is more accepting of queer people than it was decades ago doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t still exist on the margins in many ways. It’s hard to express how much of a transformative psychological experience it is to go from living a heteronormative life to shifting into a queer life.

I have to actively seek out media that reflects my life, if I express affection with a woman I’m dating in public I have a fleeting thought in the back of my head whether we’re going to be fetishized or hate crimed, for the first time in my life I have to consider whether my appearance through my jewelry, grooming, or clothing choices in certain locations will compromise my safety at the same time I’m using those appearance signals to find other queer people, and many of my straight friends are supportive but have no advice or insights for what I’m going through.

Quakers have long grappled with how living out our lives means potential oppression from the state (such as facing jail time for our refusal to participate in war). Coming out during a time of resurgent homophobia in the United States in which many LGBTQ rights are actively being rolled back (with trans people being the first targets) has me extremely cognizant of the rights I may be actively losing from the state while embracing a new identity, but also: this is not the first time I’ve gone through this mind fuck process.

Paying attention to the body:

One of the most mystical things about Quaker worship (and the most confusing to outsiders) is the idea of silent waiting worship. If Quakers feel they are being given a message from spirit/the Inner Light/God/whatever during silent waiting worship, we are expected to discern whether such a message is simply for us as individuals or actually meant to be shared with the larger group. Quakers are not expected to arrive at silent worship with a message prepared to go. In fact, such a practice would typically be frowned upon, under the suspicion that it is not inspired by the spirit during the period of collective waiting worship.

Most Quakers talk about how one of the key ways in which they distinguish whether a message from spirit is meant for them or for the larger meeting is that they experience a physical sensation that often forces them onto their feet before they have the message fully formed. To be clear, this isn’t speaking in tongues: if the message is meant for the community then the expectation will be that it is in a form that will be intelligible to others (speaking in plain language is a very Quaker thing, since it reflects our commitment to simplicity and integrity). But the experience is admittedly extremely mystical, and I can confirm having experienced that physical sensation and others as a prerequisite to my occasional experiences in giving vocal ministry (it’s rare for me to give vocal ministry: I’d say it happens perhaps half a dozen times a year, if that).

This idea of your body having the wisdom and knowledge before you have the words is, I think, a hallmark of queer self-realization. It also flies in the face of Western knowledge construction, which not only discounts the body as a source of wisdom, but then commodifies and oppresses women’s bodies so much so that understanding our bodies as a gateway to wisdom is very hard to access. Women are socialized from birth to not take their own individual bodily sensations seriously.

One of the ways in which late in life queer women get caught in a real chokehold is because we are socialized by heteronormative patriarchy to be doubly dissociated. First, from the time we are born we have difficulty listening to our bodies as a source of wisdom on an individual level. Second, decades after we are born, our bodies’ wisdom is a signal cutting through the fog of societal compulsory heterosexuality conditioning but we often have trouble taking it seriously as a basis for action.

I’ll write about this a lot more once I get around to writing about comphet at length (are you ready for more multi-part essays?!), but one of the classic ways in which late in life queer women are so remarkably and tragically successful at repressing their sexuality is two extremely common and damaging assumptions that straight women are commonly told. One, that of course any kind of intimate experience with men is inherently a drag, and two, that lots of women fantasize about other women and it doesn’t mean anything. As a result, I think a lot of late in life queer women get caught in a trap of thinking they have to have gay sex to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are gay (which in my opinion is outsourcing your sense of bodily wisdom to another person, but again: more on that later), and I think this is an incredibly harmful litmus test that keeps a lot of would-be queer women closeted and very repressed.

Once it flashed into my head that living a queer life was an actual possibility for me, it filled me up intellectually but also across my body and spirit with delight, optimism, and enormous amounts of physical relief. Conversely the idea of going back to dating men and a straight-passing life makes me want to throw myself off a cliff. I can distinctly recall a period last summer where I was discovering a lot of lesbian comedy podcasts and I thought, “wow, the lesbians seem to be laughing a lot more than the women dating men. I want that, too.” I am in a real drought right now in terms of dating and no one is guaranteed anything in the romance department, so it’s hypothetically possible I could be in a drought the rest of my life. But: I can happily feel at peace knowing that I no longer have to force my body to feel at ease with men.

The reason I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am queer is not because I like being romantically and sexually involved with women (turns out that I do, way more than I could have imagined!) but because I want to live a queer life. It is the same feeling I had when I decided to become a Quaker, that I knew I wanted to live this indescribably strange weird life and there was no turning back once I embraced that possibility.

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