Drafted spring of 2026.
Revised June 3-July 24, 2026.

I’m back from my two week road trip! You can see a few pictures here.
Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

A lack of a singular script:

There is no singular experience of being a Quaker. Rather than adhering to a set of prescriptive actions or dogmatic expectations, Quakers seek to embody and live out what we call the testimonies. For example, while many pacifist Quakers would associate their pacifism with their commitment to the peace testimony, not all Quakers are pacifists, and some Quakers have different approaches to the peace testimony.

This lack of a singular script is one of the strongest parallels I find between the Quaker experience and the queer experience. The absence of “who does what, what happens next” can be both liberating, and can also be quite daunting to put into practice. It can also be deeply threatening to outsiders who find security and order in the idea of singular scripts.

I recently went on a first date with a sweet woman who I suspected was even newer to dating women than myself. She said that she found dating women to be a little bewildering because she actually had to be a good person and have her shit together, but with men she could just look cute and assume things would play out along a certain script.

While I can’t say that was necessarily my own experience with dating men (I never really had the sense that men found me very attractive or desirable, probably because, as it turns out, the feeling was mutual!!), I still understood where she was coming from. Even with my ex-husband, there was a script in the background, even if we were choosing to subvert it. When we went out to a restaurant, I would order a beer and he would often order a glass of wine, and the waiter would almost always deliver the wine to me and the beer to him. Then we would roll our eyes and switch drinks.

Being queer, and a queer woman at that, means that the script is non-existent and you have to figure out what you want it to look like. For me, that’s very similar to how I experience being a Quaker.

A Quaker identity can be both a way station and a final destination:

Shortly after I began attending my Quaker meeting, my dad gave me a copy of John Woolman’s diary. My dad was not a Quaker, but he had gone to Presbyterian seminary in an earlier part of his life and was very theologically literate as a result. He wrote a little note inside and suggested that I might find that Quakerism was either my permanent spiritual home or a “welcome way station on your journey.” That framing has always stuck with me, and I find it beautiful. I’ve even welcomed newcomers to our meeting with similar language, because often we are a temporary way station on the way to a different spiritual home for them - but you can’t get from one long destination to another without stopping by an airport or a train station. And I hope that their time with the Quakers gives them what they need when they come through, even if they don’t stick around for the long haul.

I’ve been identifying as queer for several months and I strongly suspect that I will more comfortably identify as a lesbian in the not too distant future. But I am not in a rush to get there, and this very much mirrors my own experience with developing my Quaker identity. It took me a few years to comfortably identify as a Quaker, and then even once I identified as a Quaker, it took me a few more years to commit to membership. I occasionally received some friendly questions about where I was at from people in my meeting, but I never felt significant pressure to join at any point. At this point I have also developed enough of my own language around my theology that if pressed for details, I will identify as a non-Christian theist Quaker (basically meaning that I believe in God, but I do not identify as a Christian). But ultimately I feel like identifying simply as a “Quaker” gestures to what has become my permanent spiritual home and also expansive enough of a term to cover my particular personal theology.

I see the identity of “queer” as very similar to my dad’s original suggestion of what Quakerism signified to me: that it had the potential to either be a way station or a permanent destination. And in some cases, I think it can be….. Both. Being a Quaker absolutely was a way station for me, but I liked it so much that it eventually became my final destination. To me, being queer is an accurate term of the liminal space I find myself in with understanding my evolving sexuality after only previously being with cis men.

It’s rare, but I really bristle at this snide attitude I occasionally see on Al Gore’s internet from chronically online people that women choosing to self-identify as queer are doing it for clout or to be cool. I think the expectation that others should have absolute certainty around identifying their sexuality is part of what keeps a lot of late in life queer people closeted and repressed. I also am pretty sure that if/when I identify with a more specific label such as lesbian, I’d still comfortably identify as queer. To me, being queer is an expression of my solidarity with other non-straight people, and I can’t imagine not continuing to identify with it in some way, given the journey it took for me to even get to this place.

Living your life/truth as a form of public witness:

There is an apocryphal story that Quakers love to tell about the peace testimony. The story goes that William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, used to carry around a sword, which was fashionable among men of his day. As Penn’s Quaker identity developed, he knew at some point that he would have to reckon with wearing a sword which was at odds with the peace testimony. He had a conversation with George Fox, who instructed him to “wear the sword as long as you can,” knowing that Penn was clearly reaching a turning point at which he knew he could no longer wear the sword and made the public commitment to peace.

I think about the parallels between this apocryphal story and being closeted, and the visibility that comes along with being willing to be perceived publicly the way you feel internally. It is paradoxically both a way of asserting and ceding control. You assert control by saying this is who I am, but you cannot control the ways others perceive your own self-identity or representation.

A thought I had swimming around in my head a lot last summer when I was first beginning to comprehend that my unexpected divorce had given me the opening to take my sexuality seriously was that “if God opens a door for you, you have to walk through it.” The closet metaphor is often associated with being in the dark, being invisible, and being burdened by secrets (skeletons in the closet). But I think it’s also worth considering that the small contained space associated with the closet translates into the act of living a small contained life. It restricts meaningful movement in the world at large.

One of my favorite Quaker quotes is one of the most famous ones, which is that George Fox instructed that early Friends: “be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.”

Something I’ve noticed about myself since I am no longer married to a man and now that I am happily transitioning into a queer/sapphic life is that I feel a lot less angry. The gay glow up is real, y’all. I used to carry a lot of really deep and visceral anger, particularly towards men. This anger absolutely impacted my marriage to my ex-husband. I am still angry about men, but that anger feels more abstract and manageable most days, probably because I am no longer overriding so much that my body was trying to tell me for years.

Early Quakers had a way of greeting each other that went “how does the Truth prosper with thee?” Quakers take so seriously the idea of living lives of truth and integrity because we believe that it underpins so much of everything else we stand for, such as environmental stewardship and ending the causes of war. Being out in, and despite of, a homophobic world is inherently part of how I understand being truthful to the testimony of integrity. Doing so is the only way that we can allow others to see themselves in our image, and that of God in all of us.

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