Queerly Beloved: Bridging Spaces of Christian Faith and LGBTQIA+ Identity through Creativity

Three in ten LGBTQ+ people of faith in Britain participate at least once a month with their faith communities (Stonewall, 2018). Despite this significant proportion, the subject of sexuality, gender, and faith is still focused largely on conflict in research and the media (Browne and Nash, 2017; Parveen, 2019), with queerness, faith, and religion being continuously labelled as bad objects for each other (Seitz, 2017). This project actively pushes through these narratives, exploring the intertwined socio-spatial relationships of a queer expression of church and the sacred. Through ethnography, autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, and creative methods, this project investigates the flourishing liminal spaces of LGBTQIA+ Christian communities working with two main case studies: The Open Table Network, and St Nicholas Church, Leicester. Incorporating social science theory and theology with key geographical work, this project makes a novel contribution to the geographies of sexualities and the geographies of religion, displaying how each discipline can inform each other through the example of queer sacred space already bridging these worlds. I invite the reader to journey with me through the spaces, lives, and worlds of the queerly beloved, exploring creativity, ritual, and practice through storytelling, omnitemporality, citizenship, emotion, and embodiment. As a queer, trans, Christian and geographer, I display the use of spirituality as method. In sitting with these complex socio-political and socio-spatial relationships, what emerges is space to be amongst the mess (Law, 2004), a space to be without requiring a resolution of identity or conflict, a space of discovery and belonging within the chaos – and this chaos is holy.