When I was about 12 or 13 back when i used to go to church, I told my friend that I was bisexual, and her response was to tell our youth pastor. He pulled me into his office and told me how he had previously helped a man who struggled with gay thoughts, effectively helping him “pray the gay away”. I have never felt worse about myself than I did in that moment, and I doubt I will ever feel worse than in that moment. I confronted my friend, and she shared his same views at the time. And I felt like I couldn’t trust her with anything anymore.
We are still best friends, and she’s very supportive while still being religious and devoted to her faith. With the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson being asked about her faith and her morals, I want to write about the LGBTQIA+ within the context of government positions, laws and religion, with the lense of generations. Each generation has had a different view on how the LGBTQIA+ community should live and if they should gte basic human rights. As a bisexual POC, this is something very close to me as I want to be able to live my life without other people’s religion combined with laws. This idea sounds better in my head, I promise!
Erin, there’s a fundamental tension close to the heart of your topic—the idea of social progress, that as history goes on we become more enlightened in our views on fundamental questions of rights, and the fact that legislative change does not seem to follow this progress. (Some commentators recently have begun warning that a major legal assault on gay marriage is imminent.)
Pew will provide you with lots of data on shifting views—I would encourage you to revisit the unit 1 Pew reading, in which they use gay marriage as an example for the complexity of how life cycle / cohort/ period effects interact.
I will also recommend something very different: that you think about “intersectionality” as you develop this project further. I put the word in quotation marks because it’s a keyterm, and because it might help you in thinking about / finding material that considers how folks negotiate between different facets of identity—writing “as a bisexual POC” may mean you think about LGBTQ identity in terms of how it intersects with race, and on the legal ramifications of that intersection….