Dissecting Identity: Internalized Homophobia, Religion, and the Queer Community with Stephen Long

Today, we welcome Stephen Long, the brain behind Sacred Tension Substack and its podcast. We're in for a deep, meaningful discussion about internalized homophobia and how it affects the LGBTQ+ community. But, we're not stopping there, we're delving into the nitty-gritty; the politics of relationships, religion's role in society, and the evolution of identity language. We grapple with the terms "gay" and "queer", and the generational gap in their interpretations.

We discuss the daily struggle of reconciling deep religious beliefs with homosexuality, and how queer people of faith endure a constant battle of making peace with conflicting aspects of identity. We'll also be touching on the complexities of activism and the loss of personal growth caused by internalized homophobia.

To wrap things up, we'll refocus on religion's role in society. We'll bring in perspectives from the Satanic Temple, a non-theistic religious organization emphasizing compassion, empathy, and human rights. We'll dissect the elements of religion, its challenges, and how it can add structure and meaning to lives. This is an episode packed with boundary-pushing conversations, norms challenge, and enough self-reflection to spark meaningful change. Make sure you like and subscribe to Deep Dive with Shawn C. Fettig on your preferred podcast platform; you won't want to miss this one!

Mentioned:
On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State - Graeme Wood
The Identity Trap – Yascha Mounk

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**Artwork: Dovi Design
**Music: Joystock

Transcript

Stephen: 0:00

I think the biggest component of internalized homophobia for me was constant self-management. It was constant maintenance of this part of my life that was socially, spiritually, religiously and personally unacceptable. And the amount of energy that went into that management was just gargantuan. I mean, multiple nuclear power plants could not have provided enough energy to maintain the 24-7 management of my homosexuality.

Shawn: 0:42

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, Shawn C Fettig. I should say welcome back to Deep Dive. We've been on hiatus for almost two months and, while it was well needed, we're back, I'm well rested and we've got a whole host of exciting guests and topics on Deck for Y'all. Beginning now, my guest today is Stephen Long, the creator of and writer at the Sacred Tension Substack and also host of the Sacred Tension podcast, in which he focuses on the spiritual discipline of asking questions. Topics range from Marxism to Satanism, to surviving a cult, to exploring Christianity as a queer person.

Shawn: 1:22

In our conversation, stephen and I talk about a lot of things. We talk about the language of identity, how it evolves, in what context that language matters and in what context it might not. We talk about how the politics of today, on the right and on the left, might be crowding out our natural ability and desire to form and maintain bonds with our family, our neighbors, our community that transcend things like gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, race, etc. And instead instill a sense of fear and hatred and otherness that we're willing to foist onto each other at the ballot box. We talk about how much development, happiness, peace, creativity and genius is lost, is robbed, when people and communities are forced to focus all of their energies on battling dehumanization, ridicule and humiliation. We ask does it matter if someone disagrees with fundamental things about us and who we are, so long as they respect us and aren't actively trying to cause us harm? And also how much we can control the offense and harm caused us by other people's beliefs and words about us? And we talk about religion, its role in society and if, at this point, there's any redeeming quality to it.

Shawn: 2:42

If you liked this episode, or any episode, please give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email deepdivewithshawn@gmail. com. Let's do a deep dive. Stephen Long, thanks for being here. How are you?

Stephen: 3:09

It is such a pleasure and I'm very well. Thank you.

Shawn: 3:12

I'm excited to have you here. I wanted to talk to you because in your work so you have a sub-stack and you have a podcast, both called Sacred Tension you talk quite a bit about some things I've also been thinking and talking about lately, and what I'm referencing is your experience growing up in a religious household and then the intersection of that with your sexuality, and I suppose we should at the outset. I'm learning to ask this question because we all identify differently. I guess the question is how do you identify? Do you reference or are you more comfortable with gay or queer or somewhere else on the spectrum?

Stephen: 3:47

Yeah, I identify as gay. I am a garden variety, gay, factory default, gay Perfect.

Shawn: 3:59

I've never heard these, but I'm like, oh, me too.

Stephen: 4:02

Yes, I also don't mind the term queer. I know that there are a lot of people who dislike the term queer. A lot of our gay elders dislike the word queer because that was the word that was used while they were being bullied. It was a horrible, venomous word. And then there are other gay people who feel like it's been overly politicized. I understand both of those hesitations regarding the word queer. I kind of use queer and gay interchangeably, so I don't have hangups about the word queer, but I usually just default to gay.

Shawn: 4:36

Okay, I did know, because I also use them relatively interchangeably. But as I've paid more attention to this, I think I've realized that when I'm referencing the community generally, I tend to lean into queer more, and when I'm talking about myself, I think I use gay more.

Stephen: 4:53

I'm the age where all the animosity around the word queer just doesn't exist. When I was coming out of my late teens, early 20s, the word queer just wasn't charged in all the negative ways that I think it is for a lot of LGBT people, yeah.

Shawn: 5:13

I've definitely not so much lately but not so far removed from maybe just five years ago was definitely in spaces with cohorts of people around my age that had very strong feelings about that word queer.

Stephen: 5:25

Sure, sure, yeah, that makes sense.

Shawn: 5:28

And it did feel awkward, for I almost kind of like was forcing if queer is a square box through. I was trying to force it through a circle for a while, even with myself, and then I don't know what happened. Maybe it was, I was doing a lot of activism work for a while and I was surrounded by younger people and that was just the vernacular.

Stephen: 5:47

Absolutely. Yeah, I find the arguments over words within minority communities so interesting. I recently read a book that made me think of this is called the Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and he's an indigenous horror writer and there's this scene in the book where it's a bunch of Native Americans in a sweat lodge together, and so there are the elderly natives in there with the younger guys who are like 18, 19, and they're fighting, they're arguing over what word to call themselves, and the older guys say, no, we're Indians. That's what we've always caught ourselves. We are Indians. You young ones call yourselves natives or indigenous. And there was this divide that the author was exploring between the generations and how they describe themselves, and I just I find those kinds of language dynamics within minority cultures really interesting.

Shawn: 6:50

Yeah, I absolutely agree. This is something I've actually I've talked about this before, but I'm glad you bring this up because I think this is particularly I don't know if sensitive is the word it's definitely charged in our current kind of social and political environment. And I come from. So I come from the Midwest and rural Midwest. So even as a gay kid or as I was realizing, you know that I was a gay person. I the only words I had available to me were whatever words were used in my community Right, yes. And then I moved to a bigger city and I lived in Chicago for a while and I, you know, kind of went global for a while and was exposed to much more urban kind of language and was often like, ridiculed for it. You know, you know I was using LGBT, which you know. At the time, you know we were transitioning to queer and people were like could peg me? Oh, you're older.

Stephen: 7:50

And I think peg. I think people peg me in the same way, not not for being older, but being like a gay boomer at heart.

Shawn: 7:57

Yeah.

Stephen: 7:57

I still use terms like LGBT.

Shawn: 8:01

Yeah, I actually am really grateful for that experience because I think being both an insider and an outsider so I'm an insider to the queer community but I'm an outsider to other identities Right, I definitely give much more weight to intent than I do to somebody's use of the quote. Unquote correct word.

Stephen: 8:19

Absolutely. Yes, I'm 100% the same way and you know, I have a friend, really really close friend, who is very Southern, raised in a rural area, but he was a music professor at a college, at a Christian college, where they demanded actually, it was the college that I went to in the late 2000s, early 2010s and this college demanded that everyone on staff and faculty sign a covenant that marriages between one man and one woman, which effectively started this you know little civil war inside the school and my friend refused to sign it. He decided it was wrong, it was immoral, and that he was going to stand up for gay people and for his gay friends, and he lost his job, he got fired over this and he also had a habit of calling things because, you know, he was like a trailer park skater boy growing up, you know, from Columbia, south Carolina, and so he would often just passively, without realizing it, use the word gay as a synonym for lame.

Stephen: 9:35

Oh that's so gay. Eventually, I was like I know where you're coming from. I know you don't mean anything by this. Other people will not interpret this well, using the word gay as an insult. But the fact is I know that he lost his job over defending gay rights and he was doing it the best he could in the context that he was in, while still using language that was imperfect. And when he realized how hurtful using the word gay as an insult or as a as a demeaning term, just in passing, was, he stopped doing it. And so, yeah, intent really matters, because if I didn't know him, I would have heard him say that and would never have known that he lost his job defending gay rights. And so you know, language is complicated and intent is complicated, so I try to extend a lot of grace in these areas.

Shawn: 10:34

Yeah, I'm the same and I'm glad you mentioned that because that's like some of my closest friends in my late teens and early 20s did the same the exact same thing. You know that's gay, and they were some of the most well-meaning, generous, kind people.

Stephen: 10:48

I've ever known in my life. And when the rubber meets the road, they're there for you. When the rubber meets the road, they're the ones who will lose their jobs. To defend your rights, yeah.

Shawn: 11:01

That definitely gets lost when you know, in our kind of charged binary environment. Yeah for sure. I always wonder for those folks when the world becomes so binary and so angry or maybe the United States anyway in our politics where do they end up falling? Do they? Do they end up not voting? Do they end up becoming more conservative in their voting because they feel like they've been ostracized?

Stephen: 11:26

Yes, absolutely yeah, I think so. I think the process that we're seeing over the past decade of polarization in the United States is kind of the messy middle being emptied out, being evacuated, and people going towards the fringes. You know, of course, this isn't in every case, and I think that there's still a broad, complicated middle of people who often have contradictory beliefs or who don't think very closely about politics, or but for those who are noticeably political, I think that there is an evacuation of kind of this, this broad, messy middle where, you know, maybe there's there's more dialogue and more openness to nuance and complexity and questioning and instead people are going to the extremes and I especially saw this shortly after Trump got elected, where it's like the middle left and the middle right just became empty. So I, yes, I think that that is absolutely what happens, where, if someone has a bad experience, I think, or if someone has an aversive reaction to like that black and white thinking that you are describing, I think, I think people get alienated and get get pushed further to extremes.

Shawn: 12:52

And I think that's to the detriment of you know full disclosure, and this shouldn't be a surprise to any listener, just at this point would never vote for a Republican. Yes, same, Absolutely. I think the Democratic Party is doing itself a disservice in leaning into the binary and not reaching into that void. Yes 100%. I think they're losing a lot of potential voters in that space. Yeah.

Stephen: 13:17

And you know I so I live and work in kind of so. So I work in the service industry. I manage a grocery store. I manage a small, locally owned grocery store and that's, that's the whole other part of my life, when I'm not recording and writing and and doing interviews and doing shows and etc, is I'm I'm really existing in a very tight knit community of service workers, because my store is kind of like a village marketplace and absolutely everyone comes into the store. Like I feel like I see every single person in my county at least once every two weeks. So everyone comes through and it's a really diverse population.

Stephen: 14:03

And this is a small Appalachian Mountain town and so we have, you know, immigrant families and we have super religious families and we have, you know, amish families and we have just every type of person, and then the hippies who come down from the mountain, you know, and the gay witches who who hang out in the tea shops downtown every type of person imaginable. And the task, my job, is to be hospitable to all of them, because all of them deserve to eat. You know, food is this fundamental need that unites everyone. It's my job to provide this kind of fundamental, universal resource of food to everyone, and when you do that, you really start to see very clearly how these divides are incredible and deeply superficial and false. They don't exist in a meaningful way and people are just far more complex. And when we're hospitable to that complexity, I think really beautiful things happen.

Shawn: 15:05

So, as long as we're down this road, I do want to pick your brain a little bit, because you touched on this a little bit, or at least this is inherent in what you're saying in some way. I have some friends that I'm thinking of, two in particular very devout Muslim and, like very dear, close friends of mine, they love me to the ends of the earth and vice versa, and yet they are absolutely staunchly against same sex marriage. They don't think that, you know, same sex discussions should be held in school in any capacity, and I've intellectualized this. There's an emotional component and there's an intellectual component, and the emotional component is a little bit of does this hurt? Does this bother me in any way?

Stephen: 15:56

Yes, yes, which it?

Shawn: 15:57

bleeds into the intellectual side, which is, you know, I kind of don't care what they believe as long as they respect me and, at the end of the day, they're not going out of their way to cause harm Right.

Stephen: 16:09

Yes, yeah, no, I'm right there with you. I made, by the way, were you raised Muslim or were you what? Christian Okay, christian Okay. So I made a resolution with myself several years ago that I would readjust my threshold for what I considered threatening. So this was maybe about a decade ago and it's one of the best choices I have ever made in my life.

Stephen: 16:36

I decided very deliberately that I would only be threatened by someone, that I would only allow myself to feel hurt or fearful if they were actually trying to physically hurt me and it's just like set a really, really high bar or they were actively trying to remove my rights in some way. Right, yep, and so you know a, for example, an activist conservative activist, say, at the family research council, who's working to undo gay marriage. Yeah, I'm going to be pissed about that. But other than that, I decided that unless someone is coming at me with an axe, I just won't care because I can be okay regardless of what they believe about me, and I think that's the most. That was the most liberating decision that I ever made, and it took some.

Stephen: 17:32

It took a couple of gay elders of mine to sit me down and talk me through this, and they basically said Stephen, there will always be assholes and you have to be okay despite their existence. They will always exist. People who disagree with you will always exist. Stop internalizing that you can be okay regardless of what other people believe about you. This is the best choice and most liberating thing that I have ever done for myself, because it means that I have a level of emotional freedom socially that I didn't have previously, where I feel like previously I internalized every belief, any one, any, every single belief that everyone had about me in a really toxic and destructive way and that I could not be okay, I could not live a full life until, basically, everyone was on the same page, but the fact is no one. There will never be a time when everyone is on the same page about people like me and that's fine. I can live a full life in spite of that.

Shawn: 18:42

This is a good segue, because I did want to talk about some of the things that you've mentioned related to internalized homophobia, which manifests itself. You know, this is an expected side effect of growing up an outsider in some other type of setting right, and so for me, that was like growing up queer in a religious household. One of the things that was difficult for me it was both difficult and liberating for me to understand was well, two things. One, there's always chaos agents. So, even if it seems like you've hurted the cats, there's always some chaos agent that's going to throw everything in disarray, right, and so, to some degree, this speaks to what you were saying is there's a futility in trying to get everybody to the same place. Yes, the other is that there's an inherent tension in activism, and so when I was trying to figure out where my space was in, you know, the queer world and this was me coming out of a very religious world and I think some of this was so afraid of losing my people, I need to define new people.

Stephen: 19:44

What denomination or tradition were you raised in, by the way?

Shawn: 19:47

I was non-denominational, but we were losing for a while.

Stephen: 19:50

Okay, perfect.

Shawn: 19:52

There's an inherent tension in activism. One is like you kind of need everybody to drink the Kool-Aid yes, yes, this is not besmirching, you know queer activism. I think this is across the board, whether it's conservative, liberal, whatever. You have to have a collective. There has to be like collective action that requires everyone to like just drink the Kool-Aid and be your warriors. Right. But in doing that I think you smooth rough edges detrimentally. You oversimplify. There is a lot of complication and there's a lot of individuality in how we interact and how we determine how we're going to be in the world with people around us. That gets lost in activism 100%.

Shawn: 20:35

But to that end I do want to build up to kind of some of your experiences that you've talked about, because I think they're very interesting and they're very divergent from experiences that I've had. But I, you know, delay a little bit of foundation. You've talked about internalized homophobia and that that's how that's impacted your mental health, and I'm wondering if you could just tell me what that looked like. How did that manifest for you?

Stephen: 20:59

Yeah well, it manifested in about over a decade of persistent self-injury. So my arms are a just latticework. My arms and legs are a latticework of scars, and I had other untreated mental illness as well, but it was certainly exacerbated by internalized homophobia. I think the biggest component of internalized homophobia for me was constant self-management. It was constant maintenance of this part of my life that was socially, spiritually, religiously and personally unacceptable. And the amount of energy that went into that management was just gargantuan. I mean, multiple nuclear power plants could not have provided enough energy to maintain the 24-7 management of my homosexuality.

Shawn: 22:01

Were you religious and gay at the same time, but kept them separate.

Stephen: 22:08

I was deeply religious and in many ways I'm still deeply religious. You know I'm a non-theist, I'm an atheist, but I have the religion super bug. I can't get rid of it.

Stephen: 22:20

I can't get rid of the religious impulse within myself. So, yeah, I was simultaneously deeply religious and fabulously gay, and the battle of my teens and twenties was how do I bring these two things that I did not choose, or how do I bring these two things that I did not choose together? It was like two magnets trying to force them together when they're facing the wrong direction. And the thing that I want to communicate to people, especially to secular people or to people who are maybe more marginally religious, is to people like me, to people who are like you know, who are raised like I was and who had a deep, deep, deep faith like I did.

Stephen: 23:09

Religion is not arbitrary. Religion is as real and as relevant as your own heartbeat. I mean, it is your pulse. It is as real, as relevant, as pressing, as central as your own heart rate, and everything must be considered through that lens. Personally, everything had to be considered through that lens. It was words fail to describe how real it was for me and so it very much wasn't a thing that I could just get over. In fact, getting over it took years. It took years of thinking and conversing and writing and struggling and praying and so on and so forth, and so the I think the conflict that I was in was that I was even from a young age, you know, from my teens, could not really at my heart level, in an emotional sense, could not quite grasp what was wrong with homosexuality and what was wrong with gay relationships?

Stephen: 24:21

because I looked at them and I saw them as beautiful and that conflicted profoundly with this kind of vast edifice of internally consistent theology about the structure of the world. Right, and if you mess with that structure theologically, so you know, marriages between one man and one woman, because that reflects the perfect balance within creation itself, the relationship between Christ and his church, the relationship between God and his creation. So it's layers of symbolism, layers of harmony, and there is this very real sense that if you violate that, even within your own personal life, that you are fucking with the DNA of the universe. You are, you are undermining the structure of the world and when you do that it has dire consequences for yourself and for others. This is, it isn't rational, but it is a profound emotional experience, it is an emotional aversion, it is a disgust response to any violation of that created order. So having these dual realities within myself, where I am myself very gay at an emotional level, not understanding why it is wrong, while also experiencing the revulsion not just of myself but of other gay people, and the terror of what embracing homosexuality would mean for the created order, because if you fuck with that, you're fucking with everything you are, you're wrecking the finely tuned balance that is beautiful and ornate and delicate that God intended from creation. So and I'm not, of course, saying that any of this is true, but this is, this is just an account of the internal experience. So the maintenance of that fact and the constant emotional battles, the constant back and forth, the constant debating with myself, the going through ex-gay therapy, all of the energy being put into well, first, as a teenager, all the energy being put into not seeming gay, all of the energy being put into managing relationships with girlfriends, trying to make that work being impossible. All of the energy being put into then trying to change my orientation. All of the energy being put into managing my attractions, lusts, porn use, whatever the case may be. All of the energy then being put into trying to live a celibate life and facing a life, when you're 22, of being celibate for the rest of your life and deeply lonely, being deeply lonely, yearning for a male partner, for someone who can be both a friend and a lover, and being deeply lonely in the way that young 20-somethings are, and having and looking into your future and seeing no respite from that deeply crushing.

Stephen: 27:41

The greatest loss of internalized homophobia is the delay of time and development and waste. It is wasted time because so much of your energy goes to managing your internalized homophobia. Well, that's time that you could have spent in school. That's time that you could have spent developing skills. That's time you could have spent developing meaningful friendships and meaningful relationships and pursuing things that you love. All of that is lost. All of that time over the course of for some guys decades, for me it was about a decade, over a decade, about a decade and a half. That is lost time to just perpetual management.

Shawn: 28:22

This is fascinating, hearing this story, because it's same, not same. So much of what you're saying resonates with me, and then I can see where we took very different paths, which that's life, that's normal For me. I was coming out of religion, as I was leaning into being gay, and once I was out of religion I just dropped it, and then I've always had an anthropological interest in religion. I find it fascinating, but I don't feel it in me anymore. So it's like my relationship with sharks. To be honest, I'm absolutely fascinated by that, but you're not a shark.

Stephen: 29:01

I want to get as close as possible, but you're not a shark. Yes, I don't want to get bit.

Shawn: 29:08

But at the same time I can see how the impact of the way that I dealt with it was my own form manifested in its own form of homophobia, and so we both had this altered gay age. That just shifted us up a bit. And I was definitely well aware at significant and important periods of time in my life that I was not at the same emotional maturity level as my peers, even spiritual level, maybe intellectual level as well, and that's just because I was just kind of lagging due to this right.

Stephen: 29:44

Yes, that's right, and you know. Toni Morrison talks about how the real cost of racism is. It's a way it wastes your time. It keeps you explaining and she says you know? Someone will say our skulls aren't shaped right. You drag out scientists to prove that they are. Someone says you don't have poetry or you don't have language. You spend 20 years. You know, fighting that you do. Someone says you don't have kingdoms, you have to dredge that up, and she says none of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing the real, the real effect of racism is that it wastes your time, it keeps you from doing your work, and the same is true of homophobia.

Shawn: 30:23

This is something, in its own way, that I wanted to talk to you about, so let's just jump right to it, which is you've talked about wanting to be done being a quote unquote gay man. Yes, you know so for any listeners out there, because I feel exactly the same way, I'll speak for myself. I don't mean I want to be done being gay. What I mean is I want to be done with that being my dominant identity. But let me put it in the context of what you were just saying, which is, I think we live in a society that often relegates whatever is the you know, the identity of the moment or the controversy of the moment people that embody that it relegates them to being that trans rights or trans issues are the political hot topic of the moment, then every trans person on the planet has to be a trans person when they're in the room, and for me, that's always been a struggle, because I don't want to be the gay guy in the room. I don't want to always have to be.

Shawn: 31:18

You know people have questions or they want to talk about LGBT issues. Well, Shawn's gay right, and so, like that's, all I have to offer is my gayness. But at the same time I wrestle with. But that's the moment I don't have the luxury by being born this way, I don't have the luxury of saying yeah, but I tap out, I don't want to be that, because I feel like what I'm doing then is creating a void where the worst, the worst demagogues enter, where you know the less agreeable, less thoughtful people fill the void on the on the right or the left.

Shawn: 31:57

Yes, Am I conceptualizing what you're saying about not wanting to be a gay man? Is that what you're talking about?

Stephen: 32:04

Yes. So you know, it's interesting because I feel most free when I am in my home with my partner, who I've been with for close to a decade, and our six cats because we're crazy cat people getting a picture now, yes, six. And we, you know, and we I hate to pit, I hate to paint too rosy a picture, but we, you know, we live in kind of like this little, this little mountain house on the, on the edge of a national forest and in Appalachia, on a hill, and my home life is truly lovely. You know, I have a secure and loving attachment with my partner where we can just go days without, without really saying a word to each other, but just enjoying each other's animal presence.

Stephen: 32:56

One of the things that makes it so lovely is the spaciousness. There is a psychological and spiritual spaciousness where I, when I am in my home, I can pursue whatever it is that I find interesting. I can read whatever book I want, I can watch whatever movie I want, and practically none of that time is spent thinking about the fact that I'm gay. I am gay, of course, you know I. I'm living with a man. Of course, it is descriptively true. Also, you know, no one has ever mistaken me for a straight man. No one has ever looked at me in a crowd and being like yeah, that's a straight stallion right there.

Shawn: 33:37

That is never fucking hard, as hard as I was trying. I think it's probably true of me as well.

Stephen: 33:41

Yes, yes, no, I mean, even when I was in the closet, it was a. It was a very chic glass closet that you know was so. No one has ever mistaken me for a straight man and I'm not denying my gay identity. I think some people hear what I'm saying and and assume that I am eschewing the gay identity and the and gay as an accurate description of myself altogether. That's not the case at all. It's instead a search for spaciousness, to be fully human and to be fully individual, and I experienced that the most when I am at home and with some very close friends. You know there are some I have some great friends where we're not talking about me being gay. We're talking about philosophy and religion and our creative projects and the album that my friend is recording or a piece that I'm writing, or whatever the case may be.

Stephen: 34:36

It's only when I go out into the world where, suddenly, my homosexuality really matters, and it is a feeling of confinement, because what it does is it shifts the attention to something that, frankly, I think is one of the least interesting parts about myself. I think that what's interesting about me is what I want to explore regarding philosophy and religion and theory of mind, or philosophy of mind and just all of that stuff, all the stuff that I cover on my show. And instead I entered this world, when I leave my front door, where the fact that I'm gay really matters, and I genuinely believe that the fact that it matters is still a sign of cultural oppression and it is something to manage. I believe that and this is not to be confused with it just to this is not to say that it isn't important. Of course, the fact that I'm gay is developmentally significant, and I think that that will be true no matter how accepted homosexuality is culturally, because being a minority, being not like all the other kids in your class, that is going to be developmentally significant, and so I'm gay. If someone doesn't know that I'm gay, then they don't know me, right? Instead, it's a shift in emphasis, it's a difference in emphasis, and I keep thinking about the way the physicist, neil deGrasse Tyson explained this, where, of course, he's black, and I forget which podcast I was listening to, but the host was really pressing him on what is it like to be a black scientist? Or what is it like to be a person of color? And blah, blah, blah, blah.

Stephen: 36:19

And Neil deGrasse Tyson said okay, listen, I have a comic strip and I wish I could find this comic strip because it's like the perfect illustration of my own experience. Where it is, the comic strip is of two scientists at a lab, in a lab, and one of the scientists is black and the other scientist is white, and the white scientist has a thought bubble above his head and it's oh, I wonder, I wonder what it's like for him being black in this setting. Has he experienced bigotry here? Just blah, blah, blah, blah. You just oh, I hope I'm not saying anything racist, I hope I just on and on and on and just the perseverating over the fact that the man next to the scientist next to him is black, is a black scientist, and then in the thought bubble for the black scientist is just mathematical equations. The black scientist is just thinking about the science. That is so very much my own experience. But you're right that this is the moment we are in, a cultural moment. But I think how we respond to that moment can really say a lot.

Stephen: 37:25

I have also, of course, found myself in that position where it's like oh hey, steven's queer, let's talk to him about this. I'm happy to be that person. I'm more than happy to be that person. I think I can respond to those questions by emphasizing universal humanity and universal individuality.

Stephen: 37:45

So when people are like, hey, steven, the queer community seems kind of nuts right now. What do you make of that? I'm like well, the queer community isn't actually a community. They're gay communities, but there is no unified theory, there is no unified ideology, there is no unified worldview. Gay people appear at random. Lgbt trans people as well appear at random across human civilization, across all cultural divides, across all languages and religions and political ideologies and generations, on every single continent on this earth and every single country. There's no way in which that is. There's no meaningful way in which that is a community. That isn't a community. There are gay communities of LGBT people who share a similar worldview and cohere together, but there is no gay community.

Stephen: 38:40

So the thing that when I get asked questions, I always try to emphasize that, first and foremost, just like everyone else, gay people are individuals with their own unique worldview. There is no unified theory that gay community has. We're not all on Zoom together Every Tuesday night, being presided over by Ian McKellen, where we come up with the finer points of the gay agenda. That is not a thing that happens and that we are. And I have always emphasized that we are human. We're just as human as everyone else. Just treat us as human. Just treat us as individuals, treat us as humans and there is vast intellectual diversity. So what I find myself trying to emphasize is that we are just as human as everyone else. So there's a way to respond to these questions that we all get as gay people. There's a way to respond to these questions that doubles down on the sort of world that I want to live in, that world where everyone has the sort of spaciousness to be whoever they are. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?

Shawn: 39:51

Am I okay?

Shawn: 39:52

Yeah, and there's so many different directions I want to go in. So, going back to the earlier part of your response, you make a lot of intriguing points. I'm thinking it is absolutely true that I am only gay quote unquote when somebody outside of my house brings it up. That's right. That's right. It's absolutely true that even in my most intimate moments, even when my husband and I are like, are cuddling, I'm not like. This is me being gay? Yes, absolutely. But it makes me question and I've been doing this a lot lately like what does being gay mean? The truest definition of being gay is when someone says you're gay, let's talk about it.

Stephen: 40:33

Yeah, it's when it's reflected back at you by your surrounding culture. Otherwise it is just a description. So I think that liberation for me personally, liberation is a move away from perseveration over identity categories, so it's a shift from identity to description. It is descriptively true that I am gay. It is also descriptively true that I have brown hair, that I am an American, that I was born in Taiwan to Christian missionaries, that I was raised in a multicultural household. All of those things are important. They are descriptions of the type of person I am. They are descriptively true, but are they identities? Well, identity is complicated. Of course, they have played a role in my identity at various times over my life, but for me it really is a shift towards these things being descriptively true. If someone were to describe me, an important part of that description would be oh, he's gay, he lives with a man, he is exclusively attracted to men, he exclusively has had sex with men. Of course, that's an important feature, but it is a description.

Shawn: 41:45

And you know who would say that is someone who doesn't know me. That's right. The only people that would say, oh, s, who is he? He's gay Are the people that are not close to me. Anybody that's close to me would never. That is not who I am.

Stephen: 41:58

Yes, that's right. That's right. And the gay part of us? It isn't. Of course, it's developmentally important. It has informed our lives and I think that that will be true even if we ever reach this utopia of total LGBT acceptance, and it will still be a minority and that will still shape someone's adolescence in meaningful ways, of course, because you will look around, your friends, your friendships, and you will have a different experience from them. That will shape you. But I think what you're describing it's the people who don't know me, who would only describe me as gay. It's really. There's always this jarring moment for me because I will be at my store, stalking a shelf, listening to an audiobook, listening to a fantasy novel or something fascinating, and my head the fact that I'm gay is just nowhere on the radar. And then very often, a customer, sometimes a stranger, will come up to me and be like oh hey, you know I saw this, this really good movie and has this gay character and they wanted to tell me all about it. And of course, they're trying to be hospitable.

Shawn: 43:12

Yeah, correct.

Stephen: 43:14

And connect, but I'm I've suddenly pulled down. I'm suddenly yanked down from whatever it is that I was thinking about and from the audiobook I was listening to, and from the shelf that I was stalking down, to the fact that this complete stranger was thinking about who I want to fuck, and that is a very weird experience. That is a very, very jarring experience.

Shawn: 43:40

I think this is a significant component of the construct of internalized homophobia, which is that even when we're coming into sexuality and realizing what that is, I don't think we're ever at that moment. It's a big part of our lives because we're uncovering something new, but we are still not, even in those moments, spending 100% of our time thinking I'm a gay person, I'm a gay person, I'm going to do what gay people do.

Stephen: 44:06

Yeah, exactly.

Shawn: 44:08

But other people are. You know, we know that as soon as we say I'm gay, that is all we are to a lot of people.

Stephen: 44:15

Yes, correct.

Shawn: 44:16

And that's a constant struggle. If you're insecure and coming into something that is not dominant society and you want to incorporate this into the constellation of your components and that's all you are to someone and you are surrounded by people where that's a shameful thing and they're hateful about it. How horrific.

Stephen: 44:35

Yes, it is horrific because and you hate it yourself as well very often in those situations, and so your attention is constantly being brought to this singular thing about you that other people hate, that you hate, and it becomes all-consuming, it becomes this black hole, it becomes this ulcer in your spirit, in your heart. That just requires constant energy.

Shawn: 45:02

So let me ask you this, because I think life is a constant pursuit of not necessarily complete joy, but balance at least. And I've been thinking a lot about balance in my own life and what that looks like. I also think about this on a spectrum. You know, like on one side we have a and here I'm talking about how we strike some type of balance for care of ourselves and other people in our life. So, like on one side, we have like a very collective focus, so we take care of others, but it comes at the expense of ourselves, right, and we all know people like this.

Shawn: 45:34

Maybe perhaps we've done this. But then on the other side of that, the extreme spectrum, we have what I guess I refer to as oprification of society and that's, you know, we start to focus on our own personal growth so much that it comes at the expense of collective good or collective care or taking care of anyone else. And I'm trying to figure out how to balance this in my life, how to incorporate the things that we talked about, how to incorporate being a gay man into, like I said, the constellation of my collective, and how to engage with that, how to advocate for that, and there's other components of myself as well. My gender for you maybe it's religion in meaningful ways that aren't in some way consuming us.

Stephen: 46:12

Yeah that do no harm. You know in a way that, in a way that does no harm to ourselves, and it's like a spiritual Hippocratic oath that we're trying to.

Shawn: 46:22

Yeah, how do we strike a balance? Where we're, we're fulfilling that in ourselves, but we're also cognizant of the people around us and caring for that.

Stephen: 46:31

Yes, for sure. So I think that there is a first. I do think that there is a false dilemma in how I think maybe activist culture that we've both been part of frames this issue, where there's a false dichotomy, where either either we lean into the fixation on identity and I think people know what I mean by that, you know the, the, the rumination fixation on identity categories and how we interact with them, whether we lean into that and defend the rights of marginalized people or we walk away from that identity fixation but also walk away from defending the rights of minorities, and I just kind of fundamentally reject that binary.

Stephen: 47:36

I don't think that's accurate and I think the really the maybe the person who put this, the person who articulated this former option, is Gayatri Shakravorty Spivak, who's an Indian scholar, and she used the phrase strategic essentialism. And the idea behind strategic essentialism is that we know, of course we know, that groups that that marginalized people, they don't actually have much in common with each other because you know they are individuals, and is there kind of a coalescing core to these groups that that essentialize them? No, we all know that. That's not true. You know there are 40 million black people in the United States. Of course they don't.

Shawn: 48:32

But I think we often make the mistake that cohesive quality is just being gay.

Stephen: 48:38

Yes, that's right, that's right. Well, well, and so this is this is what Spivak said is we know that that's true, but in order to fight for our rights, we are going to essentialize it. Is it is strategic essential, is strategic essentialism where it's like OK, we know theoretically that the essentialism is not an accurate picture of reality. However, we are going to essentialize because that is the only way for us to organize to get rights. I think that that notion has just so deeply embedded itself in a lot of minority communities, I think that idea and and in a lot of active, more so activist communities, and I just fundamentally reject it. I don't think that that is the best way for us to get rights and I don't think it's a good way to live. I think I think it.

Stephen: 49:34

You know Yasha Monk, who's a political scientist. He calls it a trap. It is a trap. It is. It is a political trap because it it seems progressive and it seems compassionate, but it ultimately works, I believe, against progressive causes. But it's also a personal trap because ultimately, strategic essentialism is dissatisfying. It is ultimately emotionally and spiritually dissatisfying. So it's a personal trap as well. So I think I just fundamentally reject the whole quandary. I think I just I just don't buy into the conundrum at play here, because I, you know, I believe that I fight for the rights of marginalized people every day and I do that in how I talk to people.

Stephen: 50:23

I do that in how I talk to the stranger and how I talk to people who are outsiders, social outsiders and I and I feel like we can do that in how we talk about people who are social outsiders. We do that by emphasizing our shared humanity, and we can do that every day. And how we vote, and we can do that every day and how we confront people if they are demonstrating bigotry, and we can do that. It just, it just. I'm a I'm a big believer in like boots on the ground, day to day, boring, quotidian humanization. I'm a big believer in that. I I'm a big believer in like in our own backyard, when we're at the coffee shop, among our friends, among our family, when we're at the grocery store, when we are at work. That's where the real work happens.

Stephen: 51:14

I mean, that's why Harvey Milk said everyone must come out, because it is those day to day relationships that shifts culture. And he knew that if everyone who is gay actually came out, then society would change. And of course, he was right. And that is exactly what's happened. Everyone came out Well, not everyone, but a ton of people came out and the result is suddenly, in their day to day lives, everyone knew someone who was gay. Everyone had an uncle or a hairdresser or a coworker or a boss, or whatever the case may be, who was gay. So I think that it is entirely possible to walk away from strategic essentialism while still humanizing marginalized people on a day to day basis in how we live our lives. So, to me, I think that there just isn't, I think that, in principle, there isn't a conflict.

Shawn: 52:06

I'm glad you bring this up because I think this is something for people that are activists or even advocates or even not, just are kind of ancillarily involved or feel the effects of activism, kind of see what maybe aren't able to put into words. And what I mean by that is there are two things, two negative things that come out of strategic essentialism. One is that I think what it does is it stratifies communities in a way that you create a dominance and you oversimplify to the point that the needs of the most dominant get attention and are met at the expense of everyone. That's not In the example in the queer community.

Shawn: 52:44

Is this singular focus on same-sex marriage, which is that a virtuous cause? Yes, but at the same time it came at the expense of trans folks and folks of color and their needs in the queer community. But there was this demand to focus on that and then a complete diaspora after that and at a wasteland of needs met for folks. So that's one. The other is, I think it kind of creates this intrinsic idea of value and what you're supposed to be for people that it doesn't work for it tells you like, if these are our goals because we were so oversimplified and this is who we are, then this is how you have to be. And for people that are trying to figure out what it means to be something, they're looking for someone to help them and tell them what that is. And let's say, I'm gay and this community is telling me how to be, I guess, a gay person, you still can feel at odds with it.

Stephen: 53:36

Oh, absolutely so. Yasha Monk's book the Identity Trap, which I highly recommend. His newest.

Stephen: 53:43

And he has this quote and I think I featured this quote in a recent article describing strategic essentialism and what he calls the identity synthesis.

Stephen: 53:55

He writes of minority, of people who are part of a minority identity. He says others will chafe under the expectations of such a society because they do not wish to make their membership in some group they did not choose so central to their self conception. They might, for example, define themselves in terms of their individual tastes and temperaments, their artistic predilections or their sense of moral duty toward all humanity. People with a wide variety of personal beliefs and religious convictions are likely to feel alienated in a society that most prizes a form of self conscious identification with some group into which they were born. So I think the important thing here is I think what I'm arguing for is the freedom to identify with what you want to identify, because that is a mark of liberation and I'm a big believer in individual autonomy and it is okay if someone wants to.

Stephen: 54:53

And I think we've all gone through this phase. We've all gone through the baby gay phase, where maybe we move into a gay neighborhood and maybe we move to Boys Town, Chicago or whatever, and we're in all the pride parades and we're at the club every night and whatever. And being gay is central to who. That's great, that's fine. What I want is the social margin, is the spaciousness for people to self actualize in other ways. So the doubling down on the kind of rainbow identity, that's great. What I want is for people to also have the freedom to not choose that right To, as Yasha Muntz said to. Maybe someone wants to double down on their religious identity, on their artistic predilections, on how they serve others. It's a matter of spaciousness, it's a matter of options and I do think that gay culture, especially activist culture, in some ways actually unintentionally reinforces the bigotry of limited options for how one can self, for how one can practice self determination.

Shawn: 56:04

Stephen, I want to circle back to something. This is going to be a hard right. I wanted to ask you earlier I'm not even sure you said that you're an atheist. I said I've pretty much removed myself entirely from religion, so I'm not even sure if we're the right people to answer this question, but I do want to ask it. I think we both have spent a significant amount of time thinking about the role of religion in society, historical and contemporary, and I don't think it's entirely controversial to say that religion, organized religion, is what I'm talking about here. So this is removed from spirituality. It's associated with a lot of abuse and violence and shame and authoritarianism, subjugation, etc. And I have been wondering and this is a serious question if there at this point in you know world history, if there is any redeeming quality to religion that couldn't be offset by something else in society, and here I'm thinking about social value, of charity or goodness or virtue, etc. Is religion any good at all?

Stephen: 57:04

Yeah, no, I mean, that's an important question. I think that there is still social value. Admittedly, a lot of this is driven by my own temperament, which is being still a deeply religious person, although I am a non-theist. And this is where I should probably throw in the wrench into the conversation and say that I am a leader and minister in the Satanic Temple, which is a non-theistic religious organization, so I am a religious Satanist Actually.

Shawn: 57:38

I don't really know what that is Like. I saw that coming, so maybe explain that like bumper sticker that.

Stephen: 57:45

Okay, so the bumper sticker is that TST, the Satanic Temple. It was started a decade ago as kind of a reformation of modern Satanism which was founded by Anton LeVe in 1960s. And so the Satanic Temple is an update of it, is a reformation of modern Satanism to kind of veer it towards values of compassion and empathy and human rights and it is a religion. It often gets confused for just an activist group because we are very politically engaged for religious freedom, activism, division of church and state, etc, etc. Most people know TST for its court cases, but there is a whole religious component to it where we have a large ministry, international body of ministers of which I am part. We have congregations around the world and it is a non-theistic religion, meaning we venerate the romantic symbol of Satan as the ultimate outsider who stood up against arbitrary authority. And it is not rooted necessarily in the biblical Satan, rather it is rooted in the long literary tradition which started with Paradise Lost by John Milton. So it is a literary and symbolic religion but it is heavy with ritual. We have rituals, we have practices, we have core tenets, we have the seven tenets of the temple around which we kind of organize our lives, and I certainly organize my life around the tenets. So, yeah, I can go on, but I will leave it at that. So is there a redeeming quality to religion? I mean, I say this, I bring up the fact that I am a Satanist just to emphasize that I am still very much part of religion.

Stephen: 59:37

I think that a good comparison to religion is family. Is there a source of greater abuse than family? Right, but also, family contains the best of humanity and it contains the worst, and I think religion is similar. This is the challenge. Religion contains the very best and the very worst of humanity. It contains all of heaven and hell. All I can say is that I am personally deeply unhappy without it, without the scaffold and meaning making institutions that religion provides.

Stephen: 1:00:17

And I believe that religion at its best provides four things, which is cultists, creed, code and community. I forget the scholar who used this, who came up with this, but cultists is the, or creed is a set of beliefs about the way the world is and our place in it. Code is how to live in light of that. Cultists is the set of rituals that people engage in as they explore the creed and code. And then there is community, of course. I think that those things are of immense value, and I think that there is a crisis going on in our culture right now because we are losing those things.

Stephen: 1:01:06

I am pro-secularization, of course, but there is a baby in that bathwater and we throw it away at our peril, I think, because creating an individual system, creating an individual system of meaning, some people can do it, but I think for most people, it is just too great a burden to come up with meaning, making structures, that is just too great a burden for most people, I think. Of course, though, the challenge then, is that religion is also laid down with delusional beliefs, with untenable, unphosphiable beliefs about miracles and the supernatural and all of that stuff. And yeah, it is a challenge, it is a conundrum, and can people be happy without religion? Yes, I think that there are people who can thrive without religion. All I know is that I am not one of them. I am deeply unhappy, and I think that is true for a lot of people.

Stephen: 1:02:05

In my writing, I use the term bound and unbound, and I really believe that these are temperaments. I really believe that this is subconscious, this is subterranean, where people who are unbound are people who feel completely hindered and unhappy when they exist within a religious structure. They hate it, they cannot stand it, and to have a religious identification feels like going backwards for them into oppression. But then there are the bound. I am one of the bound, and the bound are the people who feel like they are unhappy if they are not bound to a particular path, to a particular way, to a particular dharma, the way. I think that these temperaments are unchosen and I think that they often have a hard time understanding each other. So is there still value in religion? Unfortunately, I don't know if it matters because it isn't going away. I mean, we have to learn to live with this thing. We have to learn to live with this human impulse.

Stephen: 1:03:13

And I really believe that when we organize our understanding of religion in a very protestant way which is, you know, it meets every Sunday for church, it has a building, it has a book, it has a you know, all of that stuff I think we actually tend to miss the vast religious landscape that we're living in, where I think religions are springing up all around us all the time.

Stephen: 1:03:36

I think horoscopes and astrology is a sort of religion. It provides ritual and structure community. It creates coherence for people. I think UFOs, the UFO culture, has strong religious elements. I think religion is everywhere, and I think actually structured and organized religion is everywhere, but we just tend to be a bit blind to it because of the preeminence of Christianity and we tend to just see the monotheistic religions as the definition of religion. I think if we put that aside and we open our eyes, we'll see that religion is everywhere. It keeps springing up, even when people try to kill it. It will never go away. So the question then is how do we live with, how do we create humane religion? How do we create compassionate religion?

Shawn: 1:04:27

Okay, steven. Final question Are you ready for it? I'm ready. What's something interesting? You've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately.

Stephen: 1:04:36

Oh goodness, right now I'm in the middle of an audiobook called the Way of the Strangers Encounters with the Islamic State by Graham Wood. He's a journalist who goes deep into the Islamic State and it is fascinating. It's very humane and compelling and terrifying. So I've been reading that. I've been reading a biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves. Mill is a hero of mine.

Stephen: 1:05:01

He wrote the great book on liberty which is one of the most beautiful defenses of a liberal society and free speech and human rights written in the English language, and I've been writing a lot about the stuff that we've been talking about identity. I just published a piece in Persuasion about my moving away from identitarianism and to kind of an individualist self-conception, and one of my greatest passions is meditation and philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness, and so I meditate daily. I have just started doing meditation for my paid subscribers on Substack and I'm also a runner, so every day I run after work. Yeah, no, I do lots of things that bring me joy and fulfillment.

Shawn: 1:05:58

Stephen Long, thanks for being here. I've really enjoyed this conversation truly.

Stephen: 1:06:03

I have too. It's been a pleasure.

Shawn: 1:06:11

As we wrap up this episode, navigating the complex intersections of religion, sexuality and belonging in our place in the world, I want to be clear that I acknowledge that these are deeply personal and often painful topics for many. My conversation with Stephen today reminds me that each person's journey is unique, with its own joys and challenges, regardless of our backgrounds. My hope is that we can approach these conversations with open hearts, lead with empathy and compassion and give each other as much grace as we would hope for ourselves. Perhaps, if we could commit to that, the differences that get amplified and demonized in our political world wouldn't be so all-consuming and vitriolic in our daily social interactions and relationships. Rather than making assumptions or judgments about each other's experiences, I encourage us to listen first and seek to understand, though full agreement may not always occur, connection can Alright. Check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks.