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“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter their color.” ~ Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now
Before there were laws or labels, before normal and deviant drew their hard lines, the world pulsed with a thousand forms of life…spiralling, branching, shapeshifting. Rivers split and rejoined, animals changed sex, flowers opened in one form and ripened into another.
Creation itself was queer: fluid, surprising, resistant to the straight line.
Queerness is not an error. It is nature’s favourite grammar…her endless improvisation, her refusal to repeat herself. Human bodies and desires have always belonged to this wild logic and have never been contained by the binaries empire built.
To remember this is to remember something older than any prohibition: queer bodies and loves are not modern anomalies but ancient embodiments of the sacred. Across continents and millennia, cultures honoured gender diversity, fluidity, and same-sex love as holy threads in existence’s tapestry. What changed was not queerness. What changed was power. Colonialism and patriarchy, hungry for order and hierarchy, recast sacred multiplicity as sin, sickness, or crime. Reclaiming queerness as holy does more than affirm 2SLGBTQIA+ lives. It dismantles the founding lie that life must be split in two and that only one form of love or embodiment is legitimate. That lie underwrites patriarchy and domination. Queerness—diverse, fluid, irreducible—is its antidote.
The natural world has never been binary.
Scientists have documented same-sex pairings and cooperative parenting across hundreds of species. Clownfish transition sex as a normal part of their life cycle. Some slugs carry more than two reproductive roles simultaneously. Trees graft their root systems together, sharing nutrients. Our own bodies carry both estrogen and testosterone, shifting in ratio across a lifetime. Creation myths across the world echo this fluidity…sources that are both mother and father, light and dark, seed and soil.
Hindu iconography from the Indian subcontinent imagines Ardhanarishvara: Shiva depicted as literally half woman and half man in a single body. While Taoist wisdom from ancient China paints yin and yang as interpenetrating currents, each seeded with the other. These stories do not exalt separation. They consecrate union, spectrum, and flow.
To live queerly, then, is not to rebel against nature. It is to join her…to honour the creativity that birthed stars.
History remembers this reverence even where empire tried hardest to erase it.
Across many Indigenous nations of Turtle Island, the land now called North America, Two-Spirit people embodied both feminine and masculine spirits in a single person. In nations including the Lakota, Zuni, Navajo, and Ojibwe, among many others, Two-Spirit individuals served as healers, matchmakers, mediators, and ceremonial leaders. Their presence was not merely tolerated. It was understood as a specific spiritual and social gift…a form of wholeness the community needed.
In South Asia, hijra have blessed births and weddings for thousands of years across the Indian subcontinent, invoking fertility and divine favour at the most significant thresholds of community life. Rooted in Hindu, Muslim, and folk spiritual traditions, hijra have been recognized as a distinct third gender with their own lineages, rituals, and religious authority, present in historical records stretching back to the Kama Sutra and the epics of the Mahabharata.
In Hawai’i and Tahiti, māhū—meaning “in the middle”—were and are recognized as people of a gender between or encompassing both masculine and feminine. Traditionally respected as teachers, healers, and keepers of cultural knowledge, māhū have played central roles in hula, in the transmission of chant, and in the guidance of their communities. Colonization suppressed and shamed this identity, but Hawaiian cultural revitalization has been actively restoring it.
In Samoa and across the broader Pacific, fa’afafine—literally meaning “in the manner of a woman”—are recognized within family and cultural life as a third gender, raised alongside sisters, taking on both feminine and masculine roles in family and community. Fa’afafine are woven into Samoan social fabric without the pathologizing lens that Western frameworks have imposed.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, the galli were the priests of Cybele, the great mother goddess worshipped across what is now Turkey, Greece, and Rome. Moving beyond conventional gender, the galli led ecstatic rites, were understood as sacred vessels of the goddess herself, and were a recognized and respected presence in Roman religious life for centuries.
These are not outliers.
They are fragments of a vast global mosaic in which gender-expansive people were woven into the spiritual and social leadership of their communities. Empire’s response—criminalization, pathologization, missionary suppression—attacked these lineages precisely because they embodied a freedom that control could not abide.
Even the so-called hard sciences refuse tidy boxes.
Intersex people—born with natural variations in chromosomes, hormones, or anatomy that don’t fit conventional definitions of male or female—are part of the human family at rates comparable to the prevalence of red hair.
Chromosomes and hormones tell many stories, not just two. Studies of animal behaviour describe lifelong same-sex pair bonds, communal parenting, and erotic play flourishing across species. Biology, like myth, affirms that diversity is not deviation but design—evolution’s engine and the cosmos’s signature.
Our oldest stories whisper the same truths.
In ancient Sumer, in the region now called Iraq, Inanna’s lamentation priests, the gala, moved between genders to sing the goddess’s songs, their fluid identity understood as integral to their spiritual function. Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy and transformation, consistently blurred the borders of gender and ignited queer ecstasy in his followers. Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite in Greek mythology, merged masculine and feminine into a single body…honoured rather than pitied.
In Yoruba cosmology, originating in what is now Nigeria and Benin and carried across the Atlantic through the African diaspora, the oceanic orisha Olokun flows beyond binary…a deity of the deep sea whose gender is fluid, vast, and not reducible to either pole. In Dogon cosmology from Mali in West Africa, the primordial beings Nommo were understood as simultaneously male and female, multiplicity honoured as the original condition of sacred existence.
Even within Christian scripture and early tradition, careful reading reveals references to gender-nonconforming lives and intimate bonds between saints that later institutional interpretation worked to obscure. The relationship between David and Jonathan, described in language of love surpassing the love of women. The eunuchs whom Jesus describes as those who have made themselves so for the kingdom of heaven. The beloved disciple. These threads were always there.
Queerness is not a modern rupture from tradition. It is tradition, older than scripture, older than the walls we built around love.
To live queerly—in body, desire, gender, imagination—is to embody life’s deepest law: everything changes, and that change is creative. Identity behaves like a river, not a box. Relationship replaces hierarchy. Binaries turn brittle; fluidity proves resilient.
Queerness becomes teacher and sacrament, instructing us in both/and, neither/nor, and the freedom of something else entirely. This is why queerness is holy: it trains us to meet the world relationally, generously, with a curiosity stronger than fear.
Yet centuries of erasure have left scars…internalized shame, religious trauma, severed kinship. The return to holiness often begins in grief before it flowers into joy.
Healing starts with truth-telling: our ancestors were not ashamed.
Queerness is not new. It has always belonged to the sacred story. It deepens when remembrance becomes ritual…when we gather to name our elders, light candles for those lost, reclaim ancestral words for gender and desire, and bless our own bodies aloud. And it blossoms fully when communities move beyond tolerance into reverence, when queerness is centered as gift, teacher, and face of the Divine.
If you wish to honour this truth, begin close in.
Notice the messages about queerness you inherited and the ways they shaped your understanding of body and love.
Let the lies fall away.
Seek a lineage that resonates— Two-Spirit teachings from the nations of Turtle Island, māhū wisdom from Hawai’i, the blessings of hijra tradition from South Asia, the ecstatic rites of Dionysus, the fluid depths of Olokun from Yoruba tradition—and listen for what it asks of your life.
Offer blessings.
If you are queer, speak holiness over your body and your desire. If you are not, speak holiness over the queer kin in your care. Walk outside and apprentice yourself to nature’s queerness: the way leaves refuse uniformity, the stones’ many colours, birds improvising songs that do not repeat. Let the more-than-human world mentor you in difference as design.
Queerness is not an argument to win.
It is a reality older than language written into soil and stars and our own pulse. It is the way rivers refuse the straight line, the way trees twist toward light, the way galaxies spiral, never identical, never still.
To be queer is to mirror the cosmos: unpredictable, abundant, irreducible.
Empire told a small story…that there are only two ways to be, that love must follow a single script, that the Divine wears one face. The larger truth is this: the Divine wears many faces, loves in many ways, and dances in many bodies.
Queerness is the evidence.
So let it be said plainly and without apology:
Queer is holy.
It always has been.
It always will be.
~
{Editor’s Note: Several links have been added for quick refence and study, but we highly recommend you taking a closer look at the included reference list provided by the author on these topics to more fully grasp and explore them.}
References
Abrams, M. H., & Greenblatt, S. (Eds.). (2006). The Norton anthology of English literature (8th ed., Vol. 1). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Blackwood, E. (2000). Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism: The politics of feeling good. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Bullough, V. L., & Bullough, B. (2019). Before Stonewall: Activists for gay and lesbian rights in historical context (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Driskill, Q.-L., Finley, C., Gilley, B. J., & Morgensen, S. L. (Eds.). (2011). Queer Indigenous studies: Critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2020). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality (Updated ed.). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Herdt, G. (Ed.). (2021). Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Zone Books.
Lang, S. (2016). Men as women, women as men: Changing gender in Native American cultures. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Nanda, S. (2021). Neither man nor woman: The hijras of India (Updated ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Roughgarden, J. (2013). Evolution’s rainbow: Diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people (Rev. ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Spencer, C. (2022). Transgender history: The roots of today’s revolution (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Williams, W. L. (2022). The spirit and the flesh: Sexual diversity in American Indian culture (Updated ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
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