From Fanatic Fundamentalism to Queer Liberation: An Exodus

A year ago I left a cult.

We are all just searching for the one thing that will make us feel whole again.

In my bones I am a mystic—a Scorpio born on All Souls Day and raised by a pastor, I have always straddled worlds. My childhood was full of evangelical preaching, ecstatic praise dancing, and praying in tongues. I loved it. I spent hours a day studying the Bible and talking to G-d. I went to church multiple times a week: youth group, Bible Study, revival services, prayer meetings. I attended conferences with names like Acquire the Fire and Rock the Nations and spent one summer in a tent with 100 other teens pursuing spiritual discipleship.

When I began to realize that I was gay as a high school senior, I panicked. Entering my teenage years in the mid 90’s severely sheltered, I hardly knew what gayness was. The church included homosexuality on the list of sins G-d detests, sandwiched between murder and pedophilia. In the church we could not stray from rules, regulations, and beliefs. Any deviation and we were “succumbing to ‘the World,’” “falling into temptation",” or being “deceived by the devil.” We were rejecting G-d-given authority and exhibiting a “Jezebel spirit.”

Desperate to be loved and not detested by G-d, I moved out of state to join an even more fundamentalist church and pray the gay away. There I fasted and prayed and confessed my desire to a few trusted leaders. I also self-harmed and begged G-d for relief from my own queerness. I thrashed against myself, tortured by the belief that I had to choose between G-d— the love of my life—and my own truth.

When nothing worked, I surrendered.

I came out to myself on the steps of the Kansas City Music Hall after seeing Rent for the first time. It felt like the heavens opened up in celebration of the embodiment of my truth and, I knew I couldn’t bring the G-d I once knew into my new life.

That day cracked me open. I broke free from dogma and began to look for G-d outside of the church. My search led me into chanting at protests, attending poetry slams, and grinding on sweaty gay bar dance floors. I channeled my longing for the sacred into justice work, crystal grids, and pagan rituals—still other people’s concepts of G-d, none of which quite hit the mark. Most fervently, I looked for G-d in romantic relationships, craving intensity and otherworldly ecstasy.

Though I felt free for the first time in my life, something was still missing. Longing for transcendence can be dangerous when you haven’t yet learned to trust yourself, when you are still convinced that G-d and the Beloved can only be found somewhere else.

Years into my exploration, I met someone who crossed the bridge between the G-d I had loved and the queer human beloved I had begun to seek to take the place of my previous spiritual devotion. I became entangled in an epic journey with them, a slow surrender of my power and sovereignty in the name of love and enlightenment. They eventually seduced others into their world as well until they had enough devotees to start a group meant for training and spiritual development. This fascinating queer spiritualist-come-cult-leader spoke the language of awakening, but required our absolute submission to them rather than to the truth of our own souls. For years I mistook control for guidance, hierarchy for holiness. I handed over my intuition in exchange for their incandescent spotlight on me—where I felt radiant, and without which I was in despair.

The story of the cult exodus is long and tangled. It involves abuse disclosures and breaking silences among cult members. It involves massive breakdowns, ego deaths, and a literal hike to the top of Mount Sinai. It entails all that is brutal and miraculous.

But something had been happening inside of me for the two decades since I left the G-d that I knew. I had so very slowly and gradually begun to find G-d in myself. My eyes were pried open to find that I am the I AM, that I am the Beloved. When the last piece finally clicked into place, I found a wild force inside of me and discovered that this force is what I had been searching for all along. I realized G-d was never outside of me. The Divine Invisible had been moving through my breath, my queerness, my grief, my body all along.

Sovereignty, to me, is the art of belonging to yourself while still belonging to the world. It is the radical act of trusting your own knowing. It’s how we begin to deprogram the inner hierarchies and systems of domination that tell us someone else knows better, that we must be saved by a teacher, a lover, a movement, or a god outside of ourselves.

True liberation begins in the body—through reclaiming our own authority, intuition, and pleasure as sacred. And, personal sovereignty is inseparable from collective freedom. The way we treat our own bodies, minds, and spirits is the way we treat the earth, the marginalized, the unseen.

This is what I’ll be exploring here on Substack: the intertwining of mysticism and embodiment, activism and intimacy, healing and liberation.

In my next post, I’ll share how I came to understand service and activism as not separate from spirituality but as the most tangible expression of it—how love for G-d and love for justice are, in truth, the same river.

Until then, I’m grateful you’re here—reading, witnessing, remembering with me that the sacred is not something we find out there. It’s something we inherently are.