Building Catholic Futures (Interview with Eve Tushnet)
On LGBTQ+ Flourishing, Discipleship, and Witness
This piece is a part of my Interviews series, in which I chat with some of the people I find most interesting. Of course, views expressed by interviewees are not necessarily my own; you will probably inevitably get a sense of my own views through the questions (and my other work on this Substack).
This week, I interview author, blogger, and speaker Eve Tushnet.
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Eve! Let’s start with a little information about you. Who are you, how do you spend your time, and what is most important to you?
Hello! I’m excited to be, virtually, here, metaphorically. By profession I’m a writer: I’ve written two novels and two nonfiction books about gay Christians’ spiritual lives. I’m 46; I came out in the early 1990s and became Catholic in 1998, at the extremely good decisions making age of nineteen. My queer touchstones include Derek Jarman, Rebecca Brown (now also a Catholic!), Dorothy Allison, and Hanif Kureishi. I became Catholic basically because of the Crucifixion’s resolution of the conflict between justice and mercy, the Eucharist’s shocking physicality, and the Creation as the origin of the beauty and meaning of the world around us. I really like reliquaries.
I’ve recently moved to the Bay Area, as part of my preparation for a covenant of kinship with a woman here. We’re modeling our lives on the promises of Ruth to Naomi: “Where you go, I will go.” I think that’s a decent intro!
Readers may have already come across your books Gay and Catholic and Tenderness. Both of those books were incredibly important to me in my own journey of faith (and I wholeheartedly recommend them!). What led you to write them? What did you learn through writing them?
Thank you—I’m so glad the books were helpful to you. I wrote them because nobody else had written the book I wanted to read. At the time I wrote G&C, most of what was available for gay people who were seeking to live in harmony with Catholic teaching was memoir, with a smattering of theology. I wanted a book that would focus on the many vocations of queer people: the paths of love available to us within the Church, especially for those of us (the majority) who are not called to marriage or religious vows. G&C opens with a short memoir, since I figured, I would not trust a book about gay religious things if I had no idea where the author was coming from. But the majority of the book is about ways to give and receive love as a queer, orthodox Catholic.
And it turns out that if you write a book called Gay and Catholic, a lot of people tell you their stories of being gay and Catholic! I began to realize how sheltered I had been. I heard some fairly harrowing stories. But beyond the stories of flamboyant harm and trauma, I began to perceive the universal burden that almost all queer Catholics carry, even people like me who have had a very easy time in the Church: the people who first introduce us to God’s love have no idea what it might look like to be openly gay and obediently Catholic. No matter how well these people loved and guided us, they almost universally perceived “gay” and “Catholic” as identities in conflict. And so we came into our faith with this conflict embedded in our self-understanding and in our relationship with God. Tenderness focuses on restoring queer Christians’ relationships with God, re-grounding that relationship on a foundation of wholeness rather than inner division. It’s intended to be quite practical as well as evocative and hopeful.
Recently I know you have been at work building an organization called Building Catholic Futures. Could you tell us more about the vision for this new organization? What need(s) are you seeking to address?
I kind of just did! I hadn’t intended for that description of Tenderness to be such a clear mission statement for the organization, but Building Catholic Futures is a nonprofit that equips Catholic leaders and institutions to evangelize and catechize LGBT+ and same-sex attracted people. We want everyone who forms queer people’s faith to have a deep understanding of what it might look like for people like us to flourish in the Church.
So we are creating resources and workshops for those who guide people in faith: parents, priests, educators, parish and diocesan staff—and queer adults, who can become the trustworthy mentors so many of us wish we’d had. We know that people in all of these roles genuinely want to evangelize—offering people an encounter with Jesus. And they want to catechize—guiding people to flourish as Catholics. But they don’t know how to do that with non-straight people. A lot of very kind and thoughtful people struggle to imagine a path to flourishing for a queer person in the Church. BCF’s resources are created by people who know that the joy of the Gospel is for everyone, because we’ve seen it and lived it. We want to invite others to share that joy. If this sounds intriguing, go ahead and check us out! We’re at https://buildingcatholic.org/.
Who is involved? Who are the people of BCF, and what kinds of people are you working with? Who are you hoping to work with?
BCF was founded by me and Keith Wildenberg. Keith is a retired executive who has spent decades mentoring and evangelizing in gay communities in San Francisco. He’s seen how gay people can build up and serve the Church, and how the Church’s wisdom can illuminate gay people’s real questions and experiences. BCF is made up of sexual minorities (gay, lesbian, bi, same-sex attracted… that sort of thing) who accept Catholic teaching in full. That’s me and Keith, and that’s the Witnesses who appear at our events. You can learn more about Keith and the Witnesses at the URL above.
But BCF’s work isn’t just based on a few people’s experiences. Between the two of us, Keith and I have held formal interviews and informal conversations with thousands of LGBT/SSA+ people, across a wide range of relationships to the Catholic Church. We’ve drawn on all of that experience, listening for what Catholics do that makes trust in Christ’s love harder—and what opens doors of faith. And we also work closely with the kinds of people who will be using our resources. Everything created for parents is created with parents, everything created for teachers and school personnel is created with them. That’s how we offer guidance that speaks to the real needs, challenges, and questions of people who are forming others in faith.
If you are a person whom others might view as a representative of the Catholic faith, we want to work with you! And if you are in the LGBTQ/SSA+ alphabet soup, and you’re interested in deepening your relationship with God through a retreat designed around the themes and patterns in queer spiritual journeys, check out our Witnesses track.
What is new in this work that you haven't seen before? How does BCF build on developments in gay Catholic life, and go even further?
What’s new: BCF was built on the knowledge that queer people are flourishing, and have flourished, in practicing their Catholic faith. We’ve brought together the elements of Scripture, Catholic theology, the lives of the saints, and contemporary Catholic biography that have inspired queer people.
BCF focuses on vocation, on the questions which have increasingly come to the fore as queer Christians speak for ourselves: How am I called to love? Where am I able to take the next step toward Jesus? Catholic outreach to LGBT+ people often focuses on sexual morality or social justice. Both of these are a part of our faith. Chastity is a part of our call to follow Jesus, and so is working for justice. But they’re only parts of a whole life. If Jesus liberates from sin and oppression, what are we being freed for?
And BCF focuses on the people who form and guide queer people’s faith. We do that because we asked queer people what helped them find peace in the practice of the Catholic faith. Over and over, we heard that just one person can make a difference: one parent, one priest, one teacher, one role model. If we want Catholic communities where gay people’s flourishing is not exceptional, but expected, we’ve got to serve the educators: the people who first open the possibility of faith.
BCF has five “building blocks” that guide its work. I am especially intrigued by two of them: “telling good stories” and “showcasing unnoticed vocations.” What do you mean? Tell me more!
Telling good stories, for us, means telling stories that are relevant to both Catholics and queer people. That might be stories of same-sex love in Scripture, since for many of us, the longing to love and make a life with someone of the same sex is part of what it means to be “gay.” It might mean stories of real historical figures who experienced same-sex desire and found peace in practicing the Faith. It might mean telling stories of people on the margins encountering Jesus, it might mean telling stories of our own weird journeys; it might mean stories of sacrifice, stories of finding community, stories of discovering you can be loved for who you are. We tell these stories in ways that make clear that they hold lessons for all Christians, and are especially urgent for queer Christians.
The gay, Catholic poet Dunstan Thompson wrote something about his life partner that sums up how I feel about mine:
“Here I have found, as after thunder showers,
The friend my childhood promised me.”
Discovering his story gave me the words for mine.
And those lines speak to the “unnoticed vocations” building block, also. There are queer people who are called to the vocations of sacramental marriage and vowed religious life. But I’ve had well-meaning people treat my queer life as a problem to be solved via marriage or religious vows. Other vocations, like “chosen family,” intentional community, service, art, and life-shaping friendship, are more challenging to American economic and religious norms—but the Jesus of Matthew 12:46–50 and John 15:13 knew them well. This seems like a great example of how making our churches more open to gay people’s needs will make them more open to Jesus’ call.
BCF also frequently uses the phrase "missionary discipleship.” What is that, and why is that so central to the mission of BCF? What changes if we assume that LGBTQ+ people are called to missionary discipleship?
Missionary disciples are people who have known the joy of the Gospel and can share it in ways that surprise and invite. This doesn’t mean we whitewash our own suffering, or make excuses for the harms people suffer in our churches. But it does mean that our witness comes from a deep trust that Jesus is on our side and wants us to find welcome, refuge, and bliss in His embrace. Approaching someone as a potential missionary disciple means that you can’t reduce them to their experience of sexuality—or their experience of oppression. You have to begin from the assumption that you can learn from them, that God wants to reveal something through their life and their unique experience. When we’re liberated by Jesus, we’re also called by Him to delight—to the God whom St Augustine called “my Joy.”
You have already had a few opportunities to put on events in a couple cities in the United States (readers: you can read a little about those events here and here). What has been the biggest surprise so far, as you have begun to launch BCF in the "real world"?
Maybe the biggest thing that has surprised me is how hungry people are to hear witnesses who are honest and even raw about the pain people can experience in the Church, but equally honest and vocal about the beauty we have found here. People expect gay Christians to talk about sad hard stuff, and sometimes we have to do that. But we also want you to know that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, and that’s amazing, lol.
A Queer Catholic friend wanted me to ask: this kind of work has to be draining, even if it is also extremely exciting. I sense that a lot of LGBTQ+ folks in ministry deal with this tension. How do you take care of yourself in the midst of that tension (and also, how has God taken care of you)?
I am not always a model of patience! But I am incredibly blessed to have the support of my partner and both of our families. I know many queer people can’t say the same. Also, though, I find getting to know queer Catholics and our journeys and our histories immensely fulfilling. It’s fun! Did you know that one of the first lesbian novels ever written was penned by an exotic dancer and literal princess who was buried in her Dominican habit?
And in 2012 I quit drinking. Sobriety is something I know I did not reach on my own. I know how lucky I am to have had such a visceral, undeniable demonstration of God’s saving power.
How can readers learn more about BCF? Do you need to be Catholic or LGBTQ+ (or both!) to get involved?
The best way to learn about us is via our website. You definitely don’t have to be LGBTQ+, since most of what we offer is intended for Catholic leaders and teachers regardless of orientation. And our work is grounded in our Catholic faith, but my guess is that a lot of what we do will be of interest to other Christians.
If readers want to hear more from you outside of BCF, where can they find more of your work?
Right now, BCF is pretty much what I’m doing! But I also do have a Substack where I write about weird books.
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Beautiful! God bless you, Eve, for all you do!