Jasmine Qureshi

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Many LGBTQ+ People Are Religious. Why Don’t We Have More Data About Them?

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n the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, researcher R.G. Cravens saw a headline about the importance of LGBTQ+ voters. How would results have changed, he wondered, LGBTQ+ religious people stayed home on Election Day? But when he went to review exit polling, he found his question was unanswerable: The survey was done in waves, and questions about religious affiliation and LGBTQ+ identity were never asked together. 

That lack of data isn’t unusual, said Cravens, now a senior research analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and author of the forthcoming book “Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States.” High-quality quantitative studies about religious LGBTQ+ people are few and far between; most of the research that does exist has been released in the past decade.

It’s estimated that 5.6 percent of American adults identify as LGBTQ+ and roughly half consider themselves a person of faith. Researchers studying religious LGBTQ+ people run into issues common to working with small populations: It’s difficult to get a large enough sample for meaningful analysis, and that work is resource-intensive. But bias also plays a role, as many people incorrectly believe religion and queer people to be incompatible. 

That idea has a political purpose: As religious right-wing ideologies gain popularity among people in power, it is easier to justify the systematic denial of LGBTQ+ rights when they are portrayed as a community clearly delineated from the faithful. Proof of religious LGBTQ+ people pushes back against hateful movements by showing faith and queerness are not exclusive.

Religion can play a large role in the lives of LGBTQ+ people, even if they currently do not consider themselves religious. A recent non-representational study of 1,255 LGBTQ+ adults, conducted by several fellows at the nonpartisan nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), found that the majority of those surveyed were raised religious. Among those who now identified as religiously unaffiliated, a third still “felt a connection to their religious heritage.” 

More data like this can support deeper narratives about religion and LGBTQ+ people, said Tyler Lefevor, associate professor of psychology at Utah State University and one of the PRRI fellows. As a psychologist, he’s interested in how religion continues to impact the lives of LGBTQ+ people who leave restrictive traditions — a common experience illustrated by surveys like the one he co-ran.

“What I see is that people step out into an LGBT community that’s supposed to be really loving and accepting, but find themselves really rejected by the community because they don’t look and act and talk like other LGBT people,” Lefevor said. “Because their values are still conservative, their beliefs are still conservative, they may hold on to aspects of their religion and that makes them stand out.”

Higher visibility of religious LGBTQ+ people can help others reframe their distress as a societal issue, not a personal one, said Lefevor.

“I think there has been a dearth of research on the religious experiences of LGBTQ Americans because the default assumption often is that if you’re part of the LGBTQ community, by definition, you’re probably not religious,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI.

Deckman said this narrative is often clear in the media, where stories abound about religious denominations that oppose LGBTQ+ rights. 

Data is missing on religious LGBTQ+ people for multiple reasons: there are gaps in demographic data collection in general surveys — like in the case of not asking whether people were religious and LGBTQ+ in exit polls — and in surveys specifically designed to study religious experiences. The former is a result of a cycle of marginalization in the social sciences, Cravens said, where LGBTQ+ people are seen as non-normative and not worthy of independent study.

Cravens pointed to the case of the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running surveys of American social and political life conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. The GSS began measuring attitudes toward homosexuality in 1978 but didn’t ask about same-sex sexual activity until 10 years later. And the survey only asked respondents to self-identify their sexual orientation in 2008 — 30 years later.

“We knew that homosexuality was a concept worthy of studying or asking straight people about, but we didn’t consider understanding the sexual identities of the people we were asking these questions from until much later,” Cravens said. “Heteronormative assumption feeds a data gap of LGBTQ+ experiences in social scientific research.”

Specifically when studying religion, “there’s a lot of work on the attitudes of religious people toward LGBTQ people, but very, very, very little about the attitudes of LGBTQ people toward religion,” said Lefevor.

More large-scale studies about religious experiences can create space for new stories. It also helps paint a picture of religion in America.

Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit research institute, last ran its Religious Landscape Survey in 2014, which had a sample size of 35,071 American adults. Because of the scale, researchers were able to break out the religious composition of LGBTQ+ people. But a lot can change in 10 years. 

One of the most up-to-date studies on LGBTQ+ religious life is PRRI’s annual American Values Survey, which is the result of over 20,000 interviews across the nation. The survey has asked about the sexual orientation and gender identity of respondents since 2019.

While it’s true that some religious doctrine is explicitly against homosexuality, that information can’t be used to assume the beliefs of queer people, said Greg Smith, associate director of religion research at Pew. For example, similar shares of straight and queer people identify as Catholic despite the church viewing homosexuality as immoral.

“One of the things studies about religion have taught me is that it’s really not safe to assume too much based on what you think you know about the traditions or doctrines of a particular religion,” Smith said.

Changes in religious beliefs and behavior writ large tend to happen for two reasons: changes in subgroups or larger demographic shifts, Smith said. As more people identify themselves as LGBTQ+, that has “downstream effects” on religious composition as a whole.

That being said, some of the attitudes LGBTQ+ people have about religion are tied to other demographic factors, said Anna Brown, a research associate at Pew Research Center. “LGBT people tend to be younger, on average, they tend to be more liberal on average, and younger and more liberal people also tend to be less religious on average.”

The size of surveys needed to get adequate sample sizes is a financial burden. “It’s enormously expensive to get really good, gold-standard probability-based samples of lots of Americans,” Deckman said. “Funding is an issue because LGBTQ Americans make up a smaller portion of the U.S. population.”

Cravens knows this intimately. While working on his dissertation in 2016, he wanted to issue a short questionnaire to a random sample of 1,100 LGBTQ+ people. He was quoted a mind-boggling $56,000. He had to switch methodologies to a non-representative sample to accommodate his grad-student budget.

When the barriers to quality surveys at scale make it difficult to document the experiences of millions of religious LGBTQ+ Americans, that gap clearly benefits actors who would prefer to pretend those categories are mutually exclusive. 

Christian nationalists, who believe the United States is a Christian nation and its laws should stem from Christian doctrine, are one of those groups. While the ideology has been around for 50 years, recent research has shown the beliefs have gained traction with more Republicans today. Newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson has a long history with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist legal group behind many pushes for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, spanning from attacks on trans athletes to supporting the case that lead to the Supreme Court’s contentious ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which gave a Colorado wedding website designer the right to refuse service to LGBTQ+ couples.

While not an intentional undermining, the lack of data on religious LGBTQ+ people makes it more difficult to prove their existence. 

“The notion that LGBTQ people can’t be religious is very much a function of a political construct by the religious right to say, ‘This group of people isn’t like us. They’re not religious like we are,’” Cravens said. “And it’s easier to exclude, it’s easier to discriminate against, it’s easier to take away rights from people who aren’t like us.”

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One of the world’s most iconic Asian nightclubs has been celebrating queerness for almost 3 decades

When I first started questioning my sexuality and identity, I didn’t feel butterflies. I didn’t feel excited or even the strong desire to understand more about these new feelings. I felt scared. Terrified even. I knew that even the first tendrils of these thoughts had the capability to unravel my entire life.

And unravel it they did. My past world had revolved closely around my community and my family. When you grow up in a Pakistani Muslim household as I did – and strictly Muslim at that – there is often a great reverence and respect placed upon relatives and elders, and also a strong emphasis placed on the importance of blood ties and family.

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I grew up thinking of myself as a boy. In a world where men had certain duties and roles, my entire life and my outlook on the world was shaped by these men and the power they held.

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Transness brought a real loneliness, and my world fell apart. My family withdrew from me, but I also shrank from their touch. Since then, I have found it hard to find community that I can really relate to.

So imagine my delight at finding Club Kali.

Creating magic 

Club Kali emerged in the 90’s club scene in London, 1995 specifically, out of an intense need to develop an environment of freedom, dignity, and beautiful brown magic in the closeted doorways and rain-soaked paving stones of the city.

The struggle to build a space for Desi people, even without the added layers of queer identity, was intertwined with the tail end of 70s and 80s political movements for equality that were cloaked in political blackness and the strong stereotype of “queerness” being equated with whiteness.

This struggle drew together two incredible Desi women – DJ Ritu and Rita.

Ritu and Rita met at the Shakti Disco, a venue in the London Lesbian & Gay Centre (LLGC) in Farringdon (a community center in London), where Ritu was the DJ. When Shakti closed, Ritu – by day a full-time youth worker – knew something was needed to replace one of the few scenes where intersectional Desi queer people could connect with a culture that often relied on the family love they had lost. For Rita – by day working with victims of Domestic Violence – her love of music was key to this future they wanted to build.

Ritu spoke with LGBTQ Nation about the first time she met Rita: “Rita walked into my DJ booth at the LLGC and asked for an Abba track to be played. I thought she was gorgeous. This thought was unrequited for about 3 years! But we became friends and then a couple. Eventually, we simply became business partners that created the two [of the] longest-running Asian club nights in the world. Club Kali since 1995 and our straight Bollywood club, Kuch Kuch Nights since 2000.”

Music and dance are strong reminders of the past, used as key tools in many cultures to teach the stories of ancestors and morality, but they are also important for self-reflection, self-love, and community care. Queer Desi communities called out for the magic of their culture to be intertwined with the newer aspects of London nightlife, in a time where community care was all but essential.

As Ritu explains, “Last century, being LGBTQ+ was an isolating, lonely, experience of feeling confused and ‘othered’. We had very few positive images of people like us in the media, particularly women. There were almost no South Asian role models – queer or non-queer. Everything associated with who we thought we were, was negative, and of course the intersectional racism, sexism, and homophobia was difficult. Eventually, I found a ‘gay scene’ in 1985, went on my first Pride march, and a few years later, became a founding member of a new South Asian LGBTQ organization, Shakti”.

DJ Ritu is a pioneer in this sense, and Rita is right up there with her. They dragged a biased world into a new age of music by never forgetting their roots but also never feeling the need to sacrifice all they had learned from their time in the UK music scene.

Ritu says that Kali itself was born specifically out of a need for safety, but also the need for a multicultural, multi-faith space that celebrated South Asian music. She says as a DJ, her magic is in the bringing together of diverse cultures through the power and joy of music, culminating on the dance floor. Through her work with Club Kali and her many other venues, she has provided a proper performance space for new artists and drag acts, and even hosted high-profile Brit Asian stars like Rishi Rich, Juggy D, and Jay Sean.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CYCTdgFTplU%3Fstart%3D113%26feature%3Doembed

Pushing boundaries, fighting hate

To take it upon yourself to walk a path so hard is awe-inspiring, but unfortunately very common within the Desi Queer community. Many of us even now are forced, through the “othering” of ourselves as individuals and as a community, to walk alone. And while that is changing, I was keen to ask Ritu, along with Club Kali’s Community Engagement Officer Sakib Khan, what they think of the evolving world, and if they think we are on a track to more freedom and autonomy for queer Desi youth.

Ritu sees a bright future ahead, stating that Club Kali and its members and team, trailblazed and created new pathways for so many others to follow. She says that as soon as Kali was held up as a baton for others to see, many new and similar clubs opened. She spoke warmly of Zindagi – a club founded in 2003 for queer people in Manchester, that plays a colorful mix of the latest Bhangra, Bollywood tunes, Arabic music, RnB, HipHop and Dance, which she says is “furthering the boundary of clubbing.” She also praised the acclaimed Saathi club night in Birmingham. “Authenticity is key,” she said, “It must come from the heart.”

Sakib agrees, saying: “There are more events now than when Kali started, nightlife has changed a great deal in the 28 years since Kali began and there is greater visibility of LGBTQ+ people of color and from the South Asian diaspora, which is wonderful to see. Also, the change in legislation across the globe, particularly in India, has begun to shift attitudes. People have digital channels as a way of connecting and finding community. All of these are positives and with each generation comes a change in attitude”.

So we’re going strong, and now more than ever, with dangerous legislation on trans people finding its way into politics around the world, a space of safety and community for marginalized queer people is desperately needed. I pointed this out to Ritu, emphasizing my anger and pain as a generation of trans youth building our own new worlds, and she agreed strongly that while things are looking up in many areas, a huge push overall is needed.

“I wish we could do more… Because there’s such a huge need for it. But sadly, no – there aren’t enough spaces for queer Desi youth being made. Club Kali is limited in how much help and support we can offer to people at the moment. There certainly does need to be more funding for specialist organizations that can offer other services”.

Even so, it’s inspiring to see such strong figures exist in a world I thought I would never have and to see how much love and strength they have cultivated and nurtured for our community. Club Kali was established to offer shelter, and it would seem – through incredible platforms in dance, performance art, music, and even film – that it has developed into a godmother of the queer Desi clubbing scene.