Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

Evangelicalism builds a prison inside a person, but the truth will set you free.

Did I deserve to spend this kind of money on myself? On an item that had no greater purpose than my own pleasure, than feeling good against my skin, that wasn’t for the intention of serving someone else’s needs?

I am reminding myself that I have a body, and that it is good and deserving of pleasure, that my curves are not sinful. That I am beautiful simply because I believe myself to be.

I appreciated the shock value of the placement, of Lilith’s display in a liminal space where she greeted travelers who were only ever on their way somewhere else. But it also felt like the stairs dishonored her. It’s not that stairs cannot be a majestic home for a work of art—the Louvre’s Daru Staircase, which houses the Hellenistic Winged Victory of Samothrace, comes to mind. But I sat with Lilith often enough in this back staircase of the Met that I witnessed how many people simply passed by, how few really took time with her, shocked and awed by her ferocity, by her piercing gaze, which asks you just how invested in freedom you are.

Jewish tradition tells us that Lilith was exiled from the Garden for wanting to be on top, for wanting to ride Adam into the ground beneath her.

For Lorde, the erotic is craving. Purpose. Motivation for living. The erotic includes sex, but it is not just sex. In Conversations with Audre Lorde, she continues, “We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

Purity culture—both religious and secular—also disconnects us from our own bodies, all so that we can become consumers of the machine that sells us back to ourselves.

Lorde’s erotic and Brown’s exhortation to empathy are essential correctives if we are ever to get free.

Tenderness and joy and pleasure can be found outside the Garden. Lilith’s daughters are skilled at making a communal oasis in what appears, to others, to be a desert. We always have been.

This is also true: nothing and no one can replace Jesus, just as getting a new best friend or girlfriend doesn’t “replace” the old one who unexpectedly broke up with you.

There are just as many crystal-loving folks trying to use spirituality to disengage from their lives as there are evangelicals. To me, corrective spiritual medicine is learning to be present in the body—affirming that this world is our home. That my body is my home. That I am aware of what’s going on in the world around me, of the damage being done to the people in my community, to the land that I live on, to the climate at large.

My dad sends me devotionals and writes Bible verses in birthday cards, but his efforts never hit the same way as my mom’s. As of this writing, he still hasn’t been a Christian for as long as I was, and I didn’t grow up with him as a spiritual authority the way I did my mom. I find his attempts to lecture me on the Bible well-meaning but misguided; it’s hard to take him seriously when I’m aware that I know scripture better than he does. It’s hubris, but it’s also a lack of empathy on my dad’s part—he had no idea what my faith meant to me, how difficult leaving was, and he has shown little interest in understanding more about the pain of that process.

I think doubt has been pretty normal for me throughout my life, so I’ve had to be flexible with things around faith. That’s probably why I still believe in God, she continues. I started praying again. I talk to him. But I don’t think the Christian version has to be it for people. I think we can find answers in a lot of places.

You can’t have roleplay without trust from everyone sitting at the table. Guests who have played with us, such as my dear friend and fellow writer Austen (who has also DM’d games I’ve played in), have commented on the vulnerability in our game, on how easily we slide between humor, battles, flirtation, breaking into song, and an outright in-character fight, often in the scope of the same three-to-five-hour session. When the game ends, we engage in what is essentially aftercare: hugging, processing what happened, and continuing to check in on Discord in the days following. The level of communication has to be high in order for us to engage so vulnerably with each other. I am perpetually struck by the transformative power of witnessing and participating in this kind of care, follow-up, and consent check-in—an intentionality that never happened in any church or Bible study I ever attended, or led.

I began doing ancestor work (Don’t talk to spirits you don’t know, Mom always told me when I was very young, a lesson I quickly internalized).

I’m finding ways to hold the texts, ideas, and people of my upbringing in ritual space, in ancestral honoring, in being in community with the other-than-human. If I’m writing on my couch, look out the window and start talking to the birds that happen to be visiting my balcony, and feel my grandmother’s spirit and presence—it’s all part and parcel of the same moment. Spirituality is a mundane, integrated way of living.

Leave it behind. Burn it down. Go build something new. And know this: You aren’t alone. You were never alone.

Human beings are driven by belonging, by hope. The urge to believe in and belong to ourselves, to each other, and to something greater is real and profound—and the harm that it has caused in the past need not continue in the future.

Queer joy is different from the “joy” I grew up with, the kind that is emblazoned with Christmas colors on holiday towels. The Latin root of joy is gaudere, to rejoice. Joy is not simply a feeling one settles into, like a warm blanket; it is active, perpetual movement—a state of being that is cultivated with others. “I want to attempt toward joy,” Ashon T. Crawley writes.* Queerness isn’t just a sexuality. It’s a way of life that requires active and intentional daily work to decenter the normative and recenter our community, our safety—and our joy.

Queer joy is not hierarchical. Queerness is the freedom to belong to yourself and others without societal restriction, without the bonds of natal family, hierarchy, and the state pressing on you. “Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world,” José Estaban Muñoz writes.* Queerness is getting to invent the communal structures that best serve your beloveds in real time.

Something in me resists the idea that we are our own gods—but what is a god but a creator, a source, and what are we, queer people, but the creators of our own lives?

When the no drops, a gate slamming into the ground, everything that no has made room for becomes clearer. More space. More presence. More love. More mindfulness. Less bullshit.

I’m hosting: constantly scanning the room for empty hands and glasses, walking around pouring freshly uncorked rosé and distributing sweating ice-cold bottles of Topo Chico, refilling the cheese board, putting out forks for dessert, trying to ensure that everyone here has gotten some amount of one-on-one attention. But a few times, I pause to take it all in. People from almost every important part of my life are here, and so many who couldn’t make it sent flowers and spices and other sweet gifts, and this feels like a culmination: the gifts, a ceremonial blessing; everyone’s presence, a ritual way-opening. Having so many people I care about in one place, talking, laughing, finding points of connection. This kind of togetherness is all I ever wanted. I look around, and I know—whatever home is, I have found it.

Coming out and leaving the church was a death: of an identity, a worldview, everything I thought I had known about myself. Like so many queer people before me, I lost friendships, family, community. But there is a secret that the church does not want those of us who have left to remember. There is a love that is as strong as death—the love you discover for yourself when, as Audre Lorde once wrote, you define yourself for yourself. I buried my old self years ago. Do not look for her; she is not there. This is the truth about queer people: We have resurrected ourselves. We are born again. Our tombs are empty. We are risen.

To my Wonder Women of a writer’s group: Angela Chen, Lilly Dancyger, Deena ElGenaidi, and Nina St. Pierre. I am so grateful for what we have built together and for all the ways y’all make my life better, personally and professionally, every goddamn week. Thank you for being the ultimate sounding board, the best possible team of creative midwives.

For always treating and respecting me as a whole person, rather than something to be mined for parts, and in so doing, teaching me how it was possible to survive in this industry.

To Melissa-Leigh Gore and Kyley Caldwell, for showing up for me during the events of this book and for being my family ever since: A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. As Melissa once said, “Thank you for traveling with me to every place my heart has needed to go.” You have shown me so much about the nature and meaning of love.