There are of course plenty of differences between atheists and gays, or perhaps I should say atheist and gay communities. Some of those differences are minor and unimportant, but others may be quite significant and the best people to explore them are the people who can count themselves as members of both. What I find especially interesting are the differences in how atheist groups treat gays versus how LGBT groups treat atheists. A bit depressing and disappointing, but still interesting.
Greta Christina writes that despite having identified as gay for over twenty years and as an atheist for merely two, she feels more welcomed and understood as a gay person among atheists than as an atheist among gays:
I've been exhorted to pray. I've been told about "our Creator." I've seen comments in LGBT blogs, listing bigoted and wildly inaccurate anti-atheist canards that could have come straight out of the religious right's playbook. I've heard inaccurate statistics bandied about regarding how many believers and non-believers there are in the U.S.... statistics that diminish atheists' numbers and our strength. (For the record: We're more than five percent, people.) I've heard the inaccurate and insulting canard about "fundamentalist" atheists... and, when I've pointed out that this term is both inaccurate and insulting, had the language firmly defended.
I think it's important to keep firmly in mind that the Christians or otherwise religious members of LGBT groups are not theologically and politically conservative — or at least it's rather rare for any to be theologically and politically conservative. There are conservatives who are gay, but gays aren't very welcome in most conservative circles yet. What this means is that the Christians and religious members of LGBT groups are exactly the sort of liberal religious believers which atheists should, in theory, be able to "reach out" to in order to achieve common political, social, and cultural goals.
Or at least that's what concern trolls keep telling us atheists we should do. They have a point and as a general principle it is good to reach out to people you disagree with on one issue in order to achieve common goals on other issues, but it's hard to do so when those people harbor so much animosity towards you. If the above is what we atheists can expect from the believers with whom we have the best shot of making common cause with and with whom we have the most in common (politically, socially, culturally), then exhortations to atheists to "reach out" may be wildly misplaced.
Instead, I'd like to suggest that it's the Christians who need to do more reaching out, something that will first require them to give up prejudices, assumptions, and bigotry. You'd think that religious believers who identify as LGBT would be the first to understand and do this (they are, after all, the targets of so much of the same from conservatives), but apparently that can just be too much to hope for.
Pride & Prejudice
There's a parallel to this which I think is worth thinking very carefully about: racial and ethnic minorities who also identify as LGBT. Blacks and Latinos who are gay seem to have a much harder time coming out than middle-class whites because their racial communities harbor more homophobia. Once again, you'd think that people who suffer from racial prejudice would be among the first to avoid similar prejudice on their own part, but that's not always true. Why not?
There's no simple answer to that question, but there is one factor which needs to be considered: it's comforting to feel superior to some group and it's probably even more comforting to feel superior to someone else when you're otherwise in a position of extreme social inferiority. A black man in America has to deal with a lot of racism and social stigma, but he's still "superior" to black women and to gays. Someone who is part of the LGBT community experiences prejudice and discrimination, but they can still feel superior to godless, militant, fundamentalist atheists.
Everyone is a member of some privileged groups and some disadvantaged groups. Even a poor, black, atheist, female bisexual is still privileged a bit as an American. White, male, middle-class atheists have a lot of privileges that counter-balance the animus they experience as atheists. My point here is that people need to be more aware of the ways in which they are privileged. It's hard because our privileges are often part of a cultural, political, and social background which we are taught to take for granted rather than think critically about. We often need someone who comes from outside our privileged class to point out where we are going wrong.
Atheists seem to recognize a lot of unjust social privileges and this may be because their critical stance towards traditional religion causes them to learn how religion has propped up unjust privileges (male, heterosexual, white, American). Maybe this is part of why atheist groups are generally very accepting of gays and interested in hearing what gays have to say. Maybe LGBT groups aren't as accepting of atheists because too few members recognize all of the unjust privileges which they benefit from, like religious privilege and Christian privilege.
Coming Out to Your Gay Friends
Apparently, there are more than a few nonbelieving gays who aren't comfortable coming out as atheists to their gay friends:
I think we all know that, when you make yourself visible as an LGBT person in a non- specifically- LGBT group, and a whole bunch of people come up to you privately to tell you that they're LGBT... you know that there's a problem. You know that something's going on in that group that's making LGBT people feel like they can't be completely out.
It seems like that's happening for atheists and other non-believers in the LGBT community.
And the whole thing is making me really sad.
It's ticking me off, too. But mostly, it's making me sad. It's reminding me of my earlier days in the community, when we were fighting for the B to be included in LGBT, and people who I thought were my family were telling me that I didn't belong. It's making me feel like I have to fight for my place at the table. It's making me feel like I have to choose between being welcomed, and speaking my mind about things that are deeply important to me. It's making me feel like my home is not my home anymore.
Here we can talk about another factor: I don't think human beings like to be too inclusive of anyone who can easily be marked as "different." Above I described as reason why people of one group might benefit from feeling superior to outsiders in a different group; here, we have a possible reason why people in a group might want to limit membership and keep certain others as outsiders.
The LGBT community has gone through a lot of intense debates and conflicts over including transsexuals and bisexuals alongside gays and lesbians. Is it really so surprising that some of the same people are resistant to treating atheists as equals alongside Christians and other religious believers? It's sad, but it's not too surprising if people tend to be inherently less inclusive and have to work hard to achieve greater inclusivity. This may be especially true of any oppressed group which struggles to develop a strong identity that can be made to look positive to oppressors.
The Role of Religious Critique
I'm not saying that I've never encountered homophobia or homo-stupidity in the atheist community. I have. But I've found it to be very rare, very much the exception. And maybe more to the point: When it does show up, it gets smacked down like a bug, by a dozen different hands or more. I don't always have to be the one to do the smacking. I don't even usually have to be the one to do the smacking. When a homophobic or homo-stupid commenter shows up, the atheist blogosphere -- straight and queer -- promptly tears them about sixteen new assholes. I have never before been in a community where I felt so strongly that straight people had my back.
I can't begin to count how often I've heard from Christians who simply assume that I'm gay simply because I write critically about how gays are persecuted by religious believers. I also often hear from Christians who can't understand why I'd bother to write about the experiences of gays on a site that is supposed to be about atheism and agnosticism. It's apparently never occurred to these believers that one human being would care deeply about the suffering and negative experiences of other human beings. They also don't seem to understand that when so much of that suffering is due to religious belief, then this will naturally become part of any critique of religion.
Karl Marx wrote that the critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique. What he meant was that if you're going to engage in a critique of politics, society, or culture, you're going to have to first engage in a critique of religion because religion will inevitably be found playing an important ideological role in all those systems. Religion provides justifications, defenses, and support for all the political, social, and cultural relationships around us. So if you are going to critique the treatment and status of LGBT people in modern America, you have to begin with a critique of how religion is used to justify and defend the treatment of LGBT people.
Atheists have no problem with this and are probably already involved with just such a critique. This should make them immediate, natural allies for anyone who wants to improve the situation for members of the LGBT community. Unfortunately, that critique of religion won't stop at just the most conservative forms which are most directly involved with the oppression of gays; instead, it will also include any liberal forms and the very foundations of both. This will be discomfiting to LGBTs who want to hold on to some part of the religion they grew up with, or at least to spirituality and theism in some form.
I'm not sure there is any way around that. Liberal believers will have to deal with being as discomfited as conservative believers. They do not, however, have to react with the same animus and bigotry that is so commonly expressed by conservatives. When they do, they are behaving in a manner that is far too similar to the conservative believers they usually argue against.
For the reasons you describe here, I think it’s reasonably safe to say that heterosexual atheists in the United States are substantially more likely to be strongly in favor of/outspoken about/politically active regarding GLBT rights than are heterosexual Americans generally.
The GLBT community is, of course, much more skeptical overall than the general population is, so there is some “return love” going on, at least in demographic terms. But when it comes to heterosexual allies, infidels are the most consistent bloc GLBTs have got. In that light, Greta’s testimony is pretty annoying.
– Rieux, fellow heterosexual atheist GLBT-lover
I don’t feel the same way Greta does, either. From age 16 to 27 I was an active alcoholic, and some years after I finally achieved sobriety, it became apparent that I had been suppressing my sexual orientation with all that booze. With sobriety and coming out, I had to confront the years of indoctrination from the catholic church and reevaluate the role of religion in my life. Since the catholic church was clearly no place for acceptance, I thought about looking into more welcoming faith communities. Some of my new gay friends invited me to their churches. But I decided that questioning faith itself was necessary rather than just switching religious brands. And after much reading and discussion, I came out as an atheist. There were people who had more of a problem with that then my sexual orientation, but I can’t think of any gay people who have given me any grief about my being an atheist. Maybe I’m lucky; in my community (Sacramento), one of the elder gay rights leaders is a prominent and outspoken atheist, so there has often been a respectful consideration for non-believers.
From personal experience, I have found that it is much easier to be openly atheistic than openly gay.
As a bisexual and an atheist-agnostic, I see her point. If I were to come out aboot my orientation, moderate, and even conservative, peers would find it tolerable and leave it be; however, when I make mention of atheism, a debate ensues half of the time and I find more shock than I would as a part of the GLBT community.