Asking the Clergy: Joys, challenges of being an openly LGBT spiritual leader 

Coming out as LGBTQ+ can be challenging, even in an era that brought last year’s passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. This week’s clergy discuss their own, still evolving, journeys to acceptance as spiritual leaders in Long Island faith communities.

The Rev. Ray Bagnuolo

Pastor, Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ

As an ordained openly gay Presbyterian minister, I share the joys and challenges of being called to this work in the well-known ways of any pastor. As a gay man, and with others in the LGBTQAI+ community, I share experiences of rejection and harm sometimes caused by what are often called institutional religions.

I hope the ministry that I and other clergy practice helps to eliminate closed doors to queer folk or any marginalized community. There is much to do to make that happen. The LGBTQAI+ community (including families, allies and friends) knows the challenge in finding welcoming faith communities, but there are more such places of worship with each passing year. The congregation I serve today is among those where extravagant hospitality is at the core of our spiritual lives together. And there are others that can be found.

Among the many gifts the queer community and leadership bring to religion is a growing understanding of what it is to be faithful, welcoming and affirming in our worship and lives. LGBTQAI+ folk continue to help us in practicing God’s call to love one another, marking the path where the joy and the challenges of such love blend into good news for all.  

Rabbi Jaimee Shalhevet

North Shore Synagogue, Syosset

When I began serving as North Shore Synagogue’s assistant rabbi, I was asked to speak with an eighth-to-12th-grade youth group about my story. While I certainly wasn’t hiding my identity, I also hadn’t shouted it from the mountaintops. So I almost didn’t do it.

The challenge of serving anyone as an LGBTQ+ spiritual leader is only tied to our own fears versus our faith about our people. Have I found throughout my 14 years as assistant, associate and now senior/solo rabbi that there are people who judge me based on my sexuality? Of course. However, I have also found that when someone gets to know me, when we share a spiritual moment together, when they hear a sermon about my wife and children that touches them and connects them to their family, their opinions begin to change.

The biggest joy, however, involves the connection my very existence brings some people. Those who are marginalized, who think they cannot find themselves in our holy texts, find that “different” people do exist, belong, and can and do lead. Letting people recognize that there is a place for them in Judaism? That’s what I’m here to do in the first place. Thank God I can.  

The Rev. Canon Marie A. Tatro

Canon for Community Justice Ministry, Episcopal Diocese of Long Island

Being an openly LGBTQ priest is a privilege. I prayed long and hard when discerning this calling. I was not really concerned about the bigotry that I would face within organized religion. My main question was, “Is it right for me to join an institution that has persecuted, and even killed, my people for centuries?”

There is an old Kenyan proverb: “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunting will always glorify the hunter.” I cannot deny that I’m an agent of the church: some might say, initiated into the guild of the hunters. Yet as a queer, gender-nonconforming woman, I also remain one of the hunted, among the millions injured by mostly manmade doctrine. But by embodying multiple identities, I see through a particular lens when retelling the story of the hunted: a story that Jesus himself lived, and in dying, overcame death for all of us.

Walking with my church members at LGBTQ Pride is a great gift. At such events, diverse, beautiful faces smiling, cheering and weeping, are finally seeing a sacred reflection of themselves. When I witness others starting to see, in themselves, the beauty of holiness — perhaps for the first time — I stand on holy ground.