A revival for queer religious groups with plans for collaboration

A lot has changed since Newsweek ranked Penn the No. 1 most “gay-friendly” campus in 2011 for having the most resources for LGBTQ students. For queer students from faith backgrounds especially, the past few years have been an ongoing effort to keep their organizations — and voices — alive on campus.

This semester, however, the Queer Christian Fellowship, J-Bagel and Queer Muslims and Allies at Penn have expressed interest in a potential partnership with one another after collaborating on their first interfaith dinner at Penn Hillel last week.

“I think everyone had a very positive experience with it,” College junior and J-Bagel Co-Chair Cody Smith said. “In fact, we may be coming together again for more discussions because the response to this event was so positive.”

Nursing senior Andre Rosario, the former QCF chair who rebooted the organization in 2014, believes the inspiration for a collaboration came partially from his own personal experiences with the LGBT Center.

“For me, personally, for the earlier half of my time at Penn I didn’t feel totally comfortable or that I fit in necessarily at the LGBT Center,” Rosario said. “I thought my personality fit in more with the religious groups on campus, as I used to be involved in the Newman Center.”

Rosario initially contacted J-Bagel and QMAP student leaders to work together for the event in hopes of fostering a more holistic queer-religious community.

“So I think this isn’t totally true, but I almost felt like the LGBT Center tried to attract a certain type of personality that I didn’t always fit in with and that’s why I felt more comfortable at QCF,” he said. “I kind of felt like the other religious groups on campus like J-Bagel and QMAP, to a certain extent, might have identified with that and [wanted to] try to get to know each other more personally.”

“When we initially had the interfaith dinner, my wildest dreams were that it would go so well that we would want to do it once a year,” current QCF chair and College senior Scott Sprunger said. “But it went so well that we actually want to do it much more regularly throughout the semester, including collaborating for QPenn week.”

“The thing that really struck me was the commonalities that we found together,” Sprunger added. “I was really impressed by the amount of vulnerability and how willing people were to share intimate details and be authentic with each other.”

President of QMAP and College senior Shan Choudhri described the event as “illuminating” because of the different struggles that each religious group brought forth to the discussion.

“It was very meaningful in that we got to see how other groups interacted with this campus in different ways that we’ve never had ... and a lot of people who came didn’t even know that queer Muslims existed on this campus so it was really enlightening in many ways.”

Choudhri, who co-founded the organization in 2014, explained that while QMAP was more of a cultural group than one about theological exploration, there were still notable challenges of getting such a social community for queer students of Muslim faith on its feet.

As there “wasn’t a space for [QMAP] in the mainstream Muslim community” because it “was a bit more conservative and not really open to our kind of alternative interpretation of religion,” there was a need to create a space where students could “express themselves in the ways that we wanted to,” Choudhri said.

He explained that while QMAP received support from the Office of the Chaplain, Choudhri had trouble acquiring resources or institutional support from the campus minister to the Muslim community, Kameelah Mu’Min Rashad.

“We did meet with her once last year and it just seemed like we weren’t on the same page in terms of what we wanted, and resources and what they were willing to do for us,” Choudhri said. “I don’t want to say that there’s antagonism between us and the other mainstream Muslim community here, but there’s sort of a rift because sex and sexuality are topics that are generally taboo.”

Regarding future goals for QMAP, Choudhri added that having more interfaith events focused on sexuality is definitely a top priority in order to increase awareness and “normalize our community so it’s not necessarily seen as an outcast type of thing anymore.”

Their ultimate goal, Choudhri explained, is “to create a space at Penn where all Muslims regardless of sexuality can get together under the same umbrella and no one has to feel marginalized by that.”

For Smith, the interfaith dinner was an opportunity to have people involved in Hillel leadership engage in this discussion of dealing with sexual identity while also being part of a faith-based community.

“I think despite this not being a Jewish-life centered event, because of its interfaith quality it brought a lot of people from Hillel,” Smith said. “While some may not have personal experience being queer in a religious space, the questions were still applicable to people to by just talking about your perceptions of queer people in your religious community.”

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