Meshing Together Realities: Queer and Christian at Boston College

Written by Henry Reichman

On a sunny spring afternoon in the Stokes quad, Professor Nick Fagnant, a doctoral candidate in the Clough School of Theology and Ministry and teacher of ‘God, Self, and Society,’ sits down on a bench to talk. He’s been asked to chat about certain interesting cruxes in his life: being young and openly gay, being a devoted Catholic and a religious scholar. However, the talk keeps getting delayed. Multiple of his students – ostensibly from his freshman class – walk by and wave at him, give him fist-bumps, trade an inside joke or two. One of them talks briefly about their work in other queer scholarship projects they’re involved in. Even before Prof. Fagnant gets into his own story, it is clear what he is at BC: a role model and a focal point for the underdiscussed, yet deeply rich, community of LGBTQ+ Christians on campus.

Born in Nebraska, attending elementary school in Wyoming, and spending his teenage years in Denver, Colorado, Fagnant’s identity developed in often patchy places. “I, for a lot of reasons, didn’t explore my queerness at all. I knew it as a kid but then pushed it so far back, deep down. I had so many survival things that I had to worry about that it wasn’t a conscious choice; it was just, with Matthew Shepard being in the town that my family loves and I’d visit all the time, I grew up with the sense of, ‘this is a life-threatening thing,’” he explains, referring to the famous and tragic murder of a gay student in 1998 at the University of Wyoming. “I wasn’t even out in college,” he adds.

But what he was doing in college was diving into theological studies. “I got involved in the School of the Americas Ignatian Family Teach-In in its earliest years, and so I found my home in the faith with the rest of the folks on the margins, and the people who were like, ‘we have to dismantle these barriers to belonging.’” After teaching high school, Fagnant went on to do his PhD at BC, often writing the reading lists for his own courses, “Queering the New Testament,” for example. He led workshops at the Ignatian Family Teach-In for queer and trans high school kids. guiding conversations with the students on what brings them joy and how to best support each other.

During this time he continued taking classes on queer theology and developed scholarship in this emerging field. “Part of our methodology is dismantling barriers that separate, in troubling binaries, and looking for what’s an overlap in the middle that we can do? Patrick Chang writes about queer theology and Christianity [being] radically engaged because they use this sense of radical boundless love as the core of both.” He stresses how if God is love, and we’re all made in the image of God, and “we have this person of Jesus who’s that enfleshed in action, and that spirit is alive in us,” then it’s fallacious to implement a framework of restriction in the ways of how one can best express that love. It is a point so self-evident, so consonant with the teachings of Christianity, that it makes you wonder how anybody – much less religious culture for centuries – has denied it.

But the LGBTQ+ theological experience at Boston College is best heard through its students. Megan Smith, LSEHD ‘27, sits across from me at Hillside Cafe one morning. “I love talking about this,” she says off the bat, diving into this Venn diagram she calls home. But the stories aren’t quite as rosy as her tone. After a high school experience of friction between her queer identity and her parents’ expectations of attending Catholic mass, her attempts in college to carve out her own space didn’t always go as planned.

“I joined one religious group. They were Christian, non-denominational, or so I thought. It was later revealed that they were a certain denomination, and I didn’t know that, which was kind of hard. [But] I was like, ‘okay, this is my chance to fix my relationship with Christianity.’ Will this group of people who believe what I believe accept me in my sexuality? So I remember I was talking to one of the leaders, we had a little one-on-one meeting, and I was like, ‘yeah, and I’m queer.’ Immediately she was like, ‘no. I can’t support that.’ She was an adult leader, a missionary…and she was just like, ‘I can’t support that lifestyle.’”

It’s a gloomy story, but as anybody can attest to, freshman year is long and with many twists. Thankfully for Smith, there were more experiences in the cards. “February of my freshman year, I went on this retreat: Ignite. It changed my life, it was my huge turning point. I met my best friends there, and I had a really incredible conversation with one of the leaders. I was like, I’m going to try this again, I’m going to be brave, I’m going to admit that I’m Catholic and queer, and we’ll see what happens. And she just met me on my level. ‘This is still your home, this is a journey, you’re welcome here,’ and all of these things. So that retreat began the healing process for my sexuality and spirituality.”

Things have been on the up for her in the time since. “Christianity is very good at building community, and my closest friends are the people who our friendship is built on God.” She makes a sell for Christianity that is incredibly persuasive, and it is clear how carefully yet fruitfully she has found her space within it. “I’ve always loved the phrase that the church is simply a body of people, and people are flawed, and people make mistakes, and people can be really cruel and mean. But God isn’t, and God never is, and Jesus never was, and so I would love everyone to understand that you can have a relationship with God, and you can create your own relationship with Jesus that is never going to be changed based on whatever religious organization you subscribe to.”

It is a vision of a personalized embrace which she is not alone in. Keira Rao, MCAS ‘27, is somewhat of an expert in finding her own footing in these places. When she came out as trans during her San Francisco childhood, her religious mom was very accepting and her church (Jesuit-turned-plain-Catholic) was great: the kind with pride flags all over, with Catholicism particularly the setting for her. “If I’m going to be stunted in my growth because I am religious and queer, I might as well be stunted in my growth and develop religious trauma in the fiercest of churches. With the best iconographs. The tallest spires. The best history. The best cathedrals. The best stained glass art. The best art in general. The best music. Right?”

She elaborates on finding her own angle of the Bible to allow herself to feel at home in the religion. “If you truly believe that this God loves everyone and everything regardless, then how could you eternally punish someone for having the free will and using that free will and then making them what they are?” “A lot of times liberal Catholics get accused of being ‘cafeteria Catholics,’ or picking and choosing parts of the Bible. But realistically everyone’s a cafeteria Catholic. No one reads all of the Bible and accepts every part of it.”

Part of Rao’s faith involves the exact kind of rethinking and challenging of accepted theological certainties that Fagnant navigates in “Queering the New Testament.” She says that one of her beliefs is that Jesus Christ was a transgender man, and upon giving a talk in Queer Leadership Council to make this case, it was halted by Boston College administration just a couple of hours before it was to be given, because apparently she “was not allowed to talk about God and gender in the same sentence.” One would think that to apply this rule squarely, the administration would also wish to censor Genesis 1:27 in the Bible: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

It’s not the only time that Keira Rao’s identity has fallen into friction on campus. Being a transgender student, housing has been a headache for her. She informs me that in 2024, for the first time, “[First-year housing asked for] biological sex assigned at birth, based on their Catholic values.” And while observers may see that at a glance and view the marriage of queer identity and Christianity as a tenuous, shaky one here, Rao puts down the bottom line. “I like to think about how Jesus lived…and try and live the best version of myself in whatever ways that looks like, whether that be helping people, [or] doing whatever good I can. And I think that while Catholicism has definitely held me back in some aspects of personal understanding of myself, I think it’s also helped me mesh together realities of who I am.”

Political climates worsen and seasons change. A campus moves on through the years like it is the Ship of Theseus, every student slowly being replaced by younger counterparts, until it is at once completely different yet indistinguishable from its past selves. What gives it those scant consistencies is not just the similar dilemmas that different students must always face inside themselves, but the organizations dedicated to bringing out the best from those difficulties. Axios, sponsored by BC Campus Ministry, “a place where queer students can come to understand God’s love as people who are ‘wonderfully made’” is one of them.

“With regard to the recognition, honoring, and celebration of LGBTQ+ full personhood in our society right now, so much harm is being done on a daily basis, and at least the near future feels very threatening. To be clear, I say all that as an ally, so I don’t and can’t speak from within the queer community,” says a pensive Rick Rossi, the Campus Minister of the group. But through Axios, he is persisting in the fight for individual dignity. “Axios has a curriculum that’s structured towards successive engaged reflection. It builds in an intentional direction of reflection, while still remaining open-ended towards each person’s experience of how they understand the intersection of sexuality and spirituality for them.”

The idea of an intersectionality between those things is key in Axios’s philosophy. ““The perspective of Cura Personalis, so embedded in BC’s overall culture, encourages integration, rather than compartmentalization, of our various identities. That’s how people seem to flourish: when there can be a sense of a full self.”

And that integration of identities, which BC queer Christians have been so good at constructing, lays out a challenge for not just them but for everyone in our society. In a world that is becoming more identitarian – where groups form and the pressures of mutual exclusion erupt – how can we present ourselves as the sum of all of our parts, and not just a variety of disparate labels? It is a matter of privilege too – many of us do not face the same imminent pressures to unify all of our selves that LGBTQ+ religious people at a Jesuit Catholic university face so saliently.

“I was blessed to have queer people in my life,” says Rossi, when asked about his motivation to support Axios. “Both in my own life and then getting to know more people here at BC.” It speaks to the benefits of the university in general, where students can find role models and classmates who have balanced these identities already.

When a religious community forms with such a powerfully distinct sense of what “radical boundless love” looks like, finding beauty and value – one that encompasses Megan Smith and Keira Rao in the student body, Professor Fagnant in the faculty, and Rick Rossi’s project in the administration – it should be recognized and celebrated, not ignored.