With Election Day just around the corner, read why Jeza Belle believes the LGBT community should not sit out of this election in the Huffington Post here! 

Love doesn’t always look like love.

When I published this blog post two weeks ago, I was prepared for some people to applaud it, and for others to condemn it. That’s what happens whenever you put an opinion out there.

I was fully prepared for the waves of both support and hostility that accompany any vantage point on anything, especially a controversial topic like Sexuality. 

What I was not prepared for in any way, were the literally hundreds and hundreds of people who have reached out to me personally, to thank me for bringing some healing and hope to their families. Parents, children, siblings, and adults have confided in me (some for the first time anywhere), telling of the pain, and bullying, and shunning they’re received from churches, pastors, and church members; from professed followers of Jesus.

Scores of people from all over the world have shared with me their…

#GamerGaters are on the case

Over the last several days, the #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter has been speckled with self-contragulatory Tweets by Gators boasting that they have “found Anita’s harasser.”

Who, this guy?

Religious but not Spiritual

I was raised an atheist. My parents were careful to explain the importance of respecting other people’s religious beliefs but they didn’t see the point in us knowing anything about religious practice. Certainly we never celebrated or ritualized our beliefs.

But the idea of religious practice fascinated me. I had beliefs that were important to me: evolution, environmentalism, love, respect for all individuals in their glorious diversity. I wanted to share those beliefs, I wanted to celebrate them with a community.

• The off-hand comment that a student was granted admission or a colleague was hired “for diversity”
• The scheduling of homework or tests over Rosh Hashanah
• Sending home a “parent” permission slip

These are all examples of what Professor Derald Wing Sue and his colleagues would term microaggressions, the “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges, which are put-downs” (2007). Their research suggests that we express our biases every day in ways that are loud and clear, and yet at the same time, subtle and hard to prove. After all, there is an initiative for greater diversity (so I’m just sayin’); students do get Rosh Hashanah “off” (and there are so many schools days missed in the fall!) and most children live with their parents, not other relatives or guardians (don’t they?)

The common theme in these incidences of microaggression is being singled out, intentionally or not, on the basis of identity–to be more precise, non-majority identity–and experiencing being less than an equal member of your community.

You know you’ve…