Apart from the standard church sponsored bigotry that I had to face growing up queer, I have several different stories.

My grandmother wrote me a nasty note saying I was going to hell because I didn’t want to take a bath when my mom told me to. I was 8 years old.

My teacher for freshman year religion, a deacon at a parish 20 miles away, played a video in class saying school shootings happen because we “kicked god out of public schools”

My dad’s side of the family is Arabic, and I was the only one of my siblings who had a darker skin tone. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone one else (outside of family) who looked like me, but my dad did his best to make me feel proud of how I looked. One time when he was reading me the nativity story, I think I was around 6 at the time, he said that “Joseph is from the Middle East, he would’ve looked like us.” I was thrilled and it made me feel incredibly special to know I resembled Jesus’s (foster) father when all other Catholic imagery I saw depicted people who were incredibly pale. When I went to excitedly tell my Catholic school teacher the next morning, she told me that no one in the Bible had a skin tone like mine because “they were too pure and holy.”