Faith and queerness don’t often coexist harmoniously. Religion is frequently weaponized to justify discrimination, with passages of scripture taken out of context to condemn rather than uplift. Yet when we strip away the layers, love and acceptance lie at the heart of faith. In Reading Secrets, Malcolm Himschoot highlights this core message through his memoir prose. He explores the complexities of faith, queerness, gender, and identity while navigating the painful relationship with his father, a man whose own repression of his queerness led to harm. Through his exploration of family, faith, and self, Himschoot challenges societal norms and allows his faith to embrace and celebrate human differences.

1. Reading Secrets artfully reflects on the social construct of gender and highlights the irony of using language as a weapon. You touch on how humans began as simple mammals, without rules, authority, or language, and evolved into something far more complicated. I’m curious, how did this idea shape the way you approached both gender and spirituality in the book?

Who was it that said “things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler”? I worry that so much of the tendency to over-simplify humankind, self, gender, scripture, or God is in order to obstruct or extract something. I wanted to create a work of complexity to allow more resonance in the depths of endlessly fascinating experiences – including the experience of childhood, which is where the narrative begins.

2. Your poetry wrestles with the contradiction of the Bible as a written word being used to oppress, even though language itself is a human creation. How do you personally reconcile the tension between sacred scripture and the way it’s been wielded against queer communities?

Language cannot help but be an artifact. That doesn’t have to be oppressive, but it can document – or

even imagine an alternative to – some oppressive realities within processes of human culture. The year I was born some North Americans got together to have a conference on “biblical inerrancy.” Having studied linguistics, I happen to think that was really misguided and it enshrined a lot of bias and selfish motivations into patriarchal and heterosexist readings. And then they assigned those readings to God! My father never realized there was space for interpretation, and whenever he heard judgment, he thought that was God. It split him apart. If we as queer people have been taught self-condemnation, we have to begin to recognize that voice and ask, “Whose voice is that?” It’s not God.

3. You interweave Bible verses throughout your prose so seamlessly. What was your process like for

drawing those connections? Did the scripture inspire your writing, or did you find verses to echo what

was already on the page?

I would say three cycles of scripture reading impacted my writing. One, my own devotional readings. Two, the readings I do for the church preaching cycle. Three, time spent during the pandemic with the actual books that my dad related to in his life. The comparison (and cacophony) between memorized verses within me, my accountability for outward messages, and then the deeply toxic stuff I was reading in my dad’s pages, resulted in the connections in the book.

4. There’s a recurrent theme of rain in Reading Secrets. Can you touch on what rain represents to you, both symbolically and in a more personal or literal sense?

Weather conditions and the natural world are laced throughout the book. There are a few reasons for

this. One, I was learning to pay attention in a new way living closer to the Earth during the pandemic

year when everything slowed down. Two, while I wrote Reading Secrets, frankly I had to take time to

detox with the more-than-human world in order to deal with this old spiritual abuse and religious

trauma. Those may be accidental reasons, or inspired reasons. But here’s an intentional reason. This

work is consistent with the call many white Christians are responding to in the 21 st century, to return

to reckoning with how we have dealt with indigenous places and peoples. Only the Earth is older than

all of us, and its guidance will be needed to de-colonize unjust relationships. My human family’s story

and lineage, including our biblical literalism and racism and classism and sexism and homophobia, is

ultimately part of that broader story.

5. One of the most moving threads in the book is the complex relationship with your father. Many

queer people carry deep, unresolved pain around parental acceptance. In writing Reading Secrets after his passing, did you find any sense of closure or peace? Was the writing process healing for you?

Many of us carry relationships that will never be whole and healed, because our parents did not or

could not accept us as queer people. In my case my dad could not accept himself, and he rejected me

by extension. There was a dream I had near the end of the writing process, which made me feel

otherwise. In my dream, not only were we good, but he was good! But most of the time in the writing

process I spent dealing with his ghost – or the ghosts who haunted him – which makes me think there

is something important in the realm of the ancestors that has bearing on the landscape we are all

walking today. Including the undone work of reckoning with the created world and injustice across

generations.

6. The line: “All humble in the clear bright light / of the universe, I realized I could not tell / my Creator how I was supposed to be. / My part was to be. / And that is mystery.” This is such a powerful moment. What does “mystery” mean to you in the context of identity and faith?

Once, around a table, I invited a group of people to share their own mystical experiences. At first people were hesitant to begin, and said, oh that doesn’t apply to me. But once we got going, most people could name something – not language, but something – that spoke to them in a profound way. It’s not so far off to find the sacred in the stuff of life! Especially in paradox. My paradox that defied logic was that I could be a man. My other paradox, which was highly mystical, was that moment when I stopped looking at myself, and stopped telling God how awful I was, when I was re-directed to a

worshipful posture, and I actually found empowerment.

7. Another line that struck me was: “The words my dad read were not always / the same words he pronounced.” It feels especially poignant in light of modern Christianity, where doctrine is often preached in one way and lived in another. What were you hoping to explore with that contrast?

Reading is selective, no matter what. On the same page, my father would pick up on some words and I might pick out others. Some of what Jesus said, we both loved! So much is about the people you’re with, and what you’re all amplifying together. Fundamentalism is part of the tradition which is a reduction of the lineage and legacy of faith. Out of all the things that possibly could be said, it repeats over and over a message of condemnation. Maybe for some people that’s their mystical paradox. But for queer people, the problem is authoritarianism, which subjugates readers to the text, subordinates some people beneath other people, and rewards and punishes compliance to enforce a system in which no one can ever notice anything different! In scripture, fortunately most people would defy that

system, and we see them helped by the Spirit of God.

8. On page 170, you write about your father with such raw honesty, showing both his flaws and the things you loved most about him. It’s a touching reflection on the complexity of human beings, especially when love and harm can coexist. Your father’s repression of his queerness, intertwined with his faith, led him to express hatred toward queer people, perhaps even toward parts of you. What was it like to dig into your father’s contradictions, uncovering the ways his own struggles with faith and queerness shaped his actions while also finding the space to empathize with the person he was?

This is well said. I loved my dad. He had been dead a while, and I had been in ministry even longer, and in therapy longer than that, when I wrote the book. So it wasn’t necessarily for catharsis, or forgiveness. I wanted to write it because I think in doing the work of empathy, we collectively can get somewhere that we can’t get with individual superiority. “My dad” is so many countless American white men alive today. So I cried and wrote a poem, because tears and incantations can do things.

9. Queerness is still a sensitive and often divisive topic, especially when addressing an audience rooted in faith. As an out trans man, did you have any reservations while writing Reading Secrets, knowing the sensitivity of the subject matter? Did you encounter any moments of internalized phobia or tension in the process of exploring these themes so deeply?

One internalized-phobia thing I’m currently dealing with is not knowing where to publicize the book. I don’t want to be a martyr, and I imagine religious groups would want to persecute me for it. What I am trusting is that there are channels and champions this book will find, to help people traverse the ground they need to traverse. Thank you for this interview, one example of helping that to happen.

10. Reading Secrets closes with the line: “How can I understand? Yet I will praise my Maker.” To me, this line speaks on the what it means to have faith, whether our faith be in God, in energy, or simply in the joy that exists within the suffering of the human experience. What does that line mean to you now, looking back on the book?

One of the challenges of a book like this, the whole plot of which is delivered in the first few pages, is knowing where to end it. It’s a cyclical thing that could go on and on! But it felt complete to me to claim the posture of a faithful person wrestling with unutterable things, and to have unresolved things not be the end the story. So I chose a quote from the very middle of the Bible.