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Navigating Two Tides: A queer man's struggle to keep the faith and accept who he is

Wednesday, 30 March 2022

As a child, Iatua Felagai Taito already knew he was different, so he turned to God for answers. (First published March 2022)

People in Tāmaki Makaurau's Pasifika queer community report feeling shut out by their faith, their culture, their family. Their experiences have never been properly surveyed, and support services are patchy, leading many to feel discriminated against, like they have no voice, like they are lost. This is just one of their stories.

When Iatua Felagai Taito​ was young he would hide away to pray so no-one would hear him asking God why he was so different.

At 11 years old, he had come to realise he wasn’t like his classmates. He didn’t yet know the word “queer” but he knew he was different.

So, as he always had, he turned to God for answers.

When no-one was looking he would sneak into his parent’s room, close the door, get down on his knees and pray.

“I prayed all the time, and I'd be like, ‘God, you always answered my prayers. Why aren't you answering this prayer … to take this … energy out of me?’”

Taito has found his own way of connecting with Christianity after struggling to come to grips with some tenets of the faith.
Taito has found his own way of connecting with Christianity after struggling to come to grips with some tenets of the faith.

But the answers didn’t come. The feelings didn’t recede.

The memory stirs lingering anguish in the now-23-year-old Samoan as he talks about the path he has walked since then.

“No-one put that on me, but I used to think that there was something wrong with me.

“I was like, ‘Why am I this way? Why am I just more flamboyant? Why am I just feminine? Why can’t I be just a normal average person, average male, right?’”

At his church, while homosexuality wasn’t explicitly spoken about, he saw an ideal held up for the congregation to aspire to, and it was one that never included anything about how Taito was feeling.

Through dance Taito has been exploring different ways to connect with and understand his Samoan culture.
Through dance Taito has been exploring different ways to connect with and understand his Samoan culture.

The church had always been a place of community, a place where he felt welcome.

Yet the closest he came to any acknowledgement of his queerness was when work was being done at the church and he would be sent to help the women with their jobs.

He would do dishes and clean, before eventually being asked to join the men as well with their tasks.

Some voices in the rainbow community say the conservative values espoused by the church conflict with traditional cultural values in the islands.
Some voices in the rainbow community say the conservative values espoused by the church conflict with traditional cultural values in the islands.

As the only queer person in his congregation - that he knew of - he found himself walking a fine line between what was expected and what he wanted.

Yet over the years he taught himself to navigate different spaces, changing his demeanour to fit the social situation - a behaviour known as code-switching.

He changes his voice and tones down the more effeminate gestures, hiding who he is.

But that only paints a partial picture of Taito’s journey with his faith.

While there have been tough times within the church, he sees his relationship with God as a personal one.

It has been an anchor in his life, helping him navigate his acceptance of his sexuality and his place in the world.

“That's where you bring your language and your histories, you learn your love for your genealogies through the church,” Taito says.

“And so it's important to talk about the church in a healthy way because a lot of that is where we get our sense of community from.”

And, while his faith had a hand in the confusion bubbling inside him, it also gave him clarity when, as a 13-year-old lying in bed one morning, an epiphany struck him.

“I felt like God did answer my prayer,” Taito says. “That I wasn't supposed to be changed, that I was beautifully made in His image, and I was supposed to be exactly who I was.”

It lifted the spiritual weight he had been carrying.

So rather than shun religion, Taito thinks it’s important to continue opening up dialogue in the hope of changing attitudes within the more conservative segments of the community, to be more inclusive.

Taito says the church is where many Samoans go to connect with their
Taito says the church is where many Samoans go to connect with their

But it won’t be easy, as long-standing trans rights activist Phylesha Brown-Acton​ says – conservative attitudes are prevalent within the Pasifika community.

“There is a big alignment to conservatism by certain leaders that do not make it easy for people in our communities to live their lives without discrimination, violence, fear or stigma,” she says.

While not as widespread as it may appear, Brown-Acton says there are streaks of conservatism out there making life for trans and homosexual Pasifika difficult.

She says although faith and church communities are “protective factors” for Pasifika, whether they are part of the rainbow community or not, the conservative elements can be hard to grapple with.

Dance has been cathartic for Taito, who has used it to unpack complex and deep-seated thoughts about sexuality and culture.
Dance has been cathartic for Taito, who has used it to unpack complex and deep-seated thoughts about sexuality and culture.

Western labels around queerness are corrupted in the church, she says, another reason to lean on indigenous terms rather than Western ones.

“Those are the words used to persecute people in churches. ‘The gays are the sinners, the lesbians are the sinners, the trans are the sinners.’ Those utterances become problematic when we frame people that way.”

Christianity spread and embedded itself throughout the Pacific Islands within the space of just 200 years, becoming the dominant religion across the region.

The church has become central to many facets of life in the Pasifika community - more than two thirds (67.9 percent) of Pacific peoples in New Zealand identified as Christian in the 2018 census​. That’s at least 20 percent higher than any other ethnic group in New Zealand and the number is vastly higher in the islands.

The spread of Christianity has informed many of the laws and attitudes towards members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Before the arrival of Christianity there were a vast array of genders accepted among the cultures of the Pacific.

Yet now, in many of the islands, sexual acts between people of the same sex are illegal, and in some islands, carry prison sentences.

But for Shaneel Lal​, a trans rights activist who grew up in Fiji, the blame doesn’t fall on the shoulders of Pasifika, rather those who brought Western religion to the islands.

Lal, a trans non-binary person, was subjected to conversion therapy in Fiji and after emigrating to New Zealand has become a strong voice in pushing the Prohibition of Conversion Therapy Bill​ to and through parliament.

Lal says the colonization of the islands brought religious practices to the islands that stigmatised the queer parts of cultures that had previously been very accepting of it.

Taito’s hope is to share an open and honest discussion about sexuality within his community.
Taito’s hope is to share an open and honest discussion about sexuality within his community.

“Indigenous queer identities are pre-colonial, which means that there is no colonial equivalent of indigenous queer identities and attempt to translate our identities will cause our identities to lose their meaning and value and significance,” Lal says.

“What we need for indigenous people is a revitalization of indigenous knowledge and a part of that is trying to root out and find out what indigenous queer identities existed.”

While Lal does not condone the stigmatisation of the LGBTQIA+ community, they say Pasifika leaning towards conservatism is understandable as they have already been stripped of so much of their culture.

“For them now, I feel like Pacific people have lost so much of the culture that now they feel that to accept colonial queerness is neocolonialism.”

Taito agrees, saying conversations around acceptance of the LGBTQIA+ community within the church were seen as being too Western.

But the church is such an important part of his culture, turning away from it is not an option.

While a comment from various churches was sought by Stuff, none of those contacted chose to respond.

“That's where you bring your language and your histories, you learn your love for your genealogies through the church,” Taito says.

“And so it's important to talk about the church in a healthy way because a lot of that is where we get our sense of community from.”

So through his postgraduate dance studies at the University of Auckland​, he is trying to bring together the different worlds he inhabits.

Through the movement and fusion of Western and traditional Samoan dance he is able to express what he feels inside.

His final project as part of his master’s thesis is a dance for his family. A dance to show them who he really is.

“If you suppress that, you're gonna lose a lot of opportunities and lose who you are,” Taito says.

“And I just hope that I can at least be some form of representation in that you have to be courageous enough to just say your truth, unapologetically.

“And for me, I am proud to say that I am a Christian, and I am queer, and I am Samoan.”

Where to get help for the LGBTQI+ community