Mendonca says that like most members of the LGBTQiA+ community, she went through a wave of doubt; it was as if her identity was at odds with the faith she was brought up in. “It is a religion that teaches you to love, respect and forgive. And then suddenly you realise he’s the same God who’s also discriminatory. What kind of a God is this who says he created man in his own image and then calls you a sinner for the way you are?” she had wondered. “What kind of a God says he died on the cross for my sins and for my salvation and then says I’m going to hell and not heaven just for the way I am?”

While she is still religious, she says her relationship with faith has changed. After dropping out of school, she had to beg on the streets of Mumbai and also engaged in sex work. At Bandra station, she was gangraped and recalls that when the police arrived later to investigate, they made fun of her genitals. “After all that, you start finding peace, you start looking for solutions to your problems. That was the time I turned back to religion,” she says. “I spoke to the priest, listened to the word of God and prayed. I found comfort knowing that I could talk to a supernatural power.”

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.79%

AAP 42.62%

INC 24.59%

Submit

View All In Poll

Mendonca has worked with the National Council of Churches in India to make churches more inclusive for the LGBTQiA+ community, and has met and worked with gay Christians. These experiences, she says, has taught her to re-read the Bible and see it in a new light. “I saw phrases and paragraphs which were comforting rather than discriminatory. I found my peace there at the darkest time. And that was because I saw God there but a different God—a ‘rainbow’ God, a queer one. The community may criticise me for saying this but he’s my God and I can call him whatever I want.”

She has since worked as a Sunday school teacher and become a member of the Parish Pastoral Council. Some of the children she taught have come out to her as gay and yet continue to be religious. “The only reason for that is that they saw Jesus in a very different way. They saw a God who’s more inclusive,” says Mendonca who has come to realise that there is much manipulation of the scriptures and that Jesus’s biggest commandment was to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.

Recently married, Mendonca says that her familial relationships too have repaired. “I realised that it took me more than 20 years to fully accept myself the way I am. How could I then expect somebody who had no exposure to education or the Internet to accept me?” she says of her father. “I realised that the fault was in the way people like myself are brought up, in religion, in the way they are manipulated and in the things that are said to them.” “They are still religious,” she says of her family members, “but they know that not everything can be taken as the word of God because god doesn’t teach you to discriminate against people. God belongs to everybody.”