While many people enter the new year after spending time with families over the holidays, many incarcerated people enter the new year feeling an exacerbated sense of isolation. While outreach ministries, prison chapels, and other forms of spiritual care offer lifelines, many incarcerated LGBTQ+ people—especially Christians—find accessing this care more challenging.
Pastor Que J. Thomas, senior pastor of The REEL Center of Atlanta, and a formerly incarcerated transgender man, spoke to just how significant these obstacles often are.
“Spiritual care is definitely vital, but it was not a safe place,” said Thomas, who was incarcerated in the Georgia state penitentiary system from 1999 through 2015. “If you were a known LGBTQIA person on that compound, the warden and superintendent would not allow you to participate in religious services.”
He comes from a Pentecostal background where he has always been passionate about singing, but during his incarceration, his exclusion from participating in any church life took a great toll on him.
“If you were gay you were not allowed to be in the chaplaincy department or the choir,” Thomas said. “Having to suppress who I was and the spirit inside me … it was just a horrible mental and emotional experience.”
Need for affirming ministries
Thomas’ experience isn’t unique. And it creates an expectation of mistreatment among some incarcerated LGBTQ+ people. Sharon Crandall, director of Prism Restorative Justice, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles that provides care to incarcerated people, said she observed many queer and trans Christians who are incarcerated have an immediate skepticism of clergy.
“What I’ve learned in my experience is that many LGBTQ individuals don’t feel welcome in church or religious settings,” Crandall said. “The minute I say I’m a chaplain, I’ll notice that there’s a little bit of a reflex, but then as we continue to talk, I think they feel affirmed in who they are.”
To her, that signals two things: Incarcerated LGBTQ+ people desire spiritual care and, “at the same time, it’s a space that hasn’t always felt safe.”
It’s a warranted skepticism. Prison Fellowship and Kairos Prison Ministry, two of the largest Christian ministries that work with incarcerated people, have historically upheld non-affirming policies.
In 2016, Prison Fellowship required that all coordinators participating in their annual Christmas program sign a statement of faith, including the view that marriage is “between one man and one woman.” Coordinators serve as liaisons between Prison Fellowship and participating congregations. Nine years earlier, Prison Fellowship had disqualified a United Church of Christ congregation from participating in the program over the church’s LGBTQ+ affirmation.
In the summer of 2023, Episcopal News Service reported that the Episcopal Diocese of California had begun a dialogue with interdenominational Kairos Prison Ministry, after an Episcopal volunteer discovered the organizations trans-exclusionary policies, such as requiring the use of a person’s gender assigned at birth for volunteers and participants in its ministry weekends. One church in the diocese barred Kairos from using its facility while the anti-trans policy was in effect.
Kairos Prison Ministry CEO Evelyn Lemly told Sojourners the situation in California was “addressed and at rest,” but did not answer further questions about their policies. Prison Fellowship did not respond to questions regarding their policies.
Last Christmas, Prison Fellowship worked with over 4,500 churches across the U.S and reports it has access to 1.58 million prisoners worldwide. Kairos is active in 37 states and 13 countries.
Hostility toward LGBTQ+ people
The need for affirming prison ministries is also intensified by the hostile conditions for LGBTQ+ people behind bars.
A 2022 report from the Sentencing Project, which advocates for carceral reform, highlights that LGBTQ+ people face higher rates of incarceration due to factors such as “police bias, anti-trans laws, and discriminatory bail practices.”
According to Just Detention International, an advocacy group committed to ending sexual abuse behind bars, “in women’s prisons, lesbians and gender nonconforming women are singled out for staff sexual abuse and punishment … Transgender women — who are almost always kept in men’s facilities — are especially vulnerable.”
Rachel Simms, legal case manager for the Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center, described the violent bureaucracies transgender, gender-variant, and intersex inmates routinely have to navigate.
“Incarcerated [transgender, gender-variant, and intersex] folks spend way more time in administrative segregation than the average inmate.” Simms wrote to Sojourners in an email. “If they report harassment or abuse, it puts a target on their backs, and they risk being labeled a ‘snitch’ ... It’s very difficult to get needs met, communicate to jail staff, and reach fair and safe resolutions for [transgender, gender-variant, and intersex] folks.”
Amid increasing legislative attacks on queer and trans existences, the advocacy work that TGIJP does has become even more crucial. Simms quoted their program director Oakley Phoenix who said TGIJP is “truly swimming the deepest waters we’ve swam in for some time.”
Rev. Liz Milner, an Episcopal priest who has been working with incarcerated people since 2006 and now serves as executive director of CIC Ministries, a jail ministry in Santa Clara, Calif., spoke on how outreach ministries can better serve as safe spaces.
“Incarceration represents a moment of crisis,” Milner said. “As a spiritual care provider, it’s vital to come to a person you’re meeting without judgement or preconceived ideas of what they need.”
Milner discussed the inefficacy of ministering with the intention of converting inmates instead of tending to their needs. She said conversion-oriented ministry often isolates inmates and doesn’t produce any substantial change or connections. Milner instead advocated for spiritual caregivers to set aside their “religious and social agendas” and open up a space for people to “express where they truly are.”
“I think that a non-judgmental safe space, if we can create it, is just a beautiful place to be,” Milner said.
Advocates like Stanley Zerkowski, member of the Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition and executive director of Fortunate Families, have been working to undo the attitudes that inhibit the creation of safe and non-judgmental spaces for LGBTQ+ Christians.
Zerkowski referred to “resistance to looking at LGBTQ people as more than what they might be doing sexually” among Christians as a common challenge he encounters in his work. In an email, he said there was often an unhealthy “preoccupation with talking about sex as it relates to LGBTQ persons.”
“These kinds of attitudes are obstacles that I work very hard to change,” Zerkowski wrote. Instead, he hopes that ministers can “open doors so LGBTQ persons can enter and be fortified by the sacraments, be doers of the Word with a parish community and be - themselves- the living image of God for others.”
Zerkowski remains adamant on the importance of ministering to queer and trans people inside and outside of prisons.
“LGBTQ persons have been told by their clergy that there is no place for them in the church. Yet, they are children of God and have a birthright,” Zerkowski wrote. “Spiritual care is part and parcel to being whole, being complete; wholeness and holiness go hand in hand.”
For some queer and trans inmates, Crandall said Prism Restorative Justice has functioned as a source of spiritual rehabilitation on top of spiritual care.
“I hear a lot of them say that ‘I never thought I’d be welcome at church again’ or ‘This is the first time I’ve been to church in a long time,’” Crandall said.
The worship services that Prism tailors for LGBTQ+ prisoners, such as Pride services, include music from Christian tradition and queer history and those at the intersection of both. In the 2025 service, they used “Explaining Jesus” by Jordy Searcy, a song with lyrics that affirm queer experiences within Christianity.
The effort to affirm queer and trans existences is one that Thomas of The REEL Center agrees should be essential to the work of spiritual care providers.
“There is no gender with spirit,” Thomas said. “Those who worship God must worship him in spirit and in truth and our truth is that we’re queer, Black, brown, white, LGBTQIA … That is the truth.”
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