Regina V. Cates: Author
Photo provided by Regina V. Cates
Has anyone else struggled with finding their faith after coming out as a queer person? In our exclusive QNA with best selling author Regina V. Cates, we explore everything from the inspiration for writing her new book “The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have: A Call to Bravery, Peace, and Love", to how readers can use her book as a spiritual roadmap to inner peace!
Her take on spirituality, building a relationship with God, and living her life on her own terms is refreshing to say the least. Check it out below and share with a friend who’s looking for something FAB to read!
TFF MAG: Tell us a little about your personal back story and your journey to becoming an author.
I’m a little past middle-age woman who has an undergraduate degree in education and a master’s in leadership. Before creating Romancing Your Soul and becoming a full-time author, I spent over 25 years running for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.
I’ve also been a classical musician, a rock drummer, and an athlete. I’ve had the big corner office and salary. There was a time I was focused on surrounding myself with things and titles in an attempt to heal the hole in my heart. It never worked. Today I consider my greatest achievement to be overcoming the physical and psychological abuse by society and institutionalized religion that left me feeling unworthy. Putting my journey of healing on paper is the motivation for my becoming an author and writer.
Now my life is devoted to helping people around the world get to the other side of life’s challenges by discovering how to love and respect themselves. With healthy self-love and respect our relationships become better, our communication clearer, and our challenges fewer.
TFF MAG: When did you come out, and how did it impact your relationship with your immediate family as well as your church community?
For years I struggled with wanting to be accepted and to live an authentic life. I share in this book that at age eighteen I could no longer deny who I was, so I told my parents I was gay. With the intention of “curing” me, they sent me to a physician who sexually molested me. Then I was locked in a psychiatric hospital because they thought I was depressed. Of course I was depressed. I had just been sexually violated, and the two people who were supposed to love me unconditionally told me I was going to hell and had broken their hearts.
I am deeply blessed to share a happy ending to this part of my story, as Mom (who passed away at almost 100 on August 1, 2024) and Dad (almost 102) are two of my biggest fans and best friends. Faced with the truth of who I was born to be, they eventually came to a place of unconditional love by bravely questioning their beliefs. When they did, they found love to be stronger than fear.
The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have provides the talking points and ammunition needed to have meaningful conversation with anyone who is respectful and open. It provides acceptance for who we are as LGBTQIA+ people. But we must always remember we cannot open the minds of those with closed hearts. That is why we need to surround ourselves with like-hearted people. We must join with our Black and brown sisters and brothers, immigrants, followers of other faiths, to be united as powerful love in action. This unity will bring about lasting positive change in the world.
TFF MAG: How has your relationship with yourself as a queer person influenced your relationship with God?
It was the radical acceptance of my sexuality by my beloved friend, Byll, that most influenced my relationship with God. He is an atheist. Even though he did not believe in God, Byll was gentler, more respectful, and more supportive than any man in my life who had professed to be God-loving had ever been.
In his presence, it began to feel safe for me to confront the pain and anger of being born a gay woman in a male-dominated world filled with religiously justified misogyny, inequity, and abuse. The marathon hours we spent talking and sharing slowly opened my heart. I began healing a deeply wounded sense of unworthiness, shame, and inadequacy. Byll taught me intimacy has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with honestly baring your soul to another who holds it safe.
I believe God is love. And God has a sense of humor, given that it took finding deep friendship with a man for this gay and oppressed woman to open her heart to men and to God. It was Byll who encouraged me to do a deep dive into the motives behind all religions, societies, and political parties that suppress, subjugate, or attempt to control. He assured me I am not a bitch for going up against the white male hetero religious agenda. I guess you could say the bottom line is that my faith in God is a direct result of conversations I began having with Byll decades ago.
TFF MAG: What inspired you to write this book, and what was the writing process like?
I want folks to know this is not a religious book. The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have is a blueprint for how we save humanity.
As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church in the southern part of the United States in the 1960s, I know what it’s like to be targeted as the “other.”
We are living in an age of deep division, fear-based rhetoric, and the cruelty that comes from making an enemy of those considered less than. Observing our social interactions, politics, and the bastardization of Jesus’ message of ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ I ask myself: What would Jesus actually say to us today? About LGBTQIA+, gender inequity, a culture of guns and individualism, white male heterosexual privilege, abortion, war, environmental destruction, Christian nationalism, greed, corruption, racism, prisons and war as business models, the vilification of immigrants, education, and a free press, etc. I am positive he would call out those who are abusing power over people and harming their fellow human beings. He would courageously exercise tough-love and offer real-world solutions.
That is what I strive to do in this book.
The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have is my way of sitting down at the table with Jesus (a person we equate with radical inclusion, integrity, bravery, and love) to ask hard questions, and imagine solutions, about important issues we must face if we are to survive as a human species. The world is starving for real spiritual conversations. This book is the blueprint for how we can have the deep spiritual discussions necessary for us to be the positive change we want to see.
As far as the writing process – I love it. Putting my heart on paper is liberating. The practice of self-assessment (in this book and my first book – Lead With Your Heart, Creating a Life of Love, Compassion, and Purpose) and looking at our past candidly, is healing because facing our trauma, instead of running from it, or attempting to medicate it away, is the solution.
TFF MAG: What was your favorite part of the book to write, and why?
This is almost an impossible question to answer because each sentence was a project on its own. Stringing them together into this labor of love was a multiple year’s process of very hard, but rewarding work.
I guess if I have to choose then I would say sharing my personal experiences. Such as the little turtle story to demonstrate a Sunday school teachers idea of eternity in hell. The Native People’s Inipi Ceremony where my concept of God began to move from a suggestion imposed on me by other people to a living experience of personal resonance. Sobbing in a homeless man’s arms where I truly learned what it means to love unconditionally. The story of being 5 years old on Halloween and how one woman’s hatred and bigotry, because of someone’s skin color, shattered my heart.
This book is filled with personal stories. They are my favorite parts to write because they touch the heart of readers in magical ways.
TFF MAG: How can readers use your book as a spiritual roadmap to navigate today’s anti-LGBTQ+ climate?
I directly address how those who twist their religious beliefs to persecute others are absolutely wrong. And I make observations about tangible actions we can take each day to continue to move ourselves forward; both as individuals and as a society.
The power we have is within us. That immense power to be the positive change we want to see in the world comes from accepting several truths.
First, we cannot reason with unreasonable people. When we drop a let’s fight fire with fire egocentric mentality we are able to surrender to a higher wisdom that allows us to be heart motivated. To behave in ways aligned with integrity, regardless of how other people choose to behave.
Second, let’s admit those who seek to persecute us have a history of blaming the “other.” We must be the positive change we want to see by understanding it’s by bravely and honestly questioning our beliefs about who we are and being authentic with ourselves that we will have the opportunity to help change the heart of those who hate. This book was written to strengthen the heart and activism of everyone who desires to be part of the solution to the abuses of power found within institutionalized Christianity so we can actually heal our world.
Third, those of us who believe in a loving God cannot be complicit in accepting abusive teachings as God’s word or God’s will. We speak up in loving but firm ways and speak truth to power.
Fourth, all things are designed to change and grow, including our spiritual beliefs and practices. We have the duty to allow—even to encourage—our heart and soul to evolve. Only by asking questions of ourselves and being open to advancement and transformation do we improve intellectually and technologically from generation to generation.
It is by focusing on changing ourselves that we change our little part of the world! And one day our little parts of the world will meet.
TFF MAG: What made you want to reclaim your faith as a Christian woman after experiencing rejection from the church and growing up in a conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ environment?
First, I want people to know I am not comfortable calling myself Christian. I am a fan of who we believe Jesus was and his messages of radical inclusion who asked us to love our neighbor as ourselves. The label Christian is uncomfortable for me because institutionalized religion, corrupt ministers and politicians, as well as people who are motivated to hate in his name, give Jesus a very bad name.
Second, I’ve learned it is my behavior that creates my life. I want to live a peaceful life filled with self love, respect, and acceptance so I stopped seeking these from outside myself. My focus is on doing my best to love my neighbor as myself. Today my faith journey is based on continuing to expand my understanding of the interconnectedness of all life so I can be a better ambassador of God’s love. Which is not always easy to do but it is my goal.
What advice would you give LGBTQ+ people who want a personal relationship with God but aren’t sure where to start?
Define God for yourself. Begin by expanding your awareness past the limited box you were told to put God in.
Think of it this way. If we take a drinking straw and look through it up into the night sky, we would see about 10,000 stars within the tiny circumference. Multiply the objects in that small space by the entire night sky and the number of stars, planets, and universes is beyond comprehension. There is no way we can put God into a box of gender or form.
I believe the best way to view God is to see God intentionally in everything and everyone. Doing our best to treat everyone and all life as we want to be treated is having a personal relationship with God. It’s not always easy to do but we can choose to go first in living the Golden Rule. And surround yourself with like-hearted people who are also striving to be the positive, loving change they want to see in the world.
How would you sum up your book in two words?
Transformative Conversation
