Former Christian singer Nicole Serrano comes out as a non-binary lesbian and slams church
Nicole Serrano has come out along with a song to accompany the announcement. (Credit: Nicole Serrano/Instagram)
Former Christian singer-songwriter Nicole Serrano has come out as non-binary lesbian.
Serrano has penned songs with Christian artists such as Chris Tomlin and Matt Maher, but is moving away from gospel as she embraces her queer truth.
The artist, the child of a pastor, told The Advocate they have embraced their identity after years of internalised homophobia stemming from their church upbringing.
“I just started slowly coming out to myself, basically, and realizing this is how I’ve always been and that there was nothing I could do to like, earn or lose worthiness or love.”
Serrano says she started to have panic attacks because of the anxiety living a lie caused her, and found herself in the emergency room a couple of times.
About five years ago, they began going to therapy.
“I just slowly started to realise like, OK, there’s a lot of holes in this whole like, church thing,” Serrano told The Advocate. “First of all, who was making the rules? Why are they making the rules? Why did they get to change them?”
Serrano was still working in a megachurch at the time, and was something of a “poster child”.
She finally worked up the courage to come out to her church.
“But the second I actually showed them who I was, they ended up firing me,” they said.
Nicole Serrano remains a churchgoer, having found a new church in Nashville to worship at, but is burned by her experience and has cut ties with Christian music.
“The true essence of what it’s supposed to be is so much bigger than all that,” she said, of organised religion. “It’s like, can we just burn it all down and start over because it’s really not cute?”
In a separate interview with People magazine, Serrano said writing new, secular music has been “therapeutic”.
“It’s how I work through my own life,” they said. “‘Nice to Meet You’ is a song I wrote one morning when I woke up and said to myself, ‘I just don’t care anymore.’ I needed everyone to know. I really wrote it as part of my own healing.”
