‘I’m a bisexual, genderqueer comedian who has found Christianity – this is what it taught me’
Comedian Sam Williams reflects on finding Christianity as a bisexual person. (Michael Julings)
Comedian Sam Williams reflects on finding Christianity as a bisexual person. (Michael Julings)
Comedian Sam Williams on coming to bisexuality, coming to faith, and coming to the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival with his new show about the two.
I grew up in Maidenhead, forty minutes west of London. It’s a strange place to realise you’re queer.
Maidenhead is a culturally Christian town in the worst way: judgemental, repressed, Tory. Places like this force people to live contradictory lives. Our MP was former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, but the town is also home to an infamous gay dogging site called The Thicket.
Everyone knows about The Thicket – it was the butt of so many playground jokes. I learned quickly that the worst thing you could ever be was a queer bloke stumbling through the woods in search of intimacy.
My sexual confusion started around age 12 and it terrified me. Although I was attracted to men and women, bisexuality hadn’t reached the Tory heartlands yet. I immediately thought, ‘I must be gay, and I’m just going to pretend I’m not’. I tried to cover it up by switching my Twilight books for Mario Puzo’s Godfather series.
“It’s kind of like being on The Traitors. You feel like you’re the only one”
The legacy of Section 28 – which banned schools from talking about homosexuality until 2003 – definitely had a long tail effect on the people of Maidenhead: I didn’t meet an out gay person until I was 17, and I know people pushing 30 who are still in the closet.
It’s kind of like being on The Traitors. You feel like you’re the only one. You’ve had your shoulder tapped and you’re like, ‘Well! I don’t want this. This is way more annoying than being a Faithful’. There was this prevailing sense of fear that manifested as anger. But to be fair that was caused by the Godfather books too.
It was at Brighton university where things started to fall into their fruity place. I hung around with the drag society, and being bisexual started to feel not just normal but actually quite dull. Here was a group of people living at the very frontier of sexual and gender identity and I’m still panicking about wet dreams involving M&S underwear models from the men’s and women’s catalogues.
I tried drag, but being put in a corset once was enough. I’m too lazy to do something that demanding. Instead I started doing stand-up as part of my drama course. I had low self-esteem back then, so it was nice to experience social interactions with a clear contract: even if I made an audience laugh once, I’d won that interaction. I only realised that I had potential for doing it as a career when I won the Komedia New Comedy Award in 2023, and then when I got chosen to be part of the Pleasance Comedy Reserve at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.
“I remember feeling, why do I still feel called to explore this?”
It was also at university that I stopped being an atheist and developed an interest in Christianity. I had to read John Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost, for a first year literature module. That poem reveals faith to be something that people experience; it isn’t about the concrete existence of God, it is a grounding and steadfast hope that a just and peaceful world can and will be delivered. The impact was seismic: I didn’t renounce my atheism, I simply could not be one anymore, because I realised I never had been one in the first place.
I was scared for the next six years about what the Christian faith would offer me, because I thought it was still bigoted, unaccepting, judgmental, responsible for an unfathomable amount of violence and abuse. I remember feeling, why do I still feel called to explore this?
Then, during the pandemic, I got one of my favourite ever jobs: I was a teaching assistant at an Islamic faith primary school in London. I was working in the special educational needs department and accompanied students to everything including Jummah, the Friday prayers. That was the first time that I’d been in a prayer environment, and I felt truly welcome.
Faith and queerness started dovetailing in my heart and mind. I started listening to podcasts where queer Christians were talking about not just reconciling faith with their identity, but how faith was the source of their queerness and vice versa.
I finally bit the bullet aged 26 and went to Union Chapel in London. At first, it was essential to me that the outward politics of a church aligned with mine. I discovered that the minister was gay and immediately felt reassured. It’s been two years now, and I still go. How could I not? To be baptised at the hands of a queer elder, in a non-conformist place of worship that has truly welcomed the stranger for 150 years, is something I will cherish forever.
It’s not some utopian queer rainbow world, it’s an accurate representation of the world around us, where queer people mix with asylum seekers who mix with more conservative middle class folk.
Community as a word has been cheapened by brands who are like, ‘If you buy our toothbrush, you’re part of this toothbrush community’. Really, it’s about sharing life together in harmonious ways and being bound together through comfortable and uncomfortable times. That’s when you feel the binds of community get stronger, and Union Chapel has shown me it’s important to seek community with all people, not just those who share a label with you.
I’ve turned these experiences into a comedy show, Touch Me Not, which is at Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. It’s about my double awakening: first, realising and panicking about queerness and desperately trying to overclaim it, and then faith being the thing that’s ended up helping me live a queer life properly.
Why does being a queer person of faith make a good mix for comedy? It’s a contradiction. All comedy comes from a place of conflict. Although it is integral to who I am, I am not precious about my faith; this show will massively offend a lot of Maidenhead-type Bible bashers, but I think the mystics will love it.
“There’s inherent queerness to faith”
And while queerness and faith seem contradictory, they massively overlap. There’s inherent queerness to faith and lots of aspects of faith that are inherent to queerness, that conviction that comes with knowing that you have been fearfully and wonderfully made.
I have made this show for the 21-year-old Sam who felt called to answer God, but was too scared to respond. At the time I felt like I was committing a double betrayal: throwing my queerness under the bus for a cause that has done so much damage to LGBTQIA+ people, and not being ‘normal’ enough for church. I hope that if my younger self saw this show, they would cease to be afraid.
Sam Williams: Touch Me Not takes place at Below at Pleasance Courtyard at Edinburgh Fringe Festival between 30 July and 25 August.
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
