Greta Christina

Early life

Christina was born in Chicago on December 31, 1961. She graduated from Reed College in 1983. She legally changed her name in her twenties, dropping her family name and taking her middle name as her last name, resulting in her current name of Greta Christina.

Career

Christina is a regular atheist correspondent for AlterNet, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist, and has been writing about atheism in her own "Greta Christina's blog" since 2005. Her blog is now part of The Orbit. In 2009, Hemant Mehta at the "Friendly Atheist" ranked Christina's blog in the Top Ten most popular atheist blogs. She also created the "Atheist Meme of the Day" on Facebook.

She has been writing professionally since 1989, and has been a full-time freelance writer and speaker since 2012. Her writing about atheism has appeared in print in Skeptical Inquirer and the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, as well as in her own books Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why (2014) and Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless (2012).

Speaking to Chris Mooney for the Point of Inquiry podcast, she stated that "there isn't one emotion" affecting atheists "but anger is one of the emotions that many of us have ...[it] drives others to participate in the movement". She feels that there are many goals for the atheist movement — more separation of church and state, ending "bigotry against atheism", and for some, persuading people "out of religion". She thinks it is a "valid goal" to work towards a world without religion.

As a speaker, she is a member of the Speakers Bureau for the Secular Student Alliance and the Center for Inquiry. She was a speaker on the Diversity in Skepticism panel at The Amaz!ng Meeting in July, 2011, the Reason Rally in 2012, and the 50th annual convention of American Atheists in 2013.

In 2013 she was named the International Team Honored Hero of the Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB). The Foundation's teams raise money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. As of 2015 she is a member of the Foundation Beyond Belief's Board of Directors.

She received the 2013 LGBT Humanist Pride Award from the American Humanist Association.

Also in 2013, a photo of Christina with her wife Ingrid and a piece about the photo by Christina was featured in the book A Better Life, by Christopher Johnson, which is a book with photos of 100 atheists and pieces by them about how their atheism has enabled them to have, in their view, a better life.

In 2015, Christina received the first Secular Student Alliance Ambassador Award, which was the 2015 Secular Student Alliance Ambassador Award. Christina is an Advisory Board member of the SSA and a donor at the Lifetime Membership level.

Outside of her atheist work, she is the editor of Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients and of the Best Erotic Comic anthology series, and has written the erotic novella Bending and the erotic fiction collection Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. Her writing has also appeared in three volumes of Best American Erotica. She has also written about cats for Catster, and has written for the magazine Femme Feminism.

She previously worked at Last Gasp and Lusty Lady, both in San Francisco. She has also performed in pornography.

Personal life

Greta Christina has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1984 and lives with her wife, Ingrid Nelson, whom she has been with since 1998. Christina is openly pansexual. Nelson is openly bisexual and works as a nurse practitioner in the field of HIV and AIDS. Christina and Nelson were married in February 2004 at San Francisco City Hall, during the time that year in which same-sex marriage licenses were being issued in San Francisco; all those marriages were later voided, and Christina and Nelson got married again at San Francisco City Hall in 2008. They also had a wedding (although not a legal marriage) on November 12, 2005 in San Francisco's Swedish American Hall in the Castro district. Christina stated in 2010, "Ingrid and I are very happily married. We've been married for six and a half years (or five years, or two and a half years, depending on which of our three weddings in the shifting 'same- sex marriage' winds you're talking about), and we've been together for close to thirteen years." Greta Christina is co-organizer and co-host of the Godless Perverts Story Hour and the Godless Perverts Social Club in San Francisco. She is openly kinky and polyamorous.

Christina's parents divorced when she was 12. Christina's mother died of cancer at the age of 45, when Christina was 17.

Christina has struggled with depression off and on throughout most of her adult life; as of 2014 she considers herself chronically depressed and takes the antidepressant Wellbutrin for it, and expects to take antidepressants for the rest of her life.

In 2012 she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. She had a surgical hysterectomy and oophorectomy to treat it, and is now cancer-free. However, she has a presumptive diagnosis of Lynch Syndrome (a diagnosis based on family history), which significantly increases the odds of getting certain kinds of cancers, including endometrial cancer.

Views on issues other than atheism

Christina has declared, "I'm a feminist. An ardent one at that."

She is sex-positive.

She is pro-choice with regard to abortion.

Books