Priz | The Commtee on Lbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgenr History

Contents:

• GAY BOSWELL
• WHY ‘GOD AND THE GAY CHRISTIAN’ IS WRONG ABOUT THE BIBLE AND SAME-SEX RELATNSHIPS
• ALPHOPOIIS: THE MYTH OF THE “GAY” BYZANTE MARRIAGE RE
• THE COMMTEE ON LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR HISTORY

GAY BOSWELL

Revisg Christiany, Social Tolerance and Homosexualy over a after I first read , and three and a half s after s publitn, is both an spirg and a prsg experience.

Their prcipal objectns (which vary articulacy and logic) are:● that  is anachronistic and misleadg to speak of ‘gay’ people the premorn perd● that Boswell’s terpretatns often exceed what the evince warrants● that Boswell misreprents the medieval Church’s stance on same-sex relatns (nservative Catholic scholars tend to quarrel wh his argument that the early Church was largely unncerned about them, whereas queer theorists sometim plore his ‘whewashg’ of the Church’s persecutn of sexual mori). Boswell’s e of the term ‘gay’ to signate those ‘nsc of erotic preference for their own genr’ any era seems disgenuo and overly limg, particularly when functns to erase bisexualy or sexual fluidy. In a seri of strips June 1994, recently outed gay character Mark Slackmeyer attempts to pick up a fundamentalist Christian married man, and tells him that the church had, for a lennium, performed gay-marriage ceremoni.

In barely 20 years at Yale, Boswell’s work as a historian managed to set the t among the pigeons to stupendo effect, through years of meticulo scholarship that, if rrect, unrmed the very foundatn of much morn homophobia.

WHY ‘GOD AND THE GAY CHRISTIAN’ IS WRONG ABOUT THE BIBLE AND SAME-SEX RELATNSHIPS

In the troductn to his 1980 Amerin Book Award-wng Christiany, Social Tolerance, and Homosexualy: Gay People Wtern Europe om the Begng of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, he observed that gay people were “still the objects of severe proscriptive legislatn, wispread public hostily, and var civil rtrats, all wh ostensibly relig jtifitn. The book argued that the Roman Catholic Church had not always been as hostile to gay people, and ed, until the 12th century, had thought homosexualy no more troublg than, say, hypocrisy—or even celebrated love between men.

ALPHOPOIIS: THE MYTH OF THE “GAY” BYZANTE MARRIAGE RE

But other crics felt that, spe s attentn to tail, s central this—that Christiany and homosexualy had not always been such uneasy bedfellows—was not only false, but a failed attempt by Boswell, gay and Catholic, to square two aspects of his inty they felt uld not be renciled. He did not set out to shake up the straight world but rather to clu the gay world the love of Christ… to acquat all wh the fear­some power of that love, the wild­ns, the ‘not tame­ns’ of .

THE COMMTEE ON LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR HISTORY

But the ia that the ncept of iendship has simply changed rang hollow to him—pecially given that many ancient societi, homosexualy was nventnal and so might well have been part of a normal iendship. ” Elsewhere, however, he claims to have “ntamated the sprg of iendship wh the dirt of lt and darkened s brightns wh the blackns of sire”—yet this is a nigratn not specifilly of homosexual lt and sire, but of sexualy more generally.