So I got a wild hair and made this challenge. It’s got twenty categories. This is partly for fun, and partly to make a point—that you can do a twenty-book challenge focusing on works important to queer Christians with what is reductively called “a traditional sexual ethic.” (lol I still hate this phrase but have not found a concise substitute.) I will almost certainly do suggestions for the various categories in the comments, so drop a comment if you have a book to suggest for one of the categories or want suggestions for them!
This was going to be a bingo card but that looked complicated to do. If one of you gets all DESIGN IS MY PASSION and creates something more beautiful, I will post it! But for now, you just get a list.
Scoring
5 = virgin queen (welcome to the party!)
10 = a walk on the Wilde side
15 = God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked (yes I know this is Nietzsche… it was my yearbook quote, because of course it was)
20 = God’s gayest angel
There’s more to life than books, you know (but not much more)
NONE OF THESE WORDS ARE IN THE BIBLE: anything about Biblical exegesis, history, fanfiction… you can literally just reread the Book of Ruth and call it a day
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN: coming of age
IN THE RUINS OF RIEVAULX: anything medieval
GET THE FOUCAULT OF HERE!: anything about the social construction of sodomy, homosexuality, friendship, romance… you get the picture
NEAR EAST? MORE LIKE QUEER EAST: anything from Eastern Christianity
MORE LIFE: anything about or set within the AIDS epidemic
THE FRIEND MY CHILDHOOD PROMISED ME: the gayest book you read when you were a kid
VICAR IN A TUTU: anything by or about an ordained minister or involving gender play
THEY WERE ROOMMATES!: anything with a same-sex friendship that inspires you
GROSS INDECENCY: anything about queer life under criminalization
TRAGIC GAYS: free space
AGAINST NATURE: a text that’s historically important or personally meaningful, even though you suspect it’s also lowkey homophobic
ROMOPHOBIA: a book from a Christian tradition other than your own
WHAT IF ALL THE TREES IN THE BIBLE SYMBOLIZE VIRGINITY?: a text from the early Church
WOMAN, BEHOLD YOUR SON: a book about chosen family, found family, or the church as family
DESERT HEARTS: lesbians. Yes I am doing a Best Uterus category. Most of the books that shaped me were by and about men, and that’s fine as far as it goes, camp is the thing with feathers, but what if you’d like also to be shaped by women’s writing?
GAY AS IN HAPPY: a book with a happy ending
BRIDGES ACROSS THE DIVIDE: a book by someone with a notably different understanding of the Christian sexual ethic from your own
THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!: a book by a contemporary “side B” author
FAKE AND GAY: fiction about celibacy, lifelong friendship, life in community, or other relevant themes
I did this to amuse myself, mostly, but I also do hope it leads some of you guys to discover new works—or new ways of bringing works into conversation. What happens if you read Angels in America alongside St Methodius’ Symposium? What images of death and the body emerge from that collision? There’s a persona and a way of life implied by setting all these categories together—it’s a somewhat willful act of community creation, imagining a kind of person who barely exists yet. A tradition, caught in flagrante in the act of being handed over.
St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, from the Getty Museum and used under a Creative Commons license.
Rebecca Brown is a Catholic convert, which retroactively makes her phenomenal short-story collection The Terrible Girls eligible for DESERT HEARTS and, imho, GROSS INDECENCY.
For THERE ARE DOZENS OF US! I'll recommend Greg Coles's Single Gay Christian, Greg Johnson's Still Time to Care, Bridget Eileen Rivera's Heavy Burdens, and--a fellow traveler--Tim Otto's Oriented to Faith.
Realized St Bernard also counts for NONE OF THESE WORDS ARE IN THE BIBLE.
MORE LIFE recommendations would include Michael O'Loughlin's Hidden Mercy, Andrew Sullivan's Love Undetectable, Rebecca Brown's Gifts of the Body :/, and the one I would do for this challenge myself because I need to reread it, Pier Vittorio Tondelli's Separate Rooms. Oh and Jose Luis Zarate's The Route of Ice and Salt.
VICAR IN A TUTU: how can I forget Gerard Manley Hopkins; also Matteo Ricci's On Friendship: 100 Maxims for a Chinese Prince.
Sure ok, I have a minute so...
IN THE RUINS OF RIEVAULX: lol Spiritual Friendship by St Aelred obviously; also the Life of St Aelred by good ol' Walter. Jesus as Mother by Caroline Walker Bynum. St Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs. THE FRIEND BY ALAN BRAY.
FOUCAULT: Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity; Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century; Frederick W. Roden, Same-Sex Love in Victorian Religious Culture; Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World.
NEAR EAST: Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium; I've been putting off reading The Pillar and Ground of the Truth but maybe one of you people will get there first.
VICAR IN A TUTU: anything by Wesley Hill or Fr Henri Nouwen
GROSS INDECENCY: Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
AGAINST NATURE: Let me throw this out there: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164212/the-life-and-struggles-of-our-mother-walatta-petros The 17th-c biography of a woman canonized in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; tres problematique, iirc she blames lesbianism for the plague, but she also had a truly deep love for a spiritual sister.
VIRGIN TREES: St Methodius, Symposium; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity; Augustine's Confessions.
DESERT HEARTS: Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks
FAKE AND GAY: Okay, its relevance to Christian life is extremely tangential, but Florence King's When Sisterhood Was in Flower is one of the single funniest novels I've ever read, and it's set within a feminist commune co-founded by slutty, bisexual conservative Isabel and prudish progressive Polly. Apparently the version in The Florence King Reader, which is the one I read, is a lot better than the version published on its own.
Also seconding Brideshead Revisited, the dowager empress of queer Catholic lit.
Gotta run but might do more later....