05/30/2026
🏳️🌈🏺extra 2-Gay in History: Bible 15🛐🏳️🌈
This is the closing post of our Bible series —
The Bible is more than you’ve been told, and certainly more than you’ve ever been quoted from a pulpit. Just read the Song of Solomon — the most erotic book in scripture — and watch how the church tied itself in knots trying to spiritualize and suppress it, because inconvenient texts have always made institutions nervous. That instinct to control the text is the same one this series has been tracing all along.
This kind of q***r exploration was something John Boswell famously began decades ago in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homos*xuality, and the scholars who followed him have built a substantial body of work.
We’ve drawn on a lot of it here. But we want to be honest: not every argument in this series carries equal weight. The authorship of the Secret Gospel of Mark is genuinely contested. David and Jonathan being more than brothers is suggested by the language but never named by the text. Some readings are mere possibilities. Others — the pais/doulos distinction, the rhetorical trap of Romans 1, the manuscript evidence behind the silencing of women, the interpretation of S***m as violence to strangers— are confirmed by the text itself, and the scholarship is solid.
Then there is all the hypocrisy of ignored passages on polygamy, divorce, dietary restrictions, and slavery, while homos*xuality alone is held up.
We’re not asking you to take any of this as gospel. We’re asking you to sit with the reasonable doubt. Because the burden of proof was never ours. It belonged to the institution that wanted to exclude us from the love of God that Jesus preached — and reading the whole text, it turns out they didn’t have nearly as strong a case as they pretended.
What we can say with confidence is this: q***r people are in the Bible: not as cautionary tales, and not just in the margins. In the covenant with Naomi. In the grief of David. In the faith of the centurion. In the intimacy of the Beloved Disciple. In the promise Isaiah made to the eu**chs, fulfilled in Acts on a desert road. In the very words Jesus chose when he described people who fall outside the binary and said simply: let anyone accept this who can.
The institution spent centuries deciding that what the text said could not mean what it said — because the people it honored could not be holy. Feminist scholars started dismantling that project fifty years ago. Q***r scholars have begun doing the same work ever since. Both projects are the same: reading the whole verses, refusing the interpretations and lies layered over them, and insisting the Bible is large enough to hold the people it always contained.
That work is now showing up in pews and pulpits. The United Church of Christ has ordained LGBTQ pastors since the 70s. In 2003 the Episcopal Church, ordained an out partnered bishop; and along with the Lutherans (ELCA) and the Presbyterian Church USA, all mainline denominations are now fully affirming, even allowing same-s*x marriages to be performed. Just in May 2024, the United Methodist Church — the second largest Protestant denomination in America — voted with 93% approval to lift its ban on LGBTQ ordination and called s*xuality “a sacred gift.”
Christianity is not a monolith. There are communities where you are not just tolerated but celebrated. Where your love is not a problem to be managed but a gift to be blessed. Where a place at the table is waiting for you.
And if institutional faith isn’t for you — for one reason or another — know this: you were always in their story. Before the translations. Before the councils. Before the sermons and the rulebooks and the schisms. The Bible reflects and has space for the full human spectrum.
You were always there. The text of the Bible records it.
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