The gay scholar who took on Christianity
John Boswell lit into the religion—and changed it
Growing up Christian, I never heard of a legend of the faith—the genius Medievalist at Yale University who’d set out to talk to Christians about sex.
I’m now learning about John Boswell, who published a scholarly book in 1980, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, that did a shock ‘deconstruction’ of everything the religion thought it knew about itself.
At present there’s no biography of him.
He could’ve been regarded as a saint — like Joan of Arc. He’d admired her since he was a boy. In taking up his own crusade, he expected to meet her same end. “It was a little bit of a moral letdown in fact,” he recalls in a 1989 interview, “because I had prepared to make this great courageous sacrifice and to be the noble martyr with good grace.”
At present, there’s not even a biography of him. I’m looking over what’s available of the life of John Eastburn Boswell, called ‘Jeb’ — an acronym of his initials. He was born in Boston in 1947. His father was an Army colonel, and he grew up in Turkey and all over Europe.
