One Ex-Evangelical’s First 100 Queer Books
Lessons from my self-guided tour through queer literature.
What to Expect:
- My “Story”—The Necessity of Narratives
- Our Stories—A Few that Stood Out
- What I Learned—Revising and Editing
My “Story”—The Necessity of Narratives
A few years ago I decided that Southern Evangelical Christianity just wasn’t working for me. I knew of a few queer folks who were evangelical, and since then I have done interviews with LGBTQ+ people who have remained Christians for decades after coming out. For me, however, this wasn’t possible.
When I came out as gay in my last year at my Baptist liberal arts university, though that was an exciting time for self-discovery, I was left with a dearth of narrative tools to help me understand who I was or what my life could be.
Up until then, the Bible had been the grand narrative that framed how I understood the world. The purpose of life, the nature of right and wrong, what relationships were holy… and which ones sent you to hell.
I was unable to see how I could fit into that system, so I had to abandon what I had been so sure of for so long. The problem with leaving an entire system of beliefs is that you aren’t quite sure where you fit in anymore, on a personal, romantic, familial, or cosmological level.
Being the voracious reader that I am, the natural next move for me was to find new books, as the Bible had before, that could help me understand my place in the world — as a young gay man.
Over the course of two years or so, I set out to read one hundred queer books, sure that I would find some new grand narrative, some new words that could give form to my life in the way that God had spoken and created the world out of the formless waters.
Our Stories—A Few that Stood Out
My selection wasn’t systematic. The only thing guiding me was my desire to read what other queer folks had written. I read everything from poetry to theory, fiction to history, and manuscript analyses to graphic novels. I wanted a selection of books equally as queer as the people that form our community. As I read, each book led to another book—or another dozen books—and I simply followed whatever seemed interesting in that moment.
While this isn’t a book review post, here are a few highlights from four categories that made up the bulk of my reading (and yes I did keep a spreadsheet).
Literary Fiction
This post can trace its beginning all the way back to my junior year of high school. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple takes credit for “throwing the first brick” at the traditional Christian worldview I clung to at the time. As I attempted to hold onto my beliefs, Walker’s characters provided a picture of what one combination of queerness, gender, and religion can look like all within a Southern context.
Now, the merits of this text are manifold and many have written about why this specific book was important to them. For me, the young white middle-class Southern Christian cisgender male closeted homosexual that I was (breathe), this text first spoke to me on the spiritual issues that I needed to square away with my sexuality at that time.
While the resolution of my religious anxiety would come later, The Color Purple opened up for me the possibility of living at ease with these different aspects of my identity.
Other standouts include Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, John Rechy’s City of Night, Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing, and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life.
Poetry Collections
Without a doubt, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass takes the spot here. When I entered a lull in my reading project, it was Whitman that pulled me back in. That was because Leaves of Grass captures the inconsistencies, the desire, the thoughtfulness, the ineffability of living a queer life in a heteronormative society.
The “Calamus” sequence of poems naturally captured my attention the most, being the section specifically focused on male homosexuality. But this isn’t a book just for gay men. In fact, Whitman talks about his love for women, nature, and democracy with almost equal fervency, which just makes him all the queerer.
There are a number of books and scholarly articles that cultivated my reading of Whitman, but Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life and Michael Moon’s Disseminating Whitman were particularly helpful.
Other standouts include Rafael Campo’s What the Body Told, Randall Mann’s Complaint in the Garden, and anything from Audre Lorde or Allen Ginsberg.
History
Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lebian Nun in Renaissance Italy is, in a word, captivating. Aside from my own penchant for anything monastic or medieval Catholicism, Immodest Acts is for anyone interested in queer history, feminism, or the machinations of the Renaissance Church.
Brown stumbled across the story of Benedetta and Bartolomea’s relationship in the form of court proceedings from their trial. I won’t spoil the ending, but the fascinating thing for me was seeing how their sexualities were (not) understood by the masculinist Church that lacked the mental categories to think about two women being together by choice.
If you’ve made it this far and you’re not a reader, Brown’s book was recently adapted for film by Paul Verhoeven in Benedetta. The movie attempts to portray all of the miraculous events and visions on screen, so this experience of the story is rather different than reading the historical account.
Other standouts include Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War, David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England, and Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality.
Theory/Literary Criticism
You might think that theoretical books are out of place in my odyssey through queer narratives. However, queer theorists have, from the beginning, critiqued heterosexist narratives that serve as the foundation for the marginalization of queer lives.
Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive takes a close look at where queer people fit into the symbolic universe. While much of this book is rather dense reading, it’s eye-opening to see how narratives of straight and queer lives impact our perception of the world. The ways we think about how our lives can go and what we value are directly related to the stories we tell and the symbols we use.
Loosely, Edelman defines queerness as occupying symbolic negativity (yes that does sound confusing to everyone else too). In short, queers have been marked as villains and outcasts in stories for centuries. As a result, we need to be thoughtful about the stories we share and analyze them for how they might impact other parts of our community.
Other standouts include Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind and Other Essays, and Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex.
What I Learned—Revising and Editing
Needless to say, I learned a lot over the course of my one-hundred-book introduction to queer literature. Each one felt like an editor revising the narrative I was attempting to craft for my life. With every chapter finished, one more attribute or characteristic that I held as essential to queer identity would be tossed out or reconfigured. The result was a more fractured picture of queer history, thought, and narrativity.
I came to realize that this same sense of fracture is what gives queerness its bite. This is the primary value of queer writing, revealing that the true nature of any person can’t be captured in a single theory, history, or narrative. For that matter, even one hundred formulations of queerness still won’t (didn’t) account for all of us in all of our various appetites, desires, or aspirations for what kind of life we want to live.
While it is true that our work differentiates us from the heteronormative, the “straight mind” as Monique Wittig terms it, our work also serves to question our own ideas of what makes us us.
With that being said, there is still the incessant urge in all of us to create a story out of the disparate events of our lives. We need stories to give our lives meaning and value. This is especially true for queer people who have been systematically overlooked, marginalized, and even demonized in the stories we grew up with and live with now.
As more of us read and write stories with people like us in them, there are a few things we need to keep in mind:
- We can’t capture all of human experience with words.
- For better or worse, stories shape our possibilities.
- We can create our own stories with new possibilities.
- We should create our stories thoughtfully.
Altogether, our stories should reflect what we as individuals know to be true in a way that doesn’t dictate what others have to know about themselves. We must bear in mind the fact that our community is purposefully diverse and that we’re better for it. What we share in common is great, but what we have individually is equally as good.
In the end, I have more questions now than answers. I didn’t find the overarching narrative with the same totalizing power that the Bible held for me in my younger years. And that’s a good thing. As queer people, we cannot afford to place a certain narrative perspective on a pedestal. Instead, we must interact with those we have received, take what we need from them, and disregard the rest.
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