Jesse Monteagudo: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII Issue 162). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is a writer and an activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner and his many friends. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online.
For centuries, the Judeo-Christian Bible was used to oppress gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) people. In “Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible In Gay and Lesbian Culture” (Second Edition) edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain (Harrington Park Press; 266 pages; $29.95) GLBT people quote Scripture to their purpose.
First published in 1997, the essays in this second edition “illustrate, first, how gay writers transfigure biblical tropes to undermine what is traditionally used for homophobic purposes, such as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis or Paul's New Testament imprecations.
Second, they show how biblical texts that admit or even invite the possibility of a homoerotic reading have been co-opted by orthodox tradition, and how they can be reappropriated by gay writers and artists – most obviously the same-sex relationships of David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and John the Beloved Disciple.”
Of course any attempt to depart from orthodox interpretation of Holy Writ has been met with sharp resistance from those to whom the Bible is the unerring Word of God: Witness the uproar that arises each time someone tries to stage Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi. But what is now considered canonical is only a small percentage of the writings that circulated throughout the Roman and Persian Empires during the first centuries of the Common Era.
For political and other reasons, certain Gospels, Epistles, and Acts became part of “the Bible” while others didn't. In “Homoerotic Texts in the Apocrypha: ‘Naked Man with Naked Man'”, author George Klawitter writes about Apocryphal writings whose take on male nudity and homoeroticism are far closer to the pagan Greek philosophers than to the Jewish Tanakh, or the Epistles of Saul of Tarsus.
Other contributors follow in the same vein. In “The Discourse of Sodom in a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Text,” Armando Maggi discusses the transgressive properties of Antonio Rocco's L'Alcibiade fnciullo a scola (Alcibiades the Schoolboy), a 1650 work called “the most obscene book of the Italian literature.”
By the same token, Claude J. Summers finds ”(Homo)Sexual Temptation in Milton's Paradise Regained”. And in “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”, Frederick S. Roden writes about “Same-Sex Biblical Couples in Victorian Literature”, at a time when you could write about practically anything as long as you didn't make it obvious. Other essays study Biblical echoes in the writings of E. M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, Jeanette Winterson and, of course, McNally's Corpus Christi.
All in all, Reclaiming the Sacred is a valuable contribution to Biblical studies and the GLBT community's unique contributions to that field.
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