Reforming Sodom

Heather White’s Reforming Sodom is a bold and learned challenge to the notion that the rise of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States represented a triumph of secularism. On the contrary, she argues, gay activists drew on liberal Protestant thought, not merely intermittently or as a cudgel against fundamentalists, but as one of their most fundamental sources of inspiration. Pulling together threads that have been already present in LGBTQ scholarship, White contends that historians of sexuality must take religion more seriously as a category of analysis. And she is indeed highly persuasive. “The untold story of Stonewall,” she argues, “is that a movement sparked by a bar raid held most of its meetings in churches” (p. 76). Indeed, in many ways White makes a point that has been hidden in plain sight to historians of the homophile and gay liberation movements. Gay activists took on church doctrine, to be sure, and they encouraged new interpretations of the Bible that conflicted with those most prevalent in American culture, in which homosexuality was abjectly and categorically sinful. But those interpretations themselves, she demonstrates, had their own history. It was only in the 1940s that English-language Bibles first employed the word “homosexual” in translating New Testament passages whose meaning was, for centuries, understood in a context alien to our contemporary, binaristic conception in which “homo” and “hetero” classify not only acts but persons.

Context (archaeology) · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Schism · Secularism · Sociology · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies