Gay Desire: A Second Chance For Gay Theology

For over a decade, I’ve been working on a book: Gay Desire: A Second Chance for Gay Theology.

This week, I started publishing it.

The book lives here. The Preface is there now. The six chapters and the epilogue will arrive on that page, one at a time, as I finish them. You can read it like a book — start at the Preface and follow the contents — or skip around. Either works.

Companion essays will show up on my Substack. One per chapter as it comes out.

Why do it this way? 

Books in my field traditionally move through university presses — Duke, Fordham, Columbia. That route earns you legitimacy and a few hundred library readers (not an insult, a fact for most scholars, and one that they pay for, rather literally). It also takes two to four years and requires you to write for a tenure committee that, in my case, doesn’t exist. I’m a minister and a scholar, but I’m not seeking employment in academia.

So I’m doing the democratic thing. The book is open. Free to read. Anyone who wants it can have it.

The book builds on David Halperin’s How To Be Gay — and is dedicated to him — and argues that traditional gay male Christian theology, the kind that emerged in the 1970s with Loving Women, Loving Men, has been working from a broken figure. That figure is the Androgyne. The Androgyne can’t deliver on what it promises, doesn’t pass the feminist or anti-racist tests, and ends up disciplining gay men instead of liberating them.

I’m proposing we start over.

Specifically, I’m proposing gay desire — what Halperin describes in How To Be Gay — as the new ground for gay theology. And I’m arguing, to restate Halperin’s argument through the idiom of Harold Bloom, that traditional gay theology is, and in the precise sense Bloom gives the word, satanic. 

What do I mean? Well, I am glad you asked! The Preface is here.

A few practical things:

Comments live at Substack. The Preface and each chapter have a Discuss button on the book page that takes you to my Substack post for that chapter. That’s where the conversation happens — pushback, questions, footnotes I should have included, lines that didn’t land. I read all of it. I’ll write back where I can.

Subscribe to get chapters in your inbox. When a new chapter goes up, you’ll get the companion essay here, with the link.

I hope this project is helpful to you, and I thank you in advance for reading and any comments you may wish to share with me.