Lies Still Told About the Sodomites
lgbtq meditations on religious meanings
And what is good, Phaedrus
And what is not good —
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
— from the dialogues of Plato
Preface
One Sunday morning in 1958, I was sitting in the Seventh and James Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, listening to a sermon by a visiting preacher devoted to ideas about Christian approaches to “living the good life.” In the midst of his message the preacher allowed himself a tangential swing into the evils of homosexuality. He first made clear his belief in God’s repugnance towards such depraved behavior, and then with a sly and self-assured smile, he looked down from the pulpit and straight into my eyes (at least so it seemed to me at the time).
“I don’t know a quicker way to take yourself straight to hell and eternal damnation,” he intoned with a quickening tempo and slightly rising inflection in the pitch of his voice, and curiously with an enormous smile on his face. Unbelievably to me, his largely collegiate congregation responded, after a brief pause, with laughter, a deeply melodious and decidedly male affirmation of the pastor’s words. I was seated close enough to the front to see the sparkle in his eyes that conveyed the…
