Lies Still Told About the Sodomites

lgbtq meditations on religious meanings

Hunting for proof that God hates lgbtq love. Photo by Nathan Bingle on Unsplash

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 pleasure this man felt at the success of his skillful and, I must say, effective injection of humor into what was for at least some of the congregation an entirely somber reflection.

A postcard of the church as it was in 1958.

I had joined this church a few months earlier knowing that, unlike many churches of the time, its membership was open to people of all “races and colors,” a principle that I strongly supported.

Later that week, I skipped lunch with friends to speak with a church counselor about what he called the “salvation of my eternal soul”. I told him that I wasn’t, actually, a homosexual, but that I had had some feelings in that direction, Furthermore, I told him that I had never felt the matter was a very serious one. I told him that I had engaged in sexual play with both men and women, nothing too…