Growing up Christian, I never heard of a legend of the faith—the genius Medievalist at Yale University who'd set out to talk to Christians about sex.

I'm now learning about John Boswell, who published a scholarly book in 1980, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, that did a shock 'deconstruction' of everything the religion thought it knew about itself.

At present there's no biography of him.

He could've been regarded as a saint — like Joan of Arc. He'd admired her since he was a boy. In taking up his own crusade, he expected to meet her same end. "It was a little bit of a moral letdown in fact," he recalls in a 1989 interview, "because I had prepared to make this great courageous sacrifice and to be the noble martyr with good grace."

At present, there's not even a biography of him. I'm looking over what's available of the life of John Eastburn Boswell, called 'Jeb' — an acronym of his initials. He was born in Boston in 1947. His father was an Army colonel, and he grew up in Turkey and all over Europe.

Ungodly bright, he'd learn seventeen languages. As a scholar he was interested in everything. He loved singing and dancing, Star Wars, Disney, and the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis—and Christianity.

At age 15, he converted from his family's Episcopal faith to Catholicism. His mother was concerned he ought to wait until he was older. He asked her: "How long will you deprive me of the Sacrament?"

In a 1986 filmed lecture that is almost the only video of him, he strikes me as a bit autistic and speaks with a lisp.

Whatever people thought 'gay' was — he was a lot of it.

He says awareness of his sexuality came over him slowly.

"I don't think I even knew the word 'gay' when I was an undergraduate," he says in 1984. "But I knew something was different about me."

He'd attended William & Mary, and gotten a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1975, and went to work at Yale the same year. For the next four years, he was professionally closeted.

In 1977, he published his doctoral thesis on medieval Muslims in Spain. But he was at work on a vast autobiography. That's how I read Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, which says little or nothing about the author's life, but is an effort to locate himself in Christianity.

His project didn't seem too promising to colleagues.

He was warned he'd end up "a shoe salesman," he jokes in 1989. "But I had a really good feeling with that book that I was doing the right thing…"

He had the rare scholarly skills to look at Christian history and Western history in original languages. Bit by bit, he came to his big realization.

As he summarizes in a 1989 speech:

"Prior to the 13th century, homosexuality was not viewed negatively by the church."

In publishing his book, he would come out of the closet—and stand before the world as that apparently contradictory state: a gay Christian.

Boswell saw 'gay' people as a type of person that is found throughout history.

He saw the term 'gay' being used since the Medieval period to refer to people who were same-sex attracted and seem to read as 'gay' in about the way they do lately.

These are people often disruptive — people not just attracted to their own sex, but placing unusually high value on love and friendship, on education, literature, on sensory experiences, and sacred ones.

And there's that part about not being so focused on reproduction, on children — or succession, or accumulating family resources, or continuing family goals. Gender roles were flexible or fluid.

Was God against it—or was that just later Christians?

The basic stance of his book is that the Bible was often just made to say whatever clerics had wanted. And in the Medieval period, as the Catholic tradition was fighting Islam, a theological shift occurred.

It wasn't hard. The Bible is full of complex narratives and vague terms. The clerics could "say" what things mean—and who would know?

But what came to be known as the traditional "Christian teaching" on homosexuality, oddly enough, was mostly just what highly repressive systems tend to say about that subject.

As Boswell notes in a 1979 speech, the philosopher Plato had observed that "barbarians" regard homosexuality as shameful, "just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them…"

Anything 'gay' — as anything free or self-directed — was a problem.

Boswell went through the "anti-gay" Bible passages.

It turns out, they weren't exactly what Christianity had said. Everyone thought that the Sodom narrative in Genesis had God making a big statement about His views of gays. Destroy them!

To examine the narrative, detail by detail, it's not so clear.

Boswell made use of a 1955 book by an Anglican priest named Derrick Sherwin Bailey— apparently straight—who in 1955 had published Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. Largely ignored by Christianity, the book was pivotal in the British decriminalization of homosexuality.

It offered, actually, a very compelling re-reading of the Sodom narrative as not about 'homosexuality' at all.

If the scene in Genesis has two angels being threatened with rape by an angry mob, is God's problem that the possible sex is gay?

There might be other factors—like rape?

Women are raped in Bible stories, and nobody thinks God is making a big statement against heterosexual sex. But…it's puzzling. In other rape stories, fire doesn't rain down from the sky to punish entire cities.

Boswell ended up shocking many readers into asking: Had Christianity ever known what Sodom was about?

The Sodom scene is discussed throughout the Bible, with no suggestion that sex had been the context of the city's violation. In Ezekiel 16:50, God locates the problem to the city having been 'inhospitable'.

But inhospitality, again, is not usually punished with fire from the sky. Why Sodom is destroyed remains a bit mysterious. But the key ingredient would seem to be that the visitors were angels.

Boswell went through all the "clobber" passages.

Christians often cited Leviticus 18:22 as a key 'gay' passage telling the religion what to do about that issue. Boswell sees the context as ritual purity around the Temple.

Christianity had often just dropped the whole idea or existence of the Temple—when that's what Leviticus is about.

He turned to Romans 1, another passage often thought to concern 'gay' sex. Here Boswell got rather creative, seeing the context as the apostle Paul condemning straight men having gay sex. As Boswell writes:

"…the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. The whole point of Romans I, in fact, is to stigmatize persons who have rejected their calling, gotten off the true path they were once on."

Then is it clear what the "arsenokoitai" were?

Boswell turned to the strange word found in 1 Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10—which was translated 'Sodomites' or 'homosexuals'.

He sprang a surprise. There was no evidence in the ancient world, he reported, that the rare Greek word, arsenokoitai, referred to gays or homosexuals — or anything sexual.

The word's etymology is "man" and "bed"—but could its meaning be known from that? Boswell offers the English phrase "lady killer" as an example. If examined for its parts, the phrase means someone who murders women.

Actually, it's a man who has unusual success in seducing them.

The word arsenokoitai, he noted, had been translated over Christian history with many meanings—from child molestation to a man having anal sex with his wife. One might conclude the religion didn't really know what it meant.

Did God think poorly of gays—or was that just later Christianity?

Early Christianity, he noted, seemed to leave a puzzling record of tolerance toward gays, even enthusiasm. Christianity could seem rather 'gay' — not unusual, one might think, if the religion worships a deity who'd wandered around as an unmarried man, telling people to love each other.

Boswell noted John Chrysostom, the typically severe early Christian cleric, writing in Against the Opponents of Monasic Life that he was shocked by the behavior of Christians around him.

"Indeed," Chrysostom writes, "there is some danger that womankind will become in the future unnecessary with young men instead fulfilling all the needs women used to."

Throughout the religion's history, Boswell found, there were same-sex love letters, same-sex romances, even same-sex marriages.

Into the Medieval period, there were crackdowns on homosexuality.

But those could seem like power plays against specific clerics who were gay. Many gays, clearly, had been Christian clerics. Boswell daringly named names — like Saint Augustine!

It might even seem that 'the church', from the earliest days of the faith, had largely run on gay labor—the many priests and nuns having been so often shuffled off into monasteries and convents when they didn't wish to participate in ordinary, i.e. married life.

As Boswell puts it in a 1989 interview: ''What gay people have given religious life is incalculable — 2,000 years of cheerful service."

He viewed his scholarship as divine service.

In finishing his book, he was out talking in the media about "an ethic based on self-giving…and fidelity to Christ in spite of unbelievably overwhelming obstacles."

When Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality was published, in December 1980, he was 33. The book "forces us to re-examine even the most fixed notions about our moral and cultural heritage," as the New York Times review noted. It won the American Book Award for history.

It had fans—like Michel Foucault, who provided a blurb for the paperback edition. The French theorist of sexuality had written in his History of Sexuality that the idea of being 'homosexual' as an identity had happened in the 19th century. He found in Boswell's work a refutation of this idea, which fascinated him.

The hardcover version hadn't featured an author photo. The paperback version showed Boswell, in 1980, seeming impossibly young—the gay twink as world-class scholar.

The Christian world tried to ignore it all.

One looks in vain for a review of Boswell's book in Christianity Today, for instance. They knew about it. Later rebuttals were covered eagerly, as Boswell's arguments were dismissed as "serpentine."

That sort of means "Satanic."

Many commentators went to work dismantling Boswell's arguments. It was a challenge. A conservative Bible scholar, in 1986, takes stock:

"Boswell's innovative treatment of the few texts relevant to his topic has certainly flung the gauntlet before the received wisdom of the commentators and lexicographers. At several points, his study has uncovered possible biases and weaknesses in our received translations of the biblical texts."

Point by point was dealt with by scholars who often barely concealed their hostility. My favorite anti-Boswell effort is Alan G. Soble's 2002 paper, "Correcting Some Misconceptions about St. Augustine's Sex Life," that assured the key Christian thinker wasn't at all on the gay side.

There were confessions of homosexual feeling in Augustine's writings, as Boswell had noted. That was "irrelevant," Soble informed—as there was no proof of sex!

Boswell's work generated endless discussion.

As Jeffrey Cisneros writes in a 2013 assessment, he "has profoundly influenced theological debates in numerous Christian denominations, particularly in the United States."

Conservatives were mostly interested in dismissing him, making whatever arguments had to be made to 'rebut' his work.

But the ones who really hated Boswell's work…were gays. As Boswell said in a 1982 speech:

"A great many gay people in the United States want to believe that Christianity is the enemy and that if they could get rid of Christianity everything would be much better."

A friend, Ralph Hexter, recalls that "the fiercest criticism, even opposition, came not from the Christian right but from the gay academic left."

Gays often wanted to see religion demonized and dismissed. Boswell was conservative in suggesting that Christianity could be reformed, or rather, restored to an original stance that simply focused on human togetherness before God.

Boswell became an academic superstar.

A suppressed area of human existence was opening up to examination. Secrets kept by history were tumbling out of the closet. In a 1995 eulogy, Ralph Hexter, who had been a student of Boswell's, wrote that Boswell's book "marked the true beginning of academic gay studies."

"Gay studies" would be rebranded "queer studies." It would often be forgotten that this academic discipline has Christian origins.

Boswell's classes were packed. "I dress up in a suit and tie to lecture, but I hate it," he says in a 1989 profile in the Hartford Courant.

He seemed to act more like a student. Unusually for faculty members, he'd attend football games. He's recalled loving to gossip. A later eulogy has a dissertation student recalling sitting with him, drinking Coke "and asking endless questions of a man who never tired of helping others."

Boswell became the first openly gay tenured professor at an Ivy League university.

He had a male 'companion'. Jerone R. Hart, or 'Jerry', was about a year older, and an industrial engineer. In an interview with the Hartford Courant, Boswell noted that 'Jerry' went to "department functions and is wonderfully accepted by Yale."

They seem to have gotten together around 1970, when Boswell was 23. They lived together, and were known for hosting a Friday night salon.

By the mid-1980s, gays were getting sick and dying.

Boswell noticed that AIDS was changing what it meant to be 'gay'. There was a new form of 'gay' identity, a solidarity, growing around it.

He writes in a 1986 essay: "Plague adds another dimension to the revealing power of sickness and death by transforming an essentially individual experience into a communal one."

In the early 1980s, it seems, he was infected himself.

He kept busy on new projects.

In 1989, Boswell published a book on the long practice of child abandonment. But his larger interest was tracking an amazing prospect: a tradition of "brotherly unions" in Christian history that might be gay marriage in disguise.

He worked on it — while becoming ill from a range of maladies. He seemed to have Lyme's disease, then spinal meningitis. In early 1992 he was diagnosed with Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy (PML), a rare, deadly brain disease.

His sister Patricia recalls, at Christmas Eve 1992, going to church together. Thinking over his illnesses, she put the pieces together:

"We started home, still alight with the beauty of the ser­vice. As we neared my home, I screwed up my courage and said, 'I have been want­ing to ask you but afraid to. Do you have AIDS?'

Boswell stopped in the middle of the road, and started to cry.

"Why?" she asked. "Why would God do that to some­one as loving as you?'"

In reply, he quoted a line from C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories, about Aslan the lion: "Remem­ber, sweetie, He is not a tame lion."

That was Boswell's view of God—a wild force that will never follow the many 'rules' we try to impose.

He worked on his final book to the end.

Ralph Hexter recalls that "he held a fearsome virus to a standstill for years by the sheer force of his will." In July 1994, Boswell published Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. His use of "same-sex" instead of "gay" was a concession to those who didn't read historical people with this term.

The book resisted clear answers. Boswell discusses the problems around the lack of evidence—which is to say, the Christian commitment to silence on sexual issues, especially those seen as 'bad'.

But he held out the strong possibility that, in the Medieval Christian world, a 'brotherhood' ritual had been used, essentially, for gay marriage.

His book was panned by many scholars. The idea spread that he'd been misleading in his presentation of evidence. Years later, scholars would re-think such critiques, as more was recognized of what was always there.

Boswell enjoyed a last bit of havoc.

The popular Doonesbury comic strip by Garry Trudeau featured Boswell's book in a series on gay marriage.

Some newspapers refused to run the series, and others papers included disclaimers that Boswell's information was contested—prompting debates in 'letters to the editor' for weeks.

Then, age 47, it was time to go. He asked his mother and sister to speak of him at his funeral. "But Jeb," his sister recalls saying, "you need some­one who can talk about your life's achieve­ments."

"No," he replied, "I need some­one who can talk about my faith."

He died on December 24, 1994. In her eulogy, Patricia said:

"Jeb's love of God was the dri­ving force in his life and the dri­ving pas­sion behind his work. He did not set out to shake up the straight world but rather to include the gay world in the love of Christ… to acquaint all with the fearsome power of that love, the wild­ness, the 'not tame­ness' of it."

The New York Times obituary identifies the cause of death as AIDS, and identifies Jerry Hart as a 'friend'.

In Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, likewise, there had just been a reference in passing to the "Jerone Hart" who "offered practical support of crucial kinds in the United States…"

A historian of the future would have to try and figure it out. 🔶