Queer Christian: The Catholic Homosexual Apologia and Lesbian/Gay Practice

This essay concerns recent positions on homosexuality taken by the Roman Catholic Church and places them with respect to historical documents engaging same-sex desire. Analyzing Aelred of Rievaulx's twelfth-century Spiritual Friendship, John Bloxam's 1894 The Priest and the Acolyte, and Marc-André Raffalovich's 1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité, this essay offers perspectives on contemporary lay and ecclesiastical apologias, defenses, and critiques of homosexual behavior. The relationship between past and present locates the Christian churches' response to the modern homosexual as a historically developed—rather than permanently fixed—model of identity and action.