Read before you kneel
Queer sacred stories
Gods, heroes, and histories that queer people have reached for, with the century of the telling kept in view.
This room exists because queer people have been told that religion is a house with no chair for them, and because some of the old stories are, inconveniently, already strange. It does not exist to prove that you are allowed to be alive. You are. The essay titled “you need no precedent” is the theological center. The other pages are study.
Not every figure here is a god. Hyacinthus and Cyparissus and Ganymede and Patroclus are mortals in the stories we have. Loki is a god in Norse myth and a poor candidate for a simple mascot. Antinous was a historical person who was deified. Inanna is a great goddess with a scholarly argument attached, not a flag.
- How to read them
- You need no precedent
- Antinous — deified historical man
- Dionysus — a god
- Apollo — a god
- Hyacinthus — a mortal youth
- Cyparissus — a mortal youth
- Zeus and Ganymede — abduction, not a romance to copy
- Hermaphroditus — a myth of merging, with violation in it
- Loki — a Norse god, not a Wiccan invention
- Inanna — a Sumerian goddess
- Aphrodite — a goddess of desire
- Achilles and Patroclus — heroes, later read as lovers
- Gender-diverse divine imagery