are always complicated. Though my paternal grandparents are dead and were very conservative in life, I inherited a tremendous legacy of faith. My maternal grandparents will never understand why I would publish such a book, but I could not have made it through school without their help. I will be forever grateful for the inheritances of faith and education from my grandparents.
For most of my life, my mom and I have struggled greatly. Regardless, I love her and she has always loved me. I would never have developed the insatiable thirst for knowledge that produced this book without her guidance. My dad taught me that people matter. In his regular giving of his life for people, Dad showed me what a real hero is. Since I held him for the first time, Justin Hood has been my best friend. I am thankful for my complicated family.
Words do not exist to describe how much I love Emily Jean Hood. Ours is the love beyond love. This is Emily’s book. Without Emily, I could have never written anything like this. Emily is my muse . . . the queerest woman I know.
Jeffrey Kyle Hood III, Phillip Ray Emory Hood, Quinley Mandela Dillard Hood, Oscar Lucas Campbell Hood, and Madeleine Jean Frances Hood, your daddy loves you more than the reach of the entire universe. I will forever fight for the space for you to be the queers that God has created you to be. This is your book for your future. Open the door!
Introduction
Theology without the practical is dead, and dead theologies do not bring about resurrection. I seek theology that speaks life into death. I believe there is desperate need for a universal theology that can exist among and participate with other theologies and speak resurrection to the entire breadth of human uniqueness or queerness. That is what this project is about. It is my intention to develop a theology of queerness using a queer hermeneutic that is based on a core understanding that human beings are created uniquely queer in the image of a God who is queer and that resurrection comes through the discovery of the Queer within and without. This theology is an attempt to correct the efforts of the church to tame or shun the Queer. I propose that salvation can be found nowhere but the Queer. I am attempting to redefine in a radically inclusive way what it means to follow God. The core of this theology is that the Queer within us is the source from which flows all knowledge of the Queer. When we claim who we are as a unique, queer, individual made by a God who is queer, we are each creating the needed space within our self to interact with the divine within our self. The Queer is the source of universal liberation because the Queer calls all to move beyond the yoke of trying to be something other than queer or what God created us to be. This is a theology of individual liberation. In this queer space of discovery and freedom, I believe that we are finally able to blur constructed and normatized identities to move to a place of acknowledgment that all people are unique, queer individuals made in the image of God and worthy of the individual resurrection of acceptance, community, and love. This is a theology of discovery and reconstruction. This is the story of God drawing queer to queer and queering the world with acceptance through difference and love.
The Courage to Be Queer is an intricate dance between hermeneutical interpretation and theological exploration.1 Throughout this introduction, I will prepare the path for a wider journey into both the chosen self and the chosen texts. In relating personal experience, creating new terminology, and exploring past hermeneutics and theology, I will describe the experiential epiphany of the Queer within me that brought me to this place of hermeneutical and theological construction.
As much as I wish it was not so and that God-talk could exist beyond language, theology has to be constructed using language, and thus terms are important. In “The Start” I discuss where the idea for this project came from. In “Terms of Description,” I explain how I use language to describe my experiences and to construct this work of queer theology.2 It is not lost on me that the word “queer” does not appear in the majority of mainstream translations of Scripture, but I think there are plenty of words and ideas that can be reinterpreted and reimagined to discover the queer within Scripture. In “The Queer Theological Approach,” I illustrate and explicate the reinterpretive theological approach taken in the construction of this project. In a paraphrase of the writer of Ecclesiastes, it is important to remember “there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9).3 In “Precursors Descending,” I illustrate where I see this project falling into the long history of hermeneutical and theological adaptation and reinterpretation. In the conclusion of the introduction and in the beginning of the wider work, I briefly outline the chapters of the project in “The Epiphany of the Queer.”
The Start
I once led a private time of sharing and healing for victims of spiritual violence. Paul walked in and took his seat near the back of the room. After a couple of people told a few stories of harsh evangelical backgrounds, Paul spoke up and described being probed in his anus by members of his Roman Catholic youth group. The intention of the attack was to show Paul how painful being queer could be. People consistently ask me how anyone can morally claim to act in the name of Jesus when such atrocities and violence are consistently committed against queer folk in the name of Jesus. My gut reply surprises everyone, “We have to kill Jesus.” It is an epiphany that has been a lifetime in the making. Unless the Jesus or God of tradition dies, then a God that is as real and queer as us cannot be resurrected. In these moments of epiphany I consistently meet the Queer, but such moments originate in a journey.
Life is filled with experiences of people trying to squash what God has created each of us to be. Religion is one of the chief vehicles used to corrupt the Queer image of God in all people. I come from a Southern Baptist background and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister. I know a thing or two about religious normatization. My people have attempted to use God, Jesus, salvation, ethics, sexuality, gender, family values, and a whole host of other things to bludgeon people into normative constructs created to control. In my time as a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, my heart was crushed by normative constructions on many occasions. Perhaps the chief occasion occurred when one of my closeted fellow students asked a professor what to do if they could not shake their attraction to the same sex. The professor said to pray for death, for it is better to die than live in sin. Needless to say, the professor was attempting to bully the student out of two of God’s most precious gifts: his life and his sexuality. Oppression is an incredibly normative construct. When we realize the queer that we are created by God to be, those who try to steal our queerness from us become not just obstacles in the short term, but the very enemies of God.
In retrospect, I realize that I have journeyed toward the Queer within. The traditional boundaries and identities contained in typical God–talk feel uncomfortable and oppressive. There was always an attempt to control. I found God to be a God of love and freedom, Jesus being the chief expression of such. I, however, always felt like something was missing—something was not right. I discovered the source of my angst when I encountered queer communities fighting the church for the right to express the Queer within. Many of these individuals were lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, but many were not. All were fighting to be able to be who God created them to be. I knew that this was my struggle too: to be who God created me to be. The God who describes God’s self as “I AM” forty-three different places in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Exod 3:14; Gen 26:3; Zech 8:8), was calling me to the same level of acceptance of whose and who I was: “I AM” queer. When I found myself in the community called queer, I found God as well. The traditional boundaries began to change. Queerness was no longer something to be frightened of; it was something to be sought, embraced, and expressed. It was divine.
Terms of Description
It is my intention to use a queer hermeneutic to develop a queer theology that speaks to all individuals through their individual context or queerness. Throughout this project, I will define queer using a primary definition of that which is non-normative. I see normativity as synonymous with evil or sin. The creation myth provides a beautiful introduction to this concept. The serpent informs Eve in Gen 3:4 that if you eat of the fruit, “you will be made like God.” In turn,
