Q: Sexual Ethics

I love writing letters. I love thinking through writing letters. Sometimes, people write to ask me questions.

A longtime mutual wrote to me a month or two ago to ask me about my sexual ethics: what are they? For years, it has been difficult for me to disentangle questions of sexual ethics from pro-queer Christian apologetics, which is neither my calling nor job.

A lot of what passes for sexual ethics (Christian and beyond) is inadequate, at least for me. Slowly, I've been developing an approach for myself, informed by my research of the history of gay/queer theology, shaped by my education and subsequent work, and rooted in the authority of my faith and sexuality as worked out in relationship. I offer the following as a dispatch from my discernment of spirits.

I asked my mutual friend if he would be ok with me sharing his question and my response on The Rearview. He graciously said yes and offered his permission to attach his name. I've edited my part a little, but not much and not substantially. Thank you, Talique!

Q

Hey there friend!

Thanks for taking my question. I’ve enjoyed following you on insta for a while and regret that we didn’t run into each other when I visited yds back in January 2025. Your insights and writing have been a gift to witness and read, and it’s always good to see a fellow gay doing serious theology.

The question I had for you was about theological sexual ethics. Full disclosure, I take most of my queues from Sarah Coakley on that question (not libertine, not conservative either, a secret Anglican third thing). But I’m curious where you stand as a queer theologian.

For context, I recently read Marcella Althaus-Reid’s chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology in which she criticized the Latin American liberationist theologians for ignoring sexual minorities and women and for fitting their theological frameworks into patriarchy. Her alternative seems to be a lot more libertine, not necessarily prescribing any kind of “ethic” to follow or adhere to but proposing a method that seems ambiguous to me but mostly consists of listening to working class women and queer and trans people in Latin America.
All of that to say, I’m curious what your thoughts are!

Sorry if this question is a bit unfocused.

Best,
Talique

A

Hello Talique,

The question is plenty focused! When talking about sexual ethics—like when talking about faith—I tend to talk in two registers: I speak about my own life, and I speak historically about what gays have done in the past. I plan one day to write something more systematic in this area, as I am dissatisfied by a lot of what I read about it.

A couple of basics. My sexual ethics begin where the rest of my ethics begins: in love of God and love of neighbor. There isn't a particular theologian whose model I've adopted for myself. I am most influenced by Kathy Tanner's work on cultural theory, seeing Christianity not as a culture of its own to transmit from generation to generation without change, or with minimal translation, but as something dynamic that Christians do to and within the cultures we live in. We break words and definitions in a Christward direction.

I am also influenced by a couple of relatively unknown theologians from the 70s and 80s whose approach to an ethic of homosexuality began by committing to learning what gay people actually do and how we understand what we are doing, rather than assuming we can judge what is good and bad in a culture that we do not understand. It's informed by Willie Jennings's writings on missiology. There were missionaries who acted as conduits of colonialism by preaching a gospel that could not survive without its European trappings, and so sharing the gospel entailed colonization, eliminating the cultures of indigenous peoples. These are the kinds of missionaries whose stories get written down and passed on—those whose missionary work is victorious, in the sense of conquering. We don't, he says, have the stories of another kind of missionary: those who fall in love with the people they are sent to, learn their language, and become lost in them, i.e., those who learn to sing a new song.

We hear the good news in the contexts and lives in which we actually live. For queer Christians, this can be confusing, because if there is a moment of coming out or of leaving a predominantly cishet world for queer community, we might join a new community and learn a new culture long after we are baptized, convert, mature in faith, etc. Some in this position have said the best thing to do is to make that culture as close to their prior Christian life as possible. So, gays can marry, but should be bound by the same standards of Christian marriage as anyone else.

To my mind, although some gay Christians indeed find fruitful lives of faith in that mode, to insist that the relational forms through which we experience grace and God's love and transformation, etc., don't change while everything else around us does is a failure of faith and a failure to take responsibility for the ongoing work of theology.

Better to ask a lot of questions, like: How did the early Christians live? Why did they see marriage as consolation for those who couldn't be celibate in order to prepare for the kingdom of heaven? How did Christians take a relational form comprehensible to the culture they lived in (marriage) and modify it for their own purposes? Across time, does Christian marriage today look like early Christian marriages—not just in the rites said, but in what spouses do together and how they live? My answer to that is a resounding no, as Christianity in the States has become invested in bourgeois forms of life, capital, and comfort, that make us more, not less, complacent regarding eternal life, loving God, and loving our neighbor. I do not believe Christians take to heart the redefinition of our relational natures that happens in baptism. The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas said that in baptism, we shift from biological beings to ecclesial ones; that is, we leave our father and mother and enter into a new kind of family.

As these questions begin to produce some answers, we start asking questions of our own circumstances: What kinds of relationships am I in and surrounded by? How do they relate to the work of loving God and loving our neighbors? Do they make me more or less prepared to do those things?

You mention Coakley! I like some of how Coakley frames the work of theology as an ascetic practice of bodily practice and transformation, always in motion and responding both to the moment and to one's own processes of change resulting from that ascetic practice. I don't think she takes her own definition seriously enough, however; or maybe we don't take her definition seriously enough if we look to her to give us an ethic rather than to enter into the process of transformation she describes. I don't think her distinction between libertinism and repression is particularly helpful in any general way, or specifically to my life as a gay man. I wouldn't ask her to categorize particular gay practices as libertine or repressive, or as potentially viable for the kind of ascesis she seeks.

Gay male theologians started asking these questions in the 70s and 80s, like I said. The most familiar ones, like John J. McNeill, took the opinion that marriage is the ultimate goal for any human relationship. The man I wrote most of my dissertation on, Kevin Gordon, took an approach rooted in his life as a Roman Catholic brother, who at the time had helped his religious institute discern what it might mean to be a brother in the modern world, post-Vatican II. When Kevin wanted to understand gay sexual ethics, he knew he couldn't do that without living among gay people and taking up their life as his own. So, he moved to the Castro in San Francisco, took classes in sexology, and just lived. He didn't find McNeill's approach convincing, because McNeill was skipping the work of theology, as I've described it. Skipping actual discernment of the Spirit in community.

Kevin sought an ethic that was "not necessarily" based on "genital anonymity" (i.e., sex with strangers in which you leave as foreign to one another as you were before) or monogamy, which wasn't really being practiced in his community. He came up with three guideposts for the in-between time based on his studies in medical ethics: informed consent (which at the time was a patients' rights concept that stipulated patients should have all of the information they needed to make decisions related to their own treatment and health), related autonomy, and fraternal friendship. This was in the mid-80s, so AIDS was killing people and a lot of other theologians and activists were telling gay men to avoid all sexual intimacy. Kevin, knowing his people, knew that abstinence was not good for them, but neither was HIV, so his ethic was intended to minimize the risk of transmission while locating sex with relationships of care and love—the kinds of relationships of care and love that gay men were already building together. He didn't imagine this as the final word on sexual ethics, and he died of AIDS before he could finish his thoughts.

That isn't my final word on sexual ethics, either. There is more to say about the way that gays cultivate broad relationships of friendship and desire mirrors the kinds of bonds that exist between Christians in the church and between all in the kingdom of heaven. Monks and nuns avoid particular friendships. It would be interesting to ask how that relates to how gays cultivate friendships and relationships.

I live these questions, and I discuss them with other gay Christians I love who similarly live these questions. And I talk with my lovers about it if/when they want to. I talk about God with a lot with people who had been strangers an hour earlier, after we have spent time learning/caring for each other's bodies. It can be a space of healing, vulnerability, consolation, mutual learning, love, and also, definitely, commitment, albeit in less familiar and formalized ways, which can mean loneliness and heartbreak, too. Now, I'm not sure what all Coakley would call libertinism, but to call that "libertinism," or even "promiscuity," is simply ignorant of what a long-term cultivation of these kinds of relationships along with prayerful discernment does to someone. It would also be to devalue a lifetime—specifically, my lifetime—of prayer.

That's a decent summary of my approach, I think. Interested to hear your thoughts!

Mr. Homodoxy

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