Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was an esteemed historian who argued that homosexuality has always existed, that it has at times enjoyed wide social acceptance, and that the Church historically allowed same-sex unions. Today's Out Spotlight is John Boswell.

John Eastburn Boswell was born March 20, 1947 in Boston, Massachusetts, into a military family, going on to  earn his undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. He was a gifted medieval philologist who read more than fifteen ancient and modern languages. 
He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1975 and joined the Yale University history faculty, making full professor in 1982.

An authority on the history of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in medieval Spain.  In 1987, Boswell helped organize and found the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale, which is now the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He was named the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History in 1990, when he was also appointed to a two-year term as chair of the Yale history department. Boswell was a gifted and devoted teacher. His undergraduate lectures in medieval history were renowned for their organization, erudition, and wit, with the course often making the "top 10" for highest enrollment. To enhance the novelty and high interest in his classes, the multi-talented Boswell would often pen his comments on student papers in perfectly executed italic script.

In 1980 Boswell published the book for which he is best known: "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century." In this groundbreaking study, Boswell argued against "the common idea that religious belief-Christian or other-has been the cause of intolerance in regard to gay people.  It "offered a revolutionary interpretation of the Western tradition, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church had not condemned gay people throughout its history, but rather, at least until the twelfth century, had alternately evinced no special concern about homosexuality or actually celebrated love between men." Scholarly reactions varied. More importantly, the book brought forward a fresh emphasis on the crime of rape being the actual sin of Sodom, rather than the homosexual acts themselves. This idea calls into question any connection between gay people today and the Biblical Sodomites. 

The book was named one of the New York Times ten best books of 1980 and received both the American Book Award and the Stonewall Book Award in 1981.

Boswell's second book on homosexuality in history was "The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe," published in 1994. In it he argues that the Christian ritual of adelphopoiia ("brother-making") is evidence that prior to the Middle Ages, the Church recognized same-sex relationships. Boswell's thesis has been embraced by proponents of same-sex unions, although it remains controversial among scholars.

 Boswell converted to Roman Catholicism as an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, and remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life. He was an effective teacher and popular lecturer on several topics, including his life journey as an openly gay Christian man.

After his conversion to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church during he remained a daily-mass Catholic up until his death, despite his differences with the church over sexual issues. Although he was orthodox in most of his beliefs, he strongly disagreed with his church's stated opposition to homosexual behavior and relationships. To a certain degree much of the work and research Boswell did regarding the Christian church's historical relationship with homosexuality can be seen as an attempt to reconcile his sexual orientation with his faith.

 John Boswell died of complications from AIDS in the Yale infirmary in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 24, 1994, at age 47.

 "It is possible to change ecclesiastical attitudes toward gay people and their sexuality because the objections to homosexuality are not biblical, they are not consistent, they are not part of Jesus' teaching; and they are not even fundamentally Christian."