Currently, I am writing a biography of Rev. Troy Perry for the Library of Religious Biography Series at Eerdmans Publishing Company. Titled The Moses of Gay Liberation, this book will be the first scholarly biography of the pentecostal minister who became the most famous gay activist in the United States in the early 1970s. Perry founded a Christian denomination called the Metropolitan Community Churches, which was the largest LGBTQ+ organization in the world from the late 1970s into the 1990s.
Selected Publications:
"Good Gay News? The History of Global Mission in the Metropolitan Community Churches and the Queer Case of Nigeria," QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion (forthcoming, 2027).
"Deaf Queer Missions and the Claggett Statement," in The Liberation of Deaf Theology, Audrey Seah and Kirk VanGilder, eds. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2027).
"On Imagining Queer Christianities and Culture War-making," Review Roundtable on Anthony Petro's Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 2025), Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming, 2026).
"A Rickety Closet," ARC: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, July 28, 2026, https://arcmag.org/a-rickety-closet/.
"Unscripted Revelation: The Spirit of Sign Language and the Threat of Deaf Christianity in the Nineteenth-Century United States," Disability Studies Quarterly 45, no. 3 (Spring 2026).
"Other Other Evangelicals," Syndicate, September 26, 2025, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/the-other-evangelicals/.
“They Tell the Bible So: On Hermeneutical Determinism,” The Immanent Frame, November 13, 2024, https://tif.ssrc.org/2024/11/13/they-tell-the-bible-so-on-hermeneutical-determinism/.
“Panic of Proximity: Antigay Evangelical Discourse on the Metropolitan Community Churches in the 1970s,” Theology & Sexuality 30, no. 1 (2024): 50–63.
“On Celebration and Critique in Queer Religious Studies,” American Religion 5, no. 2 (Spring 2024), 243–252, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/927343.
“LGBTQ+ Rights,” in The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States, Lauren Turek and Cara Burnidge, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2024).
“Don We Now Our Not Gay Apparel: A Partial Analysis of Religious Men’s Struggles to Look Straight,” Fashioning Masculinities Online Roundtable, American Religion, (spring 2024), https://www.american-religion.org/fashioning-masculinities/blog-post-title-one-exjg9.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Church: The Chicago Defender, the Federal Council of Churches, and Rethinking Shared Faith in Interracial Religious Practice,” Church History 92, no. 3 (September 2023): 607–625.
“From Neighbors to Outcasts: Evangelical Gay Activism in the Late 1970s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 31, no. 3 (September 2022): 335–360.
“Queerly Evangelical: The Rhetoric of Inverted Belonging as a Challenge to Heteronormativity in Evangelical Theology,” Theology & Sexuality 25, no. 1–2 (2019): 62–80.