Currently, I am beginning to write a biography of Rev. Troy Perry for the Library of Religious Biography Series at Eerdmans Publishing Company. Tentatively titled The Moses of the Gay Liberation Movement, this book will be the first scholarly biography of the pentecostal minister who founded the Metropolitan Community Churches (a Christian denomination with a largely LGBTQ+ membership) and who was the most widely recognized gay activist in the nation in the early 1970s.
Selected Publications:
"Unscripted Revelation: The Spirit of Sign Language and the Threat of Deaf Christianity in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (forthcoming, Disability Studies Quarterly)
“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.