Sacred Queer Stories

Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible is a creative book that interweaves biblical hermeneutics, participant observation research, and personal narratives in an attempt to re-story the lives of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees in their own voices. The book continues co-author Adrian van Klinken’s existing contributions to the study of Christianity, queerness, and the African continent, as well as co-author Johanna Stiebert’s work at the intersection of biblical hermeneutics and contemporary issues of gender-based violence. (Editor’s Note: Adrian van Klinken is an associate editor for Reading Religion.)

The book follows the Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees who relocated to Kenya following the brief passage of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2014. Despite the bill’s nullification six months later, homophobic sentiments in public and religious spheres continued, causing LGBTQ+ Ugandans to seek refuge abroad. The majority of the book’s research participants are members of The Nature Network, a queer-founded community house for LGBTQ+ refugees in Kenya. Through the participants’ personal stories and their own biblical interpretations, the book explores, with a loose structure and broad theses, how individual LGBTQ+ Ugandans contest dominant homophobic interpretations of the Bible by using scriptural stories as a tool for empowerment and spirituality outside of institutional churches. In doing so, van Klinken and Stiebert urge scholars of African gender and sexuality to reject a simple narrative of religious homophobia, and instead consider the multiplicities of religious and spiritual experiences of the LGBTQ+ community.

Part 1 of the book features twelve personal stories, told in autobiographical first-person voices, of individual queer refugees. The autobiographical stories detail these individuals’ coming out journeys, their experiences of homophobia, their departure from Uganda, their lives in Kenya at The Nature Network, and their relationship with religion and the Bible. Translated from Luganda into English, the stories—adapted by the authors from their original interview format—are raw, linear, and often told in a stream-of-consciousness style.

While the majority of interviewees identify as gay men or transgender, the gender and sexuality labels they use for themselves are fluid compared to Western norms, presenting a blurry line between identifying as gay and identifying as transgender. One interviewee even noted that though they currently identify as a gay man, they would become transgender if given the opportunity. Throughout the narratives, sex work as a means of survival—despite it being a form of work that is looked down upon by the narrators and others—is also repeatedly highlighted. As van Klinken and Stiebert themselves note, these autobiographical stories are the first collection of narratives from Ugandan LGBTQ+ persons to be published, marking an important contribution to queer studies, African studies, and lived theology. By speaking to the identities and lives of LGBTQ+ African people in ways that existing western queer theories and labels do not, the stories can also serve as an important resource for further development of grounded theory.

The second part of the book features two “inter-readings” of biblical stories that speak to the participants’ lives: the story of Daniel in the lion’s den and the story of Jesus and the woman accused of adultery. Each reading is prefaced by a brief literature review of existing queer and African biblical hermeneutics, a description of the group activities that comprise the community-based research process, and insights from the participants on the biblical texts. The participants discussed the characters and motifs in each biblical story, drawing parallels with figures and institutions in their own lives as LGBTQ+ individuals. Many of participants related to Daniel and to the woman whom Jesus defended and considered the unjust rulers or scribes to be parallel to their experiences of homophobia. The stories of these marginalized characters in the Bible “resonated with participants’ experiences of vulnerability, struggle, and hope” (153).

The format and content of Sacred Queer Stories serve as a remarkable example of academic research that centers the decolonization and democratization of a field of knowledge and its creators. While the book does not lack academic citations and engagement with existing research, individual stories in people’s own unedited words comprise of the bulk of the text. In the book, the queerness of non-heterosexuality is discussed alongside the queerness of “alternative forms of kinship and belonging” outside of traditional family structures, as well as the queerness of statelessness and of the refugee status (xiv).

However, despite the book’s attempt to focus on the varying forms of queerness, experiences of homophobia and anti-gay laws often take center stage in the book’s descriptions of its subjects’ lives. The inter-reading activities of part 2 can at times become reductive, defining the participants’ identities only in terms of their queer sexual orientations. Homophobia and its many ramifications become the only focus in these inter-readings, leading readers to be curious about how else these participants would have interpreted these Bible passages if the interviews had been less structured around experiences of sexual marginalization.

A point of clarification that I would have appreciated from the book concerns its process of translation of the autobiographical narratives from Luganda into English. In the English text, terms such as “gender, “sex,” “sexuality,” “transgender,” and “queer” are frequently used by interviewees. Given these terms’ loaded meanings—a result of largely western gender studies scholarship and activism—the book would have benefited from explaining how these terms were intended by Luganda-speaking interviewees, and whether differences exist between their English and Luganda connotations.

Overall, Sacred Queer Stories extends van Klinken’s project of demystifying and decolonizing the LGBTQ+ experience in the African continent and Stiebert’s project of gender-informed biblical studies, and complexifies the conventional narrative that conservatism and homophobia are the only faces of Christianity on the continent. The book’s experimental and community-centric research and narration style also contributes much to a decolonial theological methodology that arises from the lived experiences of everyday people in the Global South.

Flora x. Tang is a PhD student in theology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Flora Tang

Date Of Review:

September 29, 2022