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This article explores the visual culture of social network applications (apps), using "safer-sex design" as an anchor to contemplate how different practices of looking at HIV co-constitute viral visibility. Drawing on science and technology studies and queer theories, this article traces viral visibility from its digital production through its marketization, and finally to its implications for gay men's sexual communication in Taiwan. Through interviews with gay Taiwanese men and a social app developer and the visual analysis of Hornet, Grindr, and Scruff, this article describes how the precarity of viruses, knowledge of HIV prevention, and social stigmas against sexual minorities are brought together, staged, and made eligible (and ineligible) for public viewing. This article demonstrates how digital platform designs work to facilitate gay men's sociosexual communication while ironically reinforcing stigmas against HIV/AIDS in Taiwan, and suggests a critical approach to the visual culture of social apps and queer health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways gay and queer men employ the concept of 'play' in relation to sex. Using Judith Butler's theory of performativity to analyse the experiences of 16 individuals from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay and/or queer man or a member of the gay community, I present how my participants used 'play' to refer to casual and/or kinky sexual encounters, describe certain safer sex practices, and delineate the difference between queer and straight sexual identities. 'Playing' also involved a range of personally cultivated rules connected to the pursuit of well-being. When these rules were broken, the activity no longer felt 'playful' and became risky for some. 'Play' was ultimately a way for my participants to discuss how risk, pleasure, desire, identity, relationships, and personal well-being related to sexual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year, 2023, marks the sixtieth anniversary of Jeremy Seabrook's authorial career as one of our finest and most impassioned writers on the nexus of the personal, the political and the global. And, it is just over three decades since he first wrote in Race & Class. With a depth and range that spans the life situation of the poor in Britain, the underprivileged and precariat of the Asian sub-continent, the impact of imperialism and consumerism on the psyche, the meaning of work, the impact of environmental disaster and the essence of what it is to be human – and a gift for striking prophecy – Seabrook's career has been marked by the telling of beautifully expressed but often deeply uncomfortable and challenging truths. Yet always with immense feeling for the other at their heart. As expressed in his seminal piece, 'The soul of man under globalism' (Race & Class 43, no. 4, 2002), 'There are many macro-economic accounts of globalisation, but we rarely learn how it affects the psyche and sensibility of lives uprooted and radically reshaped by the penetration of their world by the market economy.' We are therefore delighted to publish in this issue and this anniversary year, not only Jeremy Seabrook's latest article for us, 'The present imperium', but also this response, by a contemporary, to his recently published autobiography, Private Worlds: growing up gay in post-war Britain (Pluto Press, 2023) which raises not only fundamental themes relating to the gay community in the UK and its history, but also profound, wider societal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Navigating healthcare infrastructures is particularly challenging for queer-identifying individuals, with significant barriers emerging around stigma and practitioner ignorance. Further intersecting, historically marginalised identities such as one's race, age or ability exacerbate such engagement with healthcare, particularly the access to and use of reliable and appropriate health information. We explore the salience of one's queer identity relative to other embodied identities when navigating health information and care for themselves and their communities. Thirty semi-structured interviews with queer community leaders from South Carolina inform our discussion of the role one's queer visibility plays relational to the visibility of other identities. We find that leaders and their communities navigate these intersectional visibilities through unique and iterative approaches to health information seeking, sharing and use predicated upon anti-queer, racist, ableist and misogynistic sentiments. Findings can inform queer-inclusive, intersectionally informed interventions by health and information professionals such as non-profit advocacy organisations and medical librarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people's first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community's existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the body of literature on LGBT+ populations within the United States place urban areas and so-called gayborhoods as goals and eventualities, paralleling early US studies on immigration. Using a multistage, mixed-methods approach, consisting of secondary analysis of the Pew 2013 Study of LGBT Persons (N = 1197) and in-depth interviews (35 gay men, 2 trans-identifying individuals, 1 heterosexual woman, and 2 lesbians), we found that rural LGBT+ residents engaged in both short-term and long-term travel to mitigate feelings of being spatially segregated from the loci of gay social life—what Ghaziani (2019a) refers to as cultural archipelagos. However, rural residents also used their geographical location to resist dominant narratives about LGBT+ life. Some of our respondents felt that living in rural areas better situated them to be activists and advocates for LGBT+ rights, while others simply did not feel they could be comfortable within more urban contexts. These findings suggest that rural LGBT+ residents may have delinked their sexual selves with their cultural and political selves, thus illustrating the plurality of rural queer voices that exists. As we also argue, while residence category should be considered as influencing one's experience, care must be used to avoid overly deterministic accounts. Finally, this article extends earlier work by Brekhus (2003), Mattson (2015), and Ghaziani (2019a) by presenting the meaningfulness of travel to and from queer cultural strongholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority male students by males in positions of authority in the university, based on interviews with eight sexual violence service providers and five men across Canada with lived experience, as well as information gathered through our recruitment work. Data were interpreted using thematic analysis. Our results indicate that there is a need to think through the specificity of sexual misconduct involving men in university settings. Several dynamics operate to perpetuate a willed ambiguity on this issue that allow abuses of power to go unchecked. These include difficulties in having a conversation on this topic, the sexualization of gay male culture, gender dynamics among gay men, 'queer' justifications, risks of social isolation, and financial precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science's interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants' current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the place of the HIV/AIDS crisis in urban geographies of sexual minority activism has powerfully insisted on the importance of community organising as a response to state and societal failures and to their homophobic, AIDS phobic and morally conservative underpinnings. This paper extends this scholarship by examining the urban social geographies of exclusion produced by such community organising efforts. It draws on the perspectives of long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS (LTS) in Vancouver to highlight the differentiated care geographies of HIV/AIDS that resulted from the racialised, classed and gendered politics and urban imaginations enacted by gay and allied HIV/AIDS organising. Though LTS networks, spaces and politics of care and community were more extended than Vancouver's gay community during the 1980s and 1990s, the centring of the West End gay village in many community-led responses to HIV/AIDS resulted in LTS geographies outside the West End being excluded from important systems of care and community. LTS narratives of the city at the time of the 'gay disease' thus tell an urban politics of sexual and health activisms as shaped not only by processes of heteronormativity and homophobia but also of racially, colonially and class-inflected homonormative urban imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing attention has been devoted to the political geography of urban social movements but trauma, its urban context and spatial politics, have been significantly neglected. This paper aims to develop the concept of 'queer urban trauma' and its aftermath in the sense of urban and spatial activism, through an analysis of two traumatic events for the LGBT community in Israel. It explains how traumatic events taking place within urban contexts affect the spatial politics of LGBT and queer urban activism. Based on geographies of sexualities and queer theory, this paper aims to fill this gap by analysing traumatic events in two Israeli cities: the 2009 shooting of two young queers in a youth club in Tel Aviv, and the 2015 stabbing of a young girl during the Jerusalem Pride Parade. Tel Aviv is considered the liberal centre of Israel and a local 'gay heaven', as well as a destination for global gay tourism. Jerusalem on the other hand is usually described with a sense of alienation among LGBT and queer individuals and movements, where every political, spatial, cultural and financial achievement is a struggle. We argue that the politics of trauma are constructed differently in these two urban settings, producing important nuances of urban activism and politics. Through this empirical discussion, we develop the concept of 'queer urban trauma', revealing divergent forms of spatial visibility, presence and activity of the queer movements within urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dating app use is prevalent among non-single Chinese gay men. Applying domestication theory, this study explores how dating apps can be accepted in gay romantic relationships. The author argues that the domestication of technological artifacts unfolds on four dimensions: the practical, the symbolic, the cognitive, and the relational. Findings show that dating apps serve a dual role: a pool of sexual or romantic alternatives and a channel to the gay community. Although the former constitutes a threat to monogamy, the latter leaves room for a couple's negotiation for acceptable but restricted uses. This negotiation is in tandem with the negotiation of relational boundaries, which leads to either the reinforcement of monogamy or the embrace of non-monogamy. Meanwhile, one can perceive dating apps to be as unremarkable as other social media platforms. This is achieved through a cognitive process where gay men learn to debunk the arbitrary association between dating apps and infidelity. Monogamous or not, they put faith in user agency, not perceiving dating apps as a real threat to romantic relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing visibility, recognition and acceptance of lesbian motherhood and gay fatherhood in countries such as Britain, it is important to ask how younger generations of sexual minorities approach the possibility of becoming a parent. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men who do not have children but may have them in the future, I explore how people become aware that having children is an option. By attending to how this consciousness manifests in conversations and how conversations shape the consciousness, I illuminate specific dynamics that raising the topic of parenthood creates in intimate interactions. My data show that it is often unclear to men and women who form same-sex relationships whether they are socially expected to have children. I argue that this ambiguity requires a kind of 'coming out' through which feelings about parenthood are made explicit. Using the concept of coming out, I ask: What if we were to think of people in terms of their 'reproductive orientations' rather than sexual identities? I suggest that, similar to expressing sexual identities, articulating reproductive orientations involves aligning with particular life trajectories based on binary logic. However, with ambiguous expectations about parenthood, neither having children nor remaining childfree is explicitly normative. As such, unlike coming out as lesbian or gay, which transgresses norms surrounding sexuality, coming out as wanting or not wanting to have children challenges normativity itself. I reflect on how this 'normative challenge' makes it possible to imagine parenthood and 'childfreedom' as intimacies of equal value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the public discussion of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the UK and investigate how this treatment and its key beneficiaries were framed by the British press between 2012 and 2016. Drawing upon an archive of articles published in national newspapers, I identify the discursive transformation that PrEP underwent during this period, as it moved from being a 'wonder drug' that benefited the health of the general population, to a 'promiscuity pill' that threatened the lives of the most vulnerable. I illustrate how this transformation was accompanied by a shift in the representation of gay men – who were almost universally positioned as the future beneficiaries of PrEP in the UK. Utilizing critical discourse analysis methods, I explore how gay men went from being 'upstanding citizens' to 'dangerous outsiders', and how the British press mapped older stereotypes of the diseased gay male body onto newer homonormative representations of the 'good gay' and the 'evil queer'. This analysis reveals the precarious status gay men occupy in 'post-equalities' Britain – a status that requires adherence to a particular code of sexual and moral conduct, and the disavowal of long-term health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key role of digital and mobile media for refugees is increasingly acknowledged, but while the literature on the topic tends to celebrate the advantages of digital media, it is important to also acknowledge limitations. Thus, the focus on the creation and maintenance of connections through digital media may obscure experiences and practices of disconnection. This is certainly the case for forced migrants with non-normative sexual orientations, for whom experiences of homophobia within the family and ethno-cultural community in the country of origin may extend to fraught situations in the country of residence. As with digital media in general, it is important to consider the 'offline' social and cultural conditions determining online media uses. This article focuses on the specific challenges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer refugees, both in general and in Belgium, drawing on desk research and expert interviews, as well as nine in-depth interviews with gay-identifying male refugees. While the refugees are relatively positive about the Belgian situation, they do identify a number of challenges. They use digital media to stay connected to family and other people in the country of origin, but often this connection has become difficult. Social media and dating sites also offer a way to connect to other gay men, but these connections can be equally fraught, particularly in the country of origin for danger of exposure but also in Belgium as social media transcend national boundaries. For this reason, some participants created new or parallel profiles, to keep their gay lives disconnected from their family lives. Overall, then, digital media are a tool not only of connection but also of strategic disconnection for gay refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global migration, diaspora's use of digital media to maintain transnational connections has become a focus of intense research. By deploying the walkthrough method and semi-structured in-depth interviews, this study explores the transnational practices of Chinese queer women living in Australia for maintaining digital connections with queer women communities in China through Rela, a Chinese lesbian social app. Rela live streaming is innovatively used by Chinese queer women in Australia to maintain diverse transnational relationships, including friendships with streamers and viewers, and romantic relationships with their partners. Rela groups have also become vital spaces through which diasporic Chinese queer women connect with the Rela queer women community. Nevertheless, although the use of Rela diversifies Chinese queer women's diasporic life and helps them gain a sense of belonging, it reduces their participation in local queer activities and limits their interactions with queer women communities in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade represents a critical moment in the story of Serbia's democratisation process and highlights the threat that right-wing extremism poses to democratic rights and personal freedoms. Through a focus on patterns of visibility and visuality in the coverage of different protagonists in the streets of Belgrade, we explore the ways in which distinct communities perform their affinities, their right to be seen in public spaces, and rejection of 'the other'. We conduct a visual framing analysis across four news programmes (RTS, Prva TV, TV B92 and Pink TV), emphasising the stylistic-semiotic choices which work to construct the contested spaces of the city. In shifting attention to how the news images work to create the spaces of political 'appearance' and the potentials for political agency through mediated visibility, the article explores the uneasy ambivalence of the democratisation process for authorities and the resulting marginalisation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historically contextualises the origins of a transnational gay male aesthetic many now think of as homonormative. While typically understood as a depoliticisation that 'recodes freedom and liberation in terms of privacy, domesticity, and consumption' (Manalansan, 2005: 142), homonormativity also has an associated look defined by a set of slick surface appearances relating both to the body and design. Recognisable in various locations across the globe and in multiple settings including cruise ships, resorts, and gyms, this aesthetic is, above all, associated with gaybourhoods and gay villages. Using Soho's gay village in London as a case-study of the emergence of this generic style in the 1990s, its branded emphasis on 'affluence', minimalist interior design and idealised gym bodies is contextualised with references to yuppification and AIDS. Constituting a 'clean break' with earlier forms of urban gay culture now stigmatised as 'dirty' and 'unhealthy', the homonormative aesthetic can be viewed as an example of 'de-generational unremembering' following the first traumatic phase of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s (Castiglia C and Reed C (2011) If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9). By placing AIDS at the centre of a discussion of homonormativity, some of the assumptions about its privilege can be queried while at the same time maintaining a critique of how class-specific 'aspirational' imagery was deployed to detract from the stigma of the health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploratory, community-based research project examined the paths of migration and mobility of Canadian Indigenous people who identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ). A total of 50 participants in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada were interviewed, many of them telling stories about the multiple layers of domestic violence, violence in communities, state and structural violence that they experienced. In order to better respond to relationship violence experienced by Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ people it is necessary to understand the specific and historical context of colonization in which relationship violence occurs. We further need to align our efforts to end relationship violence with broader anti-violence struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the concept of 'queer generations' as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts 'queer' and 'generations' in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main theoretical tension that lies at the heart of this article is how to take seriously the shared experience of growing up LGBT without insisting on a uniform narrative that is inherent to it. Drawing on an archival fragment from an HIV campaign produced in Australia and distributed in the 1990s and targeted at young gay and bisexual men, we consider the shifting conditions through which visibility has featured as a key problem for the deployment of sexual citizenship. This archival fragment is valuable because of the way that it problematizes the in/out, visible/invisible, gay/straight binaries that have dogged attempts to grapple with the at once individual and collective experience of growing up LGBT. The concept of 'queer generations' suggests critical insights into the limits and affordances of the production of generations as containers for generalized experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the effects that constructions of lesbianism – generated and circulated widely throughout Anglo-American media – had on normative discourses of gender and sexuality amongst British migrants, living in the affluent coastal tourist town of Sitges, in Spain. Marketed as a cosmopolitan location par excellence, Sitges’ identity is built largely on its reputation for playing host to an internationally diverse gay community, subsequently understood to evince an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. And yet drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967) and Kelly Oliver (2001), I suggest that the visibility of feminine lesbianism in this context was resignified through those media images, constituting a ‘double misrecognition’, which saw all female homosexuality paradoxically become invisible at the exact moment representation was explicitly deemed to have been achieved. Far from elaborating a cosmopolitan ‘openness towards difference’, I argue that the resulting double misrecognition actually substantiated highly conservative gender norms, even as it masqueraded as the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on bareback behaviours and identities constitutes a wide field of academic work. Literature on this issue has focused on the associated psycho-sociological factors, on the evolution of gay sociabilities and on the discursive and socio-political uses of bareback sex. But few of these studies have explored local appropriation of the terms in non-English-speaking contexts. The present article aims to provide an empirical illustration of this process in the French context. It is based on a qualitative study of the impact of a series of sexual health workshops for men who do not use condoms (‘barebackers’). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I offer a discourse analysis of Tiziano Ferro coming out in a regulatory Italian context. The critical texts for analysis come from the first page of the entertainment section of two Italian newspapers, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, where Ferro, an Italian pop star, came out of the closet in as public a way as possible. The pages contain a letter from the singer, other articles (editorial and comments), an interview and images. I present a discourse analysis of these newspaper pages, highlighting how the construction of this narration of coming out, with its ideology-laden and rhetorical discourse, combined visual aspects and written texts. In this way I deconstruct the narrative of coming out; I discuss the intertwining of the regulatory discourses so that homosexuality is made acceptable in the Italian social landscape, and the consequences of this coming out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study related to relationship between gender norms and speech practices in gay, lesbian parents and transgender people. The data presented in the study are made by observation, audio and video recordings of different situations in variety of field. The study reflects information on how gender norms are constructed and deconstructed through interactional, semantic and morphosyntactic patterns.

In recent decades, gay people of color have begun to challenge old assumptions regarding what it means to be 'gay', posing a threat to older notions of 'gay' identity. However, much of the coverage in 'mainstream' gay publications remains geared toward white readers. Using critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the coverage in 'mainstream' gay magazines and argues that 'gay' publications have marginalized gay Asian men by simply ignoring their existence or employing existing stereotypes about Asian men in general, thereby, maintaining 'gay' as largely a 'white' category and relegating gay Asian men to the margins of the gay 'community'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines how the public health governance of HIV/AIDS has constructed the racialized biopolitics of the gay Asian Australian community. The old biopolitics of health that excluded the Asian at the turn of the 19th century is now eclipsed by a new biopolitics that foregrounds the racialized body as a site of inclusion. The new biopolitics has emerged from within policy innovations in Australia's multicultural sexual health programs. Since the mid-1990s, the diversity of Asian communities was recognized in various AIDS councils through the employment of ethno-specific social workers, carers and peer-to-peer educators. This article problematizes how diasporic gay Asian sexuality has emerged in queer, mainstream and modern Australia through such a viral politic of containment. These policies, I argue, have paradoxically contributed to the production of a new queer Asian Australian body aesthetics that has enabled the conditions of possibilities for new sexual subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been argued that stereotypes have led many gay Asian men to have negative feelings about themselves and other gay Asians, to the idealization of white men as potential partners, hostility, towards other gay Asians, internalization of the stereotypes as passive and submissive, and being sexually objectified by some white men. To counter the effects of the stereotypes, critics and theorists of the gay Asian experience suggest increasing the visibility of Asian role models in the gay community developing a strong sense of self-identity by choosing Asian men as potential partners, and encouraging involvement with the mainstream gay community. In contrast, we explore resistance to the stereotypes at a personal level, using narratives obtained through a series of interviews to analyze the ways in which gay Asian men negotiate and (re)frame the social stigma associated with their bodies and desire for white men. We argue that gay Asian men do not simply accept the negative stereotypes imposed by the dominant culture; rather, they actively resist and continuously reconstruct meanings about their bodies and desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay men's use of the internet for social and sexual purposes is now so common that some predict an end to gay bars. In New York City, where this study took place, the use of the internet by men to meet other men seeking sex without condoms, called bareback sex, has created concerns among public health and gay community HIV/AIDS workers. This study of six popular bareback internet sites seeks to understand the nature of this new online sexual culture, initially by investigating the sites themselves through the methodology of cyber-cartography. That investigation suggested that masculinity as an analytic in gender studies might offer some value in understanding what was happening on these sites. Issues of race and ethnicity also emerged to challenge any singular notion of masculinity. This paper suggests that masculinity itself might need some recalibration, and that we may also need to rethink these sites as evolving ethical sexual cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses an examination of the two largest internet affinity portals serving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) communities – PlanetOut.com and Gay.com – as an entry point into a broader discussion of gay marketing and surveillance in cyberspace. Informing this examination are arguments that the newfound courting of the 'gay community' by mainstream marketers represents a repositioning of gays and lesbians in commercial panoptic formations based on the perceived desirability of these populations as niche markets. This position is supported by the Janus-faced design of these online portals, which present themselves as inclusive communities to gay and lesbian consumers while simultaneously presenting themselves as surveilling entities to corporate clients. The marketing strategies deployed by these portals suggest that corporate actors believe that gays and lesbians can be enticed into self-surveillance by distancing solicitations for personal information from their economic aims and rearticulating them with images of community and romance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberation theologies have been developed from a multiplicity of approaches. This article analyses the 'liberation theology' of the 'queer', that is, theological efforts to recontextualize the metaphysical dimension of homosexuality. An elaboration of 'gay community', as well as of the applicability of the label 'queer', is proposed in order to frame the examination of what constitutes Queer Spiritual Discourse. This umbrella term contains two related theological efforts, developed in recent decades by gay and lesbian theologians and intellectuals, that attempt to provide a specific hermeneutics either of biblical texts or of other religious traditions. Queer Theology reinterprets stories and characters from within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, whereas Gay Soul constructs alternative interpretations of ancient indigenous religious systems. The author also sketches some of the areas where the secular, the political, the theological, and the personal intersect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]