Melissa E. Sanchez - Queer Faith: Reading, Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Sexual Cultures

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

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Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

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In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies

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Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

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Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

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Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

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Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg

The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

Paul Morrison

The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

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Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

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Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

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Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

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Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

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In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

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Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

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The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

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Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

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Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

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Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

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Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

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Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

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Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

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Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

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The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

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The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

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Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

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Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

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A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

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Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

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The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography

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Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

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Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

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After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

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Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

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Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyongo

Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Melissa E. Sanchez

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sanchez, Melissa E., author.

Title: Queer faith : reading promiscuity and race in the secular love tradition / Melissa E. Sanchez.

Description: New York : NYU Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043757| ISBN 9781479871872 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479840861 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Queer theory. | ReligionPhilosophy. | Promiscuity. | Sexual minorities.

Classification: LCC HQ75.15 .S25 2019 | DDC 306.7601dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043757

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For Quincy

Because the writings of Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Petrarch have been available in multiple editions and languages, each situated in its own historical moment, determining which text to quote is already an interpretive decision.

For biblical passages, throughout this book I have settled on the imperfect solution of using the translations that best approximate the readers I discuss. For the first chapter, I chose the Douay-Rheims version (DRB), along with the Vulgate (V) on which it is based, on the premise that this approximates the Latin that Augustine (who was not a fluent reader of Greek) and Petrarch would have read and the Catholic tradition through which Petrarch would have understood Paul. In the following chapters, I use the 1576 Geneva translation (GB) because this would have been the English version available to and preferred by the English authors I consider, most of whom composed the poems I discuss before the King James translation (KJB) appeared in 1611. Throughout these chapters, I continue to cite the Vulgate, as well as the King James translation, when these versions differ significantly from the Geneva and provide additional information. When biblical passages appear within quotations from other sources, I leave them as they are translated in that source.