Out of the Old Testament, the Rev. Gary David Comstock raises an intriguing question about the personal life of David, Goliath's killer.
Turn to the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, he says, and read how David loves Jonathan (son of Israel's King Saul), how the two men kiss and how, after Jonathan's death, David says: "Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women."
No way to prove it, says Comstock, the Protestant chaplain at Wesleyan University, but to a gay man like himself this can be read as a homosexual relationship. "If we can't find ourselves in Scripture, we need to place ourselves there," he says. "Instead of proving this thing, I say, look, that's the way I want to read it."
For homosexuals, the Good Book has seldom been portrayed as a friendly one. "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination," sternly warns Leviticus 20:13, which prescribes death for this transgression.
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But far from being discouraged, many homosexual Christians -- thousands of whom are expected to join today's march here -- are taking a fresh look at Scripture and coming up with new interpretations of age-old stories. The result is a brand new field: gay theology.
"It's all trying to say, 'I'm a person, don't think of me as a problem . . . a person that enjoys equal dignity in the sight of the Lord, and deserves the same rights as other people,' " says the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, former senior pastor of New York's Riverside Church.
Coffin, who is heterosexual, sees this as the latest stream -- after black and feminist theologies -- to flow from liberation theology, a religious philosophy that holds that God, speaking through Scripture, demands social justice for oppressed people. "The basic point in all those liberation theologies is the affirmation of personhood. . . . and that justice is not ancillary but central to theology," he says.
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These days, gay theology is showing up both in university classrooms and the religion racks of bookstores.
The American Academy of Religion, which represents thousands of scholars nationally, includes forums on homosexual issues at its annual meetings. Recent topics included lesbianism and Islam, and the spiritual insights of people with AIDS. "It's a recognized field of study within the academic study of religion," says Warren G. Frisina, the academy's associate director.
Comstock's book, "Gay Theology Without Apology," was due to be published last week, just in time for the march. Another book, "Jesus Acted Up," by Robert Goss, is slated for publication in June. "I think the wave's still building," says Greg Link, director of New Ways Ministries, an advocacy group for gay Catholics based in Mount Rainier, Md.
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One of the best-known gay theologians is John J. McNeill, a Manhattan psychotherapist who spent four decades as a Jesuit priest. Read from a homosexual viewpoint, he says, biblical passages "rise up and take a new luminosity and a new meaning."
Ranging through the New Testament, he picks out Acts 8:27, the story of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, one of the first converts of the early church. Taken symbolically, this shows the church is open to "all those who do not marry and have children and who lead sexually different lives," McNeill says.
He also points to Matthew 8:5, in which Jesus heals the servant of a Roman centurion. What's usually translated in English as "servant" may also be read in the original Greek text as "beloved boy," suggesting the centurion was involved in a homosexual partnership, says McNeill.
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Gay theology is "definitely at the heart of liberation theology," he says. "First of all, it's teaching the church not to be judgmental and not to work in a heterosexist context. . . . It's opening the church to the full extent of the human family."
"John McNeill's stuff is great," says Barry Goodinson, executive director of Dignity USA, a national organization for gay Catholics. "When he speaks, he draws very large crowds."
Goss, another former Jesuit, aims for a somewhat different audience, the activists of the militant groups ACT-UP and Queer Nation. He calls his brand of spiritual thought "queer theology."
"It's one step beyond what you find in gay theology," says Goss, 44, a Boston businessman. Many homosexuals, he says, "identify Christianity as the enemy, but I'm trying to say to them Christianity is not the enemy, the institution {the church} is the enemy. Let's take back Christianity."
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Goss focuses on Jesus, portraying him as the courageous activist who overturns the tables of the money changers and chases them from the Jerusalem temple days before his crucifixion. "Jesus is put to death for what I call a 'Stop the Temple' action," says Goss. "It's a paradigm for action."
Indeed, he writes, it offers biblical precedent for ACT-UP's much-publicized 'Stop the Church' demonstrations, which disrupted Sunday Masses at a time when Cardinal John O'Connor of New York and other Catholic leaders had spoken out against certain gay rights and public health issues.
Less confrontational is the Rev. Lindsay Biddle, a former campus minister at the University of Minnesota, who teaches workshops in "biblical self-defense." Biddle, who is heterosexual, tells her audiences about the different ways scholars and Bible translators deal with Scriptural passages that are used to criticize homosexuality. The idea, she says, is to give people alternatives to a literalistic approach.
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But Comstock, the Wesleyan chaplain, says gay theology demands that certain verses -- especially Leviticus 20:13 -- be acknowledged as anti-homosexual. They are cautionary texts reminding him the same sentiment exists in society, he says.
"The dangerous parts of Scripture should be recognized for what they are," he says. "I think I recognize the Bible as a resource that keeps us going, rather than {as} an answer. . . . The Bible is not a squeaky-clean document."
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