As Jakobsen and Pellegrini ( 2009, 1230) have argued, ‘the dominant relations between religion and secularism are sutured at the site of sexuality’. This article suggests that the discourses concerning the legitimacy and authenticity of LGBT Christians are made possible by the role that the body and sex play in the articulation of the religious and the secular in US society. For Asad, one access point for examining how the religious and secular are structured is to examine particular attitudes towards and practices of the body. As anthropologist Talal Asad ( 2003) has argued, secularism is not simply the absence of religion in the public square of modern nation-states, but a political practice and doctrine that relies on structures and is structured by a particular construction of ‘the religious’. Resisting the tendency to concede the secular as an essentialised space outside of the religious that is both liberating and the inevitable end of progressive history, a recent body of scholarship has asked how the religious and secular are discursively co-produced (Asad et al. In addition to how queer sexuality and religious experience are articulated in public discourse, Sullivan's gay Christian identity is also complicated by the articulation of the religious and secular. Running against these narratives, however, is Andrew Sullivan's claim to an integrated subjectivity wherein his religiousness and sexuality not only do not contradict each other, but actually work to reinforce, make authentic, and legitimate each other. Therefore, to be gay and to be Christian are often thought of as mutually exclusive identities, and those who self-identify as gay Christians are looked upon with suspicion by many Christians, LGBT organisations, and queer theorists alike (O'Brien 2004 Pellegrini 2005 Robinson 2005 Wilcox 2006). Much of the social scientific discourse concerning LGBT Christians has reinforced this assumption by asking how these individuals reconcile the cognitive dissonance they experience as conflicted subjects (Rodriguez and Ouellette 2000 Thumma 1991 Wilcox 2003). Similarly, LGBT individuals are popularly understood to be irreligious or secular. Within normative queer discourse, both academically and popularly, a common assumption is that religion is a source of oppression, with Christianity in particular as being fundamentally opposed to gay rights and issues (Fetner 2008 Herman 1997). However, individuals who identify as gay and Christian are often doubly marginalised. 2 This is especially evident in how various strains of fundamentalist Christianity have inspired anti-gay movements and the dramatic increase in organisations claiming that Christians with homosexual desires can be cured through religious conversion (Barrett-Fox 2010 Erzen 2006 Wolkomir 2006). For example, much of conservative Christianity shares the Catholic Church's position that the only legitimate, natural expression of human sexuality is in monogamous, heterosexual marriage (Dillon 1999 Ellingson et al.
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Sullivan feels compelled to stake a claim on being both gay and Christian in this contribution to Big Think due to normative narratives about both what it means to be gay and what it means to be Christian in contemporary US society, and he is not alone in having to rationalise and defend both his gay and Christian authenticity. As Sullivan goes on to explain, to be out as Christian and gay is conditioned by the Catholic moral responsibility to tell the truth, and to deny his homosexual identity would be an act of sin. Sullivan continued, ‘so when people me, “how can you be openly gay and Catholic”, my response is now and always has been: “I'm openly gay because I'm a Catholic”’. And the first conversation I ever had about this with anybody was in prayer’.
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Sullivan began his narrative by saying, ‘the first person I came out to was God. For the series, contributors are asked to respond to the question, ‘When did you first come out?’ In telling his story, Sullivan not only took the opportunity to defend his identification as gay, but more specifically as a gay Catholic. Big Think, an aggregate of videos wherein prominent intellectuals share big ideas on a range of topics, invited Sullivan to contribute to the series, ‘Coming Out: Stories of Gay Identity’. On 21 October 2010, well-known blogger and political pundit Andrew Sullivan, in a video produced for the website, told the story of when he first came out as gay (Sullivan 2010).