Homodoxy's BRICC List

future plans for a small queer press

Hello friends,

I am currently in a chapter crunch, so there will be no typical Rearview missive for March—I apologize. (For those of you who found The Rearview in the wild, I’m a doctoral candidate in theology staring down my final year.) Regular programming will resume next month with an essay on the first two books by Aurora Mattia: The Fifth Wound (2023) and Unsex Me Here (April 1, 2025), both from Nightboat.

I would like to update you all on Homodoxy’s slow progress towards realization.

More recent subscribers won’t be familiar with Homodoxy. Briefly, Homodoxy is a press that I am starting for gay/queer theology and literature of any and all genres. It will publish new work and feature a series of reprints. The press will nurture queer voices of faith and spirit that are too undisciplined and unburdened by Producing Knowledge for academic presses (being “undisciplined” has itself become a genre convention of academic writing), too free for church presses, too niche for the mainstream presses, and too spiritual—even in moments pious—for other small queer presses, Homodoxy’s immediate kin. Although having its beginning in my own Christian life, Homodoxy’s spirituality will be an eclectic one, open to all faiths and those encounters with Spirit that defy easy classification.

Documenting queer life in print books is particularly vital in this moment of fascism and anti-trans violence and erasure.

I have been having informational interviews with book publishers. On the advice of a publisher, I have decided to begin planning by assembling a list of reprints—books that those interested in queer literature and theology would want to help build up their library.

The series is called Books Reprinted in Contemporary Context (BRICC). A bricc is foundational and projectile. It is something to build with, or throw. BRICC reprints will feature a new introduction, preface, or afterword. The series will also include translations and edited collections. I will begin printing briccs one by one as funding allows. The hope is that briccs will generate funding and awareness that will allow me to solicit new writing from writers I admire.

I applied for a grant to put together the first: The Theologian of Castro Street: The Selected Teachings of Kevin Gordon. I am writing on Gordon for my dissertation, so the decision to begin with him is a practical one based on my own time commitments rather than on what might catch the most attention. The grant comes with an opportunity to publish in a magazine, which would help draw some attention to the project. The grant recipients will be announced next month.

I am in conversations to acquire the rights to print other titles as well. In no particular order:

• Two books by Jack Fritscher, the storied editor of Drummer Magazine and himself a former Catholic seminarian. Jack is graciously allowing Homodoxy to print editions of two of his memoir novels. The first is What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy: A Comic Novel Based on a True Memoir, which details the life of a young gay seminarian at a midwest Catholic seminary in the midst of the Second Vatican Council. The title suggests something dark, but it is a very funny book. The second, Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco, 1970–1982, is Jack’s best known book. It follows the life and relationships of the seminarian as he moves to the city and becomes a prominent and controversial editor and a lover of masculine muscle man. Together, the books have something to say about the historical ties between religious life and gay community, as well as the pursuit of transcendence through a particular moment of gay male life and sex. The books are available through Jack’s own site (including free digital copies), but the right framing could help them reach a larger audience.

• A collection of new translations of previously untranslated essays and stories by Yukio Mishima, Shūsaku Endō, and Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. Mishima is perhaps best known to English speaking audiences for his novel Confessions of a Mask (1949, trans. 1958), being nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, being very hot, and dying by seppuku. Endō, a Catholic, may be best known in Christian circles, at least, for his novel Silence (1966, trans. 1969). Shibusawa was an influence on both men and a friend of Mishima’s. He translated the work of Marquis de Sade and Jean Cocteau into Japanese and wrote on mysticism, automata, homoeroticism, etc. A wonderful scholar is translating and editing pieces by the three writers for Homodoxy, and I am so, so excited for it. She will write an introductory essay, too.

• On recommendation of my friend and coconspirator Wendy Mallette, I am looking into Confessions of a Jewish Nun: The True Life Adventures of Sister Sadie, Sadie, the Rabbi Lady by Gil Block, a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. It is out print.

• Wendy is editing together an introduced and edited collection of letters between Andrea Dworkin and twentieth-century feminists. The volume will highlight intimacies, disagreements, and complicities across feminist histories.

• Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality by Geoff Mains is almost locked down—got permission from the archives, just need the contract. It’s an out-of-print classic in the realm of spirituality that emerges at the limits of what human bodies can do. I’ve asked Mark D. Jordan to write a brief essay on the book’s contributions to a queer spirituality, and Gayle Rubin is helping me find a writer in the leather world who will speak to the book’s place in leather history and life today. This book was and is a big fucking deal to some, and we will only print it if/when we can guarantee that we will be able to bring it to its audience.

There are other ideas that are still a glint in the milkman’s eye:

• I am seeking out the writing of a Black gay pastor and theologian named Bill Smith, who died of AIDS. His theological writing from the 1990s talks about the blues and AIDS. Smith is informed by Black liberation theology, and his writing takes real risks. I have found two essays by him and hope to find more. Regardless, the two deserve to be read, and I would like to print them together with a critical essay.

• I am speaking with Judy Grahn and her absolutely fabulous collaborator Mister Gregory about doing a potential edition of Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984). It is a genre-bending book of queer history, something of a whimsical textbook for gay/lesbian life that foregrounds Grahn’s own coming into her lesbian awareness and life as a “ceremonial lesbian.”

• I have been rooting through the archives of the historian John Boswell and finding some unexpected treasures that would provide a complement and counterpoint to his already well established image as a founder of academic gay/queer history.

• I would love, love, to find a way to liberate some of the major texts of queer theology—particularly those by a particular Argentinian feminist, liberationist, indecent theologian—that are owned by large academic presses that charge exorbitant prices for them.

Each reprint—and the translations and edited volumes—has an audience already primed toward it. In printing the texts as part of a series, BRICC makes an argument that they belong together. Queer spirituality is not one tradition, but many. Hit the right note on the organ, and the guts of these traditions resonate together. And together, the briccs will form a foundation for new queer thought as well as a foundation for the press. I look forward to meeting the crowd that Homodoxy can bring together.

The list so far is fairly gay man- and lesbian- focused, skewing white, and I am looking to expand upon that. I welcome suggestions for texts or writers to look into: email me at mr [dot] homodoxy [dot] com.

I will apply to academic jobs in the Fall. I will give it a good whack, as I would love to teach college classes. The market is already poor; many institutions that hire theologians will not see my scholarship as legitimately theological; and the Trump administration’s cuts will likely affect hiring.

So, I plan to build up Homodoxy alongside a teaching job, if I can get one. But the dreamer in me would love to be able to work on this press full time—not just scouring the archives and used bookstores for out-of-print texts, but working with living writers, established and new, on a range of texts that speak to the spiritual and material transformations of lives encountering grace in unpredictable ways and places. I would like to spend a significant amount of time editing each manuscript, which is where my talents lie, to provide writers the space and support for their language to develop and meet the vibrancy of their lives and loves.

I hope this interests you. Please forward this email along to friends. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And if you like Homodoxy’s vision and would like to help fund it, please reach out: mr [dot] homodoxy [dot] com.

Gaily yours,
sam