JOHN BOSWELL: One of Gay & Lesbian Studies’ Most Important Scholars

“Blessed is he who has learned to laugh at himself for he shall never cease to be entertained.” 

TRQ: John Boswell, Born March 20, 1947

Dr. John Boswell, one of gay and lesbian studies’ most important scholars. Born John Eastburn Boswell in Boston, Massachusetts to Colonel Henry Boswell Jr. and Catharine Eastburn Boswell. He received his AB at the College of William & Mary and his master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard University. 

Boswell’s career at Yale University lasted nearly twenty years. Boswell joined the faculty of Yale University in 1975, became a full professor in 1982, and formed the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center in 1987. He was named the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History in 1990 when he took office as chairman of the history department. 

A genius in linguistics, Boswell read and spoke more than seventeen languages. These included Old Icelandic, classical Armenian, Syriac and Persian. He was also an established authority in queer history and the history of religion in Medieval Spain. 

His book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, published in 1980, was ground-breaking in its argument against the commonly accepted notion that religious beliefs have been the cause of intolerance to gay people. Boswell’s book won the American Book Award for history in 1981. 

“If the categories ‘homosexual/heterosexual’ and ‘gay/straight’ are the inventions of particular societies rather than real aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay history.” -John Boswell

Boswell defined gay persons as “as those whose erotic interest is predominantly directed toward their own gender (i.e., regardless of how conscious they are of this as a distinguishing characteristic).” He also argued that highly-developed gay subcultures had thrived in medieval and Western Europe, classical Athens, and imperial Rome. 

In 1994, Boswell’s second book, Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, he argues that same-sex union ceremonies were church rituals in the twelfth century that celebrated the emotional bonds between male couples. The book draws on over sixty manuscripts detailing rites of same-sex unions, and was acknowledged for its scholastic impact on contemporary Christianity. Boswell’s book was also embraced by Christian readers looking to support same-sex marriage within the church. Doonesbury, the comic strip, featured the book and its arguments. 

On Christmas Eve in 1994, Boswell died of an AIDS-related illness. He shares a book-shaped headstone in Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven with his partner of twenty years, Jerone Hart, who died in 2010. Boswell’s epitaph reads, “He was not a tame lion,” in reference to Aslan, the good lion in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. 

“I regard him as one of the major innovative figures in gay and lesbian scholarship,” said Martin Duberman, founder and executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. “John was very brave and pioneering. And very brilliant.”

In addition to being a respected scholar and teacher, Boswell was a popular lecturer who spoke often his life as an openly gay Christian. Today, the Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale is known as The Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. 

In April 2021 The College of William & Mary announced that an academic building was to be renamed in Boswell’s honour. “It brings honor to our 328-year-old institution that we name an academic building for an alumnus who used his William & Mary education to improve the lives of millions of Americans,” said Jeff Trammell, the former William & Mary rector who became the first openly gay chair of the governing body of a major U.S. public university.

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore. 

Source:

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western

LGBTQ History Month

LGBTQ Religious Archives

NY Times

QSpirit

YAMP