LGBTQ Republicans and LGBTQ conservatives are more common than many people may realize. Neil Young, author of Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, joins us to discuss LGBTQ conservatives and their place within the Republican Party. We discuss how gay Republicans responded to the rise of the anti-queer religious right within the GOP, how they worked to convince church-going Americans that it is okay to be gay, how they are responding to the current barrage of anti-trans legislation, and what they want for America as we head into the 2024 election. You can listen to the Revealer po ..read more

In 2012, Women With A Vision (WWAV), a Black feminist collective based in New Orleans, helped organize sex workers to stand up for their rights to defeat Louisiana’s “Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation” statute, which predatorily criminalized poor, Black, cisgender and transgender women, and LGBTQ people by placing them on the sex offender registry for periods of fifteen years to life. Shortly after that victory, arsonists firebombed and destroyed WWAV’s headquarters — incinerating the community home they’d built and sustained, as well as the archive that held decades of their work. This fi ..read more

(Image source: Illustration by Texas Monthly; MAGA logo: Mark Wilson, Getty; hat: Getty) A few days after the 2004 election, a group of gay Republicans recommitted themselves to their work of reaching out to people of faith across the country. Many of them were believers themselves, and they bristled at how they felt a handful of fire-breathing fundamentalists had hijacked the Christian faith and the Republican Party. They were angry with how evangelical preachers and televangelist tyrants selectively used Scripture to misguide millions of Americans with harmful views of homosexuality that s ..read more

(Image source: Marcus Chin for UCSF Magazine) Hannah remembers exactly where she was when she got the news her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Out for dinner and drinks with friends in Seattle, she noticed the missed call first. Then, the text messages from her older sister. When she stepped outside to talk to her mom on the phone, her father was already gone. “I just stood there, frozen,” the 38-year-old said, “looking out and taking in the details. The way the sidewalk smelled after recent rain. The squeaking sound of the restaurant door as it swung open. The way a red light ref ..read more

(Image source: Getty Images) This past February, President Joe Biden offered a muddled statement on abortion. He disavowed “abortion on demand” because he’s a “practicing Catholic” but maintained that “Roe v Wade was right.” The President’s statement spurred a flurry of commentary that puzzled over his position on abortion and what he meant by the phrase “abortion on demand.” While Biden’s tepid support of abortion rights has been apparent for years, the meaning of “abortion on demand” is less so. Some respondents, like the President of Planned Parenthood, condemned the phrase as “right-wing ..read more

Dear Revealer readers,  In December I was contacted by a reporter for CBS News to do an interview about the pope’s “comments about blessing same-sex couples.” When the reporter emailed, I was on the island of Saint Martin celebrating my 10th wedding anniversary, my own same-sex union. My husband and I had agreed not to check our work email or read the news while away so we could enjoy some island tranquility. I missed the journalist’s request, and when we returned to New York City I learned that the world briefly thought Pope Francis had given his approval for priests to officiate Catholi ..read more

What are the religious and political messages the massive Contemporary Christian Music industry broadcasts? Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, joins us to discuss why evangelical leaders invested so heavily in this industry and why they especially wanted it to resonate with teenagers. We discuss the racial, religious, and nationalistic ideas this music promotes, the music’s messaging about gender, and what Christian pop culture reveals about what evangelicals, Pentecostals, and other conservative Protestants envision for the United S ..read more

(Image source: Alamy Stock Images) The following excerpt comes from God Gave Rock and Roll to You by Leah Payne. (Copyright © 2024 by Leah Payne and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.) The book explores the history of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and what that industry reveals about white evangelical culture in the United States. This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction, “CCM and the Industry of American Evangelicalism.” *** Fourteen-year-old David Shields was nervous. Really nervous. It was 2005, and his death- metal band Skull Crushers was about to play ..read more

(Scene from Jesus Christ Superstar. Image source: Austin Chronicle) Who killed Jesus? And why? Whatever historians make of Jesus’ life and however they explain the endurance of a movement bearing his name, one thing seems clear: Jesus was killed. But that passive construction conceals a controversy that began in the first century and continues today. Two millennia after one Jewish author blamed his own people for the crucifixion of Jesus by Roman soldiers (1 Thess 2:15), the question of how best to describe the events precipitating Jesus’ death remains historically, theologically, and ethica ..read more

(Scene in Oppenheimer. Image source: Popular Science) “Ever get the feeling our kind isn’t entirely welcome here?” physicist Isidor Rabi (played by David Krumholz) asks J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated Oppenheimer. It’s the late 1920s, and the two are traveling by train from Germany to Zurich. Though Oppenheimer jokes that “our kind” refers to physicists, they both know the people who are not “entirely welcome” in Germany are Jews. Jewishness is a quiet but important theme in Nolan’s biopic of the man who oversaw the Manhattan Project, which devel ..read more