Sacred Queer Stories book under contract with James Currey Publishers

We are delighted to have signed a publishing contract for the book Sacred Queer Stories: Ugandan LGBTQ+ Refugee Lives and the Bible. The book will be published by the end of this year by James Currey Publishers, in their series Religion in Transforming Africa.

Co-authored by Adriaan van Klinken and Johanna Stiebert with Sebyala Brian and Fredrick Hudson, the book is the result of a British Academy funded research project in which the Nature Network - a community-based organisation of Ugandan LGBTQ+ refugees in Nairobi - collaborated with academics from the University of Leeds.

In many parts of contemporary Africa, the Bible is held in high regard as sacred Scripture and is an influential socio-cultural text. Although the Bible is often used to fuel homophobic attitudes, the premise of our project is that it can also be mobilised as a tool to bring about social change and empower LGBTQ+ communities. Thereto we used methods of contextual bible study and community-based theatre. The Sacred Queer Stories book offers an account and presents the fruits of this work. It centres around two specific bible stories - of Daniel in the lions' den, and of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery - and explores how these stories speak to the life stories of participants. The first part of the book presents twelve life-stories of LGBTQ+ refugees who participated in the project, offering intimate insight into their vulnerability, resilience and hope. The second part of the book shows how participants creatively engaged the biblical stories through the lens of their life experiences, resulting in  liberatory and empowering interpretations of striking originality. 

As the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has famously stated,

Stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity. … When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

Inspired by these evocative words of Adichie, the book Sacred Queer Stories presents stories that empower and humanise, demonstrating the dignity of LGBTQ+ people, and seeking to regain paradise.