Alexandria Griffin

ALEXANDRIA GRIFFIN {[email protected]} is a visiting assistant professor of religion at New College of Florida. She holds a PhD in religious studies from Arizona State University and an MA in women’s studies in religion from Claremont Graduate University. Her first book project is on Patrick Francis Healy, a mixed-race Jesuit who passed as white and became president of Georgetown University in the late nineteenth century

Queer Mormon Histories and the Politics of a Usable Past

Articles/Essays – Volume 54, No. 1

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 1–16
Essentially, the debate becomes whether it is appropriate to apply the adjectives “gay,” “homosexual,” “transgender,” or similar terms to persons who lived before these terms had any meaning. Yale historian John Boswell freely used the term “gay” for medieval and ancient subjects who expressed a preference for same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, while recognizing it was a label impossible for them to apply to themselves, “making the question anachronistic and to some extent unanswerable.”