Books
Straight to Jesus is the first sustained ethnographic study and historical analysis of the ex-gay movement, an international network of religious based ministries that attempt to change and convert gay men and lesbians to non-homosexual Christian lives through psychological, self-help, therapeutic and biblical approaches.
The book focuses on the everyday lives of men and women at New Hope
Ministry, a residential ex-gay program in California, over the course
of several years. These ex-gay men and women grapple with a
seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the conservative Christian
beliefs of their upbringing and their own same-sex desires.
Rather than definitively changing from homosexual to heterosexual,
ex-gay men and women experience a conversion process that is both
sexual and religious by becoming born-again evangelical Christians and
maintaining a personal relationship with Jesus. At the ministry,
they also create new forms of ex-gay kinship and belonging.
The ex-gay movement envisions sexual transformation as an
individual religious process of conversion. In turn, the ex-gay
movement reshaped the Christian Right's rhetoric around
sexuality.
Since the early 1990s, conservative Christian organizations have used
the testimonies of ex-gay men and women to argue that sexuality is
changeable. These organizations have replaced the language of
condemnation with the language of compassion to support the same
anti-gay politicies and politics.
However, In
becoming what they call “new creations,” men and women at ex-gay
ministries testify to religious
change rather than changes in desire or behavior. As a result,
they undermine the Christian Right’s strategy to promote an anti-gay
political agenda through the message of “change is possible.”
Co-editor
Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2001
Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Anthony Baez, Patrick Dorismond. New York City has been rocked in recent years by the fate of these four men at the hands of the police. But police brutality in New York City is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that refers not only to the hyperviolent response of white male police officers as in these cases, but to an entire set of practices that target homeless people, vendors, and sexual minorities.
The complexity of the problem requires a commensurate response, which Zero Tolerance fulfills with a range of scholarship and activism. Offering perspectives from law and society, women's studies, urban and cultural studies, labor history, and the visual arts, the essays assembled here complement, and provide a counterpoint, to the work of police scholars on this subject.
Framed as both a response and a challenge to official claims that intensified law enforcement has produced New York City's declining crime rates, Zero Tolerance instead posits a definition of police brutality more encompassing than the use of excessive physical force. Further, it develops the connections between the most visible and familiar forms of police brutality that have sparked a new era of grassroots community activism, and the day-to-day violence that accompanies the city's campaign to police the quality of life.
Recent Articles
"Religious LIteracy in
a Faith-Based Prison," PMLA: Publications
of the Modern Language
Association, Special Issue on Incarceration, Social Justice
and Literacy (May 2008)
"Testimonial
Politics" American Quarterly,
Special
Issue
on Religion and Politics, Volume 59, Issue 2 (September 2007):
1001-1025.
"Partners
in Prayer," The
Boston Globe, Sunday Ideas Section, June 11, 2006.