Homophile Moral Politics: Robert Wood, Theological Liberalism, and Gay Pride

Robert Wood’s Christ and the Homosexual (1960) was in many ways a shocking book: written at a time when homosexuality was still dominantly condemned as a sin, a sickness and a crime, it made a bold theological argument for homosexual morality. More daring was the author’s choice, as a Congregationalist minister, to write under his real name.  This paper uses Wood’s text to highlight postwar religious and cultural sources that informed what I call “homophile moral politics.” My paper contextualizes Wood’s text and footnotes with archival sources and oral history interviews to account for two postwar contexts that directly influenced his work: the homophile movement and pastoral counseling. The latter trained Christian ministers in clinical psychology.  I show how Wood, in tandem with other homophile authors, critiqued a hegemonic Christian therapeutic axiom about homosexuality, which situated homosexuality in the ostensibly non-moral framework of the therapeutic sciences. Wood, alongside other homophile authors, challenged therapeutic frameworks for homosexual deviance with the seemingly paradoxical claim that homosexuality was a moral issue and should be approached as a problem of injustice and inequality. The paper traces this argument for a homosexual morality into the mid-1960s, where religious discourses formed an important if seldom acknowledged facet to an emerging gay identity pride.