Let’s look at the epic song in its first version — Is there new evidence available about one the most famous mysteries of Pop Culture? What the hell is Queen’s song “Bohemian Rhapsody” about? The legendary song feels epic, but incomprehensible, which seems to have been how its author, Freddie Mercury, liked it. A draft version has just emerged into public. I went in for a look. How the song was written has been mostly a blank.

A religion has its secrets — If you thought that queer men in the Evangelical world were just the closeted choir directors of Southern Baptist churches — well, you’d be wrong. This ‘Pride’ month, I’m thinking about a difficult place to be gay, gayish or otherwise ‘queer’: in America’s largest religion. Evangelicalism doesn’t point them out, but fear not! They’re there. 1. King James I (1566–1625)

A religion edits its “sacred” text — The Bible was written by God, so Christianity claims. The religion doesn’t have an original manuscript. Is that the sort of thing you just throw away? The Bible ends up being known only by much later copies. For the New Testament, scholars found some 5800 manuscripts in the Greek language. None are identical. There are some 500,000 textual differences. As one study put it, there are “more variants than there are words…”

Let’s look at a deity’s feminine side — I went to learn more about the Bible, and ended up meeting a woman that I had never even heard about in church. Her name is God. She’s right there in the Bible that religious people read, though they don’t recognise her presence. She isn’t hiding. They just—can’t see? To learn about religion is seen as breastfeeding. That is clear in the New Testament writings, like in 1 Peter 2:2–3, where the believer is to “crave pure spiritual milk” (cf. …

Let’s look at some religious hypocrisy? — The issue of children in and around drag shows is a hot-button issue in right-wing discourse. There’s rampant charges of “grooming,” “child abuse,” etc. I’m trying to figure out what to think about children in drag and in proximity to drag queens. But I’m confused. Don’t Christians love making children dress up in women’s clothes to do theatrical performances with sexual predators hovering nearby?

The unknown story of Linda Rich — I’m thinking again about the genius Christian singer-songwriter no one has heard of. Linda Rich released three albums from 1969 to 1975 on a label that disappeared. Sometimes I go looking up information about her. In her high school yearbook, sophomore year, I found the only clear portrait as seems to be available. She’d ducked out of all class photos. It’s a story of a Christian girl from Augusta, Kansas, a small town known for an oil…

Guess who runs an anti-queer religion? — As I’ve been looking over the history of America’s #1 religion, I noticed something odd. Straight white guys seem to run the show, but really they don’t. There are male clerics up on stage. But the religion is substantially staffed by women. Among them, key leaders have been typically unmarried, and seem to have close female companions. I realized: Evangelicalism was run by lesbians.

I’m a little stunned — In 2020, I began to do profiles on Evangelical leaders. Several have gone viral — especially one on Charles Stanley, the legendary pastor in Atlanta. For “Divorcing Charles Stanley” I spent weeks going through old books and newspapers, and focused on his divorce in the late 1990s. It’d been a lurking secret in the Evangelical world. Details had been hazy. I found a story of a Christian woman intent on divorcing the most powerful cleric…

Trigger warning: it’s some messy, nasty religion — You might think that Evangelicals are a lot of white folks, which is how they seem to like it. But Asian Americans tend to show up from time to time. I’m thinking of those odd moments when Asians have been seen on the religion’s lily white stage. The stories are tinged with racism and colonialism, and horror endings—as gets passed off as ‘God’. 1. Kenneth Nally