Are there Christian LGBT role models?

Honey, let me help you out.

When I was growing up, the idea of a Christian who was anything other than straight was an oxymoron. There certainly weren’t “role models” if you were . . . different. Setting out on my own study of the Bible and Christian history, I realized they were there all along.

Let’s go cruising through a few favorites of LGBT Christendom!

The Beloved Disciple (a.k.a. John of Ephesus)

Growing up Christian, the men around Jesus seem to be one big blob of maleness. You’re never told the gospel story reduce, ultimately, to a romance between a divine being, Jesus, and a young man.

It’s nervously dealt with by the Christian tradition, which pretended that the ‘John’ who is the “one that Jesus loved” and seems to have gone on to write Revelation, the 4th gospel and three New Testament letters, was the prideful young apostle named John.

Modern Bible scholars have pulled the case apart (i.e. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses), and established the ‘Beloved Disciple’ as a figure who is distinct, mysterious, and often unnamed.

That leaves the problem of who he is, and the oddness of the scenes where he and Jesus appear together—especially John 13:23, which the…