Includes bibliographical references and index.

How the Bible came to speak about homosexuality -- The therapeutic orthodoxy -- Writing the homophile self -- Churchmen and homophiles -- Sanctified heterosexuality -- Born again at Stonewall -- Afterlives of an invented past.

Print version record.

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, this book challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. The book argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching.