Caught up in the stakes of the “homosexuality debate,” neither American Christians nor scholars of American religions often pause to ask how this largely Christian dispute emerged in its current terms or why it seems to center on the sexual identify formation of teenaged boys. In this fascinating volume, Mark Jordan steps beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic tradition to explore these questions with his trademark blend of history, cultural studies, theology, ethics, and rhetorical criticism, which here takes center stage. Also characteristically, Jordan points from conversations that were to those that could be.

Jordan argues that Christian talk about homosexuality has been composed of a series of erratic “fast” rhetorics built on a foundation of enduring “slow” rhetorics (211–12). Both have focused primarily on white males in their vulnerable adolescence. Jordan's starting points are psychologists G. Stanley Hall, whose Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904) arguably invented the term, and Havelock Ellis, to whose work on sexuality Hall alluded elliptically, as well as novelist Forman Brown, in whose semi-autobiographical Better Angel (New York: Greenberg, 1933) the psycho-spiritual rhetoric of “homosexuality” that would typify the next seventy years of the American conversation was “already activated” by 1933 (25).

On this stage Jordan artfully erects a series of roughly chronological “tableaux” (xix) that illustrate the repetition, development, and metamorphosis of this basic rhetoric. The first is composed of the Kinsey reports, which normalized same-sex sexual interaction, and pulp novels like Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (New York:  Dutton, 1948), which provided a glimpse into gay life, wrapped in the imagery of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both performed the earlier rhetoric in a new key for a wider public, forcing religious leaders who disliked their “permissiveness” to employ their language, setting a precedent for combining the scientific idiom of psychology with those of sin, virtue, and tragedy.

In the next scene, American Christian moralists and churches divide the discourse: action from person, moral judgment from legal recommendation, and individual tendency from social cause, creating a space for “the homosexual” to find an “outlet” for his desire and to live uncondemned, if tragically. Jordan also traces the mid-century rise of “homophile” groups where gay men—read as members of an oppressed race—could pursue what they were already calling their spirituality at a safe distance from Egypt. In this tableau sexual orientation becomes a matter of birth, and therefore something with which God must reckon.

Jordan also notes early Quaker and Episcopalian efforts to describe homosexuality as non-pathological. Ironically, public homophobia abetted this development: urban Christian youth ministry programs pursued queer youth at the behest of “homophile” organizations which—out of public fear of “recruitment” and sexual exploitation of adolescents—were explicitly forbidden to work with them.

Next on the docket are post-Christian utopian spiritual visions and gay ire at Christian homophobia, a dialectical pairing that makes room for celebrations of the created goodness of homosexuality in self-consciously Christian gay movements. Jordan notes the unintended consequences: gay liberationists replaced the idea of adolescence with the idea of “coming out” in young adulthood, leaving behind chronological adolescents.

Media darling Anita Bryant's transformation of the standard rhetoric absorbs an entire chapter. Gay camp idol Bryant pioneered the particular mix of criss-crossing scripture citations, scientific arguments, suffering righteousness, historical and legal precedents, and claims to personal revelation that still characterizes American Christian speaking against homosexuality. She recast homosexuality as selfish choice, not involuntary condition, reopening fears of mass conversions of gullible adolescents.

Ex-gay ministries extend Bryant's logic of orientation as choice. Through Frank Worthen of Exodus and others, the “ex-gay” movement appropriates the liberationist trope of divine salvation from slavery; it transforms adolescence into a scene that can be replayed in order to reverse sinful choices; it counts oral “confession” or declaration of heterosexuality as conversion; yet it (again paradoxically) adopts a behavioral “treatment” model.

Jordan's chapter on responses to the AIDS crisis, too rich to summarize here, traces parallel rhetorics, the subtly evolving language of religious leaders across the spectrum, and the deadly serious camp of gay activists who employed religious iconography and ritual in answer to both gay suffering and religious diatribe.

The final chapter, which sets the healthy gay adolescent against the backdrop of ecclesiastical debates over creation and marriage, points to ironies: one scientifically informed strand of rhetoric sees adolescence as a time of ambiguity and exploration; another sees sexual orientation as a settled matter of “nature”; “religion” is read as irrelevant or harmful to queer youth despite the enduring rhetoric of gay spirituality; and even progressive religious communities fail to capitalize on ritual, their best bet for helping people live creatively with ambiguity.

In places central strands of the argument are more implicit than developed. For example, Jordan's excursus on Richard Love's pastoral pulp novel Song of the Loon (San Diego:  Greenleaf Classics, 1966) seems to leave adolescence, psychology, and any robust vision of Christianity behind. But Jordan uses interviews to show how the apparently disconnected rhetorical sites he analyzes—pulp novels, orange juice ads, hymns—have combined in the experiences of individuals to create coherent narratives that point to the possibility of “authentic community—and real religion, which not only liberates homosexuality, but reveals it as a sacrament” (111). The larger rhetorical framework remains intact, functioning as a powerful whole even when one or two elements remain temporarily unspoken.

There are gaps. For instance, Jordan admits that gay men of color and lesbians are largely absent from the cultural rhetorics he analyzes, although this in itself is a systematic reason to set them aside for others to address later. Yet the method Jordan models and the examples he has assembled will keep scholars busy for decades. And we should heed his underlying worry: in the light of our continued doctrine of adolescence as a period of settling into clear homosexuality or heterosexuality, the “liberating” cultural acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage may limit the horizons of people whose identity is more fluid or queer than gay just as much as compulsory heterosexuality limited the horizons of gay men seventy years ago.