Accounts of African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) life are routinely couched in an afropessimism that posits violence as the defining feature of queer life and frames religion and LGBTQ movements as incongruent. In Kenyan, Christian, Queer: religion, LGBT activism and arts of resistance in Africa, Adriaan Van Klinken offers a corrective to such narrow narratives, instead centring Kenyan activists’ engagement with religious discourse for ‘queer-world making purposes’ (7). In doing so, the book raises critical questions regarding queer identities and solidarities outside of North Atlantic contexts and highlights the ways in which activists challenge local and global discourses that flatten LGBTQ experience.

Van Klinken's book contributes to the growing field of queer African studies, a field that has succeeded in combining a critical analysis of the ‘normative frameworks of sexuality and gender’ with the ‘interrogation of economic structures’ (9). While religious studies has overlooked queer theory's potential to challenge religion's control over ‘public morality’ and the ‘purity of the nation’ (12), queer studies has neglected to engage with religion, missing an opportunity to ‘grasp the potential of religious traditions to not only reinforce but also subvert heteronormativity’ (14). Responding to this disconnect, Van Klinken centres the way LGBTQ activism and cultural production are ‘negotiating, appropriating, and transforming’ (13) Christian religious beliefs and practices, even serving as a source of queer creativity.

The case studies presented in Chapters 1–4 illustrate how recent LGBTQ activism and politics are tied to ‘a longer tradition of cultural production as a key to social change in Kenya’ (31). In Chapter 2, Van Klinken examines the work of the late Kenyan writer and public intellectual Binyavanga Wainaina, veering from Wainaina's publication of his ‘coming out’ letter to his mother, to his use of satire to critique Pentecostal belief in demonology, to his linking of domestic forms of homophobia to decolonisation (34). Van Klinken suggests we see Wainaina as a queer prophet – ‘a creative category in which to think about Wainaina's contribution to queer politics’ (36) – engaged in socio-political criticism.

In Chapter 2, Van Klinken examines a music video produced by the Kenyan collective Art Attack as a ‘sociocultural text that provides insight into the intersections of Kenyan, Christian, and queer identities and politics’ (58). The video, a remix of ‘Same Love’ by US American hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, features African same-sex couples alongside clips from American media and snapshots of front-page anti-LGBTQ sentiment in African newspapers. The video critiques religion, through the representation of the protagonist who attempts suicide after being denounced by his parents on religious grounds, but also lays claim to a more expansive concept of Christian love. Van Klinken reads the video as a ‘political and theological text’ (66) that ‘provides insight into the intersection of Kenyan, Christian, and queer identities and politics’ and its contribution to ‘an African queer theology of love’ (58).

Chapter 3 presents an anthology of some 250 life history interviews with LGBTQ Kenyans, framing them as counter stories, ‘that resist dominant narratives of sexuality’ (99) and that promote a Kenyan brand of sexual politics. Van Klinken's analysis is at its most powerful when it highlights the instability of self-signifiers in the narratives of participants, through, for example, their coming out stories. From these stories emerges a complex version of intimate citizenship that Van Klinken rightfully acknowledges is ‘far from homogenous’ (112). They both challenge the violence of Kenyan heteronormativity and reveal localised strategies for ‘dealing with sex, love, relationships, marriage, and family’ (112), unsettling over-simplified accounts of African LGBTQ lives.

Chapter 4 provides a thick description of how the Nairobi-based Cosmopolitan Affirming Church (CAC) ‘negotiates lgbt identities and Christian faith in the Kenyan context’ (144). With its connections to emerging forms of radical inclusivity within the African American Pentecostal movement, the church offers a critique of socio-political homophobia on the continent, suggesting that there has been a ‘spiritual colonization of Africa’ (155). Van Klinken shows how the church functions as much as a space for ‘queer religious world-making’ (168). For example, he describes a drag-queen contest in which the congregation is invited to envision a society in which LGBTQ people and queer practices are religiously sanctioned and celebrated, bearing witness to a theological statement on queer empowerment.

Van Klinken intersperses these case studies with four ethnographic interludes that address his experience as a researcher occupying a queer, white European subject position. For example, in ‘Bodywork’ he reflects on a sexual experience with a queer Kenyan to ‘illustrate the complex situation of power and vulnerability’ (95) of sex during fieldwork and to challenge taken-for-granted norms about ethnographic research ethics. These interludes raise ‘ethical, methodological, and political’ (24) questions related to fieldwork and, he hopes, contribute to a ‘queer-world making in academia’ (196) that affirms, rather than avoids, the embodied humanity we share with our research participants.

Kenyan, Christian, Queer will serve as an important resource for students and scholars of religious, queer and African studies. Its intervention in these three overlapping fields make it an exciting contribution to scholarship on the role of religion in queer African lives.