S3E02 Transcript: Matthew 8:5-13

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, where we explore the queer history of the Bible and Christianity. We're your hosts, Ellie Brigida...

Leesa Charlotte: ...and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode we're talking about the queer Christianity in the Middle Ages.

LC: But before we get into that, let's bring in our resident Christian, Alyse Knorr. Welcome, Alyse.

Alyse Knorr: Hey, y'all, how's it going?

EB: Hi, Alyse. So good to see you.

LC: As always. Oh, you look so hot when you do that. You're like, "What's up?" Like, "Hi, Daddy."

EB: Yeah, for all of you who cannot see Alyse, Alyse looks amazing, and is going to share with us a Bible verse.

AK: I'm gonna blush. Thanks, y'all.

EB: Alyse is now blushing and is gonna talk to us about Matthew, let's do it.

AK: Awesome. Today's passage is Matthew 8:5-13. I'll read you from the New International Version. I'll start at verse 5, just to get us into it. "When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Shall I come and heal him?’ The centurion replied, ‘Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, ‘Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Then Jesus said to the centurion, ‘Go! Let it be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that moment.’"

EB: Beautiful. So why did you choose this particular passage?

AK: I chose this passage because it's kind of a throwback to season one and two for us, as this whole episode is, because this word "servant," like the demand of it – so first of all, a centurion is like a soldier, a Roman soldier. He's like a higher up soldier. But he talks about this servant of his and the Greek word for it is "pious." And that's a word that in ancient Greek could refer to like the younger partner in a same sex relationship, like, and it's often translated to boy, servant, or slave. So some progressive Bible scholars have concluded from this word that the centurion was in a gay relationship with this, like, slave who was dear to him, right? This like, you know, he's really worried about his servant. Like, why would you be this worried about someone that you would ask Jesus to save their life, but he asks for it. So there's like a gay reading of it. But it also is like, queer in maybe the not super awesome way that some of those pirate relationships were queer. Like, it might not have been entirely consensual.

LC: I mean, he says, "Come," I say, "Come," and he comes, and I was like, okay.

AK: Yeah, yeah. Pretty kinky.

LC: Talk about queering.

EB: I did not think we were going there with this Bible verse.

LC: Well, probably we shouldn't have, but someone had to say it. Someone had to say it, and it was obviously going to be me.

EB: Yeah, ‘cause I could not say it like, I'll have to, like, bless myself.

AK: Oh my god.

EB: Yeah, I have to pray my rosary after that.

AK: Also, I mean, I think like if we're not interpreting it in a queer way, right, and this is just his servant – I think there's also an interpretation that we talked about in the previous episode of like, Jesus healing the downtrodden and like those on the outskirts of society. Right? Do a couple of Hail Marys. So regardless of – I mean, like, we know that this was a different time, and like, ways that homosexual relationships happen between men, like we know from season one, were like, kind of this was the vibe sometimes, just like the older man and the younger man, even like, you know, like a teenage boy. So regardless of like, what actually this relationship between these two people was, what's really interesting is that if this word translates to imply something homosexual, Jesus isn't like weird about it. He's not like, "Oh, you shouldn't be fucking your servant. Oh, you shouldn't be having sex with this boy, you shouldn't love this boy so dearly." He just heals him. He's just like, "Okay, you got it." It's true. It's a great point.

EB: If we don't want to super dive into like the relationship between those two, that it is like, okay, this man is wanting to heal, like his servant, his slave who does not have rights in society. But to Jesus, he is worthy of being healed.

AK: It's really cool. Yeah, I mean, and even just to kind of continue off what you're saying, like even if they're literally like lovers, there's some kind of homosocial love going, there's some intimacy of some kind that this man cares about this man in his home. And I think the other like big takeaway, why this is a parable, is that like, Jesus is always doing these like, I don't know, like magic tricks in the gospels, like, you know, he turns water into wine, and he heals a lot of people. And I think that people, like I know, for me growing up at my church, get really distracted by these miracles as magic tricks, like that he has magical abilities like a wizard – when the point of them is not that he's able to heal people with a touch of his hand. The point is that often the people heal themselves through their faith, through their trust in him, in the universe, in their own bodies. And so here, it's made really explicit that the centurion's like, "You don't need to come to my house to lay hands on this dude. I just believe that if you say he's healed, he'll be healed." And Jesus praises him. Like, thanks for not making me come to your house, thanks for not making it all about me doing magic tricks, thanks for just having faith, because that's the point that he wants people to take away.

EB: Yeah. I love it. I also love, I mean, coming from a Catholic church, like, one of the parts of the Catholic Church is like they do a reading and a homily. So like, every mass, they do a reading and then the priest will, like interpret that reading, or like at a children's mass they'll have the children come up and like talk about that reading. So I also feel like I'm like, oh, yeah, let's dive into a parable. Like that's very Catholic of us. Let's go.

AK: Oh, yeah. I think Jesus – yeah, Jesus just wants people to like, believe and have some faith, you know. Like that's something where I feel that something miraculous could happen, that something beautiful could happen, that we can have hope in something, in a sickness changing course, and someone healing, and that healing is possible. I mean, for queer people like to believe in your bones that healing is possible without needing proof of it, without needing someone to come do it for you, right? Just asking someone like, can you just be with me in this, can you just like, think about my man at home, my dude? And Jesus is like, I'm thinking about it. Well it's like, well, that's all I need. Like, it's just beautiful.

EB: I love it. Well, thank you Alyse, for sharing that.

AK: Yeah, of course.

EB: I really enjoyed that one. We will be back after a quick break.

LC: We're back. As we said at the top of the episode, this episode we are discussing queer Christianity in the Middle Ages. Every season, we come back to this.

EB: We love our Middle Ages. For this episode, we spoke to Roland Betancourt, Professor of Art History at the University of California Irvine, with an expertise in the Byzantine Empire.

Roland Betancourt: So I wrote an article in Time Magazine on essentially sort of the unknown, untold lives of queer relations in the Middle Ages. I work on the Byzantine Empire, so essentially the Eastern Roman Empire during the Middle Ages. And so therefore, there's a sort of concrete focus on the Byzantine world, which for a lot of people is even less sort of known. We have some ideas about what the Western Middle Ages looked like. And it's not to say that they're completely different. But they do have some radical and important differences that I particularly love. And so I was really trying to sort of flesh out in this article some of the ways in which we have evidence of queer life in the Middle Ages that has oftentimes been ignored, or just sort of overlooked because it oftentimes appears in sort of scraps and fragments of historical texts and other forms of evidence. What we see in the sources is not so much like a sort of warm, open embrace, but rather a very clear amount of evidence that these sorts of relationships were not considered unfathomable or unique. I think there are a lot of interesting histories that we can get into here. You know, there's oftentimes been the long-standing argument that the idea of sodomy, as we understand it, doesn't emerge until really the later Middle Ages, and that's very true in the West. In the Byzantine world, there's a very different trajectory to that history. But still, we see the fact that, fundamentally, you know, Christian moralists, their top priority is not the same gender relations. And I think that's one of the most important things that becomes sort of unfathomable to anyone living in our modern world, where it's like they had bigger problems to worry about, you know, whether it be sort of what is Christ, who is Christ, rather than worrying about sort of these nuances of like sexuality, as we would understand it. Relationships between men, in particular in monastic communities, were sort of treated in a very nonchalant way as sort of the things that happen when you're living in a community. And there's some really interesting examples of how, you know, there's a clear set of rules as to how you deal with these relationships. Essentially, it's not really good for monks to be having sex with anyone, especially not with each other. But really what's fascinating here is that it's handled as a question of like the integrity of the community. And one of my sort of favorite narratives of this comes from John Climacus's heavenly ladder sort of manual for monks and how to live their lives. And one of my colleagues, Joe Kruger, has a lot of great work on this text, where there's basically this idea of like, blessed are the peacemakers, but also blessed are the monks that know how to sort of stir drama between monks who have had a pornographic relationship that are basically sleeping with each other. And so there's this real sort of sensitivity and, you know, very casual sort of citation of these relationships in a way that understands that this is about community and sustaining these problems that emerge in community that are just as challenging as if two monks hate each other and are fighting all the time. So there's a sort of very interesting way of looking at sources here that I think is also important to understand of how you find evidence for these types of lives.

LC: Narratives of drama?

EB: Drama within the monasteries? I also feel like this brings me to like, actually, last night, I was like singing and dancing to The Sound of Music, because I had like – I know like, you know, that's a little bit different. But still monasteries, like remind me of like, nuns. I know, monks are different, but I was like dancing around with my guitar case. Like, "I have confidence in sunshine." And I was really loving it.

LC: Oh, my god, of course, what else does one do with an empty guitar case?

EB: Exactly. I knew you would understand. We did not think that this was gonna go there. But I feel like there's like the Marias of the monastery, right? That's what it brings me to, like dramatic monks. Like there had to be like a Maria there. What are they going to do with the problem Maria?

LC: It feels like every season and like last season, obviously, there are a lot more. But like every season, we have, like a television show pitch and like –

EB: Oh, I can see this –

LC: This season, is it going to be the gay lives of Byzantine monks, is going to be our first? I'm gonna say first, because I don't believe it's going to be our last, but like our first TV pitch of the season? But I guess before we start pitching to HBO, because, you know, it needs to be raunchy. So we got to put it on like HBO. But before we get into these, what were some of these narratives of drama?

RB: For example, if there are young monks that are beardless, there's a real sort of anxiety of like this young, attractive monk should be handled separately. In other words, like, make sure you keep them away from the other monks. And this really, in one of my sort of favorite stories where this comes up, is in one of these stories of a monk who has been assigned female at birth, but lives out their lives passing as a unit, essentially, within a male monastic community. And their authors, they have the sort of conceit that, "Oh, of course, there's a woman. So therefore, we can talk freely about what's happening." And their, they're very open about the fact that like, oh, yes, and we're concerned that this particular monk might stir up feelings for other brothers, so make sure to keep them away. But what's interesting is that you see the same types of concerns for cisgender monks who are in these types of communities as well. So it's a very interesting way of also understanding how sources contemplate sort of gender identity, as well in relationship to how they articulate these potential desires. One monk in particular is Smaragdos, which I talked about in my Time piece, and there's a very clear idea of – keep them at a safe distance from the community, so that he does not stir up desires in the other monks. We have a few series of stories where we have these narratives of these monks who were assigned female at birth, and for various reasons, end up in a male monastic community, and many of them end up living out their entire lives in that community. There's also, one of things that I find most poignant about these stories, is that there's also a very strong desire of essentially not being outed to the brothers at the end of their lives. So please do not prepare my body for burial. Please, just bury me as I am. And it's very interesting, because the authors oftentimes struggle with this. There's a great deal of respect that's shared, and it's always sort of by accident that another monk, you know, while attempting to put a cloth over what they were already wearing, it's like, oh, and he saw that he had breasts like a woman on his chest. And so then there's these sort of quiet moments of discourse between like a monk and an abbot, where it's like, did you know about this, and it's always like yes, let me tell you his story. And it's very interesting and how they sort of handle these figures' gender identities, it's handled very differently. Pronouns change throughout not only the manuscript tradition, but they also change throughout the texts. And it's a very sort of fascinating aspect of how these lives existed in these medieval contexts in ways that are radically different to what we would expect of medieval sources. And what's, I think, important to keep in mind as well in these conversations is that a lot of these things are outlawed by church councils. So there are sort of prohibitions of any form of cross dressing, there are prohibitions that are very clear that you know, you shouldn't be doing this. And yet you have these sort of saints' lives that are praising these figures, either some takes sort of this idea of like, she was a very pious woman, and therefore did all these things to be closer to God. Or you have these stories that really are like, look at this very holy figure, may he rest in peace with the fathers, even though there are, of course, church councils that are condemning cross dressing, which this could potentially fit under. And so I think that's really interesting. It says a little bit about how they were understanding gender identity and whether this was understood as cross dressing or not. But it also demonstrates that there is a sort of flexibility. One of the big challenges about eunuchs, for example, is that it was outlawed within the context of the church because there was a sincere fear that in order to, you know, undertake your vows of celibacy, you might just seek to castrate yourself. And so you see a lot of dynamics here, where there's a lot of church practices that go against church councils and other sort of forms of legislation, especially from the early medieval world.

LC: You could just be chill, learn from the Byzantine monks. Just be chill about it.

EB: One of the things I love so much about the thread between our seasons is like, hey, everyone. In the past, people didn't care. Like, it's like, everything's fine, like people are just living their lives how they want to live their lives. And yeah, like, everyone's chill about it.

LC: I want to shout out the name of that monk, so that you can Google it and find out more about them. So, Smaragdos.

EB: Roland also taught us about spiritual brotherhoods, another example of how early medieval Christianity was way queerer than you might think.

RB: Spiritual brotherhood is probably the most controversial rite within the Byzantine world. So it's a rite known as – translated roughly as – spiritual brotherhood or brother making, adelphic voices. This rite is probably most famous because Yale medieval historian John Boswell made a very provocative argument, where he compared sort of the rite of basically becoming a sort of adopted brother to the rite of marriage and just sort of proposing it as a form of same-sex unions in the pre-modern world. More recent scholarship has really pushed away against this, but really sort of in an extreme way. Because our sources do demonstrate very clearly, that there were sort of queer potential in this sort of form of brother making. And there's a lot of great work that's been coming out of just looking at sort of letter exchanges between figures that had these types of relationships set up. And essentially it was a church rite that united you spiritually to a brother. You could share the same bed, sort of live a life intimately. Some of these brothers might have other relationships and other spiritual brotherhoods. And so it's a very interesting rite that seems to have been a sort of hotspot for sort of queer activity. And then in the 80s, it was also there and 90s, it was very much taken up by sort of queer Christian scholars as seeing a sort of glimpse of various forms of acceptance as well. My guiding principle is to not be one of these historians who will say they were friends. But historians will say they were roommates, that meme is like my guiding sort of mythological principle. And it really is about understanding that like, there are queer people that exist. And if you just place that as a given, then society looks very different. Because you're no longer navigating society thinking, like, what is the officially validated decrees or navigating societies for spaces where you can live out your life? And I think that was one of those very interesting spaces that was, in many ways, very validated by the church. It was valid. It was a very sort of important practice within the Byzantine Empire as well, for all the reasons that you would expect, creating bonds with others, sort of sharing intimacy. And it often produced these spaces for queer love that are very queer. And the rite sort of falls out of use precisely because we have constant citations, like in the 13th century, being like, this can often lead to pornographic and lustful behavior. And I'm like, uh huh, I understand. So I mean, that's one of the sort of fascinating things about how a sort of perspective shift really allows you to understand a lot of this very differently and what some scholarship has been doing now, like Mark Masterson just wrote a book Between Byzantine Men, where he basically looks at sort of letter exchanges between some of these figures and looks at sort of the deep homoeroticism that existed and thinking about, oh, these bachelorhoods of certain figures, how they are sort of, you know, having these multiple brother rituals. And so it sort of creates a sort of clearer view of what these sort of patterns of behavior are. These types of communities provide a lot of room for people to live their lives in various capacities. And I think that one of the most pressing things for me has been to understand that these communities still exist to this day, and that they are similar sort of patterns that exist that are really not about, you know, that there are sort of vibrant queer lives in monasteries. There can be, but that there's also sort of this way in which there are pockets that sort of open themselves selectively to people, and when the time is right to certain people, and I think, you know, as a queer figure, you see those pockets, because they're opened up to you, you're sort of welcomed as like, hello, I'm here.

LC: This sounds a whole lot like matelotage, doesn't it?

EB: Yes, it does.

LC: Funny how these things keep popping up.

EB: Well, I think it's because like, human beings want companionship.

LC: And are gay.

EB: Like a man wants companionship with another man.

LC: Or a woman with a woman. And that's okay, that's okay. And so we'll keep finding ways to do it.

EB: However, whatever you want to call it, we're gonna find a way to do it.

LC: We're gonna find a way to be gay. So how common was this?

RB: The realities of monastic communities can vary greatly. These can be fairly small communities of a handful of people, they can scale up. You also have a sort of division of like, we call like a Cenobitic community, where you have sort of monks living together. And there's a lot of really great and fascinating research about, you know, the fact that these monks are going about their daily lives, but they're also contributing to the community, coming together for liturgy, for example. And within these communities, you might have these sort of satellite monks who are sort of the hermits who like, live off to the side somewhere doing their own thing. They're sort of at times nurtured and supported by the community, but they really are meant not to be disturbed. And you have, throughout these various stories I've talked about, about the sort of queer terms and thinking about trans monks as well, there's a lot of variety in how these various monks sort of live out different parts of their lives in that relationship. And so there is sort of a great deal of variation that really is about sort of size and scale of community, and how many sort of different communities there can be. So you have some key spaces, like sketes, which were really important monastic communities that were sort of like monastic capitals. And then you have other sort of, you know, in thinking about people like holy fools, these sort of figures that in many ways, I think that sort of, for a popular audience to think of as sort of monks, they sort of are devoted to God, they're sort of not really concerned with the world. There's a really interesting amount of variety of how they sort of structure their relationship to institutions. We have great sort of trajectory of like Stylite saints, which I should have mentioned earlier, because they're not the queerest example. But they were basically the saints who climbed on top of a column, and they live their life on a column. And yeah, so St. Simeon the Stylite is probably our most famous one. There's some great images of Simeon on his column. Some have even like gates around him. And he would have like, you know, an assistant who would like bring him food, or he can be depicted as being nurtured by angels. And it's really fascinating because these were living saints, essentially. And people would come and visit them. They would take the soil from around him, which just think about a guy living on a column. Yeah, they would take the soil and then they would like, impress like tokens in their hands, they would turn them into tokens. And these tokens are fascinating. Like you've got these great images of like Simeon on his column, and it's like the greatest souvenir ever. Sometimes they were fired. Other times they were not. And in some of these types of tokens, we even have people who like fall on hard times. And they like break up the token, mix it in water and drink it. And like the saint appears, and like they're cured. And so these are the aspects of like sort of existing as sort of ostracized from society can really mean many things. You also got the sense that Simeon wasn't very nice, and he was sort of like, "What are all you people doing here? I'm just trying to like worship God." But yeah, so you have a lot of these really – I mean, like, early Christianity was a really radical and subversive space. Like it was anti-imperial, it was trying to exist within these spaces and sort of Simeon, you know, had basically a church built around him and he must have been like, just, what are you doing?

LC: So Ellie, I don't know if you ever watch Sex and the City. But if you didn't, I'm sure some of our listeners did. But this just – these Stylite saints, I Googled it, and please go Google it to our listeners, but they just remind me of the art exhibition in the like, season 7 or whatever. Like, you know, those like living art exhibitions where like someone like stands in a place and like, they like curl up to the top of the pillar and like, live like that. And Alyse was telling me that some there was a guy who did this for 37 years, can you imagine?

EB: I cannot.

LC: How do they go to the bathroom?

EB: I mean, I'm sure they have a chamber pot up there.

LC: Do they just like ferry it down?

EB: Yeah, they just dump it over. Yeah, I'm sure. Lots of interesting things in the Middle Ages. I also feel like there's like a little bit of a flamboyance to that, it's like, I'm up here, and like, you can come take care of me, while I am above all of you, hanging out over here. Like there's a flamboyance there. Very, very interesting. Roland also told us a lot about the role of eunuchs as a kind of gender fluid figure in the Byzantine culture.

RB: It's one of the things that I think sets Byzantium in a very different place than the Western Middle Ages is, that eunuchs were a really popular aspect of Byzantine society. Eunuchs, who are men castrated at birth, or soon thereafter, they could also be castrated during puberty. There's a great deal of variance in castration practices, but they were oftentimes high-ranking officials, they existed within a lot of clerical settings as well. And this really sort of, in many ways for Byzantine writers, shattered a lot of assumptions about a sort of sex binary. And also, the eunuchs were also this sort of conflicted space of thinking about gender identity and, you know, what role do hormones play in how secondary sex characteristics develop, really interesting conversations. And so because of that, one of the things that you see quite uniformly in the story is that these figures, oftentimes are just are always described as eunuchs. And so it really demonstrates that there was sort of some calls to the third gender, but there is a sort of gender fluidity that exists within these categories, because there was a sort of palpable understanding of what castration did to the body, and how these figures might appear. So therefore, what is oftentimes the sticking point is that these trans monks are essentially existing with these communities, and the idea that they are beardless is sort of justified as well, they were eunuchs. And so that's sort of like the key sort of introductory point that's used in these narratives. We know from the sources that eunuchs, depending on when they were castrated, could still have erections, which adds another layer of like, the sex life of eunuchs as well.

EB: A lot of our other sources this season talked about how the figure of the eunuch was one that's important for modern day queer Christians, since eunuchs are queering up gender and doing gender differently for their time.

LC: Eunuchs really queer up our modern day understanding of how gender worked in the Middle Ages.

RB: And so eunuchs were high ranking officials, in the sense that they were, you know, the treasures of the state. They were imperial guards. They were badass in many respects. And so that's also something that's really fascinating because it goes against a lot of our sort of expectations and tropes about masculinity that are really sort of fascinating in the Middle Ages, because they don't look the way that we would expect. It's interesting. Ruth Mazo Karras, who's worked a lot on gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, wrote a book on sort of depictions of King David as sort of being the sort of perfect man in the Middle Ages, looking particularly at Western sources. And one of the things that's really interesting in her book is that, you know, a lot of the stereotypes of what makes a good man were things like yes, there's success in battle. There are these various triumphs. There's also sort of a repentance narrative of like cheating on your spouses and having affairs, but then you're good at the end. Yeah, certainly male privilege. And what's also interesting there is that when you start comparing this figure of King David, as sort of the perfect man, and you compare him to like Jesus, there really aren't any of those characteristics with the figure of Jesus. Interestingly enough, the only thing that David, in a sense, shares with Jesus is that he had very intimate friendships with men. And it's fascinating because with David, it's a point of contention, where authors are like, yeah, they might have been sleeping together sounds like it, we're not going to really focus on that, we're not going to acknowledge it. Which Ruth Karras does a really great job at sort of handling that chapter of David's relationships with Jonathan. And it's a really interesting point of contemplation as well, that a lot of sort of the ideas and hallmarks of the perfect man were not found in the figure of Jesus. A few Google searches will show you some ridiculous contemporary books that try to argue the opposite. But it is a really fascinating sort of moment to think about also just that these sort of gender roles are very different. They might seem familiar, but in practice, there's a very different space and so that eunuchs, who were castrated, were sort of higher-ranking military officials might seem strange to modern viewers.

EB: So what should we take away from these medieval queer Christians as people living in the 21st century? Roland gave us a couple of ideas.

RB: For me, what I really wanted in this project overall, and the reason why I wrote op eds, to sort of essentially accompany the book, is to try to say like, "Hey, you belong here, like there's a space in this history that exists here." And there are these really cool sources, and it makes the past more exciting. It also shows us a lot more puts a spotlight on certain things that changed the landscape of how we understand this past. And so I think that it's not necessarily going to help, you know, to fight your conservative cousins who, like, don't want to acknowledge this. I'm like, "Okay, let's live by Leviticus, then, let's go ahead and do that." You know, it's not stuff like that. But it is important to understand that these are not givens and that there has been long standing conversations. I mean, in some ways, I could say the same point by saying like, I mean, if you just look at a deep theological history of the Christian church, like you really see that the priorities of the church were highly rarefied theological nuances that had nothing to do with these questions. And so, you know, some Byzantine scholars who have looked at this work have also pointed out like, we have these legal prohibitions against homosexuality, and yet, we don't seem to have any evidence that these prohibitions were being used, except very selectively when somebody was pursuing a political aim. And I think that that's something that's also important to keep in mind, like there is a lot that is said in biblical texts, and in the theology of the church, that is haphazardly applied, depending on the politics of the time. I think that's probably the most important and meaningful lesson, which is to say that religion is always – has always been politicized. And so that's the important sort of way of approaching all of these conversations. I also think that, you know, when you see a longer history sort of removed from the challenges of like, modern sort of evangelical Christianity, or whatever sort of formulation that this can operate as an oppressor, like you also see that in these longer histories, there is so much variety and presence of vibrant queer life in various capacities. And I mean, also it's sort of the "nevertheless she persisted" line like, it is like, there could also be so much like potential oppression, and you still see evidence of these lives. And I think that's probably one of the most empowering things. I think also like for queer Christians, it's a really powerful way of also being recognized in your sources. I think that then that formulates a very different sort of perspective about how do you understand yourself in a faith that has aspects of it that have become so hostile to my existence? And I think this aspect of like, preservation is something that's really sort of interesting to me, because in many ways, I fundamentally see this work as a preservation of Byzantine history, because it opens these histories to new generations of people who want to preserve this knowledge and continue to do work on these histories. And that needs to be sort of really emphasized, in the sense that, like, scholars who are doing this type of work with Christianity, like they're not attacking Christianity. In fact, many of us, whether we want to or not, are some of the biggest proponents of Christianity in preserving a future for it. And also for medieval and ancient history, that's sort of not specific to religion. And I think that's one of the things that I think gets completely lost, and how much – and I think it's something that scholars also need to consider, like, do we want to preserve certain institutions and certain ideas. And I think that our work, even though it's not aimed for that, can sort of implicitly do that. I love this take from Roland, because it really just ties together all of our seasons. Queer erasure is a very real thing.

LC: You don't say!

EB: Surprise, I know, Leesa, you look very shocked. You look very, very shocked. But I also do think it is very empowering, as a queer person, to hear the other stories, and know that like, we're not alone in our queerness. Like, there's a long, rich history of queerness and society.

LC: Yes. And we asked Roland what was most surprising about his work, and this is what he told us.

RB: One of the things that I think is most shocking about this research at time – obviously, all the times it's, "Oh, my god, we have so much material." Secondly, I would say that one of the things I constantly confront in these sources is like, oh, my gosh, this hatred and these stereotypes exist today. And it's interesting to see, to be reading a text, and to have a sort of homophobic statement in passing. And to then think about it and be like, wait, that's still – sometimes even a turn of phrase will be something that is still in use. And it's fascinating to see how there can be forms of hatred that are preserved over time, in very poignant ways. Oftentimes, I realize it makes me realize how medieval our world is. And I don't use it in a sort of negative sense of medieval, but just to see what deep trends of continuation have existed and how certain things have endured. Other times, I see sort of forms of openness and a lack of obsession with certain forms of behavior in the Middle Ages that, you know, are far more vicious and hateful in the present. And so it's not really the sort of narrative of progress, or one of, you know, the Middle Ages are this horrible time. They really demonstrate just very different priorities. And I think that that's, for a lot of casual readers, or even experts in the field, I think one of the hardest things about accessing this past is that there's oftentimes enough signposts to make you validate that nothing has changed. And to say that, like, oh, of course, our preconceptions of this time are valid. But when you actually sort of see how sources maneuver through ideas and think about like, a lot of these texts in their primary languages, you begin to understand that it's a very different world.

LC: Not to like toot our own horn here, but this is why podcasts like ours are so important.

EB: Oh, yeah. Because I mean, we've done – this is our third season, like there's so much material, it's not difficult for us to find all this material. And yet, a lot of people like to ignore that all of these things exist. So this kind of historical preservation and recovery work is so important. And that's why we love every single one of our guests who has been doing that work. But it's also very risky for many scholars.

RB: You know, I think this work is still risky to this day. I was at my major conference, Byzantine studies conference, a year ago, and I had a monk from Mount Sinai run up to me, and he's like, "I'm really loving reading your book." And I had a moment where I was like, what book? What book are you reading? Oh, no. And he was like, "Your first book." And I'm like, "Oh, great. You can read that book. It's not a problem." Like, there's always this fear. Because you know, it's easy to sort of have archives closed off to you out of fear that you'll find more information sometimes, or just out of how dare you. And oftentimes, advisors will explicitly tell you not to do things like this because, you know, you're gonna hurt your reputation or so forth. And so, I think it's a very sort of systemic and systematic process.

LC: We're going to end with a quote from Roland about the role of historians in queer readings of Christianity.

RB: Narratives like these push us to understand the ways in which intimacies between men existed in various aspects of religious life, even between monks. These relations may not always have been prized or embraced, but they also did not receive the hatred and intensity of vitriol that they find in radicalized Christianity today. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that in the privacy of mass communities, and rites like adelphic voices, queer figures had ample room to exist in loving relationships, far beyond what the archive has been able to preserve. Our written sources point obliquely to the existence of these relations, but detailed stories of these intimacies are left only as an imprint, an outline in the sand of lives now lost, that had been forgotten by history. As historians, our role is not simply to regurgitate what was written, but to read between the lines. That's the only way we'll unearth the realities of subjects whose lives were either shielded by secrecy or erased, often on purpose by the history that followed.

LC: Beautiful. Historians like us, Ellie, we're so important.

EB: You are correct.

LC: Well, really like Alyse, I should say. People like us, who react to historians, so important.

EB: And who compile all of these historians together in a podcast, very, very important.

LC: I am so looking forward to next week's episode, where we are going to be talking about the queer ways to read the Bible.

EB: Cannot wait. Until then, here's a taste of what's to come on Sweetbitter.

Shannon TL Kearns: So by the time I came out as trans, I had two coming out moments. Came out as gay first and was like, this still isn't quite it. Came out as trans a couple years later. And by the time I came out as trans, I had really done a lot of unlearning of the harmful messages I had received about LGBT folks growing up in evangelical church. I had like, found new ways to read the Bible, I no longer believed that being gay was sinful. And so coming out as trans wasn't a struggle as far as like a theological struggle, because I had already done that work. But the thing that happened that I wasn't expecting was how my trans identity and coming back into my body as a trans person changed the way that I read scripture, and returned me to a like integrated Christianity that combined head and heart. After I came out the first time, my theology and my faith became really intellectual, and it needed to be that way. But when I came out as trans, and started doing work through a trans theological lens, suddenly, my head and my heart were joined again. And that was something that I wasn't expecting to happen. And it's been a real gift. And I'm so, so grateful for it.

Reverend Jeanelle Ablola: I think that being queer helps form and shape and mold my Christianity, or how I am a Christian, in the sense that it allows me to question, it allows me to redefine, it allows me to sort of think beyond binary understandings of things. And it's also helped me question power dynamics. And the Bible is so full of power dynamics and relationships where politics, where economics, where all of those things were impacting people, the people in the Bible, so yeah, it kind of helped me be more aware of those things. Most important to me is the ability to wrestle with the text, this text that's been used to hurt us and harm us. How can we make it into a text that is liberating, you know? Because it's, I mean, it's possible, it's not impossible.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode will be released on the 3rd of April.

EB: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple and Spotify.

LC: Like any church, we have an offering plate. We can’t pass it down the pew, but you can give us your tithings on Patreon, at patreon.com/sweetbitter.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte. Our assistant producer is Thea Smith. Our audio engineers are Cora Cicala and Ana López Reyes, and our artwork is by Istela Illustrated.

LC: Thank you to our guest this week, Roland Betancourt. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Bluesky at @sweetbitterpod. Stay sweet!

LC: And bitter!