Diocese of Montreal gains new staff member: author of “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints”

From here (page 12):

A scholar who once served as dean of students at Concordia University is joined the staff of St. Matthias’ Church in Westmount, effective September 19. Don Boisvert is in his final year of study at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College and is completing his “in-ministry” requirement for graduation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa and two books and several scholarly articles to his credit.

Born in the United States of French-Canadian parents, he studied for several years at a Roman Catholic seminary and is still on the faculty at Concordia. He specializes in the history of Christianity, religion and sexuality and religion in Canada. He was received into the Anglican Church of Canada last year and is married to Gaston Lamontagne, his partner for 34 years.

“Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” is Boisvert’s attempt to see the traditional saints through a haze of homoeroticism:

he constructs an image of a perfectly shaped, highly eroticized male body ascribed to each of the saints. This imagined saintly body is repeatedly described as “beautiful,” “erotic,” “titillating,” “handsome,” “bare-chested,” “naked” or “semi-naked,” “muscular,” “glorious,” “ragged” and endowed with “perfection,” “virile masculinity,” “masculine strength,” etc. More often than not, the saints of old appear in a body conforming to the modern norm for gay beauty.

And we mustn’t leave out his homoerotic fantasies of Jesus:

Though Boisvert imagines Jesus to be a “handsome man,” “caring and attentive, sensitive yet principled” and working “bare-chested in the burning sun” (p. 180), he is attracted also to the “broken body” of Christ. The crucified Jesus (a “handsomely glorious body of Jesus [hanging] from the cross” (p. 171)) “elicits strong feelings of comfort and passive submission, the male docile and compliant body.” Yet, this submissiveness is immediately complemented by the symbol of the “lion” with its “brute aggressive force, the male as dominant energy and the definite top” (p. 170). Not surprisingly, the “fully male, genitally endowed” sculpture of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, with its “muscular arms, thighs and buttocks” (p. 177), commands Boisvert’s admiration.

Just what the Anglican Church of Canada needs on staff: a homosexual, “married” to a man, who is so immersed in his twisted little world of gay sex that, when he writes a book about Jesus and the saints, he cannot see beyond the end of his genitals.

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