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| A website supporting my switchingview youtube and podcast channels |
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| A website supporting my switchingview youtube and podcast channels |
The switchingview project sets out to to tell a positive story about homosexual history, and to put right centuries of prejudice and distortion.
It will provide evidence showing how, in many periods through history and in many parts of the world, homosexual and other LGBTQIA+ people were widely accepted and valued for the gifts and qualities we brought to the societies we lived within. We have nothing to be ashamed of.
Sadly the Christian church developed teachings that were very critical of such people, often describing us as unnatural or disordered or sinful. This teaching distorted the narratives that developed about us and caused us great damage and suffering as Christian influence spread across the world. It is now time to challenge that prejudice and to develop a more accurate and positive set of histories.
I will be using social media to tell these stories - mainly through youtube videos and a podcast channel. I want these stories to be accessible to anybody in the world with a mobile phone or PC, rather than being inaccessible in a university library.
This switchingview.com website hosts information about the videos, podcasts and other data. The recordings are listed in the table below, both those already uploaded and the ones I plan to make over the next couple of years.
The switchingview YouTube channel can be found here. The podcast channel will be set up during the summer of 2024.
Each recording is listed with a youtube link, a podcast link (in due course), a short description of the contents, and links to a "Texts and Resources" document. These documents lists all the evidence and references I have used. There will also be guidance for further reading if you want to find out more for yourself. Again, wherever posible, I have listed easily available books, newspapers and web resources, rather than academic articles locked away within university libraries.
Planned for Summer 2024 - The background to the switchingview project, and how to get the best out of it.
Project 1 - Intermediate TypesIn this "Intermediate Types" video series I explore the relationship between the Christian Church, homosexuality, and LGBTQ+ people across history. I explore the ideas contained in Edward Carpenter's book Intermediate Types. He described how if you study LGBTQ+ peoples within cultures dominated by Christianity you will get a distorted picture due to Christian anti-gay prejudice. Unfortuanately the European colonial project from the 15th to 20th Century CE spread this Christian influence, forcibly, right across the world. But if you make the effort to examine cultures across the world and across history before Christianity got there then you will find a different story. There are countless examples of cultures where "intermediate type" people (people who appear similar to what we might today label LGBTQ+) were accepted by the society they live within, and in many cases valued for what they offered and how they lived. These recordings have been created to tell this more complete set of stories about our queer lives. |
Three introductory videos - Uploaded February 2024.
Int1.1. Edward Carpenter's Intermediate Types. How to uncover LGBTQ+ History - Exploring Edward Carpenter's theories on how to explore homosexual history, especially by looking outside the sphere of influence of Christianity to escape the distorting effects of prejudice.
Int1.2. Intermediate Types - The Evidence. Stories of Queer People in History - Following on from part 1, examples of many valued and accepted Intermediate Type people to be found across history if we follow Carpenter's method.
Int1.3. Suppression and Genocide. How Colonialism damaged LGBTQ+ History - Exploring how European Colonialism supressed and damaged many of the cultures in which these Intermediate Type people existed, to the extent that the memory of them has now been all but forgotten.
Intermediate Types - Texts and Resources Document
Planned for April-June 2024
There are a huge number of reports across history, and across continents, of Intermediate Type people being valued for their involvement in religion and spirituality - as priests, shamen and many other vocations. In this video I discuss many examples of this phenomen, and explore how such people were viewed, and often valued, by the cultures they lived within.
Part 1 - Describing the many examples of Queer Ministry to be found aross history.
Part 2 - Exploring theories about how such a link between sexuality and religion may have developed.
Part 3 - Bible study, exploring examples of Queer Ministry to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testamant.
Planned for Summer/Autumn 2024
This video explores the many reports of how, in many military cultures, the same-sex loving companionship beteen warriors was held to be a great virtue and the bedrock of military effectiveness.
Part 1 - Describing the many examples of Warrior Love to be found aross history.
Part 2 - Exploring theories about how a link between same-sex love and military effectiveness may have developed.
Part 3 - Bible study, exploring examples of Warrior Love to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testamant.
Planned for Late Summer 2024
The vast bulk of the evidence available about LGBTQIA+ issues comes to us in written and textual sources. But some interesting evidence is available from archaeology, and the study of skeletons and grave goods.
This video describes some examples of this, and explores how the modern ability to accurately determine skeletal gender is challenging old patriarchal, heteronormative assumptions about some of these ancient cultures.
Starred videosMost of these Intermediate Type videos will be structured for a general audience. They will be accessable for anybody interested in the history of sexuality and religion. No specialist knowledge will be assumed. However I will be creating a few videos which go into Bible Study and Bible history in greater detail. These videos are marked with a * sign. |
Planned for Late Summer 2024
Part 1 - A more detailed look the treatment of Sex, Sexuality, and Same Sex love within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament)
Part 2 - Going on to explore how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be created, and how the apparent negativity towards Same Sex love might have entered the texts and teachings.
No Planned Date Yet
Much of the scholarship challenging church issues around sexuality is as relevant to gender questions as it is to questions of sexual orientation. In the Int5* Holy Sex video I discuss how Christian scholarship has a tendency to label certain women as prostitutes or shamed women in some way.
This video explores the stories of Bathsheba, Saint Mary Magdalen, and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, to ask if those labels are still justified.
No Planned Date Yet.
Within Britain, much of the discussion about colonialism focusses on the slave trade. But a deeper analysis will show that there were many other equally damaging effects. Theft (of land, wealth, and cultural artifacts), Disease, and Genocide. Such genocide could be actual genocide in which the population was killed, or cultural genocide in which the population remained alive, but a new culture was forcibly imposed on them.
These videos contain three case studies which explore how the European colonial project damaged and supressed Intermediate Type people and communities across the world, through the forced imposition of European, often Christian inspired, laws, teaching and customs.
Part 1 - Spain, the Americas and the Conquistadores.
Part 2 - British Punishment expeditions in Africa; 19th Century CE
Part 3 - Forced assimilation within schools, often Church run Schools, in Canada, USA and the Pacific Islands.
No Planned Date Yet
Christianity became the official state religion in the Roman Empire after Constantine's "conversion". This video describes how church leaders used this power in the 4th to 6th Centuries CE to forcibly supress expressions of intermediate type and queer ministry behaviour.
The word "intersectionality" is used to describe how the study of discrimination and oppression cannot be sectioned off into discrete subject areas - race, gender, sexuality, disability. It is necessary to understand how these issues overlap and inter-react.
In this video I explore how the study of homosexuality overlaps with other recent research on gender and patriarchy.
No Planned Date Yet
No Planned Date Yet
I think it is important to explore exactly why the church developed such virulent teaching against homosexuality in the first few centuries. Is it simply that God Hates Gays, or are there other systemic reasons arising out of how the early church developed.
This first video is inspired by Carpenter's "reformation" theory given in his book Intermediate Types. He wrote "Just as, according to Darwin, the sharpest rivalry occurs between a species and the closely allied species from which it has sprung, so in any religion there is the fiercest theological hatred against the form which has immediately preceded it. Early Christianity could never say enough against the Pagan cults of the old world."
Can it be argued that some Christian and Jewish teachings against homosexuality and other intermediate types arose simply out of the fact that such behaviour was widely accepted and integrated into the Pagan and Canaanite religious traditions that Christianity and Judaism regarded as their enemy?
No Planned Date Yet
A second "What Went Wrong" Video
There was a very strong emphasis on celibacy in the early church, and a distrust of the sexual and the erotioc. Whilst celibacy may have been been appropriate for many people, it is a difficult discipline. Can it be argued that some Christian anti-gay teaching is linked to an unconscious level of mysogyny and homophobia arising out of an unhelpful overemphasis on a celibate vocation?
No Planned Date Yet
In a fascinating book "Silence - a Christian History", Diarmaid MacCulloch uses the phrase Nicodemites for those people who had to keep themselves hidden and silent, for whatever reason. And being in the closet was one of those reasons.
In this video I discuss the many reports of those people in Christian history who may have been homosexual, and how those people contributed to our Christian tradition.
Project 2 - Talking about HomosexualityAs you look across the world at descriptions of homosexuality there seems to be no pattern to what is described, either in the reports of people's behaviour, or in the attitudes to such behaviour within the various cultures within which they live. In some cultures homosexual people are valued, in others they are despised. In some cultures only a small proportion seem to be active in same-sex behaviour, in other cultures nearly everybody is involved, especially when young. How do you make sense of this? in this project I will be looking at how we study and analyse homosexuality. Firstly, it is important to look at how such behaviours are recorded and available for later study by academics. It may be easy to study those attitudes and behaviours which exist in public, but it is also important to study the semi-hidden or hidden subcultures which can make up a large part of homosexual existence. How do we detect and analyse these hidden cultures? And what are the problems if we fail to include them in our study? Secondly, what "causes" homosexuality? Is it nature or nurture? I will be arguing that homosexuality is a "heritable" condition, stable across millennia and across cultures, which has evolved due to the advantages it brings to the individual and/or the wider group or society.
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Project 3 - Edward CarpenterEdward Carpenter was an English social reformer and writer who lived from 1844 to 1929. He wrote some of the earliest books on homosexual reform in the UK. I will be using many of his ideas in my videos, especially those contained in his 1914 book "Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk - a study in social evolution". Carpenter is a fascinating man who is well worth knowing about quite apart from his books on homosexuality. I have created an Edward Carpenter Archive which hosts a lot of Carpenter texts, music, letters and other resources. My Carpenter video biography is hosted in the YouTube channel
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Watch Video (Uploaded April 2023)
Carpenter Biography - Texts and Resources Document
Finally, I put a lot of work into these videos, and it would be good if they can be seen by the largest number of people. So if you have a friend or colleague who you think would benefit from knowing about them, please pass on the word. TELL A FRIEND! - SPREAD THE WORD!Thank You |