God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics Of Religious Violence

"Michael Cobb raises questions of both ethics and effectiveness that are deeply urgent. If you, too, want to know how the rhetorics of violence that swirl around queer people work, then read this book."
--Janet R. Jakobsen, co-author of "Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance"

aGod Hates Fags is an exciting, even exceptional, book, and it will contribute to an important and necessary conversation between queer studies and African American literary and cultural studies.a --Christopher Nealon, author of "Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall"

At the funeral of Matthew Shepard--the young Wyoming man brutally murdered for being gay--the Reverend Fred Phelps led his parishioners in protest, displaying signs with slogans like "Matt Shepard rots in Hell," "Fags Die God Laughs," and "God Hates Fags." In counter-protest, activists launched an "angel action," dressing in angel costumes, with seven-foot high wings, and creating a visible barrier so one would not have to see the hateful signs.

aI am moved by it, as by his practiced rhetorical sensibilitya
--"Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

Though long thought of as one of the most virulently anti-gay genres of contemporary American politics and culture, in God Hates Fags, Michael Cobb maintains that religious discourses have curiously figured as the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression and activism throughout the twentieth century. Cobb focuses on how queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to the violence done against them, alternating close readings of writings by JamesBaldwin, Tennessee Williams, Jean Toomer, Dorothy Allison, and Stephen Crane with critical legal and political analyses of Supreme Court Cases and anti-gay legislation. He also pays deep attention to the political strategies, public declarations, websites, interviews, and other media made by key religious right organizations that have mounted the most successful regulations and condemnations of homosexuality.