SAS Spotlight Interview with

Homodoxy Founder Samuel Ernest

Samuel Ernest is a theologian and writer in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the founding publisher and editor in chief of Homodoxy, a new press for gay/queer theology and literature. His essays in erotic spiritual autobiography have been featured in Cephalophore, Longreads, and Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series at The Audacity. He is graduating in May with a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University, after which he will begin working on the press full time.

Homodoxy is a small press that publishes literary and theological gay/queer texts. Its books are unburdened by imprimaturs, tenure committees, and heterosexist ideas of decency and respectability. They publish books worth burning.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Sam about his vision for Homodoxy and beyond. Read below!

Norah Clifford: What inspired you to begin your own small press?

Samuel Ernest: While pursuing doctoral work on gay/queer theology and literature, I kept seeing how LGBTQ lives are distorted in academic and religious venues, in more and less subtle ways. How many more books do we need on what the Bible “says” about gay or trans people? I started to ask, what are the forces that have kept young queer people from discovering the already rich history of LGBTQ spiritual writing?

Meanwhile, I kept finding figures like Judy Grahn, Winston Leyland, Jack Fritscher, and more—people who saw the connections between gay/lesbian/queer/trans spirituality and sexuality and started presses and other institutions in order to spread LGBTQ thought about LGBTQ spirituality and desire in the words that LGBTQ people actually use. I have editorial experience, so I thought, I could do that. I should do that. Small presses are part of our queer inheritance, so it feels like time to take up and join that ongoing history.

From that history, we learn that small presses can be powerful tools for fomenting and fermenting new thoughts and wild imaginations in a time when old school fascists and new technofascists are using their profound wealth to surveil us, isolate us from each other, and deaden our minds. 

NC: How do you define “Homodoxy” and how does it represent the type of work you’re looking to publish?

SE: The word can be interpreted in various ways. A literal etymological reading would be “same teaching,” like homosexuality refers to attraction to the same “sex” or orthodoxy refers to right teaching or belief. It can also be “gay belief”—that’s a gloss I like. Or a combination of “homo” and “doxy,” which a lot of gays will associate with doxy PEP, doxycycline taken as prophylaxis for STIs. (Ask your doctor if you have a variety of sexual partners and haven’t heard about it, yet!)

I hope the breadth of possible interpretations will allow Homodoxy to become a meeting ground for people who are involved in religious communities and pressing the boundaries of language within them alongside people who are living quite happily outside of religious communities who nonetheless make real claims grounded in encounters with the transcendent and divine. Homodoxy is open to publishing writers of all spiritual practices and religious backgrounds.

I will not publish arguments for inclusion in religious communities. Those arguments are out there; they have been out there since at least the 1950s; they are profoundly limiting; and I’m tired of reading them.

NC: Can you speak more to your vision for publishing literary and theological gay/queer texts? What about this intersection interests you?

SE: As I came to understand myself as gay, I looked for books that would help me understand myself. I was struck by the repetitive nature of books on queerness and Christianity. So many of them fail to take account of the forms of relationality and sexuality that exist within gay/queer communities, and instead just impose Christian categories on all queer people. So, there wasn’t much of an imagination beyond “all gays must be celibate” or “gays can marry but sex outside of marriage is bad.”

Meanwhile, I read novels by writers like Jeannette Winterson, James Baldwin, Randall Kenan, Gore Vidal, and John Rechy. Their books are what captured my imagination in a way that drove me into a new and freer embodiment that aligned with my understanding of God as overflowing, unwieldy love and generosity. I started wondering what forms of theological and spiritual writing have emerged and might still be emerging from within LGBTQ communities that could do that: provoke faith to spill out into new forms of life and relationality.

It is also interesting to me how many writers (queer and cishet alike) are drawn to religious forms for thought and life, and draw them into their own writing practices, while distancing themselves from belief, or remaining outside of it. I’ve learned a lot from some of these writers and am grateful for their work. But I would like to publish books that push into the realm that generates those forms in the first place: the state of being gripped by God, Goddess, Spirit, the wholly Other, etc., or what name have you yet to give it? 

NC: What other presses or authors have inspired your own work both in writing or in publishing?

SE: I’ve been inspired by Winston Leyland’s Gay Sunshine Press, which was active between the 1970s and 2000s. The more recent work of LittlePuss Press has been an encouragement. Writers like Rechy, Richard Rodriguez, Aurora Mattia, Judy Grahn, Geoff Mains, and Mohammed el-Kurd, as well as the theologians Bill Smith, Linn Marie Tonstad, Kathryn Tanner, Wendy Mallette, Paul A. Daniels, II, and Mark D. Jordan have all been inspirations.

NC: Your call for Unitudes is an exciting and unique opportunity, can you speak more about this submission call and what made you want to invite these types of projects?

SE: I am excited for that series, too! Unitudes is a pun on “multitudes,” from the Whitman quote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The word’s prefix connotes something singular, but the word is plural, so it is a placeholder for writing that moves back and forth between one thing and the multiple places that one thing can take us.

I want to give authors a chance to find their own words for writing about a personal investment in or commitment to a belief, desire, object, name, or activity—without using language from academic theories as shortcuts to emotional or intellectual revelation, as some versions of autotheory do.

That’s where my collaboration with the books’ authors will come in. I’d like the series to be pretty editorially hands-on. I’d like to help writers identify any patterns of thinking and writing that might hinder them from saying what they need to say while encouraging their idiosyncrasies so that they can say what they need to say in the way only they can say it! Editing queer language is or ought to be a work of love, and that’s what I bring to my manuscripts.

NC: How do you hope to create community within and around Homodoxy?

SE: This is something I’m thinking about a lot. We’ll host launch parties for new books, but I’m only planning to publish two new books per year. I plan to focus on in-person community rather than virtual gatherings or social media. Bodies in a room together—we need more of that, badly.

I’ve lived in New Haven, CT, since 2015, and I’m planning to stay here, at least until the press gets off the ground. There is a large and lovely loft space in the parish hall of the church I attend which I will rent as an office. I’ll host book clubs on new Homodoxy books and at some point teach some courses on gay/queer/trans theology and literature. I’m starting to have conversations with a friend at the New Haven Pride Center to think about ways we can collaborate.

I’m thirty-three years old. I was raised with AOL Instant Messenger, Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc., and I’ve become exhausted by continually inventing, performing, and reinventing myself through various virtual platforms, useful as they are for self-promotion. It is inconvenient to insist on bodies in a room. But it seems like queers are giving more attention to the life-giving elements of practices like raving and analog cruising, so I’m hopeful that we are remembering the pleasures of being in close proximity with friends and strangers.

I’d love to find ways to spread the word about Homodoxy through in-the-flesh and online-but-longer-form collaborations, so hit me up if you have ideas!

NC: Congratulations on completing your PhD! What excites you moving forward in your own creative work?

SE: Thank you so much! My dissertation is on a couple of men who entered formation with the De La Salle Christian Brothers (a lay order of Catholic teaching brothers) and left to participate in the building of gay institutions in the 1970s: Kevin Gordon, a theologian and sex therapist, and Tim Dlugos, the poet who became an Episcopal Seminarian here at Yale Divinity School. Both were killed by AIDS. I’m excited to turn my dissertation into an intertwined biography of the two men, who were aware of each other’s work but never met, as far as I can tell. I’ll draw on their lives and writings as windows into the development of gay theology and gay literature from the 1960s through the 1990s. The book will be researched and readable, engaging for a wide audience.

I’m also excited to give more attention now to a selection of Tim Dlugos’s prose and poetry, which I’m editing with David Trinidad. While dissertating, I found several things Tim wrote that we weren’t aware of previously. Finally, at some point, I’ll return to the collection of essays I’ve been writing—what I’ve been calling erotic spiritual autobiography. I write in different genres, I paint, I used to make music and would like to do that again. I go where the Spirit, and my scattered thoughts, lead.

Thank you to Sam for chatting with us! Explore more about Homodoxy HERE.

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net 

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is a program of the

The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

938 Lafayette Street, Suite 514 New Orleans, LA 70113

info@tennesseewilliams.net  |  504-581-1144

www.tennesseewilliams.net