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In response to AIDS, gay theologians reconsidered sex and its relationship to gayness. In the context of AIDS, they asked, is risky sex a self-hating and selfish, homicidal pursuit or an insistence on pleasure and relationship in the midst of death? This paper will approach this discussion obliquely by drawing on fraternity, or brotherhood, as a form of gay relationality open to sexual pleasure. It will consider fraternity as a theological category in the work of Kevin Gordon, a Christian Brother theologian and ethicist who died of AIDS while he was working through his own doctrine of fraternity. Gordon’s work will be explicated in relation to other uses of brotherhood in projects interrupted by death, like Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, started by Joseph Beam and finished by Essex Hemphill, and The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood by Robin Hardy, finished by David Groff.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In response to AIDS, gay theologians reconsidered sex and its relationship to gayness. In the context of AIDS, they asked, is risky sex a self-hating and selfish, homicidal pursuit or an insistence on pleasure and relationship in the midst of death? This paper will approach this discussion obliquely by drawing on fraternity, or brotherhood, as a form of gay relationality open to sexual pleasure. It will consider fraternity as a theological category in the work of Kevin Gordon, a Christian Brother theologian and ethicist who died of AIDS while he was working through his own doctrine of fraternity. Gordon’s work will be explicated in relation to other uses of brotherhood in projects interrupted by death, like Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, started by Joseph Beam and finished by Essex Hemphill, and The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood by Robin Hardy, finished by David Groff.