Lynne Gerber

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar. Her current research is on religious responses to HIV/AIDS in 1980s and 90s San Francisco. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Articles

Religion Dispatches

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

“This is not my first plague.” In 1982, Rev. Steve Pieters was the first minister diagnosed with AIDS in the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) , a denomination that lost a third of its clergy to…

Lynne Gerber

December 21, 2020

Article

Religion Dispatches

Is Change Possible? Shifting the Ex-Gay Question

Exodus International appears to be re-thinking its commitment to transforming gay Christians into straight ones. So now it is the larger world’s turn to ask: is that kind of change really possible?

Lynne Gerber

July 11, 2012

Article

Religion Dispatches

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too.

Lynne Gerber

January 4, 2012

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