A website supporting my switchingview YouTube Channel and Podcast Platform

The switchingview project tells positive stories about LGBTQIA+ people from centuries past. It explores the relationship between homosexual people and the Christian Church, in a way that corrects centuries of religious prejudice and distortion.

It describes how in many cultures, right across the world and across history, homosexual and other LGBTQIA+ people were widely accepted and valued for the gifts they brought to their cultures. Sadly the Christian church developed teachings that were critical of these people. And as Christian influence was spread across the world, LGBTQIA+ people were attacked, pagan and indigenous cultures suppressed, and these varied queer histories have been all but forgotten.

It is now time to challenge that suppression, to recover these histories, and to appreciate the full diversity of what LGBTQIA+ lives have been, and can be in the future.

The switchingview project uses social media to tell these stories - through Podcasts, YouTube videos and a website. I want the stories to be accessible to anybody in the world with a mobile phone or PC, rather than being locked away in a university library.

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.

Each recording is listed with a Podcast/Video link, a short description of the content, and links to a "Texts and Resources" document. These documents list all the evidence and references I have used in the recordings. There will also be guidance for further reading if you want to find out more for yourself. Wherever posible, I have listed easily available books, newspapers and web resources, rather than hard to access academic articles.

To access the recordings please explore the table below, or you can go directly to the switchingview YouTube Channel, or the switchingview Podcast Platform.

I would welcome any feedback on this work. Please Contact Me.



Project 1 - Intermediate Types

I take as my starting point the ideas contained in Edward Carpenter's 1914 book Intermediate Types.

"Intermediate Types" is an umbrella term used by Carpenter, in the very early years of LGBTQIA+ research, to denote what we would today call LGBTQIA+ people.

Carpenter described how if you study LGBTQIA+ peoples within cultures dominated by Christianity you will get a distorted picture due to Christian inspired anti-gay prejudice.

Unfortunately European colonialism from the 15th to 20th Century CE has spread this anti-gay influence, forcibly, right across the world.

But Carpenter made the effort to examine cultures across the world and across history before Colonialism and Christianity got there, and he found a different story, a story of societies and cultures where Intermediate Type people were valued for the gifts they brought to their peoples.

The switchingview project describes these positive and affirming Intermediate Type stories, and then asks what lessons we can bring from these stories into our modern understandings of homosexuality and LBGTQIA+ experience.

Once I have told the Intermediate Types story I will start on other Video/Podcast projects exploring the intersection between sexuality, spirituality and religion.

List of YouTube Videos / Podcasts

Int1 - Intermediate Types

Three introductory recordings - Uploaded February 2024.

Int1.1. Edward Carpenter's Intermediate Types. How to uncover LGBTQ+ History

Describing 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.

YouTube Video | Podcast Recording

Int1.2. Intermediate Types - The Evidence. Stories of Queer People in History

Following on from part 1 - Eight historical examples showing how LGBTQIA+ people were valued and accepted in cultures across the world and across history, especially in the contexts of warfare and religion.

YouTube Video | Podcast Recording

Int1.3. Suppression and Genocide. How Colonialism damaged LGBTQ+ History

This recording describes how as European Colonialism spread across the world, many of the indigenous cultures in which Intermediate Type people had lived were supressed and damaged, to the extent that the memory of them is now all but forgotten. It is time to recover these lost histories.

YouTube Video | Podcast Recording

Texts and Resources Document - Listing the texts and references used in all three recordings, and recommendations for further reading.

The full text of Carpenter's book "Intermediate Types" is available here - Intermediate Types full text. For more about Edward Carpenter see Project 3 below.



Int2 - How do you tell the History of Homosexual People?

Uploaded August 2024

A recording discussing questions like "What exactly is homosexuality?", and "Who gets to define who or what can be described as a homosexual person in history?"

These are contested and controversial questions, so it is important I explain the approach I will be using in this switchingview project.

YouTube Video | Podcast Recording

Texts and Resources Document - Listing the texts and references used in this recording, and recommendations for further reading.



Int3 - Queer Ministry

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 - a phenomenon I have labelled Queer Ministry.

It is important to know this history.

It is affirming for those of us who are LGBTQIA+ + to hear stories where we are valued and affirmed. and it helps us to push back at outdated Christian teaching which is often unfairly and inaccurately critical of such people.

Int3.1 - QUEER MINISTRY Part 1. How Patriarchy suppressed LGBT and Third Gender Priests and Spiritual Leaders. .

INTRODUCTION - The first of a four part series of recordings introducing the important issues - especially how new research into Patriarchy can inform our understanding of LGBTQIA+ history.

YouTube Video (Re-edited and re-uploaded January 2025)

Texts and Resources Document - Listing the texts and references used in the recording, and recommendations for further reading.

Int 3.2 QUEER MINISTRY - Gender Variant Priesthood and Shamanism Across the World

A detailed study of Homoeroticism and Gender Variance linked to Shamanism and Priesthood right across the world.

Planned for upload - early 2025

Int 3.3 - QUEER MINISTRY in Judah and Christian Rome

A detailed look at how Judaism and Christianity developed anti Queer Ministry attitudes and teachings.

Planned for upload - early 2025

3.4 - QUEER MINISTRY - How Jacob and Joseph in the Hebrew Bible are stories of gender variance.

Despite much religious anti-gay teaching, modern scholars are increasingly willing to argue that many Bible stories have a gender variant or homoerotic origin. This video looks at Jacob, Joseph, and the Ethiopian Eunuch to describe such scholarship

Planned for upload - Summer 2025





Int 4A - Warrior Love

This recording explores the many reports of how, in many military cultures, same-sex loving relationships beteen warriors were 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 - Bible study, exploring possible examples of Warrior Love to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures (Saul, David and Jonathan) and the New Testament (the Centurion and his servant).



Int 5 - A Skeleton Argument

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 recording describes some examples of this, and explores how the modern ability to accurately determine skeletal gender is challenging old patriarchal, heteronormative assumptions within the scholarship. I describe examples where skeletons of warriors and hunters are in fact female, and skeletons buried in women's clothing and with beads and mirrors which are male.



Int 6 - Colonial Repression

No Planned Date Yet.

Within Britain, much of the discussion about colonialism focusses on the slave trade. But a deeper analysis will show that colonialism caused many other equally damaging effects. There was 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 Christian culture was forcibly imposed on them.

These recordings contain three case studies which explore how the European colonial project damaged and supressed Intermediate Type people and their communities across the world, through the forced imposition of European, often Christian inspired, laws, teachings and customs.

Part 1 - Spain, the Americas and the Conquistadores. 15th/16th Century CE.

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. 19th/20th/21st Century CE.



Int 7 - Repression in the Late Roman Empire

No Planned Date Yet

Christianity became the official state religion in the Roman Empire after Constantine's "conversion". This recording 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.



Int 8 - What Went Wrong - Carpenter's Reformation Theory

No Planned Date Yet

I think it is important to ask exactly why the church developed such virulent teaching against homosexuality. Is it simply that God Hates Gays, or are there other systemic reasons arising out of how the early church developed?

This first recording 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. . . . . Similarly the early Protestants could never say malignant things enough against the Roman Catholics; or the Secularists in their turn against the Protestants. In all these cases there is an element of fear - fear because the thing supposed to have been left behind lies after all so close, and is always waiting to reassert itself - and this fear invests the hated symbol or person with a halo of devilish potency."

Can it be argued that 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 predecessor and enemy?



Int 9 - What Went Wrong - Sex, Celibacy and Homophobia?

No Planned Date Yet

A second "What Went Wrong" recording

There was a very strong emphasis on celibacy in the early church, and a distrust of the sexual and the erotic. Whilst celibacy may have been been suitable for some people, it is a difficult discipline when imposed on those for whom it may have been inappropriate.

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?



Int 9 - Holy Servants and Holy Sex

Part 1 - A detailed look at the treatment of Sex, Sexuality, and Same Sex love within the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament).

In particular, I describe how many mainstream Christian Bibles seriously misrepresent this sexual content when translating the text from Hebrew into English. The Hebrew Bible is much more strange and sexual and "queer" than many of us realise.

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.



Int 10 - Rehabilitating Shamed Women

No Planned Date Yet

Much of the scholarship challenging church teachings about sexuality is as relevant to gender questions as it is to questions of sexual orientation. In the Int9 "Holy Servants and Holy Sex" recording I discuss how Christian scholarship has a tendency to label women as prostitutes or shamed women in some way.

This recording explores the stories of Tamar (and Judah), Bathsheba (and David), Rahab, Saint Mary Magdalen, the Samaritan Woman at the Well, and the women around Jesus, to ask if those labels are still justified.



Int 11 - Intersectionality

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 recording I explore how the study of homosexuality overlaps with other recent research on gender and patriarchy.

No Planned Date Yet



Int 12 - The Nicodemites

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 silent and hidden, for whatever reason. And being in the closet was one of those reasons for silence.

In this video I discuss the many reports of people in Christian history who may have been homosexual, and how these people contributed to our Christian life and tradition.






Project 2 - Talking about Homosexuality

As 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, asking questions like:

What is homosexuality? Is it to do with sex and the erotic, or love and companionship, or both?

How are such behaviours recorded and available for later study by academics. It may be easy to study those attitudes and behaviours which exist in public and are written about, but how do you study the semi-hidden or hidden subcultures which can make up a large part of homosexual expience. How do we access records of these hidden cultures? What records have been lost, or never created in the first place? What are the problems if our data collection is incomplete or distorted?

Finally, what "causes" homosexuality? Is it nature or nurture or both? 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 individuals and/or the wider group or society.

Two recordings, target date mid 2025



Project 3 - Edward Carpenter

Edward 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

Edward Carpenter - A Video Biography

Watch Video (Uploaded April 2023)

Texts and Resources Document - citing texts used in the video, and recommendations for further reading.



Finally, I put a lot of work into these recordings, 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!

I would welcome comments and suggestions on this work - Contact Me.

Thank You