{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02960222016651249, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004625346901017576, 'mean_word_length': 5.4375, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Pulpitic Publicity: James Baldwin and the Queer Uses of Religious Words

“Light and life to all He brings, / Risen with healing in His Wings!” Unexpectedly, in the work of James Baldwin, religious language is the rhetoric through which queer characters create what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner would call “counterintimacies.”1 In their suggestive essay, “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner locate queer counterintimacies and queer “counterpublics” in unofficial and slightly romanticized locations, the worlds of “entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (558). Yet queer counterpublics are found not only in the “dirty-talk” (558) of the world-making and hazy spaces that Berlant and Warner pose against an official heterosexual normal. Perhaps queerness might also be found in the “sanitized” public discourses to which all of us are subject: in the excessive morality and normative words of a religious lexicon, for example, that by many definitions quickly offers the possibility of a life that cannot be explicitly articulated at the present tense of its experience. Sometimes, that is, the form of the “normal” and the assumption of identities that are quickly recognizable and socially understood, that seem normal, express a desire not merely for heterosexual enfranchisement but for legibility, community, and another route into social resistance that need not be so “counter” public in order to be innovative and queer.2 Indeed Berlant elsewhere acknowledges that “the wish for normalcy everywhere heard these days, voiced by minoritized subjects, often expresses a wish not to have to push so hard in order to have a ‘life.’”3 Certainly the decision to pursue routes through rather than against more socially recognizable structures and institutions of intimacy does not always imply that one has uncritically submitted to, or is even protected by, the state or even the church.4 The example of Baldwin is instructive because his iconic legacy confounds the ways both queer theory and critical race theory have articulated what counts