Our Tribe: A Lesbian ECU-Terrorist Outs the Bible for the Queer Millennium

Wilson, chief ecumenical officer of the gay and lesbian-oriented Metropolitan Community Church, senior pastor of the MCC in Los Angeles and self-styled ``lesbian ecu-terrorist,'' exudes pithy humor and hard-nosed boldness. With this wide-ranging mixture of anecdotal autobiography and piercing deconstruction of passages in the Old and New Testaments that buttress homophobia (she calls them ``texts of terror''), she charges into the next millennium filled with sharp criticism for the determined insistence of Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelical fundamentalists that ``queer'' believers be kept at arm's length (or even farther) from the reconciling embrace Jesus taught. Herself a savvy survivor of the MCC's struggle to gain admission to the National Council of Churches, Wilson recalls an NCC official's 1992 statement about homosexuality as ``the most divisive issue in the church since slavery,'' and finds that it remains true in 1995. Still, she finds hope in the fact that the church's almost monolithic resistance may be beginning to crack from the critical mass of books by such pro-gay religious apostles as John Shelby Spong, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott and John Boswell, and in the burgeoning Christian commitment of many gays and lesbians themselves. (Oct.)