Please read this page before submitting your manuscript.
What makes a Homodoxy book?
Homodoxy accepts submissions under three headings: an open call, BRICC, and Unitudes.
Open call
Homodoxy will consider manuscripts in any genre: major and minor forms in major and minor keys.
Stories, warnings, visions, proverbs, fables, prayers, erotic writing, novels, essay collections, poetry collections.
Odd and old forms welcome, including prayer books, regulae for particular ways of living, the gay little black book.
There should be something at stake for you, the writer, in writing it and for the reader in reading it.
You need a stake for a book worth burning TM.
Gay/queer/trans life and religion/spirituality are at the forefront.
For our purposes, gay/queer/trans life includes life in degrees of deviation from heterosexuality, binary gender, the nuclear family, whiteness, and/or married monogamy.
- Not every book has to do all of that.
- You do not need to identify as L, G, B, T, or Q, or something else in order to deviate meaningfully.
- In fact, identification as queer, particularly, can become a substitute for lived queerness.
For our purposes, religion/spirituality includes evidence of communal and solo grappling with God, Spirit, the divine, the Trinity, angels, demons, saints, neighbors, particular religious communities, the Gospels, the varieties of sexual transcendence, a fascination with icons, prayer beads, erotic art, unbearable sound or sights, silence.
While Homodoxy is primarily interested in Christian traditions, writers grappling with the Torah, the Mishnah, the Quran, Sufi mysticism, new queer religions, the Ezili, a particular yogic tradition, indigenous spiritualities, and others are welcome.
- Piety/intimate devotion is very welcome but difficult to do well on the page—I’m excited for editing work there.
- People who have left a religion/tradition but take its practices, G/god(s), saints, texts, etc., with them are welcome.
- Interesting engagements with religious/spiritual themes by people with no religious affiliations are welcome.
Buck the scripts you were given—now what?
I’m looking for lived-in language. Vernacular from your own life, communities, loves.
Full speech.
What Mark D. Jordan said:
We need liturgical prayers and hymns, novels and poems, hagiographies and histories, moral tracts and systematic theologies in which same-sex love appears as what it is and ought more plainly to have been: life under grace. I apply this imperative even when LGBT theologies are counted in as special voices, as boutique voices, within more tolerant churches. We will be trapped once again if we allow LGBT theology to be an add-on, a hasty supplement to the “real” speech of churches. We accomplish full speech we can speak fluently in any genre of theology or spirituality or liturgy or homiletics—and then beyond them, into new or refashioned genres.
Mark D. Jordan, Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech (2003)
Theology is welcome in all forms—including devotional theology, truly mystical theology, poetry, interesting takes on pastoral and practical theology, theology grounded in a certain practice.
I’m less likely to be interested in methodologically concerned systematic theology, but I’m open to direct and oblique engagements with creation, salvation, sin, the Trinity, church, ummah, covenant, oneness, etc.
Give me theology and writing that savors the pleasures and plumbs the difficulties of queer life and faith.
Expect rounds of developmental edits.
Books will be edited by me. I’m most experienced with prose, but I have worked with poetry and experimental writing. Similarly, I’m a Christian, but I read broadly and wish to publish broadly. I will seek editorial advice on projects I am enthusiastic about that lie outside my expertise.
You may have a strong sense of who you are as a writer already—great. You may have strong ideas and hints of voice with a desire to develop your sense of who you are as a writer through editing—also great. Either way, I look forward to helping you bring your manuscript into its fullness.
Explicit engagement with sex welcome. The writing must still be good.
Engagements with the current moment are encouraged.
This press does not endorse political candidates, but it is antifascist, left and leftish, pro-trans, pro-Black, and pro-PACBI.
Translations welcome.
Fragments are fine. What about really really long passages that still hold attention? That’s welcome, too.
Writing that demands attention.
Complexity, fascination, simplicity, devotion. That sums it up?
Some caveats:
Other presses already publish resources for convincing people it’s ok to be queer. This press isn’t a good fit for that, i.e., the “gay/queer/trans is good actually, and here’s how” book.
Write as if cishets aren’t reading. Although we encourage them to read (and even write).
I’m not really interested in whether or not Christianity is or is not queer, so that it is or isn’t shouldn’t be a prior for an argument or the point of an argument.
I’m not looking for academic monographs or otherwise footnote-laden writing.
Your manuscript can definitely be researched and archive-based, but if the book is most legible relative to a certain scholarly field or discourse, I’ll only consider it if it approaches its topic with poppers or a hammer. Or poppers and a hammer.
Not really looking for straightforward history, philosophy (analytical or continental), or political theory, though chopped and screwed forms are welcome.
The use of Artificial Intelligence is heartily unwelcome and will be contractually forbidden.
We’ll get blocked and unblocked together. When we don’t know something, we’ll ask someone and build a new relationship! <3
No theory words just sprinkled in for shits or as if it does something, but we all have our vices.
I’d rather avoid trendy concepts that have migrated from academic discourses like new materialism, e.g., mushrooms and entanglement, unless your take on it is unique, splintering, actually transcendent.
Transgression for the sake of transgression is not my personal favorite, but it has its powerful moments.
BRICC
A bricc is foundational and projectile.
Books Reprinted in Contemporary Context (BRICC)
I have a list of briccs I’m working on, so submissions here aren’t high priority at the moment, but please do propose titles of works of LGBTQ spirituality that are worth reprinting and bringing to a new audience.
Translations welcome!
New collections of writing by dead people welcome, too.
Include in your pitch why this text or collection now and thoughts toward how it might be framed in an introductory essay, preface, or afterword.
Unitudes
A unitude is an exercise of simplicity in complexity and complexity in simplicity.
A series for people who have grappled with a particular thing for a long time. Tell us about that thing as only you can.
Topics could include creation, salvation, celibacy, promiscuity, pastoral theology, prayer, sin, devotion, woodwork, editing, crying, the name of God, organizing, writing liturgies, silence, song, fisting, fashion, family, death, spirituals, etc. [Crossed out words are already reserved.]
This is a more editorially engaged series for writers wishing to develop something for Homodoxy that they wouldn’t write otherwise.
Draw me into your whirlwind. We’ll find our way through it together.
Read some quotes I like, or some early Homodoxy essays.
Back to the submissions page.