Last Updated on January 13, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Donald Boisvert was a gay theologian, religion professor, author and priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He died on June 19, 2019 at age 67 after a long illness.
His books include “Out on Holy Ground: Meditations on Gay Men’s Spirituality” (2000), “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” (2004), “Gay Catholic Priests and Clerical Sexual Misconduct: Breaking the Silence,” co-authored with Robert Shore-Goss (2005), “Queer Religion,” co-edited with Jay Emerson Johnson (2011) and “The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender,” co-edited with Carly Daniel-Hughes (2017).
Boisvert (Dec. 21, 1951 – June 19, 2019) worked for many years at Concordia University in Montreal, where he taught as associate professor of religious studies. He also held various administrative positions, including chair of the religion department. In his role as dean of students from 1996 to 2003, he endowed the Donald L. Boisvert Scholarship for Gay and Lesbian Studies at Concordia University. He served as co-chair of the Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Group at the American Academy of Religion from 2000 to 2007. He retired from Concordia in 2016 to follow his longtime dream of becoming a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada.
Donald Boisvert: My personal memories
In 2005, long before I began writing the LGBTQ Saints series, I was so impressed by Boisvert’s book “Sanctity and Male Desire” that I wrote him a fan letter. I was delighted by his warm and encouraging reply!
I had just launched my first website, Jesusinlove.org, so I told him about how I created it to promote LGBTQ spirituality.
It meant a lot to me when he responded with enthusiasm: “Your projects look exciting, and your web site was a joy. Thanks so much for your wonderful ministry.”
He also told me that he was “particularly proud” of writing “Sanctity and Male Desire,” “especially since saints, as you no doubt picked up, have always been a bit of an obsession of mine.”
“Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” contains 12 chapters: Michael the Archangel; Sebastian and Tarcisius; John the Baptist; Joseph; Paul and Augustine; the Ugandan and North American martyrs; Francis of Assisi; Dominic Savio and other boy saints; Damien and the missionary saints; Peter Julian Eymard and the Eucharist; and gay saints.
Over the years he continued to support my work, and gladly wrote a blurb endorsing my book “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision”:
“What a joy it is to hold, read and contemplate a book such as this! …Kittredge Cherry’s prayerful commentary on the twenty-four panels helps move us to a place of profound theological reflection. Not only is this a compellingly gay and much-needed re-visioning of the central Christian mystery. It also defiantly reaffirms our common humanity.”
In his book about saints, Boisvert wrote, “Human desire is a path to spiritual wholeness.”
I wish that Donald Boisvert had lived long enough to witness me founding the LGBTQ Saints group on Facebook, but I believe that he watches over it from eternal life. I celebrate the life of Donald Boisvert as he enters eternal life and continues on the path to oneness with God and communion with the saints that he loved so well.
Quotes by Donald Boisvert
“Saints simply assume the risks more often than the rest of us do.”
— Donald Boisvert
“Queering implies a stretching, at times a breaking, of the limits and bonds that circumscribe, from a theologically orthodox point of view, the proper ways of relating to the holy. Queering implies nothing less than receiving the saint’s seed rather than bathing in his grace; penetrating or being penetrated by him rather than offering him empty tokens of worship and adoration.”
— Donald Boisvert
“The pitfalls of religious institutions with respect to homosexuality are legion, and gay men are right to be wary of them. Yet gay men keep believing. We continue to attend church and temple, to pray and to meditate, to come together to celebrate and to worship. What explains this almost irrational need to remain part of what is certainly a homophobic—and somewhat passé, in the eyes of some—cultural institution? What is this “pull” that the religious exerts on us as gay men? Even more fundamentally, do we have a particularly unique way of apprehending the holy, of understanding the contours and the exigencies of its highly fortuitous, though powerful, existence? What makes us, as gay men, specifically religious, if at all? Is there something about gay culture that opens us to a sense of the sacred? Important questions all, though they sometimes reflect our nascent insecurities more than our certainties. I have argued that our religiosity is marked by our marginality, and that it is mainly transgressive in character. … We are rebellious because we are marginal, and we are receptive because that is how we love.”
— Donald Boisvert, “Out on Holy Ground: Meditations on Gay Men’s Spirituality”
Links related to Donald Boisvert
Donald L. Boisvert (1951-2019): ‘Teaching was for him a kind of ministry’: Concordia remembers the dedicated professor’s kindness, generosity and ‘wicked sense of humour’ (Concordia.ca)
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in February 2021 and was expanded with new material and checked for accuracy on June 18, 2022.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
