Dr. Brett Krutsch is the editor of the Revealer and the Director of the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, He speaks to Brad about his book, "Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics." In Dying to Be Normal, Krutzsch argues that gay activists have in the past enacted a political strategy to present gays as similar to the country's dominant class of white, straight Christians. Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths, Krutzsch counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have been oppositional and reveals how gay activists used religion to bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights, and therefore deserving of equal rights. In his view, this is a limiting strategy that stifles the movement for queer liberation.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I am faculty at the University of San Francisco and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today by Dr. Brett Crutch, who has just an amazing CV and is doing many, many things.
So before I just name those things, I'm just going to say, Brett, thanks for joining me today.
Thank you for having me.
I love this podcast.
So I just want to let everybody know all the things you're doing, which are astounding.
You are the coordinator of NYU's Center for Religion and Media, and in conjunction with that role, serve as the editor for The Revealer.
And those of us in the religious studies game love The Revealer, and I'm sure many people listening will have been readers of The Revealer.
Just a great outlet.
You are the author of Dying to be Normal, Gay Martyrs, and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics, and we're going to center that book and basically spend the next half hour talking about it.
It's a really important contribution to American religious studies, studies related to queer theory and LGBTQ activism, etc.
You've also co-authored several works, one with Dr. Samir Mehta, The Changing Jewish Family, Jewish Communal Responses to Interfaith and Same-Sex Marriage, and there's also a book underway, an edited volume, Transparent and Queering the Jewish Family on TV.
Dr. Crutch's work has been cited and he's also written for Washington Post, Newsday, The Advocate, and other outlets.
I don't know when you sleep, I don't know when you have a life outside of academia with all that going on, but it's truly amazing.
All right, so as I said, we're here to talk about your book, which came out a couple years ago, and from Oxford University Press, 2019, Dying to be Normal, Gay Martyrs, and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics.
One of the things that I think just continues to surprise folks, whether that's people listening to this show or students in religious studies courses, is just how pervasive Christian framing and values are in our public square.
And it's true even of what we might consider progressive activist spaces.
So we might think of the Ten Commandments, you know, outside of a courtroom in Alabama.
We might think of prayers before a football game in Georgia.
We don't often think about activism surrounding LGBTQ rights and so on, and the sort of interjection of Christian values in ways that are problematic.
So I guess the first question is this, can you help us understand the problem that shaped your book?
I mean, in the book, and we're going to get to this, you examine the lives of Of folks like Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard.
Not only their lives, but also their deaths.
As you examined figures like Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard, what happened that bothered you enough to say, I think there's a book here and I think there's a problem that really needs to be brought to light.
Yes.
So it started 11 years and one month ago when the gay sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller inaugurated the internet video campaign, It Gets Better, which many people may remember.
And the idea of their video campaign Was to try to prevent LGBT youth suicides.
And they say in their video, we know your life is bad now.
Meaning we know you're getting bullied, physically and emotionally, but we promise you life will get better.
And as proof of our promise, here's what happened to us.
We were able to move to cities, we got good jobs, we met and fell in love, we adopted a child, and now we're able to take international trips to places like Paris.
And I thought it was a really strange video.
But I was totally odd person out within a week.
There were a thousand more videos.
It had made national news and it only continued to grow in popularity.
So by 2012, two years later, Millions of people had watched these videos.
More than 50,000 people had made their own It Gets Better videos, including the President, President Obama.
Lots of celebrities.
Lots of religion scholars, actually, as well.
People who I respect.
At some point I felt like I want to dig into this because I just think it's a strange notion that so many people are on board with this idea that life improves just because people get older or that things get better just because the calendar changes.
And so by that point, by 2012, there was an online archive of all 50,000 It Gets Better videos that was easy to search.
And I started looking to see how many people had produced It Gets Better videos who were not Christian.
And the number was incredibly small.
There was, I think, maybe one from someone who identified as Muslim, very few from Hindu, Sikh, etc.
And so it could have been that maybe there were people from non-Christian traditions who just didn't mention that in their videos, so I started watching the videos.
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