Time & Perspective Quote by Malcolm Boyd

A line like this is designed to detonate quietly: it flips the usual script in which religion is imagined as the institution policing queer life. Boyd, a clergyman who spent decades arguing that faith and homosexuality need not be enemies, uses the charged verb "dominated" to provoke. He is not offering a tidy demographic claim so much as forcing a recognition of something many church cultures have relied on while refusing to name: queer people have long been central to the labor, aesthetics, and emotional economy of religious institutions.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it reads as a defense: if gays have been everywhere in the church, then the church's moral panic looks less like doctrine and more like denial. On the other, it carries an accusation. "Dominated" hints at a kind of unpaid governance: the choir director, the liturgy nerd, the seminarian with a refined sense of ritual, the caretaker of tradition. The subtext is that churches have often benefited from queer devotion and talent while maintaining structures that keep queer bodies and relationships officially marginal. It's a critique of hypocrisy, not just prejudice.

Context matters. Boyd came of age when being openly gay could cost a clerical career, and when mainline churches were beginning to fracture over sexuality. His phrasing compresses a lifetime of pastoral observation into a single provocation: if the church has always been shaped by gay presence, then the real rupture isn't "the gay agenda". It's the institution finally being asked to tell the truth about who has been holding it up.