Wrestling with the Angel

the long version

In Wrestling with the Angel, twenty-one authors - gay men who are Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, and Mormon - explore in moving and powerful essays the paradox at the center of their faiths: If God creates each of us in His own image, then how can that image be "wrong"?" In vivid descriptions of their paths toward spiritual and sexual identity, such eloquent contributors as David Plante, Mark Doty, Lev Raphael, Alfred Corn, Andrew Holleran, Frank Browning, Michael Nava, Brad Gooch, Fenton Johnson, and Felice Picano reveal the joys and frustrations of communicating with one's excommunicator or, in some cases, of constructing a faith of one's own. Heightened by the urgency of this brutal age of AIDS, their essays are both intensely personal and partisan. They rise off the page like rambunctious prayers, reflecting not only the spiritual hunger brought on by the new millennium, but also the fact that we can no more choose our God than we can our sexuality.