Hartley explicitly does theology through a “queer” lens, analogizing gay touchstones like “coming out” to Jesus’ physical resurrection. Hartley is a younger figure who functions as a kind of avatar for Side B’s current incarnation, though his work exploring queer culture has been enthusiastically backed by “legacy” figures like Wesley Hill. Or maybe “sub-sub-cultural” is more accurate, per Grant Hartley’s quote in this Religion News piece on the phenomenon. However, that tent has shrunk significantly in the ensuing years, as the term “Side B” has taken on progressively more subcultural baggage. In that original twenty-year-old context, “Side B” was meant to refer simply to Christians who were attracted to the same sex but didn’t believe God blessed gay sex acts. To get away from words and phrases that could fudge like “conservative,” “traditional,” “progressive,” “liberal,” etc., they decided to come up with new ones. Some felt comfortable identifying as “gay,” others didn’t. Others were formerly promiscuous converts with ties to Christian ex-gay culture. But the precise specifications of “Side B” Christianity were less clear.Īs the history has been told, the phrase was first born roughly twenty years ago on a message board with a variety of different voices. “Side B.” “Side A” referred to theological revisionists like Matthew Vines and Justin Lee, who believe God blesses same-sex unions. At the time, they were so disorganized that they didn’t really have a clear umbrella term with which to describe themselves, but one bit of jargon they used that became more popular as the years wore on was the language of “Side A” vs. For those not in the know, this was a loose, denominationally diverse band of Christian writers who identified as gay or lesbian, wanting to carve out a “third way” between permissive progressivism and what they perceived as rigid conservatism. In particular, these were the early years of a blog called Spiritual Friendship.
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