Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the complexities and ambiguities of African Christian and queer world-making by examining the complex navigation of sexual ethics in a Kenyan LGBT church community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research in a small Nairobi-based Kenyan LGBT church. The church is spearheading an LGBT-affirming Christian movement in East Africa, and it is linked to an African American organisation that aims to promote a "radically progressive and inclusive black African Christianity". The paper identifies an apparent tension, if not paradox, in the church, between the self-proclaimed "radical" commitment to an African, Christian and queer imagination, and the difficulty in applying this commitment to the area of sexual relationships. In this area, the church seeks to uphold certain teachings regarding sexuality that it considers to be "biblical" and "Christian", while at the same time to provide a safe space to discuss matters of sex, relationships and love openly, and to be inclusive towards those whose sexual and relational lives are complex and messy. The most controversial issue to navigate for the church leadership in this regard was the inclusion of people involved in sex work in the church community. The paper interprets the complex negotiation of sexual ethics in this Kenyan LGBT church as a case that reveals the inherent complexities, and the possible limitations, of the project of Kenyan, Christian and queer politics. Resisting a reading of the church as upholding a "conservative" sexual ethics, the paper interrogates Eurocentric understandings of queerness as "radically transgressive" and instead acknowledges the different temporalities and alternative trajectories of African Christian and queer world-making.