ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the modes and meaning of queer participation in Zimbabwean Christianity based on four experiences. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner did much to advance ideas about publics by introducing the idea of counter-intimacies and their relationship to the public. One of the best efforts to understand this exchange is offered by Cobb in his aforementioned article Pulpitic Publicity. Through religious rhetoric Clement interjected his queerness into the normal public of religion. The image of being on fire is central to Pentecostalism, describing a sort of orgiastic affect for the divine that stretches all the way back to the original Pentecost experience in the New Testament where followers of Jesus were visited by tongues of fire. Each of these acts are hardly dissent in the sense of challenging or disengaging from a heteronormative politic. The church-inhabiting queer must, the logic follows, necessarily misapprehend the violence and trauma caused by religion for modern models of gay identity.
