A screening and discussion in honor of John “Jeb” Boswell
Whitney Humanities Center | Yale University, 320 York Street
September 28, 2023 | 4:00–7:00 pm
To commemorate the legacy of John “Jeb” Boswell, the Whitney Humanities Center is honored to host a special screening and discussion of Not a Tame Lion, a new documentary feature from Indie Rights Movies. Director Craig Bettendorf will join Dean Kathryn Lofton (Yale), George Chauncey (Columbia University), and Hussein Fancy (Yale) for a conversation about the film and the importance of Professor Boswell’s work on Christianity and homosexuality during the AIDS crisis.
John Boswell was a revolutionary figure in LGBTQ+ scholarship whose research on religion and homosexuality in the Middle Ages upended the field of Medieval Studies. From Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) to Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994), he not only refuted the idea that Christianity was the cause of discrimination against gay people but also enriched medieval history with accounts of a robust gay subculture. At Yale, Professor Boswell was a similarly transformative figure: he joined the faculty in 1975, helped organize the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale (which later became the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies), and served as both director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of History. Beloved by students, Boswell, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, was posthumously awarded the Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize in 1995, the year after he died of complications from AIDS at the age of forty-seven.
Not a Tame Lion (Craig Bettendorf, 2022)
If the inspiration for the Da Vinci Code’s Robert Langdon were drawn from a single living person, John Boswell would have been the one. He read and translated fourteen ancient and modern languages, became a Yale professor by age thirty, and was granted full access to the highly classified and restricted Vatican archives from which he researched four award-winning books. A world-renowned expert in medieval history and linguistics, John Boswell was also openly gay in an era that was neither tolerant nor accepting. Not a Tame Lion offers first-hand accounts of Boswell’s closest friends, students, colleagues, and family members as they recount his life, his works, and his final days. In a series of interviews interspersed with footage from the ’80s and ’90s, the film depicts how Jeb, as his friends called him, feverishly worked to complete Same Sex Unions in Medieval Europe—a book that changed the trajectory of the marriage equality debate—while privately battling the debilitating effects of AIDS.
With support from the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, Department of History, and Medieval Studies Program.