I am a book lover. Also queer. Primarily a performance artist, I worked with this book as
both a body and as a place—a body that's been cut, the scene of a crime. The best
aspect of participating in this project was reading the book, being introduced to this
compassionate and courageous theologian W. Norman Pittenger, fantasizing that I’d found
the book while my mom was still alive (she enjoyed reading ethics from Christian
perspectives), and remembering the liberating power of books and the public library. The
more I read from this text the more I felt for the slasher whose blade severed a few of its
pages. All previous ideas fell away and I found myself talking to him. I wrote a letter to the
slasher (predicting his return to the scene of...) and I burned this letter into the cover, out
and inside. Responding to the challenge, “What Would My Mother Do?” (Hmmm she’s so
present in discussions of sex and religion, disrespect for property, books...) I decided to
simply repair the sliced pages. This is my second burn project, reviving a high school craft
hobby, recalling performance experiments of making the body’s text more readable.
Book: Making Sexuality Human, W. Norman Pittenger, 1970, United Church Press,
Philadelphia. Third printing, 1975,Pilgram Press, Philadelphia.
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