Reddit reviews The Queer Bible Commentary

>What I want to know is if there is a book that guides through various books of the bible "how to read this book in a queer way."

That is a great question. I haven't read such a book yet. One resource that I've used is Queer Theology's podcast, "Reading Queerly," which takes a look at one of the week's lectionary reading through a queer lens. I'm familiar with the *Queer Bible Commentary**, but it's a little pricey for me. I actually just received in the mail Austen Hartke's Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians, which may be helpful for some people.

A "queer" reading of a text -- or "queering" a text -- is a hard thing to pin down. Queer theory is all about the difficulty in pinning down, well, anything! It concerns itself with the margins, and as the margins change, what is "queer" changes as well.

My go-to intro to queer theology is Patrick Cheng's Radical Love. He talks about how Christianity is queer, because it blurs those boundaries between, e.g. God and man, transcendence and immanence, fallenness and salvation, etc.

>I mean, its one thing to say, "David and Jonathan! David and Jonathan!" But its another to see Jesus being uncloseted about being God and then put to death by state apparatus in Mark.

This is a great question, and I'm not quite sure what to say other than definitionally (again, fraught in this context) queer theory, in general, has to do with what I discussed above, but it somehow especially has to do with that in the context of sex, gender and sexuality.

Take Marcella Althaus-Reid (in The Queer God, who -- and this is related to your question as well -- combines post-colonial theory and queer theory to queer the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, relating it to the destruction of indigenous cities and sexual practices during the conquista. At a first glance, that sorta offends my sensibilities for a high view of Scripture. So yeah, your last questions come to mind:

>What makes a real queer reading? How does one tell that a reading is a fake queer reading?

Edit: Oh, and one of the best things I've ever watched about queering the Bible is Peterson Toscano's film, "Transfigurations", which is on Amazon video (unfortunately not Prime), if you have an hour and a few bucks to spare.