The Master Is Here: Stories Christian and Gay

An Episcopal priest has a fateful encounter with an Amsterdam teenager who may be a prostitute-or something else entirely. An Iowa supermarket patron repurposes Bible verses for a love note to a handsome cashier, with consequences both tragic and transformational. A disgraced seminarian shows up at his lover’s first Mass, determined to be remembered.

One way or another, the characters in The Master is Here happen to find themselves in a place larger and more interesting than many others can imagine: the intersection in the Venn diagram of Christian and gay experience. Whether there by choice or quite against their will, whether making good decisions or bad ones, whether driven by love or lust or foolishness or faith, their lives are a valuable testament to the complexities and the conundrums of the human experience, and their stories chronicle the reckonings that none of us can avoid.

John Addison Dally grew up in a non-religious family in the suburbs of Chicago. When he became a Christian at 17 and then an Episcopal priest in his early twenties they shook their heads, but gave him a nice waffle iron as an ordination gift. His shockingly queer Ph.D. dissertation won the Marc Perry Galler prize at the University of Chicago, a turn of events he attributes to a bureaucratic mix-up, but he’s not giving the money back. He has been married to his husband for 34 years, 13 of them legally.