Dr John Eastburn "Jeb" Boswell
http://wn.com/John_Boswell_(historian)

On Christ­mas Eve in 1992, we decided to walk to my church for the mid­night ser­vice—savor­ing the brac­ingly cold air and the oppor­tu­nity to sing car­ols in har­mony as we so loved to do. Jeb was a tenor and I an alto, so one of us always had to make the enor­mous sac­ri­fice to croak out the melody. Ever since that Octo­ber, when Jeb had missed our par­ents’ 50th wed­ding reunion due to yet another in a long string of exotic ill­nesses I had been wor­ried. Tonight, I would ask him the ques­tion whose answer I dreaded.

The ser­vice ended with the pass­ing of a flame from can­dle to can­dle among the assem­bled wor­shipers. We started home, still alight with the beauty of the ser­vice. As we neared my home, I screwed up my courage and said, “I have been want­ing to ask you but afraid to. Do you have AIDS?” Jeb stopped and with­out a word began to weep. I put my arms around him and cried on his shoul­der, as we stood in the mid­dle of the road on that cold early Christ­mas morn­ing. Finally, I asked the most unan­swer­able of ques­tions, “Why? Why would God do that to some­one as lov­ing as you?”

To answer, Jeb reached back across the decades to our child­hoods, to C. S. Lewis’ myth­i­cal tales of the land of Narnia. Nar­nia was ruled by a beloved lion. When the first Eng­lish chil­dren were intro­duced to the coun­try, they heard tales of this lion—Aslan—and inquired about his nature, for he sounded quite fero­cious. “Is he tame?” they inquired. “No, he’s not tame, but he’s good,” the beavers answered. And so, Jeb answered me now: “Remem­ber, sweetie, He is not a tame lion.”

Jeb’s love of God was the dri­ving force in his life and the dri­ving pas­sion behind his work. He did not set out to shake up the straight world but rather to include the gay world in the love of Christ… to acquaint all with the fear­some power of that love, the wild­ness, the “not tame­ness” of it. When asked just before his death about pos­si­ble speak­ers for his funeral ser­vice, Jeb requested that either my mother or I deliver his eulogy. “But Jeb,” I argued, “you need some­one who can talk about your life’s achieve­ments.” “No,” he responded, “I need some­one who can talk about my faith.”

~ Patricia Boswell, sister

John Eastburn Boswell (known by friends as “Jeb”) was one of the world’s fore­most schol­ars on the his­tory of reli­gion and homo­sex­u­al­ity. Born in 1947 to a mil­i­tary fam­ily, Jeb spent his child­hood in Boston, Mass. as an Epis­co­palian. By the time he fin­ished his under­grad­u­ate degree at The College of William and Mary in 1969 in Virginia, Jeb had con­verted to Roman Catholicism, to which he remained a devoted fol­lower for the rest of his life.

After col­lege, Jeb pur­sued his doc­tor­ate in his­tory at Harvard University in Cambridge. A tal­ented scholar, Jeb uti­lized his knowl­edge of 17 lan­guages in his stud­ies, includ­ing Ancient Greek, Cata­lan, Latin, Church Slavonic, Old Ice­landic, clas­si­cal Armen­ian, Syr­iac, Per­sian and Ara­bic, among oth­ers. In addi­tion to his intel­lec­tual inter­ests, Jeb was known among peers for play­ing piano music in his room in the all-male grad­u­ate dor­mi­tory Conant Hall. He intro­duced his friends to the world of “Greater Gay Boston,” to which he had been famil­iar­iz­ing him­self for years.

Jeb grad­u­ated from Har­vard in 1975 and imme­di­ately moved to New Haven, tak­ing up a teach­ing post at Yale. He was made full professor in 1982, and served as the chair of the his­tory depart­ment from 1990 to 1992. In 1987 , he helped found the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale. While at Yale, Jeb pub­lished four books, includ­ing his 1980 work Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality which gar­nered much con­tro­versy and was described as “rev­o­lu­tion­ary.” He was also a much-beloved teacher, with many of his under­grad­u­ate classes rank­ing in the top ten for high­est enroll­ment. He took time to men­tor stu­dents indi­vid­u­ally, and in some cases, used his wide knowl­edge of lesser-known lan­guages to trans­late sources for his stu­dents.

Jeb died of AIDS-related com­pli­ca­tions on Christ­mas Eve, 1994, sur­rounded by his part­ner Jerry Hart, sis­ter Patri­cia Boswell, and friends Aaron Laush­way and Joe Gor­don. He was 47.

John Boswell and Jerry Hart, partners in life for life.