Reading Secrets: A Queer Inheritance of Life and Scripture

by Malcolm Himschoot

Overview

A trans pastor’s fascination with the Scripture inherited from his closeted, fundamentalist father.

When his dad died, Malcolm Himschoot inherited his father’s Bibles. He chose to re-read them, examining his dad’s notes in the margins, teasing out the details of his upbringing and gender identity amid the structures and forms of biblical narratives. For Malcolm, coming out meant exile and verbal excommunication; he embodied all his gay father tried to hide. In Reading Secrets, he travels alongside the ghost of his father, exploring their inherited homophobia and the American culture that shaped their triumphs and tragedies. With these poetic and evocative meditations, Malcolm transforms the Scripture he inherited, and finds a place in it for himself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781963511147
Publisher:	Catalyst Press
Publication date:	06/24/2025
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Malcolm Himschoot is a writer, minister, and educator. The United Church of Christ, a historic denomination, made much of his ordination as an out trans man by producing the indie documentary Call Me Malcolm in 2005. His previous writing has appeared in edited anthologies and journals.

Read an Excerpt

We give our attention to a story.

When the fire blazes up and the night sky 

descends, it begins. After the trauma, 

after the separation and the genocide and loss 

and chaos, it begins.

“In the beginning.” Genesis 1

My story:

My father died. He read the Bible

in a certain way. 

My dad died of AIDS. 

He was a white Christian man in America. 

When my dad died, I had feelings. 

I too have read the Bible.

This is a book about the way I read the Bible 

and the way my dad read the Bible. 

It was the only book he ever read. 

Except those small tracts printed 

on soft paper and kept in his wallet. 

I am a transgender man. 

He never named me as his son, 

though I introduced myself to him that way.

That is a clue to this story.

When I was lonely, I tried to find my own language. 

This is a little book about the Bible.

—

Stories of need and innocence, guilt and hunger, 

sensuality and prescribed custom, anger and hate, 

justice and injustice, life and death.

That’s the Bible.

And also citizenship and slavery, longing and 

landlessness, government and insurgency. 

In this lore, Love and wisdom can be trusted 

and suspected in equal measure. 

What is named might not be what it is named. 

Who is named might change their name. 

God became Jesus, and Jesus became Christ, 

and the Spirit moaned and grew a church. 

The Bible is that story, and… 

Listening, take a breath. 

The story continues.

Somewhere along the way I heard a prayer. 

I heard my own name and a name for God.

Jesus said, “I have no place to lay my head.” Matthew 8

But we make nests and holes to smother 

and bury him in.

This is a little book about the Bible. 

Big words may not fit. 

—

The Bible is a place. People have lived there. 

Betwixt, between, and beyond genders, people have lived there.Around corners. In cracks. 

Kept secret. 

Some people find hospitality in the Bible.

some do not. 

If you stay, or if you struggle, you might belong to this place. 

You might belong to this story.

—

Architects in every age design dwelling-places 

for deities. Big places carved out of stone. 

A great canyon flipped above the horizon. 

Canyons show the etching of ages. 

Mysteries of water and wind write lines 

in stone all the way down. 

Canons of literature show a monument flipped. 

Sediments of writing stacked on 

sediments of other writing all the way up. 

—

My first Bible had my name imprinted on it. 

A name is a thing that is not a thing. A name 

can disintegrate faster than a gourd 

or a corpse or a rotten log. A name can be 

traded like coffee or gold. 

A name can be changed on a birth certificate, 

by court order, or in a ritual of community consent. 

A name can inflate and then implode. 

It can be two things at once.

Your identity might not be what you thought it was. 

This happened to your ancestors too. 

Maybe something promised is ahead of you. 

Maybe your bones have meaning.

I had to change my name.

Someone told me, “Things will be more 

amazing than you’ve ever dreamed.” 

I read the story again. 

They were not wrong.

Editorial Reviews

"In Reading Secrets, Malcolm queers the forms and functions of memoir, biblical interpretation, and poetry to offer a landscape of story that moves like water and wind and roots through soil. The power of this movement is subtle and deep, answering questions and uncovering more, with a tenderness of heart that is truth-telling, vulnerable, and compassionate. How do we love what/who has hurt us? How do we stay in relationship with people, with traditions, that have harmed us? How do we reckon with the harm we ourselves have done? Malcolm wrestles with all these questions in ways that can help all of us build the capacity to hold the complexities of our inheritances necessary for collective liberation." — Rev. Anne Dunlap, UCC Pastor & Organizer, Co-Founder of the Liberating Lineages Collective

In Reading Secrets Malcolm Himschoot’s brilliant poetic voice transforms his father’s fundamentalistic, patriarchal reading of the Bible to a wondrous, life-liberating reading that brings hope and healing to our broken and beautiful world. Malcolm takes us through his life journey, carried by the river of his ever searching/ finding soul, led mysteriously by the truth Jesus came to reveal, that love is never ending, ever broadening, and beyond the boundaries of exclusion we humans keep erecting. With a deep understanding of scripture, a poet’s sensitivity to language and feeling, and remarkable insight and compassion, Malcolm’s memoir is grace-filled and will touch your heart, mind and soul. Be prepared to be opened to gratitude for the More that cannot be confined and that leads us into the hope of new life.— Martie McMane, ordained UCC minister and author of Living Grace: Spiritual Growth in in the Every Day World, Worship Comes Alive, and A Lexicon of Grace

 "Beautiful and sad and raw. Like life." — Jan Everhart, Emerita Professor of Religion, Simpson College

"It's about time someone recorded the bullshit going on in church ministry! This book is worth reading!" — Major Griffin Gracy, author of Miss Major Speaks

From the Publisher