THOU SHALT NOT LIE

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An independent publisher and I were talking about how a tiny and mighty poetry press paid the bills and I heard a story so good, I don’t care if it’s apocryphal: Rumor has it the small press inherited a backlist of poetry titles with one atypical title that they suppressed in their poetry catalog and yet utterly relied on for their financing: a nursing book, specifics of which I couldn’t coax out of him. Based on my bookstore days, my money’s on phlebotomy.

That gave Grogan and me ideas when we were looking to fund passion projects. We published a public domain translation of the Judeo-Christian bible removing the passages that condemn homosexuality. The word “arsenokoitai” (Corinthians, Leviticus) was not translated as “homosexual” until 1946. Our translation reverts to condemning pederasty.

The market’s awash in public domain bible editions but who knows, if you look, you might find our no homo edition still out there.