Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints Book

Part queer theory, part personal memoir, but the parts the meld theory with personal queer experience are the strongest. The sections where Boisvert writes at length about where things he personally finds attractive were the weakest sections in my opinion.
The importance of this type of writing, teasing out queer narratives where they have been suppressed, and showing the ways queer people relate to certain types of stories and rewrite them in their own imagr, is extremely important work, but for me, Boisvert's work wasn't as strong as it could have been. Individual experiences are, obviously, individual and Boisvert's experiences are not universal*, masculinity is not a monolith and neither is queer masculinity and his arguments would have worked better if they surveyed different types of queer masculine experiences with saints. The chapters on the angel Michael (a technically genderless being who creates his own masculinity) and Joseph (the father who is not a biological father) esp could have benefited from a trans masculine analysis.

*Boisvert specifically says this in the introduction, that his queer experience with the saints is not the same as a queer woman's experience, however he then fails to account for much nuance in different masculine experiences.