For its centrepiece, this year’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival chose 1946: The Mistranslation that Shfited Culture. This documentary, perhaps inadvetrently, shows the sorry state of contemporary mainstream Chirstianity. The ghost of Jerry Fallwell looms, and after him are a bunch of evangelicals who look like they take selfies in their trucks. Or who have opinions about the new Barbie movie. But this film is not about them. And instead, it’s about three people who are on different levels of biblical scholarship. Together, they expose the titular mistranslation of two Greek words that came from the quill of my namesake, Saint Paul.

Saint Paul’s original Greek talks about the ‘malakoi’ and the ‘arsenokoitai’. You may be an armchair linguist who knows two words of Greek and Indo-European. So you’d know that ‘malakoi’ is close to ‘malaka’ and ‘arsenokoitai’ has something to do with male beds. My copy of the Catholic Bible translates those words as ‘boy prostitutes’ and ‘sodomites’. In 1946, a few men translated ‘arsenokoitai’ as ‘homosexual,’ a translation that went unchallenged and unchanged until 1979. But sadly, three decades is enough time for envangelicals to pick that translation and use it to demonize 2LGBT+ people within and outside their Christian communities.

Two of the 2LGBT+ and ally scholars trying to undo the 1946 translation’s damages are Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford. The third is queer documentary filmmaker Sharon ‘Rocky’ Roggio who, in 1946, has tendencies in relying on trigger tactics that her fellow filmmakers have. She includes archive footage of Falwell and the neo-evangelicals, and within the latter she includes her homophobic father. But thankfully, she counters that presence with Baldock and Oxford, who make for great and intelligent interview subjects. Their actions and words turn a historical curiosity and make it relevant to today’s world where 2LGBT+ can feel God’s warm embrace.