One of my pet peeves involves Christian publishers who are allergic to presenting faces of lesbian or gay Christians.

There’s an old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. And for those who don’t know the publishing business, I should add that you can’t judge the author by the book cover, either. Authors usually have very little control over the cover design of their book. In most cases, the fault for the cover designs I critique below lies with the publisher rather than the author.

So here, presented with some comment, is a rogues’ gallery of homosexuals without faces.

We begin with Harvest House Publishers and God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door: Reaching the Heart of the Gay Men and Women in Your World by Alan Chambers and the Leadership Team at Exodus International:

Apparently at Exodus, when you want to reach the heart, you have to reach in through the back. I’ve never studied anatomy, but I’m guessing you would find it just under the “u” in the word “Homosexual.”

Next, we have the Deseret Book Company, which published In Quiet Desperation: Understanding The Challenge Of Same-gender Attraction by Fred Matis, Marilyn Matis, and Ty Mansfield. The book itself is actually better than God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door. Still, it’s good we have the title there to protect us from having to make eye contact with this young man:

Next, we jump in our time machine and zoom back to 1987, to Pacific Publishing House’s You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is, by Jeff Conrad:

I’m not sure that either “hope” or “freedom” are the most obvious associations I would form while looking at that photograph (it suggests “middle-aged corporate wage slave stuck in the office” more than anything else). But at least the photo insures that You Don’t Have to See Gay.

It has been my experience that in normal human social interactions, we wear clothes, and we look at each other’s faces. (There are rare exceptions, like surgery, but we’ll leave them aside.) So far, the covers we’ve seen only flout half of the convention: clothes, but no faces. With Andy Comiskey’s Naked Surrender: Coming Home to Our True Sexuality, the cover designers at Intervarsity Press decided to go whole hog, and went with a no clothes, no faces look:

I suppose it pays to know your audience’s tastes.

And finally, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, we have Alan Medinger’s Growth into Manhood: Resuming the Journey, published by Shaw Books:

One hardly knows where to begin.

My first comment, I suppose, is that if one wishes to remain chaste, it is not wise to wander around viewing the world from the perspective suggested by this photograph.

Second, I think that there is a universal lesson to be drawn from this cover by anyone who aspires, one day, to design a book cover. Remember that Amazon.com is transforming the book business. So you really ought to consider how your cover design will look when displayed on the Amazon website:

That is definitely not a promise you want to make to readers who are trying to be chaste.

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Some might see this as a comparatively minor point. What difference does it make whether book covers show faces?

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas thought that we discover our ethical obligations to others through the face-to-face encounter with other human beings.

If Christian publishers avoid putting a human face on gay and lesbian people, they enable readers to avoid confronting their full humanity and the moral demands they make.

But it would be foolish to try to argue this point in the abstract. The most effective way to see the point is simply to contrast these covers with the cover Our Sunday Visitor Press designed for Melinda Selmys’s Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism. What does this cover reveal that is missing from the photos above?

Ron Belgau is completing a PhD in Philosophy, and teaches medical ethics, philosophy of the human person, ethics, and philosophy of religion. He can be followed on Twitter: @RonBelgau.