I still haven't seen the documentary 1946, and I think I'll have to, because it's clearly having an effect on gay Christians, whether or not they've seen it. As I've mentioned before, the film is about the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the Bible and its translators' decision to use the word "homosexuals" in a list of sinners found in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It was the first time that word had appeared in an English translation of the Bible, and the filmmakers apparently present that decision as the cause of antigay bigotry in English-speaking Christendom forever after.
It was changed in later editions, but it happens that I have a copy of the 1946 edition and can confirm that the word "homosexuals" is indeed there. The 1989 New Revised Standard Version replaced it with "male prostitutes [and] sodomites," which doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, not reassuring to young Homo-Americans anxious about their eternal destiny. In 2021 the Updated Edition chose "male prostitutes" and "men who engage in illicit sex," adding footnotes to both acknowledging that the meaning of the Greek is "uncertain." If you're wondering how one word ("homosexuals") became three or more, look for my discussion of Robin Scroggs's The New Testament and Homosexuality in this post.
Lately I've been seeing allusions to 1946 in video reels and comments on them on Facebook. I don't think the people involved have seen the movie or even know its name; what they know is that something momentous related to LBGTQ and the Bible happened in 1946. One commenter, for example, wrote that the word "abomination" wasn't even in the Bible until 1946. They evidently were thinking of Leviticus 18:22, which calls sex between males an abomination (that is, hateful) to Yahweh. That translation choice appears in the Authorized Version of 1611, known as the King James Version, so the RSV translators had nothing to do with it. One video maker remarked that all the biblical references to sex between males had been altered somehow in 1946. I'm not completely sure about this one, because some of that guy's videos are intended satirically, but I think he was serious that time.
So it looks like I'll be collecting more gay-Christian folklore clustering vaguely around the year 1946. It's another example of oral tradition and its effect on information -- misinformation, rather. What's different from other cases I've encountered is that this is relatively new, springing up in the past year. I don't blame it on the Internet, because the tendency predates the Internet and social media by decades.
