Since then, "people have come up to me to express their sympathies and condolences, because they assume it goes hand in hand with homophobia, and I'm gay," he said, with evident amusement. But "in Leviticus, Jesus himself didn't say anything about homosexuality."
Christopher did not have a religious upbringing. He attended an Episcopal grade school after his family moved back to New Orleans when he was 10, and then a Jewish high school, but "my dad was a total Bible Belt atheist."
He believes his mother's books have always wrestled with spiritual issues, but "it wasn't taken seriously, vampires discussing faith and spirituality and religion," he said. "What people don't seem to understand is she explored the darker side of the spiritual realm because she thought there might be some truth there, not to hurt people. Even in her erotica, she says she went there to explore whether there was a spiritual dimension in the flesh. It's part of the same search.
"A lot of her darkness came out of losing Michele, her daughter, a huge spiritual loss," he said. "It wasn't an adolescent wandering. There was something much greater behind it: If there is a God, why did he take a 5-year-old daughter from me?"
By the time Rice returned to the church, she said, she had realized that she could embrace her faith without answering all the questions about how it fit into her life. For one thing, her studies of the Scripture have convinced her that many church dictates were created by mortals, not God.
Rice thinks one of the most prominent women in the Bible, Mary Magdalene, for example, was shortchanged by a patriarchal church that for years underplayed her role and defamed her, until recent years, as a prostitute.
"It didn't have a damn thing to do with Scripture," Rice said vehemently. "All we know is that she saw the rising of Christ before anyone else, and she was at the foot of the cross. She was probably an apostle. All the stuff about prostitution was folklore and misogyny."
She believes the Vatican's birth-control ban too is a patriarchal anachronism. "It was an obvious advantage for men for women to be passive with regards to procreation," she said.
Such views are unlikely to endear her to people like the conservative Christian who e-mailed her that morning, saying: "You're a sexual libertine, and you just mouth words about abortion, and you don't really care."
