I had invited someone to my parents' house. And by the time fear began to visit me at church in the mid-'90s, I was making daily visits on our Gateway 2000 computer - clandestinely, I hoped - to AOL chat rooms titled "m4m," where I would type and hope and desire.
About my singing, a band teacher told me I sounded like I didn't have balls. In junior high, my homeroom teacher called me a "faggot" in front of the entire class more than once. I directed my choir, loved lush colors, and on the phone I was often called by my mother's name. I was the one at school belting Whitney Houston's "I'm Every Woman" through the hallways. I, too, had a crowd I longed to hang with. His "young folks" had been delivered from the demonic, from spiritual warfare.īest Music Of 2020 He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief Thankfully, he assured us, his members had collectively fasted, prayed together. And during his sermonizing, while his accompanist played the Hammond organ, he discussed how "fornication and the spirit of homosexuality was beginning to take over" his church. We went to see him together, this charismatic visitor from South Carolina, because he was not only a pastor but a well-known singer. Then there was the preacher, around the same time, whom I met through my music teacher. This boy wore his flamboyance only a little more than I did. In the language of Pentecostalism, the devil had to be rebuked, cast out, lest the demon overtake this young person, lest hell be his ultimate eternal. We were asked to pray with him, to point hands toward him, while the preacher enunciated words of rebuke for the devil. There were words about hanging with the wrong crowd, about how he, this teenager, needed to be delivered. There was the time a preacher, a white evangelist visiting our Black church in northern New Jersey, prophesied to a teenager not more than a year my younger. And I didn't know I didn't have to be afraid. There was talk of joy, too, of course: There was music, and dance, and "getting happy." But there was also fear, always the fear.