Sweet Jesus
Each Wednesday night when I was ten-years-old was like every Wednesday night: there was choir rehearsal scheduled to begin at 8pm. Because we were black and Pentecostal, we were notoriously late each week; it was part of the ritual of preparation, some may say. My mother, brother and I would arrive at about 8pm and the kids would wait in the vestibule/library area of the church building while the adults would chat about the mid-week’s-goings on. One time, I got on a chair in the back and began singing Salt-n-Pepa’s “Doing the Butt” and my mother caught me quickly and smacked me in front of the other youngsters to let me know that “we don’t sing that kind of music” in our church. I got the picture because I never did that again. Still, choir rehearsal was something I looked forward to each week because I could count on being able to sing with my whole heart. There was safety in song for me. And I loved the ritual of preparation, kids in the vestibule talking about kid things while the adults were in the sanctuary. I cherished these moments because they were how I got to know the Divine. But there was this one time during rehearsal as we were preparing for Sunday’s service, we sang:
Sweet Jesus, Sweet Jesus
He’s the lily of the valley, the bright and morning star
Sweet Jesus, Sweet Jesus
He’s the God of every nation, bless his name
How I Love Him, How I love him…
Sister Morgan stopped the song because the modulation didn’t occur correctly. When she stopped the song to give parts, he turned around, pointed at me:
“You’re a faggot!”
At that moment, I questioned sex, sexuality, voice, exuberance, praise and God equally. Within my religious community, I was given a name but it was not “Ashon,” “son of Elder Crawley and Sister Crawley” or “brother of Ronald.” I was brought into the domain of sexuality through this naming of “faggot.” I was both named and castigated concurrently; people noticed me and disdained me, felt distressed for me and deplored me. Everyone in the church during this choir rehearsal became quiet. Only one sister of the church responded by telling the gentleman, “…that’s not nice.” Still, everyone looked at me. Mother silent. Brother silent. The gentleman, pleased with his actions, smiling slyly. It did not matter that I was a pre-pubescent boy (I was ten years old) with a high soprano voice that had not begun to change yet. After we began singing again, my once energetic voice became melancholy. I did not sing as loudly. I could not smile.
What did it mean for the “Sweet Jesus” whom I loved with my whole being to remain silent while I was castigated in front of a community of believers? How could I continue to bless this God in light of public humiliation and shaming? I had certainly been called a faggot before but this was the first time it occurred within the limits of the church building, with someone specifically saying it to me as a means to control my voice, literally. I believe because of the context of place and community that this particular incident remains etched in my mind. Recounting it, even during this writing, I feel how I felt then: shamed, silenced, afraid, disrupted, attacked, confused, cold and alone.
What makes an attack of one’s sexuality, particularly by queering it, more forceful, castigatory and shameful when the event takes place within the limits of sacred space? Even more poignantly, how has the church allowed for the queering inquiry of someone’s sexuality to be that which shames? What I mean is that because of the hostile nature of the discourse of sexuality in general, and queer(ed) sexuality in particular, public inquiries of one’s sexuality immediately causes paralysis in entire church communities in ways that are still very damaging and hurtful to everyone in the community, not just the one questioned. Referring back to my own story, even if people had not begun to ponder the sexuality of a ten year old, because of the public nature of my questioning, the thoughts necessarily had to enter their minds. How does one continue to gather in Christian community through verbal attacks and gossip of this wise? It is here, with the above questions, that I come to the topic at hand.
This story is personal to me but variants of it occur time and again within institutional Black Churches. We know him. The choir director. The singer. The musician. The faggot. The limp-wristed one. The soft man. The one condemned to hell because of the sway of his hips, the emotion in his voice, the passion in his presentation. We know her. The bulldagger with the short haircut. The dyke with no husband or children. We know them and we dismiss them. We see them and yet, we see through them, rendering them invisible.
This writing is personal in nature and hopefully, therapeutic as well. I wanted to know how I came to reorient myself to the church, to continue to go back to the building, to sing once again in spite of and despite the undercurrent of my seemingly aberrant and ambiguous sexuality. Though I was a child with a pastor for a father and could not refuse going to church because it was required in my household, as I began to reflect on my life in church, I began to wonder what caused me continually inhabit particular spaces within the church and to embody particular tropes: to sing songs, to begin to direct choirs, to learn to play the organ – that is, to live into the stereotypical black gay male of Black Church lore.
However, I am not simply interested in relationships of black queers to the church in general. I am particularly interested in how we reorient ourselves to the church once we begin to have moments of overt sexual liberation – within spaces, conversations and activities where sexuality is prominently on display, desired, and eventually consumed – back to moments of compulsory repressed sexuality. As an example, while studying at University of Pennsylvania during my undergrad years, I was the founder of as well as director and musician for the New Spirit of Penn Gospel Choir. We were asked to sing for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) week and I invoked power as founder, musician and director to emphatically respond with a no: “we do not want to give them the impression that we accept their lifestyles and behaviors,” is what I told the executive board of the choir. This, while going home to surf the internet for dates, to call the Philadelphia “party line” phone number for hook-ups with men and surf my computer for porn upon hours, waking up early Sunday mornings to minister through music at local churches in the area. It is this relationship to moments of sexual liberation and sexual repression which I wanted to interrogate. Veiled and sequestered liberative moments tended to castigate me further, to cause me to move further away from God. In other words, liberation was anything but freedom within that particular context but spoke of an internal terror and fear.
Though this work finds its foundations in my personal narrative, I am equally interested and particularly dedicated to how this work has implications outside of my own therapeutic interventions (I have a therapist for that!). While my personal experiences are unique to me, there are ways in which many black queers experience trauma, emotional pain and distress within the church walls, through the language and discourse of the church and by family members who reference God, the church and the Bible as a source of inspiration but at the expense of maligning particular sexual identities. However, I am not simply considering the church as wholly damaging and moments of sexual liberation as wholly good. As such, I am utilizing the black queer club as the paradigmatic representation of moments of sexual liberation or warranted and desired overt displays of queer(ed) sexuality. What I will attempt to do is nuance both locations and “theorize the journey” that occurs between these two locales.
Bitter Purposes
The purpose of the exploration is to ask questions regarding identity (re)formation from the momentary ruptures back into a normative posturing of the self. I will try to establish how black queers exist within, and in some ways advance, the norms in which we inhabit. Was I somehow buying into the stereotypical black gay subject by inhabiting particular spaces in the church as a musician and choir director? Was my open defiance of Penn’s LGBTQ group part of the normative script for the black queer(ed) subject who is “serious about Jesus,” in the most conventional, non-critical sense? Was my sexuality a result of the spaces in which I inhabited? Likewise, how does my sexuality affect those spaces? More broadly, what is the institutional Black Church’s relation to discourses of sexuality generally and queer sexualities, particularly and how do these discourses get carried in the bodies of black queer(ed) subjects from place to place?
Theorizing the journey, I want to untangle the ways in which black queer(ed) subjects form identity from those momentary ruptures of sexuality linked to identity and towards reintegration in a sexually repressive space. I initially came to this topic through a reading of the Tamar narrative (2nd Samuel 13), which serves as an epistemological framework, structuring this discussion of power relations, identity politics, and normative discourse of resistance, for my discussion. Rather than an allegorical treatment of the text, I believe the narrative models behavior of how the Black Church deals with issues of sex, sexuality and abuse. Though silencing of Tamar occurs patently, what are the other prevalent verbal, bodily and textual creations within the text that inform a modern-day discourse of sexuality?
Tamar’s story remains the basis for my personal reflection but will not be explicated in the text of the thesis. Currents of her narrative structure my work and run deep in the analysis. For example: What does her story intimate about the curious tension between performance of the self and of culture in diverse spaces? It is through this journey back toward the home that a new identity must be inculcated. An integration of the self must occur within a culture that not only gave Tamar context for speaking against her ill-treatment but also the same culture which allowed for the abuse occur wholesale, a culture which allowed for her to perform an identity of desolation. Contemporary discourse of identity politics and power structures tend to focus on the momentary ruptures of identity, of the proclamation of the self above the demoralization of the identity, of the disruptive character (See Mahmood). Though I initially sought to focus on how Tamar’s voice breaks through the silence, allowing her character to be disruptive of her own cultural normativity, I believe a true interrogation of identity formation and resistance must be more robust. While not dismissing her forceful claims of religious and cultic practices that should have buffered her from harm and victimization, I want to look at the journey from rape to home, the return of the pilgrim to the place of origin.
Most importantly, I am trying to establish just how pervasive and insidious religious rhetoric is and how it is found in the strangest of places as well as how both spectacular and un-spectacular moments of homophobia are terror and trauma inducing for marginalized subjects. Personally being called a faggot on the church’s holy ground was cause for trauma, to be certain. However, I pause to look at other ruptures of sexuality, using the club as the representation – where it is put on display, in plain view, drawn out, called upon and celebrated – to be possible moments of pleasure and trauma concurrently. How is being publicly shamed similar to engaging the pleasure of the body in a black gay club for the black queer Christian? Are moments of rupture always liberatory? And are liberatory moments always ruptures?
What is the process of reorienting the self through a journey to places in locations that are purported to provide safety? Both the club and the church function as safe-havens and sanctuaries for different reasons but, as I will argue below, both can cause psychological distress and spiritual trauma. Decentering the romantic notion of resistancebut rather focusing on mundane, recurrent, daily performance of reorienting the once ruptured self backward towards normative, oppressive space and performance, what do we learn of identity formation? Because I am particularly interested in the peregrination from the club back to the church, I am seeking to understand the variety of agential fortitude necessary to make this particular journey, and that recurrently.
The movement from the church to the club and back can be seen as a cyclical pattern, or what I will call the “circum-religious performance of queer(ed) identity”. These performances of identity within the circum-religious rim are “familiar to audiences on either side” of the journey: both in the church and in the club. Both locations on the rim – a rim or cycle created by the performance of queer(ed) black identity to be explicated later – allow for a reinterpretation of identity, for performance efficaciousness or failure. Roach insists, and I agree, that “performances so often carry within them the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions – those that were rejected and, even more visibly, those that have succeeded.”
Instead of simply asking how identities are negotiated, this explication tries to ascertain how identities are consolidated, purposefully foreclosed and agentially neglected in ways that “aspire” to norms that are sometimes deemed damaging. Moreover, what is remembered and forgotten through the journey that allows for the multiplicity of performances for black queer(ed) subjects within particular contexts? Performance creates but that which is created is multivocal, to be sure. As an example, Tamar asserts that “such a thing” is not to be done in Israel. At the moment she utters the cultural understanding of rape, she performs knowledge of Israel’s text and tradition, thereby advancing the voice of women. This is a momentary rupture of normative identity for women in the biblical writ. But is this all that is performed? In her statement regarding what is right and good in Israel, Tamar oscillates between disrupting and venerating her tradition and culture. She confers her power to that of Israel, not challenging the tradition but tries to function within its strictures.
For the purpose of this study, I want to ask how this procedure of pilgrimage is replicated in the lives of black queers whom are religiously oriented. Looking particularly at the black Christian religious tradition, this exploration will make meaning from the peregrinations of black queers from the momentary ruptures back to the church. As one such example, I note the usage of gospel music in black gay clubs such as the Clark Sister’s “You Brought the Sunshine” and Kirk Franklin’s “I’ve Been Looking for You.” This is an explicit display of the circum-religious performance of queer(ed) identity. As such, in “Terrifying Journeys, Traumatic Boundaries” I try to bridge queer and performance theories with discussions of black bodies within the particular location of the Black Church. There are very few discussions that explicitly bring together these topics. This is not an analysis of biblical text but rather, an examination of how black queer(ed) bodies occupy particular spaces, how our bodies contaminate thoughts and imaginations as well as how we move between ideologies and physical locations.
E. Patrick Johnson in “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark” looks at the performance of gospel music in the seemingly profane black gay club (during Atlanta Pride, he records) as a bringing the spirit and the flesh together in an orgiastic moment. The focus of that writing is on how the performance of queer identity, utilizing gospel music, disrupts notions of the queer body, the bifurcations of soul from flesh in normative Christian discourse and how these moments are evinces of agency. This work springs from Johnson’s discussion in many ways, as I am very concerned with the return from the club to the church, from the moment of disruption to reorientation into compulsory repression. Though it can be said that a (dis)orientation occurs in both directions (i.e., that the black queer must orient the self situationally – in the church and in the club – and must perform and reorient the identity whenever there is movement between places of antithetical appreciation and acceptance of the body, of sexuality, of religion and spirituality), I want to focus squarely on the pilgrimage of the return to the church, the religio-cultural tradition.
Just as the scripture positions Absalom’s house as home for Tamar, I position the church as home, or more directly, the place for compulsory reintegration of identity, within the circum-religious topography. I posit it as home because 1) with relation of the black queer to the church, the church is generally instructive long before there is knowledge or acceptance of non-majority sexuality; 2) the resonance of church within the larger black community as a socio-political force, even if only in the cultural imaginary; 3) the pervasive discourse of Black Church found in a variety of places in the black community including the barber shop, the hair salon and school, which seems to undergird the community. Simply, because the Black Church has a discourse associated with it that both Black Churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike adhere to, cite, respect, speak and advance, it seems appropriate to look at the Black Church as the place from which the black queers whom I discuss leave and return to, even if discourse only. The home, or the Black Church, is not only where the heart is, it is also where loyalties reside and from where understandings of authentic blackness resonate.
As such, it seems appropriate to view the Black Church as a particular sort of home as it is a place that is radically involved in identity formation from a young age. I want to hone in on the agency that is called upon to go back to the church continually, to continually cite it in daily life. Even gospel music in the black gay club speaks to the power of home as nurturing and sustaining. But is it possible that this same music in the black gay club could function as disorienting and terrifying?
I believe it is necessary to define the recurring terms that I will be utilizing throughout the work in order to have consistency. Trauma is the behavioral affects of mental and emotional distress. Terror is that which inspires fear, but not necessarily awe and wonder, but anxiety and worry. Terror and the terrifying are those things that can cause trauma, if continual and untreated. Terror will also encompass violent acts – both corporeal and speech/linguistic acts – that seek to intimidate other individuals or groups into a posture of compliance.
Though some theorists I utilize following define the terms place and space differently, I am taking my definition from Michel de Certeau: place will refer to “the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence” and space will be that which is “composed of intersections of mobile elements” as well as that which “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.” I use the term queer(ed) black to signify both an identity and a process: a queer black is a black person who has non-heteronormative sexual identity; a queer(ed) black is a black person who is imagined to be queer by others and become queer(ed) through discourse or through behaviors that are normatively seen as non-heterosexual in nature. As such, a queer(ed) person is not necessarily queer and vice versa. Lastly, the Black Church references historically black denominations and groups inclusive of the National Baptist Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church as well as the various Holiness/Pentecostal black groups (e.g. the Church of God in Christ; the Church of God (Anderson), the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World). This list is not exhaustive in any wise but is meant to give a contour to that which will fall within the realm of “the Black Church” in this exploration.
What are the problems this work is seeking to address? Who is the audience? Why is this important work to be done? Who will benefit? Who will be disempowered? Simply, it seems that the Black Church is not readily equipped to deal with issues of sex and sexuality generally and that these issues become the problem of non-heterosexuals with which to contend. Thus, my work seeks to benefit all us queer(ed) black people who have relationships with the Black Church, who remain ever critical of it because we have a desire for all people to be welcome there, to find sanctuary there and to be supported there. My work seeks to hold the Black Church responsible for how it has become a club of exclusionary practices and dogmas. But I also deal with the Black Church because I remain hopeful that it can, even with a multitude of voices and doctrine, affirm the life and liberty of all humanity. Those who benefit from heterosexism and heterosexual privilege will be disempowered, but not in a way that forces them to be under foot of queer(ed) persons, but rather in a way that seeks to equalize everyone and alleviate oppressive behaviors. I am taking a religious problem of exclusion and applying performance and queer theories in order to look at it differently and to find other possible solutions as well as analyze some current solutions that exist today.
If religion is the way to be human in a human place, then black queer(ed) subjects are necessitated in that we allow for non-queers to imagine what it is to be human and what it means to have place. In religious imaginaries, we tend to be non-human because of the ways our erotic and libidinal drives are imagined, we are given no place to rest within the culture. But this is very endearing for non-queers because we become the ground upon which they understand and emphasize what it means to be “normal” in every sense of the word. Religion, for Chidester, is defined as the
discourses and practices that negotiate what it is to be human both in relation to the superhuman and in relation to whatever might be treated as subhuman [black queers, within this exploration]. Since being a person also requires being in a place, religion entails discourses and practices for created sacred space, as a zone of inclusion but also as a boundary for excluding others. Accordingly, religion…is the activity of being human in relation to superhuman transcendence and sacred inclusion, which inevitably involves dehumanization and exclusion.
Through this rendering of “religion,” black queers not only occupy bodies but function as a particular place and boundary. Moreover, consistent with his definition, it seems that we are, as well, products of dehumanization.
The concern for black queer(ed) subjects is a religious concern as religion “engage[s] the ultimate – that which defines the final, unavoidable limit of all our ordinary concerns.” I note this because it seems that black queers, within the black religio-cultural imaginary are the limit, which is primarily concerned with the function and uses of sex and sexuality. Religion finds meaning in the “disciplines of the body” and through the “regulation of one’s conduct” as well as through establishing relations of power. We not only are the limit but exceed it, causing torment and distress, challenging the very notion of what religion means, what religion can do and who can be religious. These regulatory processes are generally concerned with what bodies do with other bodies – that is, how bodies relate sexually and erotically to other bodies.
When in diasporic community, religion becomes that which binds individuals together, tethers them to understandings and ideals of the past. Religious reflection becomes a means to maintaining community. If this is the case, and black queers refer to religious tropes in the club, can we conceive of the club as fostering a sort of diasporic community, a new location that is not ever really “home” but a place that becomes improvised upon, a surface on which black queers perform that isn’t intrinsic to how we view our self-worth and from which we gather our identity? Simply, is the club as the representational moment of sexual rupture, representational of an exiled community? This seems to be possible since the normative message of sexuality within churches is that of sexual repression, of veiling the body. Through reference to gospel music that is necessity in the church, the club creates a cohesive community of believers, whom, through gathering and dancing to the music, create a diaspora. As such, this diasporic community seems to intimate an exilic group, not really home anywhere outside the church. This is consistent with Foucault’s ideas regarding structures of power which have the ability to name and oppress concurrently. How do we free black queer(ed) subjects from this?
Theories and Methods
My work brings together a variety of resources in order to make my argument and utilizes performance theory as the theoretical framework. There are a couple of works that are integral to my theorizing. First is Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century Americawhich really challenged the way I looked at everyday performance of identity. Particularly, her work caused me to rethink through the ways in which terror and trauma are performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Rather than looking for the spectacular, her work looks at the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday and tries to explicate if the ways in which identity is performed at that level will be a fruitful way to make some assertions about terror and trauma. As such, I look at the quotidian performance of black queer(ed) identity on the level of the mundane and even the level of the pleasurable to how, in those instances, terror and trauma can be borne out.
As this exploration is also interested in memory because of its unique link with identities of individuals and groups, I am equally relying on the work of Joseph Roach in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performancewith his discussion of restored behaviors, effigies and surrogacy as all types of performances that seek to replace or to give meaning. Roach gives three definitions of performance which are useful: a performance “carries out purposes thoroughly, […] it actualizes a potential, or that it restores a behavior” and this seems to “assume that [a] performance offers a substitute for something else that preexists it.”
This work is socially active. It springs from my personal experience as a pastor’s child in the Pentecostal Black Church as a minister/preacher, musician, singer, songwriter, and organist. Moreover, the work seeks to speak truth to power, to challenge and to engage the Black Church to (re)consider identity formation and the ways in which it encroaches upon people’s lives. But this work also seeks to illustrate the power of a discourse and how it can be deployed in seemingly non-religious spaces. Though I began with a personal narrative and my life serves as the locus for theoretical inquiry, my voice cannot possibly be representative of all forms of victimization or responses thereof. Thus, I will augment the discussions will engage with information from interviews with other black queers. I am grateful for those who agreed to be apart of the interview process because they assisted me in thinking through ideas of both liberation and repression of one’s sexuality. I conducted 14 interviews and though there is no way that the respondents’ voices could be representative of all black queers, their voices have served to give a variety of perspectives and ideas. Questions regarding identity formation, theological orientation, role within the church, social and theological view of sexuality will allow other voices room for self-reflection.
The basis of this thesis is the performance of black queer(ed) identity creates a particular spatial plane from point to point – the circum-religious rim. It locates black queers from across a varied diaspora through our embodied or imagined performance of identity, of culture, of religion and of tradition. It is the performance that seeks to, on the one hand quiet religious noise that ever plays in the background of our lives that speaks our inherent sinfulness and disconnection from God and on the other hand seeks to reconnect us to a religio-cultural tradition from which many of us are estranged. The circum-religious rim to be explored is created through discourse and through the literal back-and-forth peregrinations from the club to the church – through the performance of queer(ed) identity. Under dualist worldviews, the church and the club are normally viewed in opposition to the other but in this exploration, I hope to demonstrate how these two paradigmatic locations exist on the same plane, with similar discourses of bodies, of religion and of identities as well as how they feed and feed off of the other. Both locations pick out particular aspects of the queer(ed) black subject to affirm and others to debase. The spatial plane upon which the journey is found “does not begin and end at national borders” but rather is a course found in the complex workings of discourse of sexuality which create meaning for religion. Through the linkage of performance and memory, it appears that similar to performance, “memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.” These performances – quotations, inventions and improvisations of identity – across physical borders as well as ideological and theological ideas about borders and bodies create the circum-religious spatial plane analyzed in this work.
Chapter 1, “Queer(ed) Black Bodies: The Real, The Imagined” tries to establish how the body is imagined as both black and queer within a socio-cultural and religious context. The chapter tries to explicate the meaning of the body within sacred and secular venues, how the body dissents and dis-orients within communities and how it becomes the product of voyeurism and fetishism within religious discourse which incites and excites concurrently. Chapter 2, “Particular Spaces: Black Gay Clubs and Churches” focuses on the two points which the circum-religion performance of queer(ed) identity accesses: the gay club and the church. I posit that they exist on a continuum rather than stand in opposition to each other, feeding the other continually. I also problematize an idea that the gay club is liberative over and against the church and try to display how both locations can do violence to the individual. In Chapter 3, “Circum-Religious Performances: Journeys of Black Queer(ed) Bodies,” I “theorize the journey” which queer(ed) blacks make from the church to the club and back, both in an ideological and physical manner. I demonstrate how the migratory process becomes the occasion for meaning-making in religion: that without this migration of particular bodies and specific ideologies, religion would be void of meaning. Admittedly, Chapter 4, “Terror in the Strangest of Places” is an experimental exploration, delving into the familiar in order to interrogate well-known concepts: I take up both love and pleasure to show how they can be terror-produced and trauma-inducing. I look at spectacular performances of homophobia within the limits of the church building to show how they become marginal to other, more insidious and undetected rhetoric. Lastly, Chapter 5, “Reconnecting” seeks to pose solutions and yield possibilities for future scholarship in the areas of performance and queer theories in dialogue with Black religious tradition.
Tamar is sent on a pilgrimage that is fraught with religio-cultural implications, an idea which I will appropriate to make the claims about journey and return, memory and loss, bodily conquest and shame. She is not only sent to the house of Amnon but is likewise sent away, sent back to her place of origin to tell the story, to give testimony of the horrors and abuse through tradition. Tamar speaks only in the moments of rape. When she speaks, she references her religio-cultural tradition as that which should shield her from victimization: “For such a thing is not done in Israel.” For my work, I am interested in how this citation of religious tradition within the space of the rupturing of sexuality becomes the occasion for victimization. The church appear to behave in ways like Amnon, utilizing the resources and talents in order to be fed, but likewise Absalom’s house becomes a place where she becomes desolate after victimization.
