The Sexual Politics of Black Churches by Sorett Josef;

Author:Sorett, Josef;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL084000, RELIGION / Religion, Politics ' State, SOC001000, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Black Gay People’s Intersectional Invisibility Within the Black Religious Community

The decision to come out of the closet is made difficult for many black gay people because it threatens to jeopardize their relationship with the black Protestant church, which is as important a source of spiritual sustenance and social integration for many black gay people as it is for many black heterosexuals.8 Because intolerance of homosexuality is still prevalent within black churches, many black gay men and lesbians feel that if they publicly affirm their homosexuality, they risk exclusion from the nurturing resources of the church. For many of them, estrangement from the church may be a cost that is too much to bear, leading many black gay individuals to attend nonetheless. In their ethnographic study of black gay men living in Harlem, William G. Hawkeswood and Alex. W. Costley found that many of the participants looked to the black church as a place to fulfill their need for belonging. As one of the participants explained, “The most important black institution to me is the church. I don’t care which church. But you better be in the church. That’s such an important part of black life. It’s your whole bein’. Without the church, you ain’t shit!”9

However, black gay men and lesbians often encounter heterocentric definitions of black Christian identity within the black church that can seriously jeopardize their feelings of belonging within that setting. While there are spaces in the church, such as the choir, where gay orientation may be tolerated so long as it is not expressed too overtly, these positions hold, in the words of Reverend Irene Monroe, who is lesbian, “prestige but no power to cause … a paradigm shift or systemic change within the body of the entire church.”10 Gay church-goers thus must decide whether they will participate in this constrained sphere or risk church sanctions. As Cathy Cohen writes, “Nowhere in this choice does the idea of inclusion as fully recognized and empowered members exist…. Their gay identity places them outside the indigenously constructed boundaries of both Christianity and blackness as defined by the church.”11

A consequence of this uneasy arrangement is that the church remains silent on issues that have particular relevance for their gay and lesbian parishioners. For example, in Washington, DC, where black gay men made up the largest group of people with AIDS in the early 1990s, church leaders were hesitant to publicly address the issue. One minister, when asked whether the black church was doing enough to address the AIDS epidemic, responded that the church “should not be expected to be the Messiah in relation to those issues.”12 Where gay members have experienced the support of the church, this access has often come at the expense of recognition of their sexual identities. Cohen writes:

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