Imagine a gospel song. You’re probably hearing a few hallmark sounds in your head: An organ, angelic choirs, lyrics that praise the Lord. In other words, it likely doesn’t sound like “Don’t Want It,” a track on Lil Nas X’s chart-smashing debut album MONTERO, in which a clicking hi-hat and infectious clap give way to the rapper’s autotuned voice, singing about overcoming depression and manifesting his dreams.. “Tell the reaper he don’t want it, he don’t want it / Oh, I know everything’s gonna be alright,” he says, over a trap beat that would sound more at home at a house party than in the pews.
Yet a gospel song it is, at least by the rapper’s own definition. It’s far from the first time the artist has reinterpreted religious ideas; in the music video for his hit song “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name),” Lil Nas X, banished from Heaven because of his queerness, embraces his fate by sliding into Hell on a stripper pole and giving Satan a lap dance. The 22-year-old son of a gospel singer father is clearly and proudly subverting religious iconography and music to glorify homoerotic desire — and in doing so, prompting a national conversation about homophobia within the Baptist church and Black Christian culture as a whole.
What’s more, Lil Nas X is far from the the only Black queer musician exploring the link between religion and queerness through art. Over the past few years, a wave of other queer and gender noncomforing artists have pioneered their own vision of gospel, subverting Christian rhetoric and images to propose a more glorious queer future.
In 2016, Brooklyn-based artist serpentwithfeet, who has long been drawn to occult aesthetics and has referred to his music as “pagan gospel,” released his breakout EP, soil, which uses elements of gospel to draw out the connections between faith, devotion, and queer desire. Since releasing their 2018 album Safe in the Hands of Love, experimental rock artist Yves Tumor, who doesn’t ascribe to identity labels, has played with taking on the image “rock god” and also a devilish being — often at the same time. In their 2020 video for the single “Gospel For A New Century,” they sing of an unrequited love, adorned in all red and devil horns and surrounded by dancers in pig masks, evoking the Biblical symbol of uncleanliness or impurity. Yet Tumor looks comfortable, even regal atop their throne. Even non-Christian musicians like Muslim artist Dua Saleh used their 2020 single “hellbound” as a form of religious satire, and took on an alter-ego called Lucifer Labelle to “playfully address” the violence of religious institutions on queer people.
Rather than assert their spot in Heaven alongside a loving God, these queer Black musicians stand firmly in their demonized queerness and, in turn, portray it as sacred. Whereas traditional Christianity views queerness as a transgression, the only sin in queer gospel is living a falsehood. What is a Heaven that asks you to hide?
An early example of Black queer pop musicians being associated with demonism goes back to Little Richard, the 1960s architect of rock ‘n’roll who publicly struggled with his sexuality due to his Christian faith. Though he idolized gospel artists and received his musical education in the church, Little Richard rose to fame singing secular R&B and rock, which his very traditional Christian family considered “devil music.” After his father picked up on his son’s nascent queerness, Richard was kicked out of the house before 10th grade, and started performing blues in traveling medicine shows. One was helmed by a Doctor Nubillo, who, according to legend, carried a black stick that contained something he called “the devil's child” — the dried-up body of a baby with claw feet like a bird and horns on its head. During his time with the eccentric performer, he was inspired to start wearing turbans and capes, establishing his fabulous, genderbending sense of style.
serpentwithfeet believes that these kinds of larger-than-life performances and ostentatious outfits are, in fact, crucial to the gospel tradition. “There are certain aesthetics of gospel music… that read as very queer,” the artist told The Creative Independent in 2016. “There is something very showy, very peacock-ish about male gospel singers,” he added, explaining that many celebrated male gospel singers, like superstar Daryl Coley, have embodied a certain queer fabulosity in their performances: neck rolls, finger waves, unabashed dancing, high pitched runs. In a way, even traditional gospel allows for an acceptable form of queer expression, as it is purportedly done in the name of praise. “For me church was always more about a performance than it was about God,” he noted.
Even as serpentwithfeet presents himself using occult aesthetics, he uses his lyrics and videos to declare himself divine. In his video for 2016’s “four ethers,” serpentwithfeet dresses as the devil to console his younger, queer self. “I know you learned some fucked up shit from your mother,” the artist laments over a gloriously dramatic string crescendo. “Had you hiding the shit that really made you special.” The artist raises his hands — in praise or anguish, for a moment it’s unclear — before delivering his sermon. “Show me yourself!” serpentwithfeet, as the devil, commands. The artist’s cry, so similar to the traditional Christian saying of “show thyself approved unto God,” instead insists that queer folks reveal their authentic selves, regardless of any God’s approval.
Ultimately, the reclamation of gospel itself is a vehicle for liberation. Multidisciplinary artist Lazarus Lynch uses traditional gospel harmonies in his 2020 single, “I’m Gay,” on which he proclaims, “I’m so free just being myself.” His words drown out the background noise of a preacher screaming, “God can't use no men tryna be women,” and other homophobic drivel. In using a gospel choir to deliver this message, Lynch powerfully asserts that he and other queer Black folks can revel in the same things that Black Christians do, such as art and community, even if they are not accepted by a traditional God. “The power of community is not limited to a building, affiliation, or religion,” Lynch told LEVEL in 2020. “Music has the ability to transcend boundaries.” It’s a forceful reminder that if God cannot grant you freedom, you must liberate yourself.
Black and LGBTQ+ communities have been disproportionately impacted by the deadly coronavirus, and some estimates state that over 40 Black trans women were murdered in the United States last year alone. So it comes as no surprise that queer Black folk are using art to present themselves as the masters of their own afterlives. While their art certainly differs aesthetically from traditional gospel music, these artists are reinterpreting how the genre was originally defined: a celebration of good news. In his 2017 book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, prolific music writer Hanif Abdurraqib defined gospel not just as a type of music, but a tool to deliver good will to the masses. “The gospel is, in many ways, whatever gets people into the door to receive whatever blessings you have to offer,” he writes.
These musicians are also carrying on a long queer tradition of manifesting an alternate future outside an oppressive heteropatriarchy. In his seminal text, Cruising Utopia, scholar Jose Esteban Muñoz described queerness not as a sexuality, but an “ideality,” a way of imagining a more beautiful future. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now,” Muñoz wrote, “and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”
So when Lil Nas X insists that he’s pushing an agenda of liberation with “MONTERO,” or when serpentwithfeet makes love songs about his queer chosen family on his 2021 track “Fellowship,” they are already building a better world in the present. In a sense, it’s their own queer Heaven on Earth. “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,” wrote Muñoz, “that indeed something is missing.” Queerness is the thing that lets us feel.
For the new vanguard of queer gospel, Heaven is not a destination, or a thing that is earned through devotion to prayer. The pleasures of divinity — community, dignity, peace — are a birthright claimed through self acceptance. These artists are fighting for a better world, one where queer folks are not tolerated but gloriously sacred. Maybe heaven is, after all, the place you can call God by your own name.
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