The Sanctified Church

When I was fourteen a school friend accompanied me to an evening service at my church. I won’t mention the denomination but it was then, and still is, the largest Black Pentecostal church in the UK. I watched her veer from sheer fright when “the spirit broke out” to complete amazement when the choir sang or the musicians jammed. Coming from a family of atheists and agnostics, this experience made the Black church especially exciting and appealing to her. “You’re so lucky to be a part of such an exciting church…” she chirped on the way home and incessantly everyday for three months.

My father was an assistant pastor in our church. My siblings and I had never known anything different. Church was our life. Our life was our church. My parents made sure we could never forget it. There was the fervent fire and brimstone preaching, the speaking in tongues; the rebuking of demons that occasionally had the audacity to walk in on one of my father’s sermons. Then came the prophesying, the healing, and the back benching of disobedient saints, the stringent rules, and the making up of testimonies. These all served to publicly demonstrate to the congregation that my father’s sanctification was still very much intact, which in turn ensured that he himself was never back-benched. Never swimming in the same pool as the opposite sex; girls never wearing make-up, trousers, or jewellery; and the constant reminders that we were born of the flesh and therefore into sin and could never be worthy, were all his absurd rules that seemed very natural to me. My attendance at prayer meetings, building programs, Sunday services and annual conventions, primarily consisted of studying music and making up cruel pseudonyms for elder church members. Children can be cruel, and for a while, the fusion of Afro-Caribbean and African-American spirituals seemed to make all the rules, dogmas and absurd assertions worthwhile.

This was the late 1970’s pushing into the eighties. I was a first generation British born Black man of Jamaican parents who were intent on never diluting the ‘word of God’. Until this point in my adolescence, I cannot recall ever-hearing sermons pertaining to sexuality. It was only over time that I became bored, aggravated, and paranoid by what I was now hearing, and had no doubt heard throughout my life. “God made Adam and Eve. He never make Adam and Steve. It is an abomination onto the word of God; the mark of the Devil; a lie.” This kind of rhetoric would reverberate, dictate, and gradually haunt me to this day. For all of my apparent ignorance, I could neither deny nor ignore what my eyes, my hormones, and my libido were telling me: I WAS A HOMOSEXUAL.

I masked my shame well. Much to my parent’s satisfaction, I threw myself into extra curriculum activities in both church and school. My ‘A’ level grades gave me ample choices for higher education. I chose The University of London and majored in Computer Science. ‘I flew the nest’ when my parents secured accommodation for me with a pastor in South London from the same denomination as us. University years flew by not in a blur of copious amounts of alcohol, drugs, or orgies, but with church, study, and sleep. My constant prayers, fasting, and repentance did little or nothing to eradicate my shame and so grew my depression and self-loathing.

Upon graduating, I secured a job with a well-known software developer for whom I still currently work. Another two years rapidly passed, as did my life, or rather lack of it. I decided to ‘bite the bullet’ and nervously ventured to the West End one night, got hopelessly drunk, and ended up in ‘Heaven’ (hmmm). This is still very much all a blur to me except my elation, surprise and disgust at seeing other Black gay men. I was not alone in my illness, deviation, possession, and disloyalty to God. Misery loves company. It would not be long before I found my way onto the Black gay circuit, which in 1987, primarily consisted of The Market Tavern (mixed – Black and white), Benjy’s on the Old Kent Road (mixed – Black and white), and numerous Black late-night house parties around London almost every weekend.

I saw countless men that I knew from the Gospel fraternity of our church. I had long since left religion behind with its piety, prejudice, and hypocrisy, but many of these ‘brothers’ are still actively involved. I knew that my eventual ‘outing’ was inevitable. In that I had no doubt, but from my own church brethren – that was a shock. Most of them, I know, have perfected the art of leading double lives. Being pleased on Saturday night by a man, and pleasing God in church on Sunday, made everyone happy. Or were they, are they, will they ever be happy?

I have seen church folks lay hands on a young Black man in an attempt to exorcise the demon of homosexuality. This, just three days after he had been discharged from The Maudsley Hospital for mental illness, barely lucid, and on a cocktail of Lithium, Imipramine, Amitriptyline, and Nortriptyline. Do you think that the church managed to convince him that he was possessed, or do you think that these bright, highly intelligent, well-educated people could see that they were only contributing to his illness? Two further nervous breakdowns ensued, as did two more exorcisms. He’s dead now.

If the Black church were to remove every homosexuals from its ranks there would be no more choir, half the pastors would vanish, and some of the sisters wouldn’t be getting it as regularly as they currently do. I know HIV-positive men in the church who refuse to wear a condom because it might suggest – what exactly? The Black church’s selective criminalisation of one sin over another is not only against its own doctrines it is wicked. How many more of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, and children do we have to bury (or ostracise) before we see?