“Peculiar ‘Til I D.I.E.”

Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.

“Wired”

Chapter 5 investigates a case study of Tonéx, a queer preacher-musician who embodies a combination of the most popular archetypes of African-American men’s worship—the preacher and the vocalist head musician—while wielding multifarious rhetorics during his musical performance. Tonéx’s case contests the portrayal of same-gender-loving men as down low, secretive, deceptive, and always withholding information about who they are from their loved ones. Chapter 5 investigates the queer Pentecostal performative strategies behind the creative process of worshipping in Spirit and in truth, as Tonéx grounds his performances in bodily experiences recorded on the Unspoken album. By vocalizing unspoken bodily experiences for gospel music audiences, Tonéx guides his fans through an exploration of what it means to be wired: that is, the occurrence of the embedded, transferred, bestowed, gifted, ridiculed, and surveilled aspects of being a queer masculine survivor of sexual assault in Pentecostal Christian communities.

Ritualizing the Unspoken

Chapter 6 continues exploration of Tonéx’s Unspoken album to consider unspokenness as a means of decentering the primacy of oration in African American worship leadership, while bringing to center the power of presence in ministry when the posture of standing in one’s truth is assumed in public worship. While music scholars have researched the moments in which the musical rest is a facet of sound, chapter 6 contends that unspokenness is a prized aspect of African American orality and nonverbal communication. More than a silent treatment, unspokenness manages musical moments in the face of censorship and oppression, during worship experiences where queer potential is assessed and rebuked. The multifold notion of standing in one’s truth is an animating principle that symbolizes a queer ministry of presence.

Pole Dancing for Jesus

Chapter 3 dissects the sociocultural sensitivity about the extent to which men’s dance or gesture in worship registers as queer by analyzing a case study of a man who worships God through pole fitness. Derived from ethnographic research of widely circulated Jungle Cat’s amateur “pole dancing for Jesus” performance footage, chapter 3 teases out innumerable creative processes through which men’s situating of identity takes place. Jungle Cat worships God to recorded gospel music with ritual components of private dancing and contemplation that absolve him from ecclesial, denominational, and organizational restrictions and surveillance. While anxieties about black male identity also apply to more conventional forms of men’s praise dance such as mime and step, pole dancing cultivates especially passionate responses from gospel music observers.

“I Am Delivert!”

Expanding upon previous research about the perceptions of black male vocal participation as queer, chapter 1 explores the sonic qualities of black men’s public renouncement of their gay identity through deliverance testimonies. In a culture where queer people are often regulated to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” social agreement, the testimonies of men delivered from homosexuality conform to what feminist writer Adrienne Rich referred to as compulsory heterosexuality. While deploying ethnomusicological, phonological, linguistic, critical race, and gender studies analysis, chapter 1 examines these delivered believers’ coded and textured performances of orality in Pentecostal worship: virtuosic singing, speaking in other tongues, preaching, and preaching-singing. Their accounts prompt (non-)verbal communication among spectators about what constitutes legitimate and sustained deliverance.

“Preaching to the Choir and Being Played”

More than the coupling of women with gay men in vocal music participation is the impenetrable work spouse relationships that occur between the preacher and the chief musician. Protected by compensation arrangements and confidentiality expectations that favor the pastor as boss, that coupling is the dominant relationship in African American Christian religiosity. With this in mind, I wonder what are the ways in which men’s collective participation in vocal music ministry has come to function as a form of eunuchoidism to handle women in churches, while granting access to men who are phallogocentrically oriented, at the very least via their servile affinity for phallomusicocentrism or multivalent male-centered music-making. Undoubtedly, there is a pervasive investment in men’s cocreation after their own kind, a creative enterprise that reasserts dominance and pre-eminence. The unspoken connections and privileges afforded through this system are beguiling to the very best of men.

Church Realness

Chapter 7 examines ethnography of formerly gay gospel recording artist and pastor Donnie McClurkin’s sermonizing as a performance of the heteropatriarchal scripts that manage gospel enthusiasts concerns about queer(ed) musicians’ spiritual fitness and protect the social order of church leadership. Since the early 2000s, McClurkin has been regarded as the architect of the deliverance from homosexuality testimony format of communicating queer sexual history in Pentecostal worship. Men’s performance of church realness in historically black Pentecostal churches is the deployment of sung and spoken heteropresentation and gender conformity. The objective of the performance is both to blend in and to assert dominance in gospel music heteropatriarchal forums in a manner that has been socioculturally required of them.

“Men Don’t Sing Soprano”

Male soprano sound in gospel choral participation has come to be a locus for scrutiny, representing a site for the vocalized performance of identity. Drawing on a case study of African-American countertenor Patrick Dailey and an ethnography of his live performance, chapter 2 observes a black countertenor’s embodiment of gendered sound and the peculiar vocal qualities that are socioculturally perceived to signify a man’s queer potential. African-American gospel singing challenges the gender binary framework that the American public expects of men as singing low and women as singing high. Dailey’s performance engages African-American audiences through various types of cultural familiarity to portray competency as a worship leader and trained artist.

Setting the Atmosphere

Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance intervenes into the crisis narrative of black male participation in historically black Pentecostal churches by examining the striking aural-visual performances of gender expression and sexuality as the Spirit moves upon vocalists’ bodies. By following the discourse surrounding the “flaming” choir director stereotype, I investigate the extent to which men’s unique approaches to music-making are met with spectators’ derision and queries about the extent to which their worship generates queer connotations. Participants are essentially guided by what constitutes a practice of the adage “where there is smoke, there is fire.” If there are rumors about a man’s sexual behavior or if he demonstrates queer potential, than it must be so. This perception is tied to the biblical notion that believers are to stay away from the appearance of activity and affiliations that are regarded as evil.