The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations

by Anthony Heilbut

We also had dissimilar views of the gay role in gospel. Where I saw it as a world gays had made their own, he foregrounded a sexual appeal. “Oh, I don’t know, Tony. You got this beautiful man, with those fine features, and he’s your lover for life. All that holy stuff is so sexy. Laying holy hands on somebody’s body. Letting him use you, and come into your heart, and just go all through you. Now, you know that’s hot!”—and he’d conclude with a giggle. Even to a nonbeliever, his analysis seemed blasphemous. Surely all that passion couldn’t be reduced to a willful sublimation!

It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I was once watching a Promise Keepers rally in Washington, D.C., reportedly attended by over a million men. Ray Boltz, who a decade later would come out as a gay man, sang to his brothers, and they wept and rejoiced. The gospel children didn’t spot him, as they would Ted Haggard. Instead they hooted with laughter at the crowd as its members trembled in contrition or shivered in ecstasy. “Uh-uh, baby, they can’t do that stuff—that’s our shit! Look at those clumsy white boys trying to act like they got the Holy Ghost. When we children got happy, they ’buked and scorned us something terrible. But let a jock do it, let a white jock do it—oh, the windows of heaven are opening and Shekinah Glory’s pouring on down.”