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

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.”