On most Sunday mornings you can find me, like some local cryptid, haunting the nearby cemetery. I take a travel mug of tea and walk the roads that I know better and better each week, watching the scenery change as the year slips through fall and into winter. Most weeks, I’ll make straight for a favorite mausoleum to sit on the steps and read. But while I walk, I listen to podcasts.
I’m what you’d call, in business terminology, a ‘fast follower’ in most aspects of my life. I’ll let everyone else try a thing out before I devote my time to it. In truth, it’s because I love too easily and refuse to let go, so I’d end up spending way too much time on garbage without some kind of filter. What this means in practical media-consumption terms is that I’m always bingeing the thing that was new and exciting six months or more ago, and right now, that thing is Welcome to Night Vale.
This beautifully strange podcast has the added bonus of a built-in music recommendation engine: in every episode, our host Cecil’s sultry baritone will invoke ‘the weather,’ which is always some flavor of song. The genre ranges widely, and the music is always something I wouldn’t otherwise have heard. It’s perfect for my approach to finding new media: artists who make a thing I like are also taking a moment to tell me about a thing they like. I get to broaden my horizons with the absolute least possible input of effort.
A couple Sundays back, I’ve decided that the roads in the cemetery are too familiar now, so I’ve abandoned them and am walking in among the headstones when Cecil takes us to the weather. It’s early fall. The sky is a no-color gray, the grass is sad, and the graves range from “aged cement” to “copper patina,” but the trees are luminescent orange and yellow and they reach into the air like painted cathedral vaults. The sound that comes through my headphones is The Queer Gospel, by Erin McKeown.
Something happens to me in this moment. I find myself walking a little taller, bouncing on my toes to the swinging beat. I kind of want to fight someone. I definitely want to dance. The autumn air, the cemetery, my mood, a thousand tiny factors have combined with this song to create a feeling of soaring, defiant joy in my own being. I always want to take on the world, but for the duration of the song, I feel like I could.
Now, I know myself; I’m not above being carried away by a moment. Big feelings are par for my particular course. True to form, I find the song on YouTube and play it over and over again all the way home, and then a few more times after I get there for good measure. I’ve started to learn the lyrics now and I’m singing along with relish. But there’s a process happening in the background here, as I burn off the billowing emotion. I need to understand why this particular thing has touched me in such a way, and like Jack Skellington dissecting a teddy bear, I will pick it apart until I find out.
Unlike Christmas for our ill-fated Pumpkin King, however, I think the Queer Gospel was able to find its way under my skin because of what had already been there. The song’s style is that of a Christian hymn (specifically, I read it as gospel music, which we’ll talk about in a moment) - an attempt to leverage the language and art of religiosity to share a message of queer empowerment. I am not now religious; I haven’t been for more than a decade. But I was, for many formative years. And the best parts of my religion felt the most true when we sang about them.
Regarding the gospel style: let me preface this by saying that I am white, and as far as I can tell by looking, so is Erin McKeown. Gospel music is unquestionably associated with Black culture, and from that angle, I’m not sure it is McKeown’s to reclaim; there are plenty of white Christian religious musical styles available. Moreover, while I can’t speak to the complexities of the queer experience in Black communities, I do know that white liberals like to be patronizing about it. And a white person co-opting Black artistry to talk about the (white?) queer experience doesn’t do much to avoid that particular pothole.
So I don’t want to approach this song uncritically. But I will say that when I heard it, I think I began to understand, in a way I never did before, the motivation to reclaim. I missed being told that my worth came from a place so far outside - or inside - myself that no one, not even me, could tarnish it. I missed the joy of raising my voice in like-minded community. I missed the feeling of honesty - though in this case, it was a celebration of my self and not an admission of my brokenness. The Queer Gospel represented a return to me of things I didn’t even know I’d given up as lost. And I think that must be at the root of reclamation.