James cleveland was gay
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” may be a thing of the past in the military.
But according to two scholars at Northwestern University, it is very much a reality in the world of gospel music within the Dark church.
“If you took all the gay people out of a church choir,” says E. Patrick Johnson, dean of Northwestern’s University of Communication and director of NU’s Black Arts Initiative, “you wouldn’t possess a choir.”
And yet, says Johnson, an expert in both gospel music and in gay Black studies, there has always been a “wink wink, nod nod” sense of knowing a choir member or gospel soloist was male lover, but few people ever brought it up, and it took tremendous courage for the gay church member to come out publicly and affirm their true sexuality.
Kent Brooks agrees. A professor at NU who teaches Black gospel music and heads programs at Millar Chapel, Brooks says being a lgbtq+ musician in a Ebony church can be “very paradoxical.”
On Tuesday evening, Oct. 11, Brooks and Johnson will present a together lecture and musical show about “Gays and Gospel,” at Millar Chapel.
The Ebony church, B
REVEREND JAMES CLEVELAND
Death of a Queer King
by Robin Dunn
(August 2020)
I was a homeless, sixteen-year old runaway when two Black women in long robes and headscarves offered me a place to stay. They brought me home to a shotgun house in East Austin, where they lived communally, sheltered the homeless, and held religious services for hours on end. I'd never spent time in church, and in any case I'd never heard of one like this. With fewer than a dozen members, no sign to notice it, no painted windows, no cross. They said they were holiness, sanctified. I arrived queer, punk, and half-feral, but the church, with its instinct of purpose, sisters and brothers, and hot meals, soon felt like family, a thing I lacked. I stayed for ten years, the only alabaster girl in an otherwise all-Black church, trying and failing to be a saint.
When I united the church I laid sex, drugs, and rock and roll down at the altar. Gospel, the old stuff, helped load the musical void. I found a wealth of records at the universal library-Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Davis Sisters, Clara Ward, the Caravans. I consideration it was better than punk. It was the root. I especially loved the Caravans, whose members-
James Cleveland
James Cleveland
The Reverend Dr. James Cleveland was born on December 5, 1931 (to February 9, 1991). He was a celebrated gospel singer, arranger, composer and, most significantly, the driving power behind the creation of the modern gospel sound, bringing the stylistic daring of hard gospel, jazz and pop music influences to arrangements for mass choirs. Cleveland is popularly known as the King of Gospel.
James Cleveland was a native of Chicago, Illinois who began singing as a boy soprano at Pilgrim Baptist Church, where gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey was their minister of music, and Roberta Martin was pianist for the choir. His parents were unable to afford a piano, so Cleveland crafted a makeshift keyboard out of a windowsill, somehow learning to play without ever producing an actual note. He strained his vocal cords as a teenager while part of a local gospel group, leaving the distinctive gravelly voice that was his hallmark in his later years. The change in Cleveland’s voice led him to attention on his skills as a pianist, and later as a composer and arranger. For his pioneering accomplishments and contributions, he is regarded by many to be one of the
The late Cleveland was established as the king of gospel and the principal force behind the creation of modern gospel sound. As a highly leading figure in the genre, many aspects of Cleveland’s life often go ignored—including his death from “congestive heart failure. But in a context where gospel music had lost so many individuals to HIV/AIDS, Cleveland’s death became the symbolic marker of what was wrong with gospel music,” Jabir added.
Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Cleveland was born into what Jabir termed a “working-class consciousness” that gives Cleveland a particular perspective of music that is
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