Why do gays appropriate black culture and gospel music

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Select a location and bookmark it today. Southern gay men, specifically rural southern gay men, often miss the exposure to the arts that their urban peers take for granted. This is a combination of several factors ranging from public school funding to repression of personal expression in rural Bible Belt communities.

Without major concert venues in small communities the musical upbringing of these young men and women is fostered in one of two places usually — band or church. The latter has historically brought Southern Gospel music to several rural communities with many small churches hosting local or regional singing groups, traditions themselves rooted in the history of southern settlers as far back as centuries.

As a musical genre, Southern Gospel rose to its regional prominence through a mostly evangelical audience and during its early years was controversial due to its instrumentation and some of the rhythms perceived as too much like rock and roll. The other was a cluster of all-male quartets with seismic bass singers and stratospheric tenors.

Gaither revived a fledgling niche genre into a multi-million dollar video and album franchise. InGaither was recognized by Rolling Stone for placing in the Top 50 highest grossing concerts of Subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter:. There was the showy vocal styling of quartet tenor and bass singers.

Southern Gospel also found itself alienated as its popularity led to the formation of its own awards category at the Grammy Awards and, rather humorously, JD Sumner and James Blackwood found themselves in an audience watching Madonna and Boy George. In the s this closet began fracturing.

Inthe FBI arrested a man who extorted tenor singer Kirk Talley after discovering him in a questionable, gay-themed chat room. In a interview with the Washington Blade artist Ray Boltz, then 55, came out of the closet and began working with the Metropolitan Community Churches.

Following a friendly photo shoot with Stevens, her partner and fellow singer Mark Lowry, Gaither spoke to her from the stage during the concert:.

The Southern Gospel Closet

The only Christ I know is the Christ in that song, with his arms out very wide, saying, come to the water. Come as you are. This otherwise very touching statement the audience of nearly 15, broke into wild applause was marred in when, for some odd reason four years after the fact, a scandal erupted and the friendly photo was released on the internet.

The late Dottie Rambo maintained a friendly stage relationship with openly lesbian Lily Tomlin. She never attended one service at the church her daughter pastors and was adamant that she never would. With the passing away of the older performers Southern Gospel music has found itself in a crisis of relevance.

Sales and popularity have declined and new scandals have come and gone. The annual performance pinnacle, the National Quartet Convention, shifted from its long-time location in Louisville, Ken. Florida Gulf Coast University professor Douglas Harrison, perhaps the lone scholar of Southern Gospel and sexuality, noted in a blog post recently that this shift in location may very well mark the decline of Southern Gospel as a nationally-recognized genre.

Waxing personal, despite a rural upbringing I discovered Southern Gospel on my own when I was Speaking to gay men as far flung as California and Maine, I have encountered amused bewilderment when trying to explain it.