Don Abram calls himself a queer church boy.
Back when he really was a boy — a shy child, small for his age — he didn’t use the word queer. He’d never even heard it, though he had heard other words used to describe him, words that aimed to wound.
Gay. Soft. Fruity.
He heard those taunts from friends, neighbor kids, a relative, and yet never inside the Chicago church where he grew up. In that South Side house of worship, he was encouraged and praised, and if anyone imagined he was gay, no one said it. He didn’t say it either, even as he got older and felt the stirrings of his sexuality. He was willing to stay silent if it meant he could stay in that church where he felt loved.
“So from 11 to 2 on Sundays,” he says, “I was straight.”
Today, however, at the age of 26, Abram no longer pretends to be straight and can’t stay silent. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he proudly embraces his identity as queer, and has set out on a mission to revolutionize the Black Church’s attitudes toward people like him.
“It is no secret that the Black Church has a long, condemnable history of vilifying the Black LBGTQ community,” he wrote in an article recently published on Medium, where he identified himself as a “queer church boy musing about race, religion, and politics.”
“Words laced with homophobia and scriptural interpretations doused with transphobia are commonplace in too many of our churches,” he continued. “Toxic theologies that routinely dehumanize and antagonize queer folks are normalized in sacred spaces, in Sunday school classes and clergy offices.”
With a $40,000 grant, he has embarked on a project he calls “Pride in the Pews.” He plans to collect 66 stories of Black queer Christians — 66, he notes, is the number of books in the Bible — in the hopes that the stories will open closed minds.
This is his story.
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Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist Church sits in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood on the city’s far southern edge, a sturdy, spacious, beige-brick building directly across from D & H, a towing company, and kitty-corner from J & B Food & Liquor.
“I arrived at this church in the womb,” Abram said on a recent Sunday. He was sitting in a pew in the dim, empty sanctuary, under the vaulted ceiling, the afternoon sun diffused through the stained glass windows. He no longer attends the church, but the pastor had agreed he could come here to be interviewed.
It was here that Abram’s mother, who immigrated from Jamaica as a girl, met his father, a New Orleans native who moved to Chicago to preach after spending a decade in prison, some of it on death row, for charges that were partially dropped.
Abram’s parents’ relationship didn’t last long, and his mother soon stopped going to Greater New Mount. Instead, every Sunday, no excuses, his Jamaican grandma took him to service.
Dressed in the boys’ uniform of black pants and white shirt, he would sit in the pews and watch the parishioners, the women especially, shout and move their bodies. He was 8 when his grandmother taught him the church term for those praiseful cries and movements: “Getting happy.”
He became a junior deacon and an usher. On Sunday mornings, he wore white gloves to pass out church bulletins to the faithful. He was thrilled whenever he was invited to escort the pastor to the altar. He joined the choir. The church bought him a bass guitar.
“In the church, no one ridiculed me because I was more effeminate or didn’t like the things boys usually like,” he said. “The pastor loved me. The church mothers adored me. They cheered me on. I had a purpose and I was accepted.”
At 14, Abram began to preach. He still has a photo from his first sermon, him standing next to the pastor wearing a pinstripe, three-piece suit that looks two sizes too large. He loved suits, bought a dozen more over time, and took to having them tailored. When he was 17, the Chicago Tribune published a front-page story on the young preaching phenomenon whose rousing words could bring a crowd to its feet and to tears.
What almost no one knew back then was that it was here in the church — where homosexuality was denounced, where his beloved pastor preached that God had created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve — that Abram met the first boy he was attracted to. They began, in his word, “exploring.” He had no clearer description for what they felt and did.
Young Don Abram wasn’t ashamed of those encounters, but he was afraid of being found out. He felt called to preach and if he wanted to keep doing it, he would have to be straight, so he showed interest in girls and in finding “the first lady” that every preacher needed.
At home, his mother was strict with the three of her four kids who lived with her. Determined that her son Don would escape the traps that ensnared so many boys in the neighborhood, she sent him to Chicago Military Academy at Bronzeville. He graduated as salutatorian, then shortly after turning 18 said goodbye to his church and family and, with a generous scholarship, headed to college in California.
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Pomona College is a small, rigorous liberal arts school in Claremont, California, a placid town 35 miles east of Los Angeles, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
“As the only low-income, inner city, Black student in my dorm ‘sponsor’ group, I felt out of place,” Abram said. “For a while, I did not know that I would be able to survive it.”
He worked hard, made friends. Survived. His world view expanded.
He still didn’t identify as queer, but he met people who did. He met people of all kinds, including undocumented immigrants. He began to think about the connections among different types of people who live on society’s margins, and it troubled him to think of how many people in the Black Church — the Protestant denominations that minister primarily to Black people — embraced only part of the call to social justice.
“College is where you have conversations about who you want to be in the world,” he said. “That’s when I started to re-imagine myself with God, the divine and my calling, to radically re-imagine my understanding of the gospels.”
Jesus, he reminded himself and others, always advocated for the marginalized.
Still, he still didn’t speak publicly about his sexuality. Then in his senior year, he fell in love. With another student. A man.
“That was when I said: This is something I cannot ignore or deny,” he remembers.
Not denying was different from telling. He was still hiding the truth from his family and most of his hometown friends when he and his romantic partner came home to Chicago the summer after his college graduation. They went to a club with a group of his high school buddies who called themselves “The Bros.” At the club, the two danced together, up close.
“As he was dancing, the friends laughed and joked,” recalls Steven Williams, one of The Bros, who would eventually join Abram in his “Pride in the Pews” campaign. “They were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ I was like, you know, guys, we should celebrate him, or just dance with him.”
That was the beginning of Abram’s coming out in Chicago.
Soon, though, he was on to Harvard Divinity School. In the intellectual stewpot of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Abram, at last, openly embraced his identity as queer. As he delved deeper into theology, he came to think of the Black Church, in its own way, as queer.
“Yes, it’s a sexual term,” he said. But he thinks the word can apply to anyone forced to exist in the shadows and on the margins.
“Really, it’s a matter of people who have to exist outside the mainstream to affirm themselves when they can’t do it in public spaces,” he said. “In that sense, I argue the Black Church is queer. It has always been queer.”
He sees a connection between the queer underground ballroom scene, founded by Black transgender people, and the “hush harbors” of the Black Church in the antebellum South, where enslaved Black people met in secret to express their faith. In the ballroom, as in the hush harbor, people were free to sing and dance and be themselves, no matter what society told them about who they were or weren’t.
None of this, of course, sits well with many Christians, or other religious people, regardless of race or denomination. It’s deemed heresy, and Abram remained afraid to tell his family.
One day he was sitting in his room near Harvard, working on a paper, when he felt his heart beat harder.
“Today’s the day,” he thought.
He called his father.
“He said he was queer,” Rev. Donald Toussaint recalls. “I said, OK, it’s your life. If that’s the lifestyle you want to live, I hope the best for you. If you need anything, let me know. I told him, as long as you’re doing ministry, do what the Lord leads you to do.”
Toussaint pastors his own Baptist church in Texas now. He welcomes LGBTQ people.
“A lot of churches don’t know how to minister to LGBTQ people,” he says. “They’re considering what they’re doing is worse than murder. That’s not the way to minister to people. Everybody’s got something going on. We all have sin.”
“We all have sin” is a version of tolerance Don Abram has heard a lot. It makes him shake his head.
“Sin,” he said, “is anything that causes harm, intentionally or unintentionally. Equating my sexuality with someone who has murdered, who has broken their vows and the sacred covenant of marriage, or who lies for the sake of self gain — that’s sin. My sexuality I embody without causing harm to people is not a sin.”
But his dad is his dad, and he loves him.
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When the pandemic of 2020 hit, Abram came home to Chicago. After graduating from Harvard he had worked for a Stanford University program that sent him traveling around the South talking to people about poverty and inequality. Then COVID-19 came, and he settled into an apartment in the diverse North Side neighborhood of Logan Square.
And sometimes he talked to Karl Bandtel.
Bandtel was in his 50s, married with children, white, living in Cambridge. When he retired from the investment business, he started studying part-time at the divinity school. He met Abram in a class on pastoral counseling.
“Don was so impressive,” Bandtel says. “He was so thoughtful, so smart and kind and compassionate. He really made an impression on me.”
In their conversations, Abram educated him on what it meant to be Black and queer and out to reform a religious institution that considered queer sinful. Bandtel was moved. He had started a small family charitable organization, the Once Here Foundation, aimed at elevating the work of people on the margins. The foundation name was inspired by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who once wrote:
… simply to be here is so much
and because what is here seems to need us,
this vanishing world that concerns us strangely —
us, the most vanishing of all. Once
for each, only once. Once and no more.
In that spirit, Bandtel offered Abram a $40,000 grant to pursue his idea for “Pride in the Pews.”
So now, with help from his board of advisers, Abram is collecting stories — testimonies — from Black queer Christians. He has created a website, prideinthepews.com, and hopes the stories will provide a way of thinking and speaking, a theology, that will lead members of the Black Church not only to accept LGBTQ people but to affirm them. He also warns that if the Church doesn’t change, it risks losing a generation of young Black people who are seeking “inclusive and justice-oriented houses of worship.”
“We are in the pews,” he said on that recent Sunday afternoon in the church where he grew up. “We are in the pulpit. We are in the choir. We are everywhere.”
Changing minds is hard work. Does he think he’s ever changed anyone’s mind on this?
The question made him pause.
“No,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “No. And that’s really hard to say. Not even in my own family. No. No.”
But does he hold out hope?
His eyes glinted. Tears, maybe, or just the reflection of the sun through the stained glass. He smiled a small smile.
“I do.”
