![lil nas x gay montero lil nas x gay montero](https://i1.wp.com/celebidentity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screenshot_20191217-1329532.png)
I never bothered to think precisely about the structure of eternal damnation, because I sensed damnation and turmoil as a daily weight. But I did have a sense for eternal torment, because I felt tormented daily. I could never conjure an image of what hell would look like, beyond the barest impressions of color and sound: deep reds, darkness, cries and hollers, loud. I never had a strong sense for the devil, for Satan the concept was always blurry to me. But it has also has made me remember these scenes from my past, moments I hadn't necessarily forgotten but had stopped thinking about with intention.
![lil nas x gay montero lil nas x gay montero](https://gaytekeepers.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/screen-shot-2021-06-28-at-2.18.59-pm-1200x636-1.png)
" Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" by Lil Nas X, whose government name is Montero Lamar Hill, has made its mark as a media event - the latest trick from a pop artist uncannily gifted at pulling charts and debate in his direction. Like many folks I know, for the past few weeks I have been watching and rewatching a music video in which a young Black man rides a stripper pole to hell to give the devil a lap dance. But I didn't know, not yet, that I didn't have to be afraid.ĪDVISORY: This video contains profanity. I felt fear that sooner or later, I would be the one marked for eternal torment. It is not only children who experience this fear, but it is children who are most vulnerable to this power, especially when wielded by adults who would presume to know the shape and direction of a life, or an afterlife. The capacity to invoke fear, whether of gods or humans, is all about power: who can act coercively, who can control thoughts and behaviors.
![lil nas x gay montero lil nas x gay montero](https://headlineplanet.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Lil-Nas-X-MONTERO.jpg)
And some Sunday when I least expected it, maybe during the offering or right before the benediction, I, too, would be called to the front of the sanctuary and told to repent. Some evening, my parents would come home early and find me chatting in a sinful corner of the early Internet. Somehow, my desires would be found out and made an object of shame. So if a preacher could publicly call out a boy he deemed in need of saving, if a grown-up could overtly and incautiously flirt with a child without comment from the adults in the room, I felt that my time to be exposed was soon to come. I'd visited another someone's apartment when I should have been in school. I had invited someone to my parents' house. And by the time fear began to visit me at church in the mid-'90s, I was making daily visits on our Gateway 2000 computer - clandestinely, I hoped - to AOL chat rooms titled "m4m," where I would type and hope and desire. About my singing, a band teacher told me I sounded like I didn't have balls. In junior high, my homeroom teacher called me a "faggot" in front of the entire class more than once. I directed my choir, loved lush colors, and on the phone I was often called by my mother's name. I was the one at school belting Whitney Houston's "I'm Every Woman" through the hallways. I, too, had a crowd I longed to hang with. His "young folks" had been delivered from the demonic, from spiritual warfare.īest Music Of 2020 He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief Thankfully, he assured us, his members had collectively fasted, prayed together. And during his sermonizing, while his accompanist played the Hammond organ, he discussed how "fornication and the spirit of homosexuality was beginning to take over" his church. We went to see him together, this charismatic visitor from South Carolina, because he was not only a pastor but a well-known singer. Then there was the preacher, around the same time, whom I met through my music teacher. This boy wore his flamboyance only a little more than I did.
![lil nas x gay montero lil nas x gay montero](https://entscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/lil-nas-x-montero-3-1024x576.jpeg)
In the language of Pentecostalism, the devil had to be rebuked, cast out, lest the demon overtake this young person, lest hell be his ultimate eternal. We were asked to pray with him, to point hands toward him, while the preacher enunciated words of rebuke for the devil. There were words about hanging with the wrong crowd, about how he, this teenager, needed to be delivered. There was the time a preacher, a white evangelist visiting our Black church in northern New Jersey, prophesied to a teenager not more than a year my younger. And I didn't know I didn't have to be afraid. There was talk of joy, too, of course: There was music, and dance, and "getting happy." But there was also fear, always the fear.