“Having spaces where Black queer people feel affirmed and safe is essential, and some participants decided to leave their church when they didn’t feel safe and affirmed in them.”

My story of queer becoming was a communal affair. After the fallout from coming out, the tears, and the imagined casting out of my queerness, there was an entanglement of messy relationships to parse through. For me, the only thing often left to do was pray and try to move on. When I first started this research, I located my family’s heterosexist origins in a Black church, my grandfather’s church, in rural North Carolina. When I was a teenager, my grandfather preached a sermon about sex that condemned queerness, sex before marriage, and other “sins.” When I fell out of the proverbial closet as a lesbian, it was not simply a nuclear family matter but a wider communal one. Afterward, I put the church community behind me.