What Jesse Jackson meant to Black queer boys in the Back pew
By the time the new millennium arrived, I was a dark-skinned teenager questioning my sexuality, fingers perched on the coveted keys of my Southern Baptist church’s Hammond organ, afraid of black men in the pulpit. I followed them as expected in the magical moments of oratorical inflection where they shouted “yes, Lord” and “say amen, church,” and in their damning declarations that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people were loved by God, but not like this.
The first time I saw Jesse L. Jackson, he looked like the other preachers I have feared, angered, and still divinely revered. I was sitting too close to the brown television in the apartment’s living room, watching his episode of A different world. Dwayne Wayne, my favorite character, and the entire cast watched this man with tears in their eyes as he told them and us that we were “someone,” that hope was a discipline, not a feeling. I knew they weren’t acting. Neither does he.
I knew Reverend Jackson was black as collard greens, Blue Magic grease, Sam Cooke, spades and sweet tea. I knew he looked like the reverends I grew up with. I knew he was different from them. In black church culture, our reverends were the closest thing to God: the respect was immediate, biblical, intense, immense.
My mother, Valerie J. Golden, a young organizer from Steinbeck Country, had once knocked on doors in isolated Salinas neighborhoods with her name on her cinnamon lips, a Jesse Jackson ’88 button pinned to her slim body, carrying campaign materials into homes that both welcomed her and barred her entry. What she remembers most about her visit to Salinas in 1988 is how brown the crowd was. As a regional member of the Rainbow Coalition, she had the honor of accompanying Rev. Jackson to the podium alongside current California Senator Anna Caballero and local Mexican gay rights advocates. The Hispanic community in Salinas showed up to hear his call and enthusiastic response to “Keep Hope Alive,” and migrant lettuce workers respected his prayer with César Chávez, who endured a 36-day water fast against pesticides and for the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott—an interracial collaboration that showed the reverend’s heart for people different from him.
Fifteen years later, one of his biographers and confidants would become my mentor, and I would understand that the same reverend who inspired my mother to earn her own threatening calls was one of the first great and great black men, like me, to willingly utter the words “lesbians and gays” from the pulpit of a national political convention. Journalist Eugene Scott later wrote about Jackson’s role in advocating for LGBTQ rights within the black community in the United States. Boston Globe.
Rev. Jackson wondered what that meant for the dark-skinned Baptist children who hid behind the organ benches during the choir’s selection, “God Put a Rainbow in the Sky.” The parallels were too blinding, too direct, and would surely risk overshadowing these young people. This is the same man who would later say that people are judged by “how you treat the least among them,” that you must love your neighbor as yourself, and that making the Bible “toxic” to justify oppression would never stand the test of love and justice.
I didn’t realize then, sitting on the borrowed organ bench, that Rev. Jackson had already abandoned the long black robe and white preaching tabs of a line of civil rights heroes who looked like him. Decades before I learned the language to call myself queer, he stood in San Francisco, California’s gay capital, to declare: “The rainbow includes lesbians and gays. No American citizen should be denied equal protection under the law.” He made these remarks at the 1984 Democratic National Convention as part of his broader Rainbow Coalition message.
He insisted that gay men, and subsequently black gay boys, were essential to the American tapestry – the covenant we continue to recite but rarely sign in permanent ink.
I would later learn that he had his own private struggles with God, which caused him to deviate from classic black theological ideologies that included old hesitations about marriage, as well as his own insistence that black suffering was not a metaphor for some other struggle. “You can’t compare the gay struggle with the fight to end slavery after 246 years…For those who abuse Scripture, that won’t stand the test of love and justice,” Jackson said when discussing marriage equality in a 2012 interview with TIME.
And, for the first time, black gay men had an unmistakable sacred figure who held both blackness and homosexuality in his calloused, prayer-scarred palms. We could finally see ourselves as both black and queer, knowing that our queerness would never usurp the fact that we were descendants of goods stolen during the transatlantic slave trade. Our quirk could never usurp that.
While Rev. Jackson was struggling out loud with his views on the LGBTQ+ community, I was a depressed sophomore studying Black Studies at California State University, Northridge. In 2004, when he declared on the one hand that gays deserved the right to choose their partner and on the other that “in my culture, marriage is a man-woman relationship”, he spoke in a conversation with The lawyer on LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. I heard the footsteps of all the black men I loved who could march for my right to vote but not to live fully.
It wasn’t that I needed his permission to love a man; it was that I needed to see a gargantuan black preacher, trained by the same Southern Baptist sanctuaries that hurt me, say out loud that he was ready to change. It’s a shift we simultaneously saw during the historic eight years in office of the first black president, Barack Obama, who undoubtedly owed his ability to campaign and be considered to Reverend Jackson’s earlier offerings.
The change Reverend Jackson made, however, did not cure my depression. It belonged to queer friends, black women, expensive therapists, and my own faith, built in the phoenix ashes of a resurgent young mind. But his public repentance – his change of heart and the evolution of his thinking in front of the cameras – made me understand that black men were not unforgivable, nor set in stone. He said, “I was wrong and I will be different.” » Reverend Jackson modeled permission by admitting that the theology that raised you could be revised, that black masculinity could mean more than what historically came from Baptist pulpits.
As a boy, hearing “abomination” more than “love” or my own name, it mattered to the queer black man I would become that a 6’3″ football player turned international theologian was willing to change his and many black people’s minds, publicly, on television. In many ways, this is my attempt to grapple with this: what it means when a Southern Baptist preacher, shaped by the same Bible that bruised me, decided that his God would no longer be used to erase me or any other black boy.
Reverend Jackson’s evolution did not end homophobia in the Black Church. There are still 2,026 remnants of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from Sunday morning sermons, where pastors call us an “agenda” from their pulpits while quoting Jackson about any other type of justice. These men will invoke his “keeping hope alive” while refusing to say our names, as if they have misunderstood the literal and metaphorical association of rainbows in his speech.
Long before it was safe, Rev. Jackson visited AIDS hospices, held the hands of the dying, took an HIV test in public, and launched campaigns to get a million black people tested, insisting that the disease was not a divine verdict on anyone’s desire.
Today, as new anti-LGBTQ+ laws multiply like grandma’s cookies, black trans youth are murdered and disappeared, and hard-won rights are taken away, we feel like we need him to come back and preach one more sermon.
We also need our black men in the pulpit to protect us. We need heterosexual black men to include us when we struggle to stay alive. We need Black institutions to move forward on Reverend Jackson’s divinely bulldozed path and serve the invisible among us – “the least of these.”
His death on February 17, 2026, was rightly mourned as the passing of a civil rights maverick, but it was also a behind-the-scenes funeral for black gay men who didn’t know they needed him until he was gone.
Learn more about NAACP Image Award-winning poet and writer James B. Golden and explore his books and poetry at www.jamesbgolden.net
This article originally appeared on Advocate: From Abomination to Someone: What Jesse Jackson Means to Black Queer Boys in the Back Bench
