Two more men have come forward to accuse Christian rock superstar and Maga firebrand Michael Tait of drugging and sexually assaulting them – including Jason Jones, the founding manager of the American hard-rock band Evanescence.

Jones said he was fired from the band – which had ties to Tait – for speaking out about his alleged assault. Jones said the firing, which he claimed happened in 1999, cut him out of Evanescence’s massive success beginning in 2003.

“It destroyed me,” said Jones. “I was achieving my dreams at an early age, and Tait changed all that.”

Evanescence co-founder Ben Moody denied Jones was fired from the band for speaking out against Tait.

Moody said he does recall Jones telling him about a sexual encounter with Tait, but at the time Moody interpreted it as consensual.

“I was a kid, only 18, and clearly didn’t realize what he was going through,” Moody said. “I’m sure I missed a lot of things I’d recognize today. I didn’t realize he was traumatized.”

In all, eight alleged victims have now come forward publicly with sexual assault allegations against Tait. A previous investigation by the Guardian reported allegations of sexual assault by Tait against three young men while another from the Christian news outlet the Roys Report reported allegations by three other men.

Tait became famous as the frontman for DC Talk and Newsboys, two Christian mega-bands known for packaging conservative rhetoric about sexual abstinence, sobriety, Christian nationalism and the coming rapture in catchy rock songs. Tait has been a supporter of Donald Trump and served as a key bridge between Trump and evangelical voters.

Tait has not responded to questions from the Guardian about the allegations against him. But in an Instagram post in June, Tait confessed to a decades-long addiction to cocaine and alcohol and admitted that he had “at times, touched men in an unwanted, sensual way”.

In the post, Tait added that he had recently “spent six weeks at a treatment center in Utah”.

Jones was described by friends who knew him in the 1990s as a happy-go-lucky Christian teenager, bursting with ambition and creativity. Growing up in Arkansas, Jones remembers, one of his biggest dreams was “to meet DC Talk”.

Jones achieved that dream in 1994 after moving to Nashville to manage the band of his friend, Randall Crawford, who was also friends with Tait and introduced the two.

Jones recalled going to McDonalds with the DC Talk frontman and being mobbed by so many teenage fans they had to leave before getting their food. “That kind of thing happened a lot,” he said.

Jones was thrilled to be welcomed into Tait’s inner circle, yet he was taken aback by what he described as Tait’s proclivity for randomly grabbing other men’s genitals. He said he eventually learned that Tait was living a double-life as a closeted gay man, which was becoming a problem for a band mentored by Moral Majority co-founder Jerry Falwell, who called Aids “God’s punishment for homosexuality”.

While surprised, Jones held no negative feelings toward Tait’s sexuality, even taking him to gay clubs in Little Rock (at Tait’s request) when DC Talk performed there.

Jones was regularly traveling back and forth from Nashville to Little Rock, and in 1995 he met aspiring musician Moody – the two of them hitting it off and collaborating on a project that would come to be named Evanescence.

After co-producing the first Evanescence demo, Jones returned to Nashville and began talking up the band to his friend, Tait.

Jones, as an evangelical, was sober and a virgin at the time. But he recalls getting caught up in a whirlwind of partying with Tait in 1995, chain-smoking cigarettes and marijuana and closing down bars, then returning to Tait’s house to continue drinking. Jones said he was uncomfortable with all of it, but was eager for Tait’s approval so he complied.

“I had this band that I was trying to take places,” Jones recalled. “And [Tait] had the power to open doors for us in the industry. So I went along with whatever, but didn’t know what it would cost me.”

Jones’ used his connection with Tait to help Evanescence get a foot in the door in Nashville, speaking with A&R people, record labels, venue owners, producers and musicians.

Sources that wish to remain anonymous alleged that Tait had a rotation of attractive young men at his Nashville home at this time, some of them underage, and that Tait had a “no clothes allowed” rule in his hot tub. “He would put his penis against one of the jets, and tell us to do the same, saying ‘see, it feels good!’” recalled a source who visited Tait regularly at this time, and wishes to remain anonymous.

“He was all about the shock factor,” recalled Crawford, who was close with Jones and Tait throughout the 90s. “He was always saying ‘let’s make out in front of these people!’ And I was like ‘no, you’re gonna destroy your career.’ But he felt untouchable. And in some ways, he was.”

Around this same time, Crawford recalls Tait driving him through the campus of Liberty University – Falwell’s Christian college where DC Talk formed – speeding at 60mph and getting pulled over by campus security, who turned from anger to laughter when seeing Tait behind the wheel, even asking for pictures and autographs.

“After they left, Michael turned to me, calm as ever, and said: ‘I can do anything and not get in trouble.’”

Jones recalls drinking at Tait’s house one night in late 1998, just after DC Talk finished rehearsals for their Supernatural album tour. Jones remembers feeling tired suddenly, and Tait recommended he go to sleep in his bedroom. “I felt honored that he felt that close to me, that he trusted me enough to let me sleep in his bed,” Jones said.

Some time later, Jones recalls waking up, his pants missing, and Tait was giving him oral sex. “I said no and pushed him off, but then, somehow, I passed out again. I woke back up and he was still doing it. I said no again, then nodded out. And then I woke up a third time, aggressively shouted ‘no!’ and pushed him harder. It was then that he left me alone.”

Looking back, Jones said, “I believe that Michael Tait drugged me.”

Two alleged victims from the Guardian’s previous report also say they believe they were drugged by Tait before their alleged assaults. In addition, a female accuser cited by the Roys Report said she believed that Tait supplied Rohypnol or some other sedative to a crew member on a Newsboys tour, who then drugged and raped her while Tait watched.

Distraught and in need of comfort, Jones flew home to Little Rock the day after he said he was assaulted. There he confided in a friend and mentor – who wishes to remain anonymous – that he had had “a bad experience with Tait,” but wouldn’t go into details. “He wasn’t the same after that,” Jones’s friend recalled.

Jones said that in early 1999 he had also confided in his friend and Evanescence co-founder, Ben Moody, about being sexually assaulted by Tait. “Ben was only 18 at the time, new to the music industry, and I wanted to warn him,” Jones recalled. “[Tait] was flying Ben out to Nashville to write songs together, to see if he fit in Tait’s inner-circle.”

Moody remembers things differently.

“He didn’t frame it as ‘sexual assault,’” Moody said. “He described it as like frat-boy joking around while they were drunk, with [Tait] saying ‘what’s the big deal? A dick’s just a muscle.’ And Jason said ‘the next thing I know he’s sucking my dick.’”

Jones said he remains confident that he told Moody the full details of the assault, including that he verbally and physically resisted Tait three times as his consciousness came and went.

Moody said he soon noticed a change in Jones’s demeanor. Jones, a passionate, fun-loving guy who was easy to get along with, began suffering manic swings from depression to rage to paranoia and then to dissociation. “After a late night studio he couldn’t get the car shifter into gear and he just started screaming, hurling his body around, jerking the shifter violently like he was going to break it off.”

Moody said he and the band began wondering if they should continue working with Jones. In retrospect, Moody said: “I didn’t know what he was going through. Looking back I would’ve been a bit more attentive, but I was the typical 18 year old who wanted to be a rockstar.”

Moody said that in a phone call with Tait, he mentioned that Jones had told him about a sexual encounter between them, which Tait then denied. “I wanted to get ahead of [Jason] talking shit about us and ruining the whole thing. Back then there were rumors Michael Tait [was gay] and at that point, right after [DC Talk’s Grammy-winning album] Jesus Freak, he was the biggest thing in Christian music history, and the scandal would’ve been a huge deal.”

Jones and Moody differ on whether he was fired or quit, but both recall the incident with Tait – however it was characterized – as the turning point of the relationship.

“I hid away after that,” Jones recalls. “I started snorting meth, then smoking it.”

His isolation and drug binge would continue for five years.

Moody said he regrets how things went down with Jones back then. “He was my best friend for so many years, and now I ask myself ‘how fucking blind could I have been?’”

Evanescence went on to be one of the biggest bands in the world, winning “Best New Artist” and “Best Hard Rock Performance” at the Grammys in 2003 and eventually selling tens of millions of albums.

The following year, Moody and Tait would go on to be roommates and musical collaborators, with Tait singing on Moody’s solo album, and Moody producing Tait’s solo album, Loveology. In 2003, Moody left Evanescence to pursue his solo career.

Evanescence co-founder Amy Lee and other representatives of the band could not be reached for comment.

Like Moody, Crawford remembers his friend Jones as a “a happy guy, a real sweetheart, but all that changed after 1998. I could tell something had happened. He didn’t tell me about it at the time, but he has since. And I believe him, because the same thing happened to me.”

Crawford first met DC Talk when the band was filming the music video for its first single, Heavenbound, in 1989. Crawford was working in a movie theater in the same Nashville mall the band was filming in. He loved their debut cassette and when they came by to catch a movie he introduced himself and gave them a discount.

Crawford remembers his friend Jason Jones getting squeezed out of the management position of Evanescence in early 1999, and that “it had something to do with Tait”, but was unaware of specifics at the time.

Back then, Crawford was an ambitious musician, and was being hired to write songs for solo projects for Tait and DC Talk’s Toby Mac (the band went on “hiatus” in 2000, and never officially reunited). Mac’s project was later nominated for a Grammy and Dove Award. Crawford had also just signed his own record deal for his band, Webster County.

Crawford recalls being distraught over a breakup one night in the fall 2000, and Tait inviting him over to hang out. “You’ll bounce back,” he recalls Tait saying, as he handed him a shot glass of Makers Mark whiskey.

“I told him ‘just one,’ and took the shot,” he recalled. “I had a pretty high tolerance for alcohol at the time, but I blacked out shortly after I took that one drink.”

Crawford said his memory picks up some time later, finding himself propped up on Tait’s kitchen counter, his pants around his ankles. “My legs were up in the air, and Tait was licking my anus,” he claimed. “I said ‘what are you doing, dude?’ and then he said the weirdest thing: ‘Hey man, did you catch the Colts game last week?’ Like we were just hanging out, chatting.”

Crawford said that he fled Tait’s house, but has no memory of driving home. He said he is convinced that Tait drugged him.

Two close friends of Crawford’s have corroborated his story. One of them confirmed that Crawford told him details of the alleged assault at the time, but only named the perpetrator two years ago. The other friend said he was told the whole story at the time.

“I was never the same after that,” Crawford said. “The joy and drive I had for music went away. Suddenly I had stage fright for the first time, brain-fog, anger issues, depression, and was even suicidal for a time. It ruined my career.”

Despite having finished recording the album for his band, Crawford felt unable to perform as a musician, and the record was never released.

Both Jones and Crawford recall thinking their assaults were isolated incidents and continued to have some involvement with Tait. Jones accepted a phone call from him when Tait’s father passed away and he was distraught, and Crawford says he was “love bombed” by Tait and succumbed to future advances.

After not speaking for years, Tait re-entered his life in 2020. Crawford’s wife was a musician herself, and Tait had offered to produce her album.

“I had buried the memory of that night for a long time,” Crawford said. After seeing Tait again, Crawford said, a lot of feelings came to the surface and he found himself weeping uncontrollably in the shower. After confessing to his wife what had happened, she encouraged him to enroll in EMDR trauma therapy, which he said had been helpful.

“Hearing Jason’s story recently broke my heart,” he said of reuniting with his friend, Jones, decades later. “I believe we’d both be in the music industry today if it weren’t for Michael Tait.”

Jones has been sober since 2008. After leaving the music industry he worked in banking and co-directed a sober living facility. Today he travels around the country sharing his story of abuse and addiction (not mentioning Tait’s name when recounting the experience).

Shortly after getting sober Jones contacted a law firm to ask about potential compensation he could be owed from Evanescence. According to his 2008 correspondence with the law firm that he shared with the Guardian, the firm told him that, because of the statute of limitations, his window for a suit against Evanescence had closed years earlier. Jones said the lawyers told him that, had he pursued the matter sooner, he could be entitled to up to tens of millions of dollars in compensation.

Moody disputed the notion that Jones has ever had the right to compensation for his management efforts in the early days of Evanescence.

Looking back 27 years later, Jones recalled the night he told Moody about what had happened to him. Warning him not only about Tait, but about the music industry in general, he recited a quote from the magazine journalist Hunter S Thompson, who said: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free.”

“And that’s true for the Christian music industry as well,” Jones said. “Even more so, in my case.”

The post ‘It destroyed me’: two more men accuse Christian rock star Michael Tait of sexual assault appeared first on Josiah Hesse.

The Christian music legend Michael Tait, whose hit song God’s Not Dead became an anthem for Donald Trump’s Maga movement, has been accused of sexually assaulting three men, two who believed they were drugged by the rock star in the early 2000s, according to a months-long Guardian investigation. Four other men have alleged that Tait, a founding member of DC Talk and later a frontman for Newsboys, engaged in inappropriate behavior such as unwanted touching and sexual advances.

The Guardian is publishing these allegations days after Tait posted an extraordinary confession on his Instagram account, admitting that for 20 years he had been “leading a double life”, abusing alcohol and cocaine, “and, at times, touched men in an unwanted sensual way”, according to his statement.

The statement appears to be a response to a separate report published earlier this month by the Christian media outlet the Roys Report, which also investigated Tait and revealed similar allegations of drug use and sexual assault against young, male musicians.

In the Instagram statement, Tait wrote: “I am ashamed of my life choices and actions and make no excuses for them. I will simply call it what God calls it – sin.” He added: “While I might dispute certain details in the accusations against me, I do not dispute the substance of them.

“Even before this recent news became public, I had started on a path to health, healing, and wholeness … I accept the consequences of my sin and am committed to continuing the hard work of repentance and healing – work [which] I will do quietly and privately, away from the stage and the spotlight.”

‘Biggest open secret in Christian music’

The allegations about Tait’s behavior revealed today starkly contrast with the public image that he cultivated for nearly four decades. The 59-year-old native of Washington DC has sold 18m albums, containing songs that often encouraged young Christians to stay sober, abstinent and straight. But sources who spoke to the Guardian claimed Tait’s alleged drug use and alleged abusive behavior were the “biggest open secret in Christian music”.

The Guardian has interviewed 25 people in the Christian music industry, most of whom say they had prior knowledge of allegations that Tait had engaged in abusive behavior. The men who have come forward and shared their alleged experiences – two agreeing to go on the record with their names, while the rest spoke on the condition of anonymity – were aged 13 to 29 at the time of their alleged experiences.

All grew up in evangelical churches where Tait’s music was the premier soundtrack of their youth groups, summer camps and mission trips. Having taken the message of Tait’s songs to heart, they were naive about sex and drugs throughout their youth. All were starstruck when meeting their childhood hero, but quickly saw their image of him as a role model of Christian piety dissolve as they were taken on a bumpy ride of rock’n’roll debauchery.

Shawn Davis, who was a lifelong fan and troubled youth who had immersed himself in Christian music, claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine on multiple occasions. He also says he believes Tait once secretly drugged him and then molested him in 2003, while he was still a minor.

“This man destroyed my life,” Davis now claims.

Gabriel (not his real name) also claims Tait pushed him to consume alcohol and cocaine before asking to join him in a hot tub in 2003, where he claims Tait repeatedly groped his penis while attempting to kiss him. “To this day I jump whenever someone touches me unexpectedly,” Gabriel says. “When something like that happens to you, you feel like the worst person, you feel dirty, worthless. It’s heartbreaking to think someone you look up to could do something like that.”

Adam (not his real name) claims he believes he was drugged by the singer while he was visiting Tait’s home in Nashville, and later woke up to find Tait allegedly molesting him. “This person has stolen a little piece of our souls,” he says.

Tait did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the allegations contained in this report.

God’s Not Dead

Over the last 38 years, Tait has emerged as one of the most iconic names in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). The genre and industry often exists in its own commercial and cultural ecosystem – yet mimics popular trends of mainstream music – creating multi-platinum superstars who are marketed to teens (and their parents) as wholesome alternatives to the “sinful lifestyles” of mainstream rock stars.

Tait was one-third of the rap-rock group, DC Talk, which formed in 1987 while its members were attending the evangelical Liberty University, whose founder, Jerry Falwell, launched the Moral Majority, the political organization that first galvanized evangelical voters around the Republican party in 1980, forever changing the American political landscape. Falwell was a mentor to young Tait – whom he referred to as “my white daddy” – and helped boost DC Talk to stardom.

Blending MTV aesthetics with Christian right talking points, DC Talk instructed generations of teens to stand against the liberalism of the Clinton era, namely abortion rights and sex education. Songs such as I Don’t Want It (a rebuttal to George Michael’s I Want Your Sex), That Kind Of Girl and The Children Can Live shaped the moral landscape of a generation of young evangelicals, mandating sexual purity until marriage.

“They used the sounds often associated with teen sexuality – like hip-hop, rock and pop music – to combat teen sexuality and adolescent desire,” says Leah Payne, author of the book God Gave Rock and Roll to You, an academic critique of CCM history. “In 1994 the True Love Waits organization asked DC Talk to perform at their concert on the National Mall promoting virginity among young evangelicals, which resulted in the signing of 200,000 chastity pledges by the teenage fans.”

In 1995, their Nirvana-flavored smash hit, Jesus Freak, championed being a social outcast for the Lord’s sake; a book companion to the album celebrated the violent histories of Christian martyrs around the world, encouraging young people to follow in their footsteps.

The fight for Christian nationalism was also a premier theme of DC Talk’s music – as well as the book Under God, co-authored by Tait – claiming the US is suffering a collapse of moral values because of the secularization of government and public schools. This was underscored with frightening urgency by their songs warning of the coming rapture. As recently as 2021, Tait warned: “I believe we are living in the last days [before the rapture].”

The CCM industry has been primarily headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, where Tait and most of his colleagues work and live. While it is not affiliated with the country music scene of Nashville, it typically shares the same conservative politics. While DC Talk addressed racism in several songs – with Tait as the sole Black man performing with two white guys (one of whom rapped) – their narrative typically placed racism as an unfortunate touchstone of the past that the US must repent for, but never as a contemporary, systemic problem.

DC Talk went on a hiatus in 2000 and for nearly a decade Tait performed as a solo artist until he became the frontman of the legendary CCM supergroup Newsboys. In 2011, their rock song God’s Not Dead became a rallying cry for disaffected evangelicals in the Obama era. In 2014, Tait and Newsboys appeared in God’s Not Dead, a movie centered around the fictional story of an atheist college professor who threatens to fail his students if they refuse to sign a form declaring “God is dead”. Tait would make an appearance in four subsequent sequels, becoming a recognizable face in the fight against perceived anti-Christian discrimination, a central theme of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Tait endorsed Ted Cruz in 2016, but shifted his allegiance to Trump after the Florida pastor Paula White – chair of the evangelical advisory board for Trump’s 2016 campaign and leader of the White House faith office in 2024 – invited him to pray over Trump before a Florida campaign stop. Tait soon became a key bridge between the candidate and white evangelical voters. Newsboys performed for Trump at the White House in 2019, and the following year Tait sang at evangelical “Let Us Worship” events, which were centered around the false claim that President Joe Biden was using Covid lockdowns to repress church attendance in the US.

“I love you, I support you, and I’m one of the growing number of African Americans who love you,” Tait said in a 2019 video praising Trump’s efforts at prison reform, before adding: “I’m looking forward to hanging out, and eating some Big Macs!”

On 5 January 2021, Newsboys’ God’s Not Dead was sung in unison during the “Jericho March” at the US Capitol, the event that preceded the violent insurrection at the US Capitol the following day.

‘He betrayed that trust’

The Guardian’s investigation has revealed an alleged pattern of manipulative behavior by Tait. Most of the alleged incidents described in this article are alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2009.

Young and sometimes naive male musicians say they believe they were targeted by the star, with Tait allegedly dangling the possibility of career or artistic opportunities before them and then cutting off all contact once it became clear that sex was off the table. According to four people who were interviewed, some of them on the condition of anonymity, Tait would allegedly invite them to parties at his house in Nashville, encouraging them to drink alcohol and use drugs before making sexual advances.

Two of the men who spoke to the Guardian claim they believe they were secretly drugged, which left them floating in and out of consciousness, unable to consent to sexual acts. They claim Tait assaulted them by touching them sexually without their permission. Three others claim they awkwardly rebuffed his advances and left.

“I wore out my Jesus Freak CD as a kid, and so when I met him I was starstruck,” recalls Gabriel, who was 19 when he was introduced to 38-year-old Tait in 2004. “And then he started calling me to hang out, it was just crazy.”

Gabriel was ambitious to become a CCM musician, and now his childhood hero was inviting him out to bars, buying him drinks even though he was underage and taking him to parties at his home in Nashville. Tait often mentioned the possibility of them jamming together, but that never materialized.

Gabriel felt a little uncomfortable at first when Tait would rub a hand on his shoulder and constantly hug him, but attributed the feeling to the fact that he had been abused a few years earlier by a serial child molester. In fact, Gabriel was testifying in a court case about that incident during this same time, an emotionally taxing experience that he confided in Tait about.

“He was very sympathetic,” Gabriel says, “and then he betrayed that trust.”

Tait started inviting Gabriel over alone, when the house was empty. When Tait introduced him to cocaine, “it was a huge shock”, Gabriel says, partially because he had no experience with drugs, and because it was being served by the man whose music informed his moral universe. “But I was too excited to be there, and didn’t want to screw up this opportunity.”

The two used cocaine together a number of times over the next few weeks. One night, while they both were high on the drug, along with a couple of vodka and Red Bulls, Tait proposed they jump in the hot tub.

It was there that Tait unexpectedly “grabbed my crotch and tried to kiss me at the same time”, Gabriel claims. “It wasn’t subtle, and it was out of nowhere. I asked him, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He said he was just joking, but then he did it again. I jumped out of the pool and drove home, which I shouldn’t have done because I was more intoxicated than I’ve ever been, but that’s how scared I was.”

Gabriel didn’t tell anyone for 15 years, when he confided about it to the same friend who had introduced him to Tait, Shawn Davis.

Shocked, Davis told him he had his own bad experience.

Davis says he was 16 when he met 37-year-old Tait in 2003 at a Nashville party that was loaded with mainstream celebrities. But Davis’s attention remained only on his childhood idol, Michael Tait. A mutual friend introduced them, and Tait took down his number, calling Davis to hang out a few days later.

“DC Talk were my heroes in a lot of ways,” Davis recalls. “They were Christians, but they rocked out, and I thought that was so cool.”

Looking back, both Davis and Gabriel realized that while they spent time together with Tait at bars and parties, at some point they were only invited to his house separately and alone, which began when he allegedly introduced them to cocaine.

According to Davis’s claims, months passed with Davis and Tait hitting the Nashville bars (Tait was able to get Davis, a teenager, drinks), before going back to Tait’s house to smoke weed and cigarettes, and snort coke along with the opioid Lortab, which Tait would crush into a powder.

Like Gabriel, Davis confided to Tait that he had been molested when he was eight years old. “Tait made me feel like, and seem like, he was my only friend,” he says.

Davis says that Tait always mixed their drinks, and claims he often felt pressured to drink heavily. One night he recalls the drink tasting strange, and Tait insisting he finish it. “Suddenly, I felt super sick, dizzy, nauseous, going in and out of consciousness,” he says. “I woke up in the closet, and he had my pants down, and was giving me a blowjob. I pushed him off as best as I was able in that state, but he pushed me down, and then I punched him twice and left.”

Davis says he believed he was drugged by Tait. He was 17 at the time.

In the months that followed, Davis claims, Tait aggressively pursued a reconciliation. “He was relentlessly love-bombing me, trying to talk his way back in the door,” alleges Davis. “He apologized to me for what happened, but never got into specifics, it was more of a broad statement.”

Davis was attempting to get a CCM label off the ground, and forgave Tait’s behavior with the hope that he would help him get a foothold in the industry. He claims that “Tait had convinced me that what happened that night was my fault, he was very manipulative. And I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

All of this came to a head one night in 2012, when Davis was in Tait’s kitchen, and Tait texted him from his bedroom, sending him a picture of what Tait described as $5,000 in cash. “He said something to the effect of ‘this could be yours if you let me suck you off and cum in your ass’,” Davis claims.

After that, Davis called his mother and asked her to quickly come pick him up; Davis snuck out quietly without alerting Tait. On the drive home, Davis says he told her everything he had allegedly experienced with Tait. He and Tait never spoke again.

Davis’s mother, and a friend he had confided in at the time, confirmed the details reported in this story. Davis has had one run-in with the law. When he was a teenager he stole his mother’s debit card to rent a limo for prom. He got probation but was then found guilty of violating his probation in connection to drug use, which occurred at a time when he was friends with Tait. He served about five months in prison. He is now married, has a 12-year-old son and owns his own construction company in Nashville.

Both Davis and Gabriel express regret today for not speaking up sooner, believing they could have prevented other people from suffering the same experience. At the time, they each thought their experiences were isolated incidents.

Another young man who got to know Tait, Abraham (not his real name), claims Tait rubbed his thigh and caressed his ear minutes after meeting for lunch in 2006. Abraham was a 22-year-old musician in an up-and-coming band. “He said, ‘At Liberty University, we weren’t allowed to let our hair touch our ears,’ and then he brushed my hair back with his hand, which was weird,” Abraham recalls.

Zach (not his real name) was a 29-year-old aspiring DJ with little experience when, he claims, Tait invited him to his house after they met in a Nashville dance club in the summer of 2008. “He was doing a solo tour and said: ‘What we need is a DJ who can come on the road with us,’” Zach alleges. “And I asked: ‘That would be so cool! What would I need to do?’ And he said: ‘You need to hang out, come around [my house] a lot.’”

But when Zach arrived at his house, and was brought to Tait’s studio, he noticed the only furniture in the room was a bed, and Tait kept encouraging Zach to sit close to him.

“I was a virgin until I was 37,” Zach recalls. “And I’d always thought to myself: ‘Michael Tait’s been single his whole life, and if he can hold out so can I.’”

Feeling uncomfortable, Zach made up an excuse to leave early. Afterward, he sent Tait several messages to follow up on the DJ opportunity, but Tait never replied.

Adam (not his real name) was another young and ambitious musician in a Christian rock band that was slowly gaining steam in 2004 when he met Tait in Nashville. The 22-year-old was ecstatic when Tait texted him a few days later, inviting him out for some bar-hopping. “Tait was like the Christian Elvis, the GOAT,” Adam recalls.

Adam was dropped off at the bar to meet Tait by some friends, one of whom said “don’t get molested!” as he was exiting the car, a comment he found strange but dismissed.

A wild night out concluded at Tait’s home, where Adam was awed by “his trophy room, where he keeps all his Dove awards, Grammys and other accolades”. At one point they needed to buy more booze, and Tait showed him his collection of cars in the garage, telling him to “pick one”. Adam selected a white MG convertible.

It was nearly dawn when they got back to Tait’s house, which was empty but for the two of them. They drank more, and Adam recalls suddenly feeling profoundly sleepy. That’s when, Adam says, Tait told him, “‘It’s OK, just go to sleep,’ and then he laid my head on his lap.”

Adam’s next memory of that night is “waking up in his bed, my pants unzipped, and [Tait] was jerking me off. I passed out again, then woke up, wondering: ‘What the fuck is happening?’ I went to the bathroom and had a panic attack, asking myself, ‘Am I supposed to go there and beat him up? Or am I supposed to play it cool?’”

Like Davis and Gabriel, Adam had been abused as a child. “It made me a lot more insecure, wondering, ‘Why me? Am I weak? Too innocent? Was this my fault?’ I didn’t ask for this, I was just hanging out with a superstar.”

Adam says he believes Tait drugged him that night. He shared the story with his girlfriend at the time, and a couple of fellow musicians who were close with Tait, and recalls that “some of them stopped hanging out with me after that, which hurt, and made me afraid”.

A close friend of Adam’s at the time confirmed to the Guardian that Adam told him about what he says happened.

Many sources we spoke with also feared reprisal, and would only speak on the condition of anonymity. Several people who were interviewed said they recall Tait stripping down to his underwear or naked at parties and backstage at a concert, often exposing himself to young musicians touring as his opening act.

Jacob (not his real name) was a 21-year-old musician when he met 40-year-old Tait in the winter of 2004. The two were both performing at a church concert, and Tait invited Jacob to fly out to Nashville and stay a few nights at the home of his childhood hero. Once there, Jacob was surprised at the amount of cigarettes and alcohol Tait and his friends consumed, as he had never had a drink in his life. One night, the two of them alone in Tait’s kitchen, Jacob claims, “Tait somehow brought up that he had a huge urethra. And then he just whipped it out and showed it to me.”

Jacob had been sleeping on the floor of Tait’s house, as he didn’t have a spare bed, and when Tait offered to share his king-sized bed with him, Jacob didn’t think anything of it, as this wasn’t uncommon among touring musicians. He wasn’t sure what to think of the massages Tait kept giving him in the hot tub earlier that night, and then in his bed. When Tait’s hands “moved lower and lower and lower, until he was massaging my butt-cheeks, I didn’t know what to do, because I looked up to him, and didn’t want to make him mad”.

Jacob tried his best to delicately rebuff Tait’s advances, saying, “‘Hey man, I’m not into that.’ Tait said OK and went to sleep.” (Jacob’s girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife, corroborated the details of his story, which he shared with her at the time.)

Israel Anthem was only 13 when Tait allegedly exposed his penis to him in 2001. Anthem descended from the Rambo family, who were legends in the field of gospel music. His grandmother Dottie Rambo (whose songs had been recorded by Elvis, Johnny Cash and many other musicians) was being honored with a lifetime achievement award, and the members of DC Talk were in attendance. Anthem and his family took pictures with the band, and a few weeks later they were eating in a Nashville restaurant when “Michael walked in, and came by our table to say hi”.

Anthem was “a huge, lifelong DC Talk fan”, he recalls. “Some kids sleep with teddy bears, I slept with DC Talk cassettes.” He says he was stoked when the two happened to be in the restaurant bathroom at the same time later that night, sharing side-by-side urinals.

“He was still at the urinal when I was washing my hands, and as we were talking [about a CD that had just come out] I noticed his penis was out, and he was facing me, turned away from the urinal. I thought he was putting his penis away, but then he was rubbing his penis, and making eye contact, while I was talking.”

Anthem recalls this lasting anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds, with Tait “visibly aroused” and “fondling himself”. Back at the table, a family member recalls, Anthem looked “white as a ghost, absolutely terrified”. Anthem later described the alleged bathroom incident to that family member, who corroborated his story to the Guardian.

‘I felt he was fair game’

Tait’s career was on a stable trajectory until January of this year.

Last Christmas he made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, and the previous Christmas he played Carnegie Hall with Amy Grant and others. That all came to a halt on 15 January, when the host of the Yass, Jesus podcast, Azariah Southworth, claimed Tait was gay in a viral TikTok video that received more than 250,000 views before it was removed for violation of TikTok guidelines.

“I felt he was fair game,” Southworth says. “Some people disagreed with the ethics of [outing someone against their will], but this deserved to be said out loud. Keeping quiet would allow a false narrative to continue, fueling a movement that is hurting myself, as a gay man, and my trans brothers and sisters.”

Southworth – who grew up in a strict evangelical household, and was traumatized by five years of “conversion therapy” – was the host of a Christian reality TV show in 2004-05 that featured Tait. During that time, he claims to have seen Tait gambling, smoking and cursing, behavior that would’ve scandalized Christian audiences.

Within days of Southworth publishing his video, Tait announced in a social media post that “it is time [I] step down from Newsboys”, offering fans little explanation as to why.

The remaining members of the Newsboys released a statement after the Roys Report was published addressing the allegations, insisting that it was only last January when “Michael confessed to us and our management that he ‘had been living a double life’”, the band wrote, adding: “But we never imagined that it could be this bad … Our hearts are with the victims who have bravely shared their stories.”

In the closing of Tait’s “confession” on Tuesday, he offers understanding to those who lost “respect, faith and trust in me”, later citing the story of King David’s prayer for forgiveness after he had committed adultery and murder. Though he is quick to add that “it crushes me to think that someone would lose or choose not to pursue faith because I have been such a horrible representative of him”.

This was Gabriel’s experience, saying he had “blamed God” for the trauma he allegedly endured that night. “Tait was presented as the pinnacle of godliness,” he says, trembling with tears in his eyes. “I get that all people sin, but to use the facade of his righteousness to commit sin, that made me walk away from my faith for a while. He took something from me I’ll never get back. In time, though, I found my own way back to God.”

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Growing up closeted while attending an evangelical church in small town North Carolina, Matthew Blake found refuge in music – particularly the songs of the Christian musician turned pop star Amy Grant. When, years later, they began performing in drag, they took on the name Flamy Grant in honor of their hero.

“Writing songs in Flamy’s voice opened up a new world to me,” Blake recalls. “I could say things I didn’t know how to say before.”

Now, Flamy has earned a No 1 hit on the iTunes Christian music chart – thanks in part to a prominent evangelical provocateur.

Sean Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, called Flamy’s collaboration with a Christian rock star a harbinger of “the last days”. He probably didn’t mean for his remarks to make the drag queen a superstar – but that’s exactly what they did.

Shortly after telling Flamy Grant “hardly anyone listens or cares what you do”, Feucht accidentally inspired the growing movement of “exvangelicals” – those who have left the Christian right – whose love for Grant’s music (and disdain for Maga persecution of drag performers) drove their album and song to the No 1 spot.

The rising phenomenon of Flamy Grant and other exvangelical musicians is not only driven by the backlash to the Christian right, but exists within a tradition of queer Christian songwriters wrestling against their industry’s institutionalized homophobia. “I’ve been called groomer and pedophile a lot,” says Flamy Grant of the harassment they’ve faced following their chart success – the album, Bible Belt Baby, hit No 1 on 27 July and remained there for nine days.

Grant’s star was already on the rise when Feucht, a failed Republican congressional candidate and one of Trump’s most powerful evangelical allies, tweeted about the drag queen. A marketing whiz of the Christian right, Feucht hosted large gatherings of Christian worshipers during the Covid lockdown, successfully galvanizing audiences around perceived threats to their religious freedom, from critical race theory to Covid restrictions.

This tactic boomeranged last week when Feucht’s attacks on Flamy Grant had a similar effect on the drag queen’s fans, who flooded iTunes and purchased the album and the song Good Day, a combination queer anthem and Christian worship song.

For generations, contemporary Christian music (CCM) was an isolated corner of the music industry that expected its performers to remain on the right side of the culture wars (with mixed results). But thanks to shifts in how music charts are calculated, along with a movement of confessional songs from those scarred by evangelical childhoods and questioning such teachings (whose work is still categorized as “Christian music” on iTunes), the entire genre is being turned on its head.

“There are a lot of people in Christian music who want this,” says Grant’s collaborator, Derek Webb, former songwriter for the popular Christian rock band Caedmon’s Call, speaking of LGBTQ+ acceptance in Christian music. “But no one wants to be the first to take that step. What would be suicide for one person could be a revolution for those who follow.”

Webb was part of a wave of 90s Christian rock stars – including Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan and DC Talk’s Kevin Max – who became disillusioned with the rightwing culture of CCM and began writing songs questioning that institution, going through a process commonly referred to in the exvangelical world as “deconstruction”, wherein a Christian unpacks the political, cultural and theological rhetoric they’ve been fed throughout their lives and discards what doesn’t ring true any more (which, for some, is all of it).

Webb appreciates the term for fueling this movement but fears that it’s been weaponized by the right to the point of being meaningless. When Feucht attacked Flamy Grant’s collaboration with Derek Webb – with Webb dressing in drag in his music video – he tweeted:

None of this was new to Matthew Blake.

A maternal figure like Grant – a kind of Cher or Dolly Parton to young queer Christians like Blake throughout the 80s and 90s – became essential when Blake, like so many questioning Christians of their time, enrolled in Exodus International, an ex-gay, “conversion therapy” program that has since shut down and been disavowed by its founders. Blake was working as a worship band leader at a megachurch in Reno at the time, and was trying to shed the queer impulses that had been with them since grade school.

“I definitely considered ending my life,” Blake recalls. (Data shows that conversion therapy leads to higher rates of depression and suicide). “Thank God for music, because if I didn’t have those creative outlets I don’t know where I’d be.”

After five years with Exodus failed to turn Blake straight, they eventually embraced their sexuality, began attending a progressive church in San Diego, and launched a podcast that laid bare their deconstruction experience. During the pandemic, Blake played music on an exvangelical livestream called Heathen Happy Hour, and one night decided to show up in drag under the moniker Flamy Grant.

Drag turned out to be the perfect medium to portray the deconstruction experience, where Flamy could organically blend dark humor, social outrage and wild theatrics fit for a megachurch. On their album Bible Belt Baby, they sing with the delicate yet powerful range of a worship band leader, while telling the story of a boy who wants to cross-dress as the Virgin Mary, followed by a feminist anthem set in the Old Testament, and a cover of Amy Grant’s Takes A Little Time.

Exvangelical audiences flocked to Flamy Grant almost instantly, leading to collaborations with the former 90s Christian rocker Jennifer Knapp, the queer exvangelical songwriter Semler (who also topped the iTunes Christian music charts the year before with Preacher’s Kid), and Derek Webb, with Grant appearing in his music video for Boys Will Be Girls.

Chrissy Stroop, trans author and one of the pioneers of the exvangelical movement, says all these artists “display an authentic expression that is lacking in what we typically think of as CCM, allowing themselves to ask real questions and not come away with the pat answers evangelical subculture demands. They also directly reject certain evangelical doctrines and explicitly include and affirm queer people.” Still, she notes, “while they may top the iTunes charts, they’re not going to be played on Christian radio stations, because evangelicals control those”.

Ever since the CCM industry was born in the early 70s – when a small group of ex-hippies began proselytizing through rock music – there have been queer Christian musicians hiding in plain sight.

Credited with writing the first CCM song, Marsha Stevens-Pino saw her career destroyed when she came out in 1979, inspiring her to form Born Again Lesbian Music (Balm) Ministries, one of the first of a growing network of queer Christians in need of a home.

Ray Boltz was an evangelical household name with his megachurch anthem Thank You, but he lost much of his conservative audience when he revealed he was gay. Yet Boltz continued writing Christian songs, albeit with new, provocative themes, like 2010’s Who Would Jesus Love?

Unlike outright mockery of faith by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ “new atheism” movements, exvangelical songs (as well as memoirs, podcasts and stand up comedy) often bleed with raw vulnerability, sitting with the unanswered questions about the Bible and the evangelical experience, wrestling with doubt and longing, loneliness and persecution, not necessarily rejecting God but often inviting him to the table for a difficult conversation.

“I don’t think uncertainty is the enemy of faith,” says Webb, adding that a lot of the ministry of Jesus was a kind of deconstruction of Jewish laws of the time, not unlike what exvangelicals are up to today.

Questioning gender roles, sexuality, capitalism, sin and salvation doesn’t sit well with the Christian right, where biblical literalism and Christian nationalism answer most questions.

Embodying conservative principles (or at least not violating them) has been a prerequisite for any musician working in the CCM genre. But exvangelical songwriters can now simply click “Christian music” when categorizing their music on iTunes, and suddenly they’re in the game.

This has led to a fundamental revolution in the genre, dragging it into a new cultural and political sphere, and discovering a large audience has been waiting for it all along.

“The term ‘Christian’, when applied to anything but a person, is a marketing term,” says Webb. “Anyone can claim the category. My record, Flamy Grant’s, Semlers, they’re for Christians, and that’s why we categorize it that way. It’s like new life from the Phoenix ashes.”

In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

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After millions of people vanish from existence, the world is thrown into violent anarchy, the streets a playground of theft, murder, rape, looting and suicide. Those “left behind” are about to endure seven years of a Cormac McCarthy nightmare: world wars, plagues and mass starvation, the streets littered with the decaying corpses of half the Earth’s population.

It’s a familiar story to anyone raised as an evangelical Christian in the last century, particularly if you grew up in the 90s with a shelf full of Left Behind rapture novels – which have sold 80m copies – or watched the Kirk Cameron film adaptation in 2000, or the Nicolas Cage version in 2014. Or if, like me, you just attended a screening of the most recent installment, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, starring and directed by Kevin Sorbo (best known for his starring role in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys).

Intended to be taken as a literal prophecy of events right around the corner, these stories terrorized me as a child – and haunt my dreams to this day.

I’m working on a memoir about these experiences and have interviewed dozens of people who grew up under this toxic theology. They all have the same story of being unable to reach their parents or siblings (a much more common scenario back in the pre-smartphone age) and suffering panic attacks at the thought of being left behind. It’s a sensation that strikes to the core of your being, the overwhelming sense of abandonment reducing you to a crying infant unable to conjure its mother.

Unlike Hollywood Bible epics, these films are almost always independently financed, star B-list celebrities like Louis Gossett Jr or Margot Kidder, and are chiefly driven by proselytization over entertainment.

Rise of the Antichrist expertly weaves contemporary Christian right boogeymen (big pharma, Silicon Valley, mainstream media, Davos, the Covid vaccine, mental health experts) into an otherwise typical tale. It’s the same narrative every time with rapture films, books and plays: the antichrist uses world war to manipulate the UN into installing him as leader of a global socialist government centered on the Mark of the Beast, a tattooed credit card – often a barcode bracketed by the numbers 666 – on everyone’s right hand or forehead.

Sorbo’s film also skewers the “globalist mainstream media”, which has supposedly conspired to use Covid, and now the rapture, to keep people indoors, distracted and afraid, all in the name of power and profit. It’s a boldly ironic stance for this movie to take, considering it rests in a tradition of using questionable theology to terrify audiences – often children and teens – resulting in lucrative bestsellers and a motivated voting base.

While every generation since Christ has interpreted modern events as evidence of the Book of Revelation prophecy coming to pass, it was a collection of post-hippie evangelicals in California who created the pop-theology of “the rapture” – a word that never actually appears in the Bible.

As part of “the Jesus Movement” – or, pejoratively, “the Jesus Freaks” – sober hippies like Bob Dylan were getting “born again” and preaching on stage about the coming antichrist. Following the collapse of the hedonistic ideals of the 60s, many flower children were being slowly seduced by the religious right, culminating in figures like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson joining Billy Graham’s Explo ’72 festival, which Time magazine called “the Jesus Woodstock”.

The literary accompaniment for this was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, impressively tying modern events (the reunification of Israel, the rise of communism, the loosening morals of the postwar era) to biblical prophecy. One of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1970s, it fueled the conversion of what would become much of the Christian right voting bloc of the 1980s.

A film adaptation starring Orson Welles hit theaters in 1978, but it was the low-budget rapture scare-fest A Thief In The Night that would set the template for not only countless films and novels about Armageddon, but an industry of fear-based plays, Christian haunted houses, and youth group sermons.

A Thief In The Night was filmed a short drive from where I grew up in Iowa. My parents were part of the tail end of the Jesus Movement (culture always reaches the midwest late) and hosted Bible studies and a youth center focused on end times prophecy. My mother wasn’t certain if the end was near, but my dad regularly told me there might come a time when we would have to live off the grid, grow our own food, avoid money (the Mark of the Beast) and live in hiding in the wilderness. If we were found, we would be tortured by the armies of the antichrist, determined to get us to accept “the mark”.

Our church held a screening of the sequel to A Thief In The Night, which was better financed and produced than its DIY predecessor. In A Distant Thunder, we follow a group of Christians who have been arrested by the antichrist’s fascist army, and have the choice to either receive the Mark of the Beast or be executed. They know that if they receive the mark, they will eventually “drink the wine of God’s wrath”, as Revelation 14:9 says. They “will be tormented with fire and sulfur … and the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

The task we’re given is to “be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life”.

A Distant Thunder ends with our lead character screaming hysterically as she watches her friends refuse to renounce Christ, then get decapitated by a guillotine.

My Christian friends and I were too young to understand the questionable leaps of biblical interpretation at work in these movies, or the political machinations fueling the cold war, the culture wars and the revolution of the Christian right in US politics. But we understood pain. We understood torture. We knew we were sinful. And we were convinced the world was not a safe place for us, and we shouldn’t get too comfortable in our beds at night.

After my parents divorced and Dad moved out, Mom worked around the clock at a nearby hotel while attending community college at night. I was alone a good deal of my childhood, and at least once a week I was convinced that everyone I’d known had been raptured up to Heaven, and I was about to face the violence, disease, starvation and isolation of the seven-year Tribulation. Worse, I might succumb to torture, agree to get the Mark of the Beast, and accept relief from momentary discomfort in exchange for an eternity of supernatural agony.

By the mid-90s, rapture fever was in full effect with my generation. DC Talk, arguably the Beatles of Christian rock, released a cover of Larry Norman’s rapture anthem I Wish We’d All Been Ready, with the heartthrob Kevin Max singing the bridge with an eerie vibrato: “The father spoke, the demons dined / how could you have been so blind?”

The same year, the evangelist Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry B Jenkins released the first in a series of 16 Left Behind novels placing biblical prophecy in a modern context. I don’t know how many times I’d meet a new face at youth group or church camp saying the books had scared them straight. Meanwhile, speakers at my camp and Christian rock shows often tied the rapture to the coming Y2K disaster, and on New Year’s Eve I was honestly surprised when the lights didn’t go out – followed by explosions, sirens and gunfire – at the stroke of midnight.

It’s the marriage of ancient prophecy with contemporary tropes that strikes an urgent fear in audiences – especially children. When you’re still figuring out what the world is, it’s easy to be convinced that your home, family, everything that makes you feel safe is ephemeral and can easily be replaced with unspeakable horror.

After watching Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist last week, we were treated to a special message from Sorbo, followed by footage of Mike Huckabee leading us in prayer.

“As you watched the movie, you probably noticed some scary references to the way the world looks today,” Sorbo explained in that gruff, fatherly voice I remember well from my childhood watching Hercules. “We live in a world of chaos, uncertainty and fear.”

The audience was mostly retirement age, and laughed heartily at jokes mocking “the media”, “trusting the science”, and liberals embracing “mental health experts” over “conspiracy theorists”. Much of the film reads like a Tucker Carlson segment come to life.

But I remembered very well the psychic impact this toxic theology has on a young mind. In fact, I don’t need to remember. I still dream of demons, hell, the Mark of the Beast and the Lake of Fire a few times a week, sometimes sleepwalking – or sleep running – out the front door, convinced the antichrist is coming to tattoo 666 on my forehead, followed by an eternity of torture in hell.

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The gray wolf, once numbering in the tens of thousands throughout North America, have faced public vilification and extermination programs that drove it to near extinction in the US. Now Colorado will vote on whether to reintroduce them into the wild after an 80-year absence, thanks to an effort that has cattle ranchers outraged but which conservationists say could restore an ecosystem that has long suffered without the apex predator.

The species was systematically exterminated by controversial, US government-backed programs in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was primarily due to wolves’ attacks on the cattle, a booming industry that has been integral to the expanding west economy. By 1940, wolves were almost completely gone.

Their inclusion on the 1973 Endangered Species Act, along with a 1995 effort to build a home for them in Yellowstone national park, has helped bring their numbers back up to 5,500 in the lower 48 states.

This year, a ballot measure in Colorado will let voters decide whether a home should be built for the gray wolf in the state. Polling indicates the measure is likely to pass, though segments of both the ranching and hunting communities are strongly opposed.

Conservationists argue that eradication of wolves threw the ecology of the Rocky Mountains into disarray, with elk and deer excessively grazing in open lands where they otherwise would have been targets for wolves, created a domino effect that has harmed a variety of species.

‘Ecological engines’

Colorado’s vote comes at a time when safeguards for gray wolves are threatened: the Trump administration announced last year intentions to remove the animals from the endangered species list.

“Gray wolves are the ecological engines of the northern hemisphere,” says Rob Edward, president of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, who spearheaded the ballot measure and has been working to reintroduce wolves into Colorado for over 25 years. He points to the successes of the Yellowstone reintroduction as evidence that similar efforts would be good for Colorado’s environment.

“The Aspen groves, which hadn’t regenerated in 50 years, were totally coming back” as a result of wolves returning, he says. “And with that regeneration came more beavers, which led to more beaver dams, which was good for the rivers, which led to more trout, and on and on with a cascading effect.”

He adds that wolves also benefit the landscape by forcing elk to move around. When the elk aren’t hunted, they “can hang out in river bottoms, which causes mass erosion, and the water gets shallower and hotter”, he explains.

Rancher opposition

Edward points out that the measure safeguards ranchers against losses by offering compensation for any wolves that kill their livestock, but Terry Fankhauser, executive vice-president of the 153-year-old Colorado Cattlemen’s Association – which represents the 11,600 cattle farms and $2.8bn industry in the state – believes the matter is more complex than just wolves killing cattle.

“Beyond the kills, there are indirect impacts of wolves being reintroduced to cattle,” Fankhauser says. “Cattle are fight-or-flight animals and they’re continually on the lookout for predators. And when there’s reintroduction of wolves, there’s a decrease in gestation, pregnancy, and weight gain, much like elk, deer and moose.”

Potential disruption of wild animals is also a concern for opponents of the ballot measure, who advocate on behalf of hunters who don’t want to see their game disappear. Preserving targets for hunters was also the motive behind the controversial, government-sponsored practice of shooting wolves in Alaska from helicopters. Sarah Palin’s endorsement of the practice was fuel for attack ads when the then governor ran for vice-president in 2008.

The proposed measure would call for the Colorado parks and wildlife commission to construct a plan – building on scientific data and concerns from public hearings – to reintroduce wolves into public lands by the end of 2023. The Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund would like to see enough wolves introduced to return balance to the ecology, with the additional aim of creating a habitat that links the wolves of northern states (along with Canada) and southern states (along with Mexico) stretching the length of the Rocky Mountains.

Fankhauser is concerned that the ballot measure will tie the hands of those tasked with reintroducing the wolves to Colorado, forcing them into blunt action where a nuanced approach is needed.

“We should not be making biological decisions at the ballot box,” he says. “And to arbitrarily decide, through a population vote, that we need x amount of wolves in Colorado without considering that ecosystem, it’s not only irresponsible to the ranching community, but to the wolves themselves.”

Rehabilitating the wolf’s image

The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition, another opposition group that describes itself as a group of “concerned sportsmen, farmers, ranchers and businesses”, has been playing up fears that wolves could be a danger to humans. Its homepage cites a story from last summer about a family of campers in Canada being attacked by a wolf, which has the potential to make the millions who enjoy camping in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains a little anxious.

Edward finds the suggestion wolves pose a threat to humans wildly misleading. (The Colorado Stop the Wolf Coalition did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“That is a one-off rarity,” he says. “Millions of people have camped in Yellowstone since wolves were reintroduced, and there has never been an attack. Wolves do not see humans as prey. They’re curious about us, like their descendants, the dogs.”

A poll commissioned on behalf of Edward’s campaign showed that two-thirds of likely voters said they were in favor of the wolf reintroduction, with only 15% opposed. The poll showed no divide between rural and urban voters, which is noteworthy considering how large the cattle industry looms in the Colorado economy and culture.

Meanwhile, supporters of the gray wolf have been working to overhaul its fearsome image. A Denver-based musical collective, Lost Walks, wrote and performed a rock opera about a wolf who saves a pregnant woman in danger in the Colorado wilderness.

“It felt important to us to use our voices for a creature who is voiceless,” says Jen GaNun, the band’s creative director. “When we found out about how wolves were and are hunted and treated today, we felt like we had to use our internal momentum in this project we started to be a part of a social and environmental movement.”

Profits from the album have gone toward the Rocky Mountain Wolf Action Fund, and live events have doubled as signature collection opportunities for the ballot measure.

“We have gotten some messages of opposition,” she says, “but mostly find that people are in support and on the side of science and kindness towards animals and the greater ecosystem.”

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Comedy Central has confirmed that at the end of this year Jon Stewart will no longer be the host of The Daily Show. Stewart broke the news earlier this evening during a taping of the show (which quickly made the rounds on social media).

“For the better part of the last two decades, we have had the incredible honor and privilege of working with Jon Stewart,” the statement from the cable network reads. “His comedic brilliance has been second to none. Jon has been at the heart of Comedy Central, championing and nurturing the best talent in the industry, in front of and behind the camera. Through his unique voice and vision, The Daily Show has become a cultural touchstone for millions of fans and an unparalleled platform for political comedy that will endure for years to come. Jon will remain at the helm of The Daily Show until later this year.”

Last November, Stewart sat down for an interview with Christiane Amanpour at CNN (a network he’d made a career out of skewering), where he said that he had moved out of his home state of New York to a location which he “can’t disclose. I got a whole thing going on.” Later Amanpour noted that Stewart’s contract with Comedy Central was about to expire, and perhaps he was looking for other artistic avenues, citing his directorial debut last year with Rosewater, a film about the interrogation and torture of a journalist in Iran. “Will we see you as host of The Daily Show for the next presidential election?” Amanpour asked.

“That I can’t tell you,” was his response.

Rumors abounded in 2014 that Stewart was offered the role of hosting America’s longest-running television program, Meet the Press, when NBC was looking for a replacement for David Gregory. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Stewart confirmed that he was offered the job, but brushed it off: “My guess is they were casting as wide and as weird a net as they could. I’m sure part of them was thinking, ‘Why don’t we just make it a variety show?'”

Stewart has often downplayed his role in political journalism, often emphasizing that he is just a comedian. So it is unlikely that he’ll pursue a formal, sober gig with any large network. Though after a 16-year* run on The Daily Show, where he launched the careers of Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Larry Wilmore, fought for the rights of 9/11 first responders, virtually shoved CNN’s Crossfire off the air, won countless awards, and forever altered the role of humor in modern political discourse, it’s fair to say that Jon Stewart has earned himself a much deserved break from the spotlight.

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Everyone pigeonholes Mark Mothersbaugh as a punk pioneer, but the Devo frontman has been actively drawing, painting, making prints, short films, rugs, and sculptures for decades. The guy who is responsible for revolutionizing music videos and writing the Pee Wee’s Playhouse theme song is having his first major gallery exhibition at the Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which will be open from now until April. The exhibit is called Myopia and it takes up the entire three floors of the museum, turning the massive concrete building into a cartoonish, beautiful war zone of witty politics and childlike nightmares. (The shows title comes from the eye condition that left Mothersbaugh legally blind until the age of eight, when he was given a pair of prescription glasses that opened the world up to him, which, he said, was when he decided to be an artist.)

The exhibit is comprised of several rooms that take the viewer through the chronological development of Mothersbaugh’s art. It begins with his illustrated journal entries blown up into large prints. Then it moves on to his video work with Devo, followed by his bizarre musical sculptures, one of which is made of whistling pipes that cause anxious pump-organ bird calls to reverberate throughout the building. There’s even a enormous ruby carved into the shape of poo and a thousand postcards hand-drawn by Mothersbaugh.

“He’s one of the most creative forces in American culture for the last 40 years,” said Adam Lerner, the MCA curator who has been working with Mothersbaugh on this exhibit over the past two years and also collaborated with Mothersbaugh on a companion book. The book has a forward written by Wes Anderson, who Mothersbaugh has plans to make a crazy theme park with in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.

I checked out Myopia at the end of October, a couple days before the exhibit opened to the public. At the time, a lot of the other sculptures hadn’t arrived—they were held up at the Mexican border because officials thought they contained cocaine. When I got there, Lerner and Mothersbaugh were conducting an interview before a small crowd of a dozen journalists. Lerner gushed over his hero and provided a historical context that linked Motherbaugh’s early artwork from northern Ohio to the sound and vision stuff he did later on that was too weird for New York.

Mothersbaugh attended Kent State University in 1970, where he witnessed the anti-Vietnam protests that left four students dead at the hands of the National Guard. This was around the time that he met Jerry Casale and Bob Lewis, with whom he would go on to form Devo. Leading up to this, Mothersbaugh said he’d been endlessly influenced by the Beatles and Roxy Music. But one day in 1974 he saw a magazine ad for laserdiscs and came to the conclusion that rock ‘n’ roll was dead.

“I thought that art students were going to take over pop culture,” he said. ” Sound and vision is going to change everything. Who cares about a record with a cover on it? Now you can do a whole album with pictures that go along to the music. So we thought we were making products for laserdisc with Devo.”

Following the group question and answer session, Mothersbaugh sat down with me for a brief chat about his five-decade retrospective show and pissing people off.

VICE: Do you think that growing up in the obscurity of Akron gave you a more authentic edge over your contemporaries in New York, who had perhaps been over-saturated with art and culture their entire lives?
​Mark Mothersbaugh: Because it was a cultural wasteland at the time, it allowed us to ferment and to coagulate. It allowed us to become what we became, and be certain about it before we ever got attacked by the press.

People who had been in New York City for a while and went to Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s, they’d seen Talking Heads just starting and changing members. Same with Blondie, who would drop a drummer and pick up somebody else or switch out guitar players. People who had been in that scene got to see those bands develop. But when Devo showed up, we were a fully developed entity. We didn’t come up as a minor player in the game.

We’d been making videos and recording singles and doing our own graphics before we event left Ohio. I knew how to use blueprint machines to make large posters for 50 cents a piece. For ten bucks, we could make up 20 of these posters that say: “Tomorrow night at Max’s Kansas City…” Instead of handing out fliers, we put up these big Devo posters around Manhattan, featuring these guys who weren’t wearing jeans. We looked like Russian cosmonauts or a waste-cleanup crew. So that’s what growing up in Ohio provided us: The time to put together our own fully-formed aesthetic.

Your work always has this combination of the cerebral and the playful. Did it ever become difficult not letting things drift too far in either direction?
​I make mistakes. But if I’m working in Devo, it’s kind of easy because Jerry [Casales] and I balance each other out. It’s symbiotic. I get to be the irresponsible, crazy, speaking-in-tongues boojie boy, and he gets to be the strategist and the explainer.

Adam [Lerner] kind of filled that role in this art show. He was responsible for developing the exoskeleton of how we would arrange things by room. When I told him what I wanted to do, he would give me the pros and cons of the different choices for the displays. Because I was originally thinking about keeping all the Devo things out, this show has become much bigger than I anticipated when Adam and I first started talking about it. He made it a retrospective that includes artwork that I thought nobody would ever see. I assumed I would pass away and then my wife would say, “OK, those red books over there—to the landfill.”

Does seeing the entire narrative arc of your creative life presented in one show make you want to scrap the whole thing and pursue something completely different?
​I think this show has enough range that I don’t think that will happen. But that’s what kept me disinterested from the world of fine art, because I have friends like Gary Panter or Robert Williams, who were painters who, once they had galleries represent them, they had to do artwork in one style. They had to develop and nurture a brand. I already had record companies do that to me. If they did that to my visual art, I couldn’t take it.

If you look me up on Wikipedia it doesn’t say that I’ve done over 150 art gallery shows in the last 20 years. It doesn’t say anything about my art at all. It only talks about the feature films and TV theme songs and commercials and games—and then Devo. I don’t know who puts Wikipedia out, but they somehow missed this whole thing. I’ve been thinking about creating a different Mark Mothersbaugh page on Wikipedia that would start with Devo and then ignore everything musical and only talk about things I’ve done in the world of art.

People are always trying to artificially name your intellectual activities. That’s why I enjoyed being anonymous. I enjoyed not having to go through the galleries. When I did do them over the last 15 years, they were always pop-up and street galleries, skateboard and graffiti art galleries.

I did do some museums, but I’d say around 125 of the galleries I did were always run by a few kids. And it was always the same story: They just got out of college, they know they’re going to have to get a job with some newspaper pasting up ads for Walmart in the fall. But before that happens, they wanted to show people that right here in, say, Saginaw, Michigan, we’ve got some of the best graffiti artists and street artists as anywhere in the world. Just as good as that Shepard Fairey guy or Futura 2000 or Banksy. We can do things even better than them. So they start a gallery, but not in the section of town where doctors and lawyers and attorneys go to buy artwork for their offices. They go to some warehouse or storefront in a funky part of town. Only 30 people show up, and the local paper doesn’t even review it.

In light of your mainstream success with children’s shows like Rugrats, Yo Gabba Gabba, and The Lego Movie, is it hard for you to make subversive art these days?
​Maybe. Maybe not. Being subversive back in the 70s involved being more naughty, more sexual. With today… Let me tell you a story:

A few years ago I became friends with a gemologist, and I saw all these gems that he had lying around, one of which was this big ugly stone that I picked up. “That’s the world’s largest ruby you’re holding.” He didn’t know what to do with it, so next time I saw him I asked if I could carve it. It’s right over there. [Points across the room to a glass case.]

I was thinking: Who do you sell the world’s largest ruby to? Somebody who’s uber-rich. And people don’t get uber-rich unless there’s something dark attached to it. It’s always communists in China, or drug dealers in South America, or oil people in Russia. It’s those kinds of people who are going to want the world’s largest ruby. And I wanted to fuck with them in some way. So I said: I’m going to carve it into a turd. But it will look like a custard. I’m going set it on top of a cone, and it will look like a sweet-treat, but really it’s a turd. They’ll buy it because it’s the world’s largest ruby, but only I’ll know that it’s a turd.

But now I’ve told you, so I kind of ruined it.

Does the desire to fuck with people wane with age?
​What happens is, you become a better shot. You know how to aim at the right place to accomplish what you want, instead of being a firehose that sprays everywhere. You take careful aim and make the most of it.

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Kronberg was supposed to have written a carnal story about Woodrow Wilson, but he characteristically twisted it into a cringe-worthy erotic nightmare involving incest and beastiality. This Denver-native-turned-New Yorker has made a career of awkward silence, driving Roseanne Barr to shout “go fuck yourself” at him when he appeared onLast Comic Standing in May. Kronberg attracts the kind of people who enjoy being an artistic minority, as does this Erotic Fan Fiction show. In the other words, the kind of people who fetishize uncomfortable public situations.

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Stuck in a hotel room one winter evening, Denver songwriter Esmé Patterson was learning to play Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” on her guitar, and as she learned the lyrics, she began to feel annoyed. “Her age is always 22… Loves me like I want her to” Van Zandt sings about a young bar-room girl he likes to hook up with whenever he’s in town. “Long and lazy, blonde and free… And I can have her any time.”

After learning Van Zandt’s song, Patterson felt inspired to write a song from the perspective of “Loretta,” informing this patronizing patriarch that she will “keep my dancing shoes on long after you’re gone.” Patterson then realized that pop history is loaded with songs addressed to female protagonists, all of whom never got the chance to respond with a song of their own. Elvis Costello’s “Alison,” the Band’s “Evangeline,” Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No,” the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” soon she found herself having written a whole collection of fan-fiction response songs, assembled in the album Woman to Woman, released this spring.

Since then, Patterson has been both championed by feminists and scorned by music geeks, who question her right to tamper with history. The characters brought to life in these songs run a dark gamut from morbid to merciless, with her Alison telling young Costello to “keep thoughts of me in my party dress out of your head… I’ll make love to whoever I want,” and responds to Jolene’s pleas to not take her man with “your man don’t mean a thing to me.”

We recently chatted with Esmé Patterson about her pop-fiction album, debating the sacrilege of song, the confines of concept art, and why she failed at responding to Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”

Noisey: When you began writing these songs, you were just coming off of promoting an album that was very personal and emotionally thick; was there an attraction to writing songs about fictional characters instead of people in your life?
Esmé Patterson: Yeah, it was a nice respite from writing those personal songs and write about someone else’s problems. But I also think that when you’re writing fiction—no matter if it’s music or literature—even if it has nothing to do with your own life, you show up as a character, or just some philosophy you subscribe to gets put in there.

It was an interesting game for me to see where I ended up in the songs; where my life and experiences would end up in whose stories. And sometimes it was surprising. Like with the song “Tumbleweed,” which was the response to the Townes Van Zandt song “Loretta.” In his song, she stays at home while he runs around on tour and he comes back to see her every once in a while.

In my song, she scolds the guy for expecting her to wait around for him. At that time, I was touring constantly, and was having the limited success with relationships that that lifestyle brings. So I realized later that in that song I was actually scolding myself for the rambling-man archetype that I was embodying at that time. Realizing that made me laugh.

Have you had a lot of other people project these kinds of things onto you with these songs?
There have typically been two responses from people about the album. Some people thank me for speaking in the perspective of women that had previously been one-dimensional, one sided, and adding a human-female element to them. I think those people could see themselves in the songs. Like in the case of the “Alison” response song: Everybody’s been in the situation where you meet up with an old lover and they’re kind of pissed at you for whatever you’ve done since [the breakup], which is really none of their business. That’s not even just a female thing; it’s a human thing.

I think people could relate to being on the other side of that song, and I thought that was really cool.

Though I imagine that given the historical nature of these songs you’re writing about, songs that are so universally beloved, that a lot of people feel a sense of ownership over them. For a lot of music geeks, “Alison” was a song they took comfort in after a breakup, and “Jolene” is like a Smiths song for insecure country girls.
Exactly, and that’s the second reaction a lot of people have had to the album. It was a lot of “who do you think you are?” These were the people who have idealized these songwriters and hold these songs as holy, they were offended that I would even touch them, or consider them up for discussion.

It’s a weird thing: On the one hand, being a music nerd myself, I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. But when it’s said out loud, it sounds ridiculous. This isn’t religion, it’s pop music. Nothing is “sacred.”
Well, I always appreciate dissent in the conversation. It wouldn’t be an interesting discussion if everyone was just sitting around congratulating each other. I thought their arguments were interesting, but this was also an opportunity to express my opinion that art belongs to everyone. It’s our cultural heritage, and it should be challenged. We are all vulnerable to each other, and there should be a conversation about characters in art and what they mean to us. Works of art should always be taken down off the mantle and discussed.

It occurred to me when I first listened to the album that you yourself had written one of these songs years earlier. “Jessica,” from your first album, is a similar narrative to “Alison” or “Jolene,” addressing another woman unfavorably. So I guess it wouldn’t be hard for you to imagine what it would be like having another person take one of your story-songs in their own direction.
I would love that! It would be great. I highly advise someone to do that. And certainly when you take other people’s work to the chopping block you have to be ready to take have yours taken there too. I’d welcome that—it would be cool.

Are a lot of people framing this as a “feminist album?”
Yes, and I welcome that. It’s a noble word to be associated with. I took on this project mostly as a personal journey in songwriting, and didn’t have any big plans with where it could go. But I certainly identify as a feminist, and I’m happy to have the work that I do give strength to that cause.

I ask that because in the response song to “Jolene,” you have the line “men should be chasing you, never chase a man.” Which, when I first heard it, sounded like an antiquated, Mad Men-era piece of gender etiquette. That’s an interesting point. And that kind of goes back to this not attempting to be a feminist-centered piece of work—it’s more of an intellectual exercise in songwriting for me. It was about humanizing these characters, which didn’t necessarily put them on one side or the other of feminist morality.

So when writing these songs, it wasn’t so much about the response to the original song as it was about creating characters responding to the songs?
Exactly. The goal of the project was to humanize these characters, and nobody’s perfect.

Do you ever fear that the concept of the album overshadows the songs, preventing people from being able to enjoy them on their own terms?
That was something that was really important to me when writing the album, I wanted the songs to stand up musically. If someone just heard it playing and knew nothing of the concept, they’d still be able to enjoy it.

Also, I was trying to create something that I would like to discover. Like if I heard a song on the radio I really enjoyed, and then did some research and learned this giant backstory behind it, and suddenly see the song in a new way. It’s an exciting thing to engage with.

Your first album was very elegantly produced with carefully selected layers of sound and thoughtful orchestrations. Yet this record has more of a raw, bar-room feel to it; like it was recorded next to a mechanical bull. Was that a conscious decision that ties into the album’s concept?
Yes. The goal of the album was to create these very flawed human characters, and so if the record was very clean and perfect it would feel dishonest. We recorded the songs live, and that felt right for these characters.

Did you write any response songs that weren’t included on the album?
Yes, actually. I wrote a response to the Fleetwood Mac song “Rhiannon.” In the song, she’s a cat in the darkness, and then she is the darkness, and I felt like there was this theme, a lot like the “Jolene” song, of this woman being held on a pedestal. In the song, Stevie Nicks is like, “Wouldn’t you love to love her,” and I got this feeling like it must be lonely being up on a pedestal.

The response I wrote to the “Rhiannon” song was about being wild and being lonely, but in the end, I didn’t put in on there because I didn’t think it was a good enough song. I loved that Fleetwood Mac song so much that I didn’t feel I could step up to it without producing something good enough.

Josiah M. Hesse once wrote a song from the perspective of the grandma who got run over by a reindeer. Follow him on Twitter – @JosiahMHesse

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