Throughout its 50 years as a genre, contemporary Christian music (CCM) has often functioned as a propaganda wing of the Christian right. Whether it’s the war on drugs, Christian nationalism, colonial missions trips, or prayer in schools, the industry has effectively used popular aesthetics to sell a conservative Christian message, often while demonizing outsiders.  

This is especially true of the LGBTQ community, one of CCM’s most frequent targets. Whether a subtle jab, as in Scott Wesley Brown singing about “fools who march for the right to justify their sin,” or more overtly in the case of white rapper Carman warning of “the homosexual in San Francisco trapped in vile bondage,” prominent artists within the genre have often peppered their lyrics with reactionary homophobia. For multiple generations, this music was pumped into the ears of queer and straight children alike through music festivals, church-camps, youth groups, and mission trips—often paired with similar messages about abortion, women’s rights, and anti-socialist fearmongering.     

But in the past two decades, the once-clear lines between CCM and secular music have been disrupted, and some queer Christian songwriters have begun challenging many of the genre’s long-held cultural norms. This is especially true as a wave of prominent LGBTQ musicians have come out publicly to an audience that once shunned them. CCM luminary Ray Botlz, whose “Thank You” scored countless evangelical funerals, announced in 2008 that his 30 years of attempting to “pray the gay away” hadn’t worked and that he would be living his remaining years with a man. British worship vocalist Vicky Beeching, who The Guardian called “the most influential Christian of her generation,” announced she was gay in 2014, followed by Trey Pearson, frontman of the 90s Christian pop punk band Everyday Sunday, in 2016.  

Although some queer artists have found success marketing their work to Christian listeners, they have often had to leave the rigid confines of CCM to do it. Preacher’s Kid, recorded by the queer, non-binary musician Semler (whose real name is Grace Semler Baldridge), quickly landed at #1 on iTunes’ Christian albums chart following its February 2021 release, blasting its way past the mega-church soundtracks. Semler’s music explores topics that would have been unthinkable decades ago, criticizing “fame hungry pastors” and calling out mission trips as “scams” on the EP track “Bethlehem.”

Preacher’s Kid, which flourished despite the support of the traditional CCM pipeline, is an indication of an industry at a crossroads. If queer artists are finding that they simply don’t need the Christian music gatekeepers to live their truth and express their art, does CCM change with the times or double down on hate? 

Baldridge, for one, believes the success of Preacher’s Kid shows that “Christian music needs a big dose of honesty.” “It needs to deal with the fact that faith—like people—is messy and complicated,” they told VICE. “I think the heyday of CCM is over. The days of creating a Christian alternative to secular music the way they did in the 90s came to an end with streaming. CCM is going through a transformation and search for identity.”  

Hillsong, the L.A.-based, celebrity-obsessed, quintessential cool-kids megachurch whose anthemic, emotionally rousing worship music is performed every Sunday morning, has commonly come to characterize almost the entirety of the CCM genre today: conservative rhetoric wrapped in hipster clothing. Founded in 1983, the church has used the allure of access to famous congregants like Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas, and Selena Gomez to appeal to young worshippers more socially liberal than Christian music’s traditional demographics. A 2019 study from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 51 percent of white evangelicals under 50 support LGBT rights, compared to only 34 percent of their parents and grandparents. 

That divide has led Hillsong, whose beliefs are based in an offshoot of Pentecostal Christianity, to make statements that appear welcoming to the LGBTQ community but only at the most surface level. In a 2015 blog post entitled “Do I Love Gay People?” Hillsong founder Brian Houston said the church’s convictions mean it does “not affirm a gay lifestyle” or “knowingly have actively gay people in positions of leadership, either paid or unpaid.”

This rhetoric is a watered-down version of the homophobia peddled for decades by the Christian right, as well as its most prominent mouthpieces. In the 1980s, CCM often functioned as an unofficial marketing campaign for the Moral Majority, a Christian political movement whose leader, Jerry Falwell, once referred to AIDS as “a lethal judgment of God on the sin of homosexuality.” DC Talk would go on to be widely regarded as the most influential Christian rock band of all time after meeting at Falwell’s own Liberty University in 1987. In 1992’s “Socially Acceptable,” DC Talk appeared to parrot many of the same talking points in a song that appeared to comment on the AIDS crisis at its height: “Times are changin’, with morals in decay / Human rights have made the wrongs OK.” 

As CCM grew into a commercial powerhouse in the late 90s and early 2000s, many of its artists were finding the genre artistically claustrophobic and began to spill over into the secular world. Jars of Clay, Switchfoot, and MxPx were beginning to appear on MTV, preceded by Amy Grant’s “Baby, Baby” a decade earlier. Five Iron Frenzy were writing songs that subtly addressed native American genocide and police brutality (which most censors at the time missed). But queerness was still incredibly taboo—and for no one more so than queer artists themselves.

While some straight Christian rockers could experiment with an androgynous or even outwardly effeminate look—such as DC Talk’s lead singer, Kevin Max—many queer artists have been forced to present themselves as conventionally heterosexual as possible. Growing up in Mississippi, Michael Passons had a lifetime of experience in the closet, which wasn’t likely to change when he moved to Nashville and helped found the massively popular vocal group Avalon. As the feel-good soundtrack for every evangelical housewife in America, Avalon was under more scrutiny than Christian art-rockers like Joy Electric or industrial rockers like Klank to be standard-bearers for all the nuclear families that attended their concerts. 

“The best way to avoid scrutiny is to have a wedding ring on,” Passons told VICE. “I wasn’t wearing one, and I was almost 30 and wasn’t dating, so I was under the microscope. There were rumors about me that weren’t true, but some that were.” 

While he wouldn’t come out for nearly 20 years, Passons was kicked out of Avalon for being gay in 2003. His band members forced him to go to conversion therapy if he wanted to stay in the band, and he attended a few sessions before eventually dropping out. After, Passon said he could no longer find work in the Christian music industry. “We had sold millions of records, Grammy nominations, a five-year record deal with EMI—a real pinch-me moment—and then I lost my way to make an income, had to sell my house, and was sleeping on couches,” he said.

Jennifer Knapp found herself navigating this cultural vortex in the late 90s and early 2000s when she sold a million albums and CCM anointed her the Christian alternative to Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton, although she never would have described herself that way. Knapp, who grew up in southeast Kansas, wasn’t raised in a religious household and said it was a “culture shock” to suddenly find herself entrenched in the evangelical world. While she said that it was initially exciting to explore her faith through her music, she encountered a number of “purity culture” tropes familiar to women who grew up evangelical, which conflicted with her identity as a feminist. 

“I would arrive at a show in a tank top and be told I had to change before going on stage,” she told VICE. “People were asking me to be a spokesperson for sexual purity, because I was viewed as one of the role models for young girls. I would tell them that I didn’t agree with a lot of this, personally and theologically, and that cost me opportunities.”

Recording music in the CCM industry forced her to put her sexuality on hold for a decade, and Knapp finally came out as a lesbian in 2010. But it’s important to Knapp to note that she wasn’t closeted during her years at the forefront of CCM and that she didn’t leave because she was gay. She said that she disagreed with a range of ideologies of that world and found she couldn’t write the songs she wanted to within the genre’s corporate propaganda machine. She got her masters in theological studies, married a woman, and returned to music in 2010 with a new album and a publicly gay identity. 

Among the changes in Knapp’s image in releasing her comeback record, Letting Go, is how the album was sold. Although her previous hits “Undo Me” and “Romans” had been favorites of radio programmers—reaching #1 on the Christian rock charts in 1997 and 1998, respectively—Knapp chose not to release any singles from Letting Go. The album was still a modest success, reaching #3 on Billboard’s Americana/Folk charts.

The decision not to market the record for Christian radio reflected a conscious choice by Knapp to forge her own path separate from the industry that once attempted to define and constrain her. “Too often CCM is made by Christians, for Christians, to make more Christians,” she said. “That undermines the experience of contemplating faith and spirituality through art, and that’s what I wanted to do then and do now. CCM has mostly given up on artistry. It’s just praise and worship music now.”

Although queer artists are creating music on their own terms, they haven’t yet found a home in the traditional channels of CCM—which include megachurches, right-wing political rallies, and national Christian radio stations like K-LOVE, a kingmaker of the genre. Shortly after coming out, Trey Pearson was ousted from the Christian rock festival Joshua Fest. Michael Passons came out in 2020, and while he is still making music, he has yet to enjoy the success that he did during the apex of Avalon’s heyday. Passons sang backup vocals on a 2020 cover of Avalon’s “Orphans of God” released by gay country singer Ty Herndon and Broadway staple Kristin Chenoweth. 

In order to keep making music within the extremely rigid confines of CCM proper, many LGBTQ musicians are forced to hide who they are. Marsha Stevens-Pino, a prominent figure in what history has dubbed the Jesus Movement of 1970s California, would go on to form Born Again Lesbian Music (BALM) and discover a wealth of queer-affirming Christians that dug her music, but things weren’t always so easy. After she came out as a lesbian following her divorce from bandmate Russ Stevens in 1979, the wildfire of gossip lost Children of the Day their booking agent, and the band split up soon after.

Stevens-Pino said that many prominent producers and songwriters remain closeted to avoid the same scrutiny she and others have faced. The fact of their sexuality is an “open secret,” she said, even though they “don’t want you to talk about it.”

“The first Sunday of every month is gospel music night at the gay bars in Nashville, and I see multi–Dove Award winners there every time,” she said, referring to the evangelical equivalent of the Grammys. “The night before the Dove Awards there’s something called a Pink Party for all the gay nominees, and its a super gay, drag queens–and-fountains-of-champagne-type party.” 

It’s unclear where the sexual battle lines of CCM will be drawn in the future. Amy Grant and Kevin Max both received heavy criticism among evangelicals for their divorces in the 90s, only for the same communities to support thrice-married Donald Trump for president in 2016. And without the isolation that the 90s music industry provided—where evangelical parents only bought their kids the Christian version of their favorite rock band—it’s difficult to imagine the industry existing in 20 years. 

But that’s a pipe dream in many ways. So long as there’s a Christian right in need of a popular culture set apart from “Hollywood liberals,” and so long as that movement uses social issues like trans people in bathrooms and queer Disney characters to further its political agenda, there will be a need for a music industry that reflects the “traditional” American identity, however sidelined it might be in a given cultural moment. Although that still raises a question that CCM is struggling to answer: How powerful could such an industry remain if young people are increasingly jumping ship? 

Jennifer Knapp thinks it would be smart for the Christian music industry to open its doors to queer musicians if hopes to appeal to millenial and Gen Z listeners, but she isn’t holding her breath. “There are evangelical queer musicians in those worship bands, living double lives, but that market won’t sign an out person until they’re a financial competition,” she said. “They have the right to have their own type of quality control for Christianity, but at that point, it’s not a genre that’s supporting the diversity that Christianity has to offer.”

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When volleyball coach Inoke Tonga was called in for a meeting with the leadership of Valor Christian high school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, this fall, he thought he was about to be offered a promotion.

Instead, he was interrogated with a series of vague, leading questions that attempted to get him to admit he was gay.

Tonga had been out for years – and knew his contract never stated he couldn’t be gay and teach at Valor – but shame-filled memories of his closeted years as a young man rose up in that moment, as his job slipped away.

“They offered to help me stop being gay, with my ‘struggle’,” Tonga says. “They said I should take my time to decide if I will accept their help, and they’ll tell everyone I’m on a spiritual journey.”

The offer they made was for Tonga to attend some form of “conversion therapy”, and when he returned to announce he isn’t gay, cut off contact with his fiance, scrub his social media of any support for the LGBTQ community, and denounce his support for them before the school.

“They said a lot of parents pay a lot of money to go to Valor, just so their kids don’t have to mentored by someone who is gay,” he recalls.

Tonga declined their offer, and resigned.

Outrage on the part of students, parents, alumni and allies over Tonga losing his job for being gay is part of a decades-long battle between anti-discrimination laws and the right of private Christian schools (of which there are approximately 34,500 in the US alone) to religious freedom.

Ever since the 1964 Civil Rights Act threatened the tax-exempt status of Christian schools who refused to racially integrate, religious schools in the US have tangled with social justice activists seeking equal protections for minority students and employees.

Freedom to discriminate

In 2020, the supreme court ruled employment protections in the Civil Rights Act should extend to LGBTQ+ employees, thereby federally outlawing termination of an employee for their sexual orientation or being transgender. But buried deep within the Civil Rights Act is an exception for religious institutions who want to discriminate against employees of a different faith.

“So while a secular employer can’t say, ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re Jewish, I only hire Catholics,’ the Catholic school can say that, because they’re exempt from the prohibition against religious discrimination,” says Joshua Block, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & Aids project. “And religious schools have argued that that limited exception should be interpreted broadly to mean that I can discriminate against anyone based on my religious beliefs.”

Courts have, for the most part, been saying no to this argument, Block says.

But Tonga’s story is far from an isolated incident – even at Valor Christian high school, where a lesbian teacher was pressured to leave under similar circumstances.

Earlier this summer, music teacher Todd Simmons claimed he was fired from Our Lady’s Catholic Academy in Queens, New York, after filling out health insurance forms that revealed he was married to a man. A nearly identical scenario involving a gay music teacher fired from a Catholic school played out only a short distance away at the same time.

The issue is further complicated in states like Florida – where the line between public school and private religious school is sometimes blurred. Steven Arauz, a sixth-grade history teacher, found himself fired from a Seventh Day Adventist school – which is publicly funded with $1m a year in tax dollars and credits – after he was featured in a Gay With Kids article where he discussed his adopted son.

“You are aware that this conduct, if true, does not comport with the Seventh-day Adventist church’s standards,” he was told in an email that terminated his $49,000 a year position. “Hand over your keys. Hand over your badge. You’re not allowed on Forrest Lake property.”

Block and the ACLU have found some success litigating these firings.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the firing of the North Carolina teacher Lonnie Billard from a Catholic school for being gay was a violation of the Civil Rights Act, shutting down the school’s attempt to argue that they had a religious exemption from the law.

“After all this time, I have a sense of relief and a sense of vindication. I wish I could have remained teaching all this time,” Billard said in a statement released by the ACLU. “Today’s decision validates that I did nothing wrong by being a gay man.”

Predator myth

The work of Block and the ACLU is standing on the shoulders of decades of litigation that provides civil rights legislation the legal muscle it has today. Much of this played out in public schools, particularly in the south, where segregationists like the Alabama governor, George Wallace, stood blocking the entrance of a school that black students sought to enter.

Around this time, the marketplace for private religious schools – thought to be protected from integration laws – began to explode in size.

“Hoping to keep their racial purity, their white evangelical identity, a lot of rich churches created their own schools,” said Frances Fitzgerald, author of the Pulitzer prize–winning book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. “They thought they could get away with being segregated.”

This proved not to be the case when Bob Jones University – which gave Wallace an honorary degree – found itself stripped of its tax-exempt status as a religious institution due to its ban on black students.

Forced integration and taxation of private religious schools – along with bans on teacher-led prayer in public schools – created a narrative among conservative evangelicals that a liberal government was waging war on Christianity, galvanizing them into the political force known today as the Christian right.

“Before this, they weren’t terribly organized at all,” Fitzgerald said of the previously apolitical demographic. “When Paul Weyrich went around trying to enlist evangelicals and fundamentalists into the Republican party, they didn’t respond to any of his issues other than forced integration of Christian schools.”

This laid the groundwork for the following generation of evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tim LeHay, who partnered with the Republican party to stir up anger around issues evangelicals previously cared little about, like abortion, drugs and the rights of women and gays.

Campaigns to overturn gay rights legislation like “Save Our Children” in Florida (led by evangelical superstar Anita Bryant), or California’s Prop 6, which sought to ban gay men and lesbians from teaching in public schools, both equated homosexuality with pedophilia and accused gay teachers of being sexually motivated in their career choice.

While the villains were new, the tactic of ginning up baseless fears had been the cornerstone of white flight to Christian schools a decade earlier.

Bob Jones University’s lack of black students was rooted in its ban on interracial dating. When the university eventually integrated in 1971, it allowed only married black students to attend, and in 1975 allowed single black students but denied “admission to applicants engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocate interracial marriage or dating”.

While openly opposing racial integration eventually became an ineffective tool for galvanizing evangelical voters – replaced by racist dog-whistles – gays integrating themselves into the American family remained a potent touchstone for the Christian right.

“In 2004, evangelical leaders were running out of money and their voters had been falling away, so they all got in a room together to decide what issues would bring their flock back to the fold, and they decided on gay marriage,” says Fitzgerald. “And so they flooded the nation with anti–gay marriage ballot measures, and that not only helped get George W Bush elected to a second term, but the ballot measures sometimes performed better than he did … They were against gay people in principle, but they also thought gay teachers were a bigger threat to kids than anything.”

Think of the children

“He was awesome– he really cared,” says Schuylar Daniel, a junior at Valor Christian high school, of his former volleyball coach, Tonga.

On a chilly November evening, Daniel was joined by dozens of classmates, alumni and LGBTQ activists outside a Valor high school football game, protesting against the treatment of Tonga. Cars honked their horns as they drove by, showing support with signs that read “God Is Love” and “Every 45 seconds one queer teen attempts suicide.”

This statistic comes from the Trevor Project, an advocacy group and crisis center for LGBTQ youth struggling with suicidal ideation. While the Christian right views gay teachers as a threat to students, the Trevor Project’s research shows that “LGBTQ youth who have access to an LGBTQ-affirming school report lower rates of attempting suicide.” Yet, “only half of LGBTQ youth reported having an LGBTQ-affirming school.”

Skyler Daniel and other students and alumni are laboring to make Valor an LGBTQ-affirming school through their organization, Valor for Change. Through their Gay Straight Alliance (which has to meet off campus) and a list of demands for school leadership, the group aims to make their school a place where all students can feel safe and supported.

The Guardian reached out to Valor high school to comment on Tonga and Valor for Change, but did not receive a response.

Who’s a minister?

While 81% of Americans say gay teachers should be able to teach at elementary schools, religious schools catering to the remaining 19% have been developing a varied strategy for keeping them out of their classrooms.

“There are constitutional arguments they make, that [being forced to employ gay teachers] violates their freedom of association, free exercise of religion, but those have been rejected,” says Joshua Block of the ACLU. “One thing that hasn’t been rejected is the ‘ministerial exception’ [to discrimination laws] which is also grounded in the constitution. It says that there are certain positions that are so close to the exercise of an organization’s religious identity that the government can’t interfere with them.”

So if Valor Christian high school wanted to say that because Inoke Tonga, for example, led his students in a prayer before a volleyball game, or spoke of the holy spirit guiding them during a game, could his firing for being gay fall under a ministerial exemption from discrimination laws?

“It hasn’t been tested at that level of specificity,” says Block, “but a lot of religious organizations are trying to incorporate religious duties into the jobs of their employees to have that sort of insulation.”

Protecting religious freedom is at the core of America’s history, identity and constitution. Over the course of the 20th century, many legal battles have been waged over when the freedom of an individual or persecuted minority should trump that of a religious institution’s freedom to behave in any way their theology instructs.

There are a seemingly endless number of lines to be drawn on this issue, but for Block and the ACLU, the freedom to seek employment is essential to individual liberty.

Block said: “It is one thing to have a belief that you practice in your own religious community, but when you go out into the public market and start hiring people, you are engaging with the public at large, and you have to respect that there are a lot of people out there who deserve equal treatment, even if they don’t share your religious beliefs.”

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Between the title and the rainbow flag, you could easily mistake this for a pro-LGBT video from the It Gets Better or Truth Wins Out campaigns. But it’s actually from Anchored North, an evangelical media company that uses short-form videos to proselytize on behalf of Christianity via social media.

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“I think it’s horrible to accuse men of being toxic, because they’re not,” said Dunafon, who owns the 35-year-old Shotgun Willie’s strip club and a marijuana dispensary in Glendale, Colorado. “Our business is men, and men are not toxic.

“How many men are we gonna pick on until finally there’s no men standing? How would you like a society with men meekly running around with little bonnets on their head?”

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As same-sex marriage inches closer toward legalization nationwide, bakeries have emerged as an unlikely new battleground for those opposed to marriage equality. Attempting to mirror anti-discrimination rulings against bakeries that refuse service to gay couples, activists have been contacting LGBT-affirming bakeries requesting custom cakes frosted with anti-gay slogans. When the bakeries decline, the customer claims religious discrimination.

In the most recent incident, Colorado resident Bill Jack filed a religious discrimination complaint with the state’s civil rights office, after Denver’s Azucar Bakery refusing to make a Bible-shaped cake decorated with two men holding hands, covered by an “X.” The bakery’s owner, Marjorie Silva, told Out Front Colorado that she offered to “bake the cake in the shape of a Bible, and then I told him I’d sell him a [decorating] bag with the right tip and the right icing so he could write those things himself.”

But Jack—the co-founder of Worldview Academy, a Christian youth organization described on its website as “a non-denominational organization dedicated to helping Christians to think and to live in accord with a biblical worldview so that they will serve Christ and lead the culture”—refused, and is claiming that by not making the cake, Silva discriminated against him based on his creed.

At first glance, it looks like Jack and other Christian activists are trying to steal a page out of the progressive playbook, in an attempt to underscore what they see as liberal hypocrisy of anti-discrimination laws. Commenting on Jack’s complaint, Focus on the Family spokesman Jeff Johnston told The Christian Post that “just as a Christian baker should not be required to create a cake for a same-sex ceremony, this baker should not be required to create a cake with a message that goes against her conscience.”

The complaint against Azucar is a sort of a warped reflection of one filed against Masterpiece Bakeshop, another Colorado bakery that was found guilty in 2013 of violating anti-discrimination laws after the owner refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The store’s owners were ordered by a Colorado court end its discriminatory practices, and to submit quarterly reports for two years on it’s progress training its employees on the state’s anti-discrimination laws.

Despite the suggestion from conservatives, legal experts say that the two cases aren’t really all that alike. “There is a difference between refusing to do business with someone based on their characteristics, and refusing to make a particular product,” said Jennifer Hendricks, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If you’re making a plain cake with flowers on it and will sell it to this type of person, but not that type of person, that’s discrimination. [The bakery] aren’t saying ‘I won’t make you [an anti-gay] cake because of your religion, they’re saying ‘I don’t want to make this cake.'”

As the legal battle over same-sex marriage winds down, gay marriage opponents have shifted their focus to the issue of religious freedom, specifically, whether an individual or business has the right to refuse service to someone based on religious beliefs. Bakeries and other wedding vendors have become a flashpoint in this new struggle. Speaking at a Values Voters summit in Washington D.C. last year, Oregon bakeshop owner Melissa Klein burst into tears explaining how the $150,000 fine she incurred for refusing to bake a cake for a pair of marrying lesbians left her bankrupt and out of business. The story enraged anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat, and inspired him to make a list of 13 LGBT-friendly cake-shops, and film himself calling each one to request a cake decorated with the phrase “Gay Marriage Is Wrong.”

“I woke up one morning and said ‘lets take the battle to them,'” Shoebat told me in a phone interview. “When the Christian says ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it’ it’s all of the sudden a civil rights issue. But when you ask a pro-homosexual, an openly sodomite bakery, to give me a cake that supports my beliefs, they can say it’s against their beliefs. My main intention was to tell other Christians: You can take it to them.”

In Colorado, newly-elected state representative Gordon Klingenschmitt—a prominent anti-gay activist who once attempted to exorcise demons from President Obama via an Internet video—has pounced on Jack’s complaint, using it as an opportunity to call for new legislation that would allow individuals and businesses to refuse service to people they don’t like.

“Right now there’s a loophole [in nondiscrimination statutes] that’s allowing these bakers to be brought up on charges of discrimination,” Klingenschmitt told Fox 31 Denver. “I think the loophole ought to be fixed so that every baker, every artist, every person in Colorado is not compelled by the government to produce anything they personally disagree with.”

Klingenschmitt said he is in the middle of drafting legislation on the issue, but hasn’t given any details about what that bill might look like. (He did not respond to my phone calls.)

Meanwhile, In the court of public opinion, the claim of religious discrimination against Azucar Bakery has rallied LGBT supporters around the store. “Our usually quiet January at Azucar Bakery has turned out to be more busy than our busiest wedding season!” the store said in a statement on its Facebook page.

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The general sentiment among the pro-weed people was that if Westboro has become anti-pot, then full legalization must be around the corner. “They’re making disapproval of cannabis look silly, just like they did with being anti-gay,” said Kayvan Khalatbari, owner of Denver Relief Dispensary and Consulting, who was dressed as a chicken at the Marisol dispensary.

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“As long as people have been getting on bikes, people have been getting off on bikes,” he says while sitting outside Velowood Cyclery, the bike shop that hosted the annual festival when it passed through Denver on the first weekend in November. Sano—an ordained minister for something called the Church of Bicycle Jesus in Seattle who looks like what would have happened if David Cross had starred in Boogie Nights—has devoted himself to spreading the gospel of sex and bicycles.

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He smelled of animal hide, which was heady and pungent…. Then he touched my face with the pads of his black fingers.” — Cum For BigfootWhen her daughter left for college in 2010, the forty-year-old Parker housewife decided it was time to pursue her dream of writing romance novels. “My only goal when I began was just to tell stories, have them published and share them with other people,” she remembers.

She enjoyed writing, but was dismayed by the response after she self-published her first book with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Sales were in the single digits, few people were reading her work — and the ones who were didn’t like it, and wrote nasty reviews. That’s when her husband stepped in. “Do you want to write for fame and get your name out there, or do you want to write for an income?” he asked. When she admitted she’d like to make some money, he handed her a paperback and said, “Then check out what I’ve been reading.”

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It’s something many advocates express — a feeling so pervasive and deep that it weaves its way as a given into everything we assume about the future. Between the dramatic shifts in media representations of LGBT people, the increasing public outcry against high-profile anti-LGBT statements, the gradual expansion of marriage equality in more and more states and the recent Supreme Court decisions abolishing DOMA and Prop. 8, young people today are growing up in a gay-friendly world that would’ve been unimaginable generations ago. This group of pro-gay millennials — who show overwhelming support for marriage equality and LGBT rights in polls — will continue to expand their proportion among the country’s voters and will eventually become its leaders, to presumably enact the laws and policies that today’s LGBT advocates refer to as full equality.

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