In the past week, two significant releases have occurred in the gay pantheon. One has been slightly more under the radar than Lil Nas X’s “Sun Goes Down” by sheer virtue of the fact that few outside of the publishing and aspiring writer world pay much attention to new book releases. The novel in question here is Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s Yes, Daddy. It, too, focuses on a boy who, not unlike Montero Lamar Hill (a.k.a. Lil Nas X), grew up with Christian rhetoric rammed down his throat. Even though we all know a dick being rammed down it would have been preferable.
Despite the fact that there seems to be a belief (primarily among Republicans) that we live in a “godless” era, evidence to the contrary exists in the form of organized religion’s persistent sway. Not only over politics, but people. And so, one has to ask, if modern life is “godless,” why does God still seem to have so much influence on affecting people’s behavior? On shaping whether or not they feel remorse or guilt about something? Namely, their sexuality… as is the case with the average repressed gay man feeling said guilt while trapped in the pockets of America that lie in between California and New York.
Lil Nas X was one such repressed gay, and so was the protagonist of Yes, Daddy, Jonah Keller. While Montero’s father was a gospel singer, Jonah’s was a pastor. Having one’s key male role model heavily involved in “church life” in such a way can only prove to be a mindfuck to the young male coming to terms with his sexuality. For the fire and brimstone warnings of the Bible don’t exactly make the religious home feel like a “safe space” for a coming out dialogue. No matter how “open” certain watered-down sects of Christian religions claim to be. And Jonah certainly learns the hard way that even the watered-down ones might still “embrace” your sexuality while also expecting you to be “faithful” to God by not actually acting on it. In other words, celibacy as salvation.
Both Montero and Jonah were relegated to the outskirts of “big cities,” the former from a small town near Atlanta and the latter from somewhere in Illinois that isn’t Chicago. While Montero sat on the information (as opposed to another man’s face) of his sexuality for the majority of his high school years, “praying the gay away,” Jonah was “discovered” earlier in his adolescence, hence the opportunity for his father to send him to conversion therapy.
Like all deluded Christians, Jonah’s parents seemed to believe “gay is a choice” that can, again, be “prayed away.” Montero addresses this notion on “Sun Goes Down” as well, with the lyrics, “These gay thoughts would always haunt me/I prayed God would take it from me/It’s hard for you when you’re fightin’/And nobody knows it when you’re silent.” Alas, with God Himself clearly having a thing for homoerotic imagery, no help ever comes from such prayers. Only more “iniquitous” thoughts about how hot Jesus looks (as is the case with Jonah’s woes in seeking redemption through the very entity that makes him feel othered in the first place). Nailed to a cross or not.
The purpose of both “Sun Goes Down” and Yes, Daddy (even if the latter executes it with dismal results) appears to be each artist’s attempt to reconcile with their past, Christian-guilted incarnations. The ones who allowed themselves to be brainwashed into believing they were somehow “less than” for being gay. For “going against nature” by “going against God.”
And so, to those who would assert that religion’s dominance has all but deteriorated in this epoch of technological worship, we need only look to the fact that, in 2021, two back-to-back examples of how religious rhetoric traumatizes and taunts a formerly repressed gay male well into adulthood have risen to the forefront with more force than Christ on Easter.
