Faith prevails for LGBTQ Charlotteans — even when churches reject them
In the balcony of St. John’s Baptist Church sanctuary, only a few pews are taken.
Matt Comer sits in the corner by himself, behind two computers.
He’s streaming the church’s Sunday service to worshipers watching at home, occasionally tinkering with the camera angles and lighting or adjusting audio levels.
But he’s listening, too.
From the pulpit, the pastor begins his sermon with a message Comer rarely, if ever, heard from preachers he had growing up. If he had, the 36-year-old may have not spent the better part of his early adulthood searching for a church he felt comfortable in.
Rev. Dennis Foust welcomes the congregation: “We will welcome you. We will embrace you. We will make sure you know, whether you’re an immigrant or refugee or an ostracized person, we will welcome you, because we understand God to be a God of love.”
For the group of young boys in the back of the balcony and the latecomers taking their seats quietly near the sound booth Comer works from every Sunday, the pastor’s opening lines may be a prelude the main event. But for Comer, it’s everything.
It’s taken Comer a long time to get here — in the back of the church, at home.
St. John’s is one of many affirming and accepting churches in Charlotte for LGBTQ people. Like many other gay adults, Comer found a place in Christianity despite the church’s history of discrimination and rejection.
“I don’t think there’s any conflict between being LGBTQ and and being religious,” he said. “There are anti-LGBTQ people who have who have concocted a conflict between the church and the LGBTQ community, but I do think they can complement each other.
“LGBTQ people have such incredibly awesome gifts to offer the church.”
Despite studies showing nearly half of LGBTQ people in the U.S. consider themselves religious (in the South, the number is even higher), many churches and traditions have been hostile places for them.
Tommy Allgood, for example, was excommunicated at age 20 from the Jehovah’s Witnesses community for having sex with a man. In Charlotte, they’ve finally found acceptance at Watershed, an affirming, nondenominational church.
“We are already a reflection of the Creator. We are already divine,” Allgood said. “So there’s nothing that we can do or not do that can separate us from the source of all creation.”
Sometimes, experiencing religious trauma can open a door for queer people to start their own ministries.
Veronica Daughety, the chaplain of Charlotte Black Pride, started a physical fitness-based ministry in 2018 focused on spirituality in the queer community. Daughety’s childhood church in New Jersey preached that gay people went to hell, leaving them unable to accept their identity as a gay, genderfluid person until college and after several moves.
Hateful teachings from their childhood echoed in their ears every time they felt attracted to a woman, but Daughety finally found peace after creating Shackless Physical and Spiritual Fitness Ministry in Charlotte.
For many like Allgood, Daughety and Comer, they may leave their church but the connection to God isn’t broken.
“We’re all created in God’s image, and we are all God’s children,” Comer said. “I do not believe in a capricious God that rejects any of God’s children because of something as simple as love.”
Being LGBTQ in church
Comer grew up steeped in a conservative, religious environment in Winston-Salem. His grandfather was a preacher, and his family had attended an independent fundamentalist Baptist church since he was an infant.
The Independent Fundamentalist Baptist tradition started in the late 1800s out of concern that liberal ideologies were seeping into congregations. Followers interpret the Bible literally and dress conservatively.
A fundamental part of the denomination’s teaching is asking Jesus to come into one’s heart, save them and be their Savior.
Comer did that at the age of 8, and by 12, had made up his mind to get baptized.
“Baptism is your first act of obedience as a follower of Jesus, and once you are baptized, you are a full member of the church and being a member of the church carries with it certain obligations and responsibilities that you need to be old enough to understand,” Comer said. “At 12, I thought I was old enough to do that.”
His mother tried to dissuade him but couldn’t, he says.
In the restroom, he changed into the white Baptism robes and thrummed with excitement. Comer made his way to the Baptism pool, was submerged in the water in front of a cheesy mural of a river, and emerged an adult — or so he thought.
“It was a great day,” he said. “But my mother was right. I wasn’t old enough, because it was just a short time after that, that I began to struggle with my identity as gay — even though I didn’t always have the language for it when I was young.”
“The church would eventually become a place of great turmoil for me,” Comer said.
Comer came out very publicly in the fall of 2000 when he started a Gay-Straight Alliance at his high school. There was a newspaper article about the group’s creation that included Comer’s sexuality, and all of a sudden, everyone knew.
“This church family that I thought I had been welcomed me into after my baptism very plainly flat-out rejected me,” he said. “But it wasn’t a quick rejection, because it also came with attempts and efforts on their end to try to make me not gay.
“There was a lot of pressure, a lot of pain and a lot of bad memories.”
Comer became the subject of sermons at church and felt everyone’s eyes on him, as he tried to disappear into the pew. He felt like he was expected to come up at the altar call at the end of service to confess his sin of experiencing same-sex attraction, while members of the congregation laid their hands on him and tried to “pray the gay away.”
Finally, at the end of one service where he was asked to confess his “sins” in front of the entire congregation, he broke down.
“That was an awful lot to ask from a 14 or 15 year old,” he said. “In many ways, there are parts of that part of my life that I don’t know if I’ll ever fully heal from, or ever fully understand.”
New paths
Unlike Comer, some other LGBTQ+ Charlotteans have not been able to find a home in the religion they grew up in after discovering their queer identity.
Tommy Allgood, raised in west Charlotte’s Enderly Park community, was brought up as a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After their father went to prison and their grandmother died, Allgood’s mother turned to Jehovah’s Witnesses for the support she was missing.
Although they were baptized at 15, Allgood’s traumatic experiences with the church began years earlier.
At 12, Allgood came out to their mom, and their nontraditional “conversion therapy” process started — the church tried to pray for Allgood’s sexuality to change. In high school, Allgood had found an online support group for followers of Jehovah’s Witnesses across the country who were experiencing “same-sex attraction,” and tried to stifle their feelings as much as possible.
When Allgood lost their virginity to a man, the church considered it an “infraction” and reprimanded them for having same-sex intercourse.
Five years later, when it happened again, Allgood’s worst fear came true — they were excommunicated.
“There was the natural fear of losing community,” Allgood said. “But I think I truly believed in what the church was teaching.”
For years, Allgood didn’t feel comfortable in church. They lived their life as an out, gay man at the time, and made a community of queer friends in Charlotte. That’s how they heard about Watershed Church.
They attended their first service there at 23, and Allgood remembers getting emotional.
“My friends were there so we hung out and I didn’t hear anything off-kilter or anything that made me feel super uncomfortable,” they said. “It was actually quite the opposite. I felt really moved.”
It wasn’t perfect then — the church blocked Allgood from becoming a leader a few years ago because of their identity as a queer nonbinary person. But over the years, the church has grown alongside Allgood, and has many queer members in its congregation.
For others in the LGBTQ community, spirituality — not specifically religion or “church” — has been the answer.
Couple Kyoko and Jennifer Rorie-Bruton joined Daughety’s Shackless Physical and Spiritual Fitness Ministry after their experiences with religion in childhood.
“My thing about organized religion, people put so many stipulations, rules and regulations on religion,” 46-year-old Kyoko Rorie-Bruton said. “It’s almost kind of a turnoff. It’s like you can’t be who you want to be and how you want to be without somebody else judging you.
“And I don’t think that’s what religion is about.”
Leading the ministry, Daughety themself has lived through the harshness of being judged in church. They were a lesbian since college, but didn’t feel comfortable in their identity until moving to Charlotte in 1990.
Daughety, who is 55, said their childhood experience in a Disciples of Christ denominational church had a lot to do with that denial — and subsequent two suicide attempts.
They were in church several nights a week — for Sunday school and service, for Wednesday night Bible study, for Friday night choir rehearsal. “And my pastor always found a way to preach about homosexuality,” they recall.
Coming home
Comer’s healing journey took years.
“I had always felt this really intense relationship with God, a personal closeness with Jesus. The Bible and theology was something that just clicked with me,” Comer said.
“There were there certainly were times that I doubted — everybody has doubts. There were moments where seriously considered leaving ... but there was something in the back of my mind.
“There was some small, still voice that said, ‘This is where you really belong.’”
Back in high school after his experience with his home church, he briefly joined a few friends from school who attended a Unitarian Universalist Church.
It was an affirming space, Comer said, and the perfect place to start his healing — but he missed the familiarity of a Baptist church. Through college at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and until he moved to Charlotte, Comer bounced around a couple of Baptist churches until he found St. John’s in 2012.
“What I am most grateful for is that my sexual orientation is only a small part of who I am in my church family,” Comer said. “That’s really all I wanted as a child anyway — to be fully welcomed into a community where I would be a part of the priesthood of all believers, I would be able to walk this path with other people.”
About five years ago Comer was thinking, as he often did, of his 12-year-old self baptized in his family’s Baptist church.
Under the stifling weight of expectations, Comer felt like he was indirectly forced into baptism back then.
“What I had experienced had been more like coercion, that I had never really had the opportunity to make a free choice and to participate in a true believers’ baptism. And as a Baptist, that was something that was very important to me,” Comer said.
He told the St. John’s pastor his story, and wondered if Foust would agree to baptize him.
Most Baptists believe someone can only be truly baptized once, citing an Ephesians verse.
To Comer, he wasn’t looking for a second baptism — he was longing for his true one.
And Foust understood perfectly.
The first Sunday of January in 2018, Comer dressed in those same white robes and made his way to the baptism pool.
It felt different — his favorite hymn was playing, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”
“The most important thing was that I knew I wouldn’t have that same sense of rejection afterwards,” Comer said. “I knew that I would immediately be able to go from that baptism that day, and begin to be active in the church and in a very fulfilling way.”
“Here by Thy great help I’ve come, and I hope by Thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home,” the choir sang.
Foust said that a baptism signified the melting away of an old life, and the beginning of a new one, and he put his hand on the back of Comer’s head and led him into the water.
This time, when Comer dipped his head under, it felt like coming home.
