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The DC
Sanctuary from Hate
In the middle of a sermon, Bishop Rainey Cheeks felt his medicine
bottle bulging in his pocket and realized he hadn't taken his pills. He
paused in the pulpit and faced the congregation in his tiny storefront
church.
'' Excuse me,'' Cheeks remembers telling his parishioners last
year as he poured three pills into his hand. ''This is my HIV medicine.
I'm going to take it now.''
As he washed down the pills with water, Cheeks saw some members staring
with wide eyes. Everybody knew that their pastor, an imposing man with
flowing dreadlocks who once competed in taekwondo championships, is
gay. But not everyone knew that he is HIV positive. ' 'Go ahead, Rev,'' a few congregants urged. But most shrugged and
waited for the bishop to swallow and get on with delivering the good
word.
Inner Light Ministries in the District's H Street corridor might seem
like a traditional black church, with fiery sermons, electric gospel
music, a soulful choir and a congregation that sways and claps in
rhythm. But it is hardly that.
For 16 years, it has served as a sanctuary for a small community of
black gays and lesbians who say they feel shunned from all directions
by black men and women who give them cutting looks of disapproval, by
mainstream black ministers who condemn homosexuality, and by white gays
who make them feel unwelcome in subtle ways, such as switching from hip
hop to country music in a club when too many black men hit the dance
floor.
At Inner Light, members say they can be themselves. In the pews on a
recent Sunday, a woman adoringly placed an arm around the shoulders of
her girlfriend. A man with a linebacker's strong build sat near the
front wearing mascara. And condoms sat in a basket near the door in
case any worshipers wanted to grab some on their way out.
Safe sex is part of the message Cheeks preaches. Two thirds of his 100
or so parishioners are gay and lesbian, a congregation that includes
the young and the old; the healthy and the sick; those who are open
about their sexual orientation and those who are more guarded.
They come to the church to pray for forgiveness and seek redemption.
But many also come to share their experience of being black and gay,
living and loving in a city where HIV and AIDS lurk in epidemic
proportions in nearly every community.
Nearly 60 percent of men in the city who contracted HIV through sex
with men are black, according to a D.C. government survey released in
March. Every minister and deacon at Inner Light Ministries has had a
close encounter with the disease. Four of them are HIV positive,
including deacon Ronnie Walker, 54, who said that 20 years ago he had
unprotected sex with a partner who never mentioned that he was sick and
dying.
Cheeks, 57, contracted HIV in the early '80s, when few people knew much
about the strange new infection that was sending so many gay men to
their graves. Much to the bishop's chagrin, HIV continues to ravage his
city almost three decades later.
A 'Time of Being Proud and Black'
In 1980, Cheeks stood on a perch over the dance floor of the ClubHouse
disco in Columbia Heights and watched Nona Hendryx belt out a song to a
packed room of about 1,200. The singer strode boldly into the throng of
dancers, who bodysurfed her back onto the stage.
At 28, Cheeks felt he was at the center of an amazing world. He'd grown
up in Northeast Washington, where only his mother knew he was gay. In a
neighborhood where gay men were derided as sissies, Cheeks was instead
an accomplished practitioner of taekwondo so skilled that he competed
in the 1973 taekwondo world championship in South Korea. Now, Cheeks was a manager at one of the country's hottest black gay
nightclubs during a heady time for homosexuals in Washington.
A year earlier, gay black intellectuals had emerged from the first
National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays vowing to
transform the District into a ''Paradise on the Potomac.'' They wanted
to work toward electing an openly gay black D.C. Council member, maybe
even an openly gay black mayor.
'' For black folks, there was the time of being proud and black,''
Cheeks recalled. ''And then you had these black gay men coming out in
the open and saying: 'I'm proud, too. Don't let your sexuality stop
you. Embrace it.' '' But before the revolution could take hold, dozens
of gay black men came down with a frightening illness that caused
pneumonia, skin lesions and dementia. In 1982, Cheeks began suffering
from fever and night sweats that doctors eventually diagnosed as AIDS.
The symptoms went away, and Cheeks felt fine, but he was an exception.
''You would watch people get sick, and two months later they would be
dead,'' he said. The ClubHouse's membership, which peaked at 2,000 in 1985, nosedived. It closed in 1990.
''I remember going through the book and scratching out the names of
people who died of AIDS,'' said Cheeks, who founded the group Us
Helping Us to help black men pay for food and medicine. ''When we got
to 300, we were so numb we couldn't continue. Half our staff was
gone.''
Cheeks, who had been ordained by the nondenominational
National Spiritual Science Center in Takoma Park, found himself praying
at the bedside of men taking their last breaths and presiding at dozens
of funerals. In November 1988 alone, he said, ''I preached at 17 funerals.'' He was
exhausted. ''I didn't have another sermon in me. I was so angry that I
told God to stop it.''
A year later, Cheeks fell ill with pneumonia and a condition that
attacked his nervous system. Doctors at George Washington University
Hospital told him that he wouldn't walk again and might die. He thanks
God that they were wrong.
' I Felt Like I Was in Heaven'
"If you are HIV-positive, stand up,'' Cheeks commanded during a morning service at Inner Light in 1999.
Ronnie Walker, who had just moved to the District from New York,
remembers fidgeting in his pew. He'd always hidden his HIV-positive
status. Then, to his surprise, about a dozen HIV positive men and women answered Cheeks's call. Finally, Walker stood, too.
''I felt like I was in heaven,'' said Walker, who always heard
homosexuality condemned from the pulpit of other churches he had
attended. ''The only place I feel safe is in my church.''
He credits Cheeks with changing his life. The bishop told him to let God in and stop living in the shadows.
Walker was able to confess a deep secret for which he had long
sought forgiveness. On the night of his honeymoon in 1973, he had
slipped away from his wife to have sex with his best man. During his
seven years of marriage, he betrayed her again and again.
The acceptance Walker found at Inner Light gave him the strength to
stop abusing drugs and alcohol, he said. But it hasn't entirely erased
the stigma of having HIV. Every morning, Walker opens a chest drawer
filled with about 20 brown and white bottles of medicine for HIV, staph
infection and failing kidneys. He doesn't keep the pills in the
medicine cabinet of his Northwest Washington apartment for a reason,
said his partner, Keith Short, who is also HIV positive.
''You don't want visitors to come into the bathroom and say, 'Oh my God,' '' Short said.
The desire to hide being HIV positive not just from visitors but from
prospective sexual partners is powerful and difficult to change. Some
men are reluctant to reveal their health status to possible partners
for fear of being rejected. Short said he might avoid the subject if he
and Walker broke up and he were dating again.
''It would depend on how I feel,'' Short said, adding that he would
probably use a condom but that in the heat of the moment, he couldn't
guarantee it. ''Sex is a very powerful thing.''
That attitude, Cheeks said, is part of why gay black men in
the District are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS. And why
he has to keep preaching the message of safe sex.
Fighting Complacency
A light rain drummed on Cheeks's umbrella as he walked to the downtown
offices of the Washington Blade several weeks ago. He had been invited
there by the newspaper's editors for a roundtable discussion about gay
life in the District to mark the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall
riots the clashes between police and homosexuals in New York that
sparked the modern gay rights movement.
The discussion among older gay activists and younger participants was
congenial until the conversation turned to HIV and AIDS. Cheeks
listened as 22 year old Antoine Smith, a former Bojangles' shift
manager who lives in Prince George's County, matter of factly described
the disease as "manageable. It's not the death sentence it used to
be.''
''I dated someone with it,'' Smith said, ''but I'm still free of it.''
Although he said he is tested every three months, he said he hadn't
always protected himself from HIV. Then a friend who had AIDS died two
years ago.
''That's what gave me my fright to stop doing what I was doing,'' he
said. ''I was the one being carefree, knowing that this was out there,
but at the same time thinking I couldn't be touched.''
To Cheeks, Smith sounded too cavalier about AIDS. The bishop lurched
back in his chair when Smith described it as ''an everyday disease.''
Even today, Cheeks said, distraught gay black men frequently call his
cellphone, asking him to help them cope with their new HIV infections.
Although powerful antiviral drugs keep many people with HIV from
developing AIDS, "there's no guarantee that your body will react well
to the medicine," Cheeks said. The medical advances have made too many
people complacent about HIV, especially young men such as Smith who
don't fully grasp its threat.
Twenty-two percent of men in Washington who contracted HIV through sex
with men are between the ages of 20 and 29, the District government
reported in March. And 40 percent are between 30 and 39.
As he left the Blade's offices, Cheeks said the discussion had driven
home the need to start a youth mentoring program at Inner Light. ''Most
messages . . . to young folk is if you're gay or lesbian, you're going
to hell,'' he said. ''So why take responsibility if you're already
condemned? ''They need to understand God loves them. But they also need to be
accountable for their sexual behavior. Not everything goes.''
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Inner Light Ministries
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