L. Lamar Wilson in Sacrilegion: The Gospel Truth

The Mickee Faust Club presents L. Lamar Wilson in “Sacrilegion: The Gospel Truth”

The weaving of blackness and queerness in a person in our society can often lead to strained relationships in families in both communities. Add the element of Christian faith into that same person and now you have a cocktail being stirred with love while contending with being loathed by the church that professes to love. This is the drink being served up with poetry and spiritual songs in L. Lamar Wilson’s “Sacrilegion.”

ilson, a native of Marianna, is returning to Tallahassee to open the Mickee Faust Club’s 10th annual Queer As Faust Festival, Friday and Saturday, June 2 and 3 at the Club’s Adelaide Schnittman Hall in Railroad Square.  Both performances are at 8pm.

An Affrilachian poet, Wilson teaches creative writing and African American literature at the University of Alabama. He is the recipient of several fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Calloloo Workshops, and the Blyden and Roberta Jackson Fund at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where Wilson is completing his doctorate in African American and multiethnic poetics. Wilson ventures where few academics dare to tread with his fearless approach to sex that is not separated from his faith. His piece, “Sacrilegion,” looks at the freeing experience of love that is both human and divine.

“At the center of every poem I wrote in Sacrilegion…is an intense desire to articulate this yearning to feel both the love of a divine force, which the Greeks call agape, and the love of another human’s touch, which we know as eros,” Wilson told the Miami New Times in a 2014 interview. “It is my hope that manchild’s stories, his journey to self-acceptance, will move, haunt, and, yes, liberate those who will pause and listen to his moans, wails, and prayers — from the lies that racism, homophobia, ableism are evils of the past; from their skepticism about open expression of faith; from their own internalized self-loathing.”