I learned a new word recently: disidentification. The word comes from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational work Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. I learned this from a book on James Baldwin by Christoper Hunt called Jimmy’s Faith.

Disidentification, in Muñoz’s theory, according to Hunt, is a way of repurposing cultural texts that at once highlights their “universalizing and exclusionary machinations” while empowering minority identities. It serves as a way of queer “worldmaking.”

I’m learning from this book that there was a way in which Baldwin spoke using Christian imagery that subverted Christendom, as we know it. This, Hunt identifies as disidentification. And it’s important to note that this term, as coined by Muñoz, is an intersectional one, and belongs to queers of color.

All queers who have ever had to exist in Christian spaces, I would argue, benefit from the work of elder queers of color. White queers must pay respect and reparations to them. It’s likely there would be no Sufjan Stevens singing songs that could be gay or about God without James Baldwin.

I see more and more queer artists using Christian imagery coyly if not all out subversively, and it’s exciting to consider a developing queer liberation theology as expressed through art. And like all liberation theologies, we owe a lot to Black and Indigenous traditions of interpreting Christian scripture.

I’d had already written my album before all this, but the process of recording my forthcoming album, The Tower of Babel Falls, was very much done in honor of disidentification.

Christian imagery features prominently on this record, and when I bring it up, I intend to hold it up as a measure to critique American Christianity and white evangelicalism at large. To recall a story to the American church, one it should be familiar with: “You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.”

With this record, I hope to add a little something to the conversation, if I may, and I wanna start by thanking James Baldwin.