(Image courtesy of Courtesy of Ashon T. Crawley, Ph.D.)

In 2022, Beyond Granite, a project re-imagining memorials and memorialization by the Monument Lab, asked a group of artists: what stories remain untold on the National Mall? They responded by designing temporary art installations that would tell such stories. Six were invited to transform their designs into monuments for Pulling Together, the first-ever curated, temporary exhibit hosted by the National Mall.

For artist and scholar Ashon T. Crawley, Beyond Granite’s question evoked thoughts of people from his youth whose stories could barely be spoken because they were shrouded in fear: Black, queer church musicians who died of AIDS. In the Blackpentecostal worlds of Crawley’s youth – Crawley uses “Blackpentecostal” to refer not only to the religious tradition but to its particular aesthetics, emotions, and sociality – these were the artistic geniuses who created musical spaces that allowed for spiritual communion with the Divine and with Black community. But they were also targets of condemnation and warning; condemnation for their presumed homosexuality and warning to anyone who may identify too strongly with them. In the 1980s and 90s, when Crawley was growing up, AIDS intensified the warning and robbed the church of these folks, their spiritual and musical gifts, and the opportunity to care for them in their illness and death.

Crawley is one of the artists who has a temporary installation at the National Mall. His piece, HOMEGOING, is “a sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis that honors fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality.” The installation uses space and sound to enact a funeral of sorts. It combines a built monument whose three sections spell out the Arabic word “Amin” – “let this prayer be accepted” – and a symphonic piece in six movements that accompanies visitors as they traverse the monument. Together, the built piece and sound create a memorial space on the National Mall for those lost and those who remember them – even if they are meeting them for the first time.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Lynne Gerber: In the installation’s symphonic piece, in the second movement titled “Go Beyond Glory,” the choir sings “may our hearts be tangled with your hearts.” I am curious about how your heart is tangled with the hearts of the folks you are memorializing, which is also a way of asking how you came to create this work.

Ashon T. Crawley: I came to the project because I think my heart is tangled and what I mean is that my life is possible sonically. The way that I think about music and sound is because of my relationship to the Blackpentecostal tradition. I grew up Blackpentecostal. I was a singer, musician, the choir director, and I was going to be a preacher too, and decided against all of that. But the way that I came to sense the world, the way that I came to understand music and musicality, the way that I came to understand Black English or African-American Vernacular English, the way that I came to understand what it meant to be in community with others, with vibration that we call sound as the foundation of that gathering, was because of what I was experiencing immersed in the Blackpentecostal tradition. Going to my church, going to other churches within our fellowship of churches I was always really moved by the music, the Hammond organ, which is my favorite instrument. Musicians who were skilled always made me really happy. And seeing choir directors move the congregation and would require the flamboyance, the joy, the seriousness of their musical practice, their openness to music and music happening in them and through them. Noticing that at a very young age was very awe-inspiring to me.

(A segment of the HOMEGOING exhibit. Image by AJ Mitchell for Monument Lab.)

But also it was very, very scary because as a young person – I was born in 1980 – the AIDS crisis was happening alongside this musical genius and joy that was happening. A lot of the same musicians that taught me – and not like sitting me down and saying this is what you do, but just the gift of their presence taught me, by just noticing them – what it meant to be open to Spirit. What it meant to be open to music happening. What it meant for music to be connection. These people who were so beautiful in what they offered were also dying. They were dying unceremoniously. They were dying with sermons that were the soundtrack to their death. And the sermons that were the soundtrack were often sermons that castigated, sermons that used pejorative language to talk about the sins of the choir, the sins of the musician, the sins of the male singer. There was a lot of deep worry and anxiety around queerness and what queerness meant to these congregations. And so people would jump up and they would shout and they would speak in tongues and praise based on the choir singing and the musician playing the organ and the director directing the choir, getting everyone sort of enraptured in the Spirit. And then the sermonic content would often be castigating the men that just did that. And I could not understand why or how the ones that were actually causing all of this deep feeling in terms of the Spirit were being called out as a big problem to get rid of.

And so I arrived to this project because I’ve always been deeply connected to these musicians and could not figure out a way to honor them. I was afraid to be a musician as a young person because I thought the music was making them gay, and I thought that being gay was making them contract HIV and that their musicality was a portal to their sinfulness. And I didn’t want my life to be a portal to sinfulness and so I wanted to escape it as much as possible. So I tried to escape the music, but I was so deeply drawn to it. Drawn to it because it also felt like a space of freedom that wasn’t being felt in other kinds of registers and other kind of material ways. And so I was still drawn to the music even as these people were dying. And so when I say in the song “may our hearts be tangled,” it’s more an acknowledgment of the beauty that they were, a kind of beauty that made my openness to the world possible. Even when many of them who died would perhaps disagree with my theological understanding – or be offended, perhaps, even – of sexuality. But their livingness was a way for me to actually ask questions like why is there this deep chasm between what we say is wholly unacceptable and what these people are doing – and yet what they’re doing isn’t actually getting in the way of them producing this capacity to move the very ones that are saying that they’re a problem. They prompted in me a series of questions, a series of concerns, a series of difficulties. And so I feel tangled with them because I want to always be in relation with them. Always be in deep gratitude for them and also always wanting to honor them and say I’m not different from you. I am you.

LG: That juxtaposition of the choir and the sermon is a very powerful image. I would love to hear more about the musical genius of the folks that you are commemorating and how that genius was and is entangled with the spiritual genius of the Black church.

AC: I think the musical genius is that often these musicians were not classically trained. If they had any training, it might have been in a public school where they had some form of musical talent and a teacher in a music program might’ve given them some lessons. They might have known basic music theory. Oftentimes they knew no theory at all. Many could not read music. They couldn’t sight read. And yet they were creating forms of music that literally were at the foundation for church services. Churches would sing, and still do today, the songs that these musicians, these singers and choir directors created in terms of lyrical content, but also the harmonic and chordal changes that musicians would use on the Hammond organ, or on the piano. They were genius because they were able to take whatever constraints of the mechanical objects that they had, whether piano or Hammond organ or the directing of the choir, or the mechanical instruments of their voice, they were able to take that and to find a form that was appropriate to their individual self and use that to outpour toward the congregation, to move the congregation, to provide music for the congregation. These were not musicians recording on choir recordings. They weren’t necessarily on TV. They weren’t perhaps the most amazing musicians according to a logic of classical training, but they were amazing insofar as they provided music that moved their individual congregation. I’m not only talking about musicians who were playing for churches that had two thousand members. I’m mostly talking about musicians who played for their family churches with fifty members, sometimes a hundred members. And within that context, providing music for them where they weren’t seeking a career in music, but they were trying to be an instrument for their congregation, where they were trying to be instrumental in the entire congregation experiencing something of the divine. And so that, for me, is a practice of genius.

LG: Your written work dwells on the idea of “otherwise possibilities” – what you describe as “the fact of infinite alternatives to what is” – and how Black art and Blackpentecostal practices evoke such possibilities and can make them real, can make them discernible to us. I’m curious what AIDS was like for the folks that you’re memorializing and how it might have been otherwise for them and for the church.

AC: What I mean by otherwise possibility is that alternatives to the normative already exist. We don’t have to wait for some future moment to enact alternatives, to be different, to figure out a different path. There are already a multitude of paths that we can take. That we can think differently about all of these things. And so the things that have happened have been the result of political and economic choices or political and economic constraints. “Otherwise” just names the fact that alternatives exist without ever saying that all alternatives are also good. They are just alternatives and we still have to figure out a way that produces an ethics of care with the things that we select to do differently.

(A segment of the HOMEGOING exhibit. Image by AJ Mitchell for Monument Lab.)

For me, HOMEGOING is an attempt toward the practice of otherwise possibility because it’s trying to give an alternative with regard to care. It’s trying to actually give us a homegoing ceremony for musicians, singers, and choir directors who often died in silence, or whose queerness could never be spoken. Or whose queerness had to be re-narrated as something that they repented of, or that they gave up – my son wasn’t like that, as one person said at her son’s funeral – or the refusal to speak queerness and refusal to speak the public health crisis of AIDS. This is an attempt to say nope. We are speaking the word AIDS. We are unashamed about a public health crisis. We are unashamed, too, about the fact that people were queer. So we are speaking queerness very intentionally. These are already alternatives to what has happened in the past. But also the exhibit’s songs are written to and about the musicians, the singers, and the choir directors. They’re songs not about God. They are not to God. They are not to worship God. They are to say that the musicians, the people, the complex lives that were lost were so deeply beautiful that we have to honor them. Because not just them, but each life is so deeply complex and beautiful and each life should be honored. And so this is an attempt to produce music that honors, perhaps something like ancestor music. But it is not gospel music, it is not Christian music, even though the phonics, patterns, and forms are deeply informed by the Black church.

LG: In another movement the choir sings “we are your family now.” I was wondering what it means to claim these folks now when they were so often unclaimed in life. And what does it mean for you and for those of us remembering them to claim them as part of queer kin when they may not have claimed their sexuality and in some cases resisted it?

AC: If I am thinking about ancestor, I am thinking about a complex positionality that still learns, that still grows, that still changes even if not existing in the fleshly manifestation of personhood in ways that we call the human. That people can learn and grow, even when they ain’t here. That relation, that ancestor doesn’t mean a kind of inert object, that whatever it was that they thought at the moment of death is the thing that’s going to remain only ever unceasing. But instead: ancestor as dynamic, ancestor as literal relation. And so to say “we are your family now” is to say that we who are alive and remain, who want to offer ceremony, homegoing for you, would like to claim you as family, as queer kin. Please let us, if you would so allow us to. It is a non-coercive solicitation, a desire to be in deep relation, to say that we are family. Not based on blood, not based on ability, but certainly based on desire to be in relation.

To claim we are your family now is to say we are unashamed of queerness. We are unashamed of AIDS. The religious violence that you had to endure, we will speak it. We will and we will honor you. And so one of the lines is “we are your family, not one that is imposed, but one through choice composed.” We are choosing to compose family this way. It’s informed by ball culture. It’s informed by Black culture where the person down the street is your auntie. You don’t know if the person is related to you, but they are related to you because that’s my auntie. It’s not blood. It is practices of care. And this care is the root of our relationship. And to claim as family is to just say, we care about you. That song particularly, I think of it both as a song to those who have departed, but also to those who are alive, who are seeking community, seeking family, that one of the things we can offer to one another is care. We can become family with one another. And because family according to normative logic and political economic practice is such a site of violence. And so it is to reclaim family as important, but family that does not need to be on the side of violence and harm, but a family that can be a site of the proliferation of care, concern, joy, love, and patience.

LG: Your exhibit is part of a larger project rethinking memorials and memorialization. And the curators have clearly thought a great deal about the National Mall itself as a space of memorialization and the historic events that occurred there, such as Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial and the 1987 display of the Names Quilt. I’m curious how you’ve imagined your piece in conversation with the other events on the National Mall as a way to rethink memorialization?

AC: I think that the publicness of a lot of what has happened on the National Mall previously has not had to deal with the question of anonymity, or the question of identification in the way that I’ve had to. So, for example, I get a lot of questions about the relationship between my work and the AIDS Quilt, a beautiful piece that honors people who were lost and their individuality. Sometimes it’s a picture of the person, the name of the person, sometimes there are musical notes, whatever a person wants to put on the square for a person who was lost. And so there’s not anonymity in that particular case.

The thing that I’m doing deals with the question of what happens when the musicians who died were also closeted or would not have claimed queerness. Or what are the ethics of naming? And beyond that, what happens in a situation where so many names remain unsaid because of shame around queerness, shame around the public health crisis of AIDS? What does one do? And so mine is in this relation and conversation with these other forms of monumentality and remembrance by saying or by asking the question, is there a way to produce memorial that also has to contend with the problem of naming, the problem of specific modes of identification? And can there still be a way to say what you did was important and necessary and righteous. It’s not the AIDS quilt, but it is still a stitching together of things.

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Beyond Granite: Pulling Together is on public display at the National Mall in Washington DC from August 18 through September 18, 2023. On Saturday September 9 at 7:30 there will be a public event about HOMEGOING and a live performance of its music at the Sylvan Theater in Washington, DC.

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar and the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Re-orientation in Evangelical America. Her current work is focused on religious responses to the emergence of AIDS in 1980s and 90s San Francisco.

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility and The Lonely Letters.