Introduction
Religious language can be both a source of comfort and a weapon. In this episode of In the Key of Q, the artists speak openly about navigating the tension between inherited faith and personal truth. I wanted to sit with the idea that the sacred isn’t something others can give or take away, rather it’s something you define for yourself.
“Sometimes it’s created in recording studios, in honest conversations with parents, or in the simple act of refusing to apologise for who you are.”
The Early Bind
For Ty McKinnie, faith arrived early and joyfully. As a child he copied the worship around him, earning the nickname “Hallelujah baby.” It’s a detail that captures the innocence of those first connections with the sacred.
But the bind comes later. Ty remembers learning that almost any wrongdoing could be forgiven, that is except being gay. That single condition reframed his understanding of what church could be. The sacred became conditional, dependent on who you were willing to hide.
Blake Mundell’s teenage years were shaped by similar messages. Nightly prayers asking to be “saved” weren’t about deepening faith, instead they were about erasing a part of himself. Here, the sacred became a task, a hurdle to clear before you could be acceptable.
Conditional Belonging
Conditional belonging is corrosive. JSky grew up in a family with both religious and hyper-masculine influences. He describes football tours with his dad and brother, and then Sunday church with his grandmother. These were parallel worlds, and each had its own rules about how to be a man. Neither left much space for open queerness. Or indeed, any.
Wuhryn Dumas’s experience was even starker: relatives naming his queerness before he understood it himself, and treating it as something that needed managing. When family and faith define you before you can define yourself, the sacred becomes a site of tension rather than safety.
Reclaiming on Our Own Terms
What I find striking is how each of these artists has reclaimed something from their past. Blake now imagines all his former selves (Christian, non-Christian, searching) sitting together at a table, each with a voice in his life. It’s a generous metaphor, allowing complexity instead of erasure.
Ty’s reclaiming is physical. He hugs his father even when it’s unwelcome. “Hugs are not weak,” he says, reframing affection as an act of persistence. It’s a small, daily reclaiming of space and connection.
For JSky, the reclaiming is conversational. Telling his grandmother “So’s divorce” when she called his sexuality a sin was a calculated moment of honesty. It opened the possibility of mutual learning, even if it didn’t resolve everything.
Wuhryn’s reclamation is representational. He’s become the image he needed as a child: a visible, thriving Black queer man. His music and presence tell others that this life is possible without apology.
The Sacred as Practice
Reclaiming the sacred isn’t a single event. It’s a practice, repeated in choices to be visible, to speak truth, to create spaces where you can exist fully. Sometimes those spaces are traditional, such as a church or a family home, but often they’re built elsewhere in any space that you can imagine.
For these four artists, the sacred is now something they carry. It’s portable. And that sacred thing is their lives in their music, in their communities, and in their refusal to let others define the limits of their worth.
Reclaiming the sacred is not about reconciliation with institutions, but about self-possession. You can respect your history without being bound by its prejudices. You can keep what feeds you and discard what harms you.
Links
- Read deep dives into our queer lives at the blog HERE.
- Check out the official podcast playlist on Spotify.
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- See producer and presenter Dan Hall’s other work HERE (subtitled version HERE).
- Find composer Paul Leonidou HERE.
- Listen to other episodes at HERE.
- Visit the guest’s homepage:
- Listen to this episode HERE.
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