Tim Retzloff: "'Seer or Queer?' Postwar Fascination with Detroit's Prophet Jones," 2002

"an unnatural relationship"

Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., writing in the November 1951 issue of Ebony, began an article about the need for sex education in the African American church with a story about an unidentified pastor's grief at the death of his handsome, talented young male assistant. In describing the funeral, Powell stressed the preacher's quavering voice, his tear-soaked eyes, his shaking body, and his attempt to leap into the grave with the coffin. "The minister's broken sobs sounded as if they had been wrung from the tragedy-twisted heart of one who has lost his lover," Powell wrote. He then played his narrative trump: "Actually, the two had been sharing an unnatural relationship for a number of years. The entire congregation knew about it. The whole community knew about it -- and yet, that minister was and is today one of the most powerful and 'respected' Negro pastors in all America."

Falling within the purview of Powell's attack on "a tiny minority of degenerate ministers," and the likely focus of his wrath, was Prophet James Francis Jones of Detroit. Prophet Jones, or, as some accounts said he preferred, "His Holiness the Rt. Rev. Dr. James F. Jones, D.D., Universal Dominion...

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African American African American male gay history Jones, James Francis