Rev. Duncan Teague’s visit to Atlanta in 1984 was supposed to be a short-lived two-week vacation to celebrate his college graduation. Now nearly 40 years later, Teague is among thousands, if not millions of Black gay men who have migrated to Atlanta in search of liberation, freedom, community, and themselves. It’s a common thread that connects those who have taken the bus ride of faith from their relatively small southern or midwestern towns, often with no concrete plan and very little money, but with an overwhelming desire to become fully realized human beings in a city that is often both romanticized and demonized, yet affords Black gay men space to simply be.

For Teague, who had never set foot inside the city before making his initial trip, the move to Atlanta would prove to be a defining moment on his journey into adulthood.

“The richness of who I am and who I became happened after I took that two-week vacation,” said Teague.

“My cousin sent for me. He tricked me. It was a two-week free vacation. I bought two weeks worth of clothes and I haven’t gone back to live at home since,” he said.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Teague’s arrival in Atlanta during Labor Day Weekend begins like so many Black gay men who have made the journey before, during, and after him.

“I’m one of those kids who showed up for Labor Day Weekend, it was before it was Black Gay Pride. I didn’t know I was coming to Labor Day Weekend, I was just coming for a two-week vacation to celebrate my college graduation,” said Teague.

And what Teague says he saw during an outing to a gay bar with his cousin during that weekend in 1984, made it clear that Atlanta was on it’s way to becoming what the city is now commonly referred to as the Black Gay Mecca.

“I turned to my cousin and I said, ‘Is every Black gay person in Atlanta here?” “And he just laughed at me because he knew what I was experiencing because he grew up in Kansas City, too,” said Teague. “And of course that was a stupid question, but I’d never seen this many Black gay people, and we’re all here together...this is crazy. And I thought every Black gay person in the South is here. I was that green about it all.”

It would be another nine years in 1993 before Troy Sanders, Bishop-Elect of Rehoboth Fellowship of Atlanta would decide to move from his hometown in Denmark, South Carolina to the city during the same holiday weekend, but under different circumstances. Raised in the traditional Apostolic church, Sanders tells The Reckoning that his theological perspective and embrace of his sexual orientation shifted after a chance encounter with the then assistant of Bishop O.C. Allen III, Senior Pastor of The Vision Church of Atlanta. The two men were introduced after Sanders’ initial objection to an LGBTQ affirming interfaith service Allen held during Black Gay Pride weekend.

“The service was so liberating for me. I was happy and sad at the same time,” said Sanders. “I was sitting back there steaming. I’m like, ‘how in the world are they doing this?” “Everything about me [at the time said the service was] sacrilegious.”

Sanders says he would begin to realize that the service he attended was “just a projection of what was already going on in me.”

“About a month and a half later, I ended up coming out, I left my Apostolic church, I became the first executive admin pastor of The Vision Church all in one weekend. I just did it all,” said Sanders. “So for me, moving to Atlanta provided the perfect context. I don’t think I would have ever been introduced to critical thinking in that regard if I’d stayed in South Carolina. And I certainly know I would have never experienced liberated worship like I saw that Sunday with The Vision Church if I’d stayed in South Carolina.”

Like Sanders, Teague says his move to Atlanta wasn’t the result of any specific trauma related to his queerness, but a necessary chapter in the evolution of the person he would ultimately become.

“I was running away to my adult life, but not away from a life that I couldn’t have had in Kansas City,” said Teague.

Burrell Edward, a USPS professional, who was in his mid-twenties in 1990 was running, too, but not from the confines of a small town. Edward, a native San Franciscan says he was running away from what he viewed as the White-centric gay community of Boystown in Chicago, Illinois. Raised on the Southside of Chicago in what he describes as a “very segregated city,” Edward says Atlanta provided an opportunity to be immersed in a culture more reflective of his dual reality.

“For Black gay men, you could be yourself in Atlanta. We had Boystown, but that was for White gay men,” said Edward.

Like Sanders and Teague, Edward says one visit to Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, solidified his decision to make the move.

“Me and a friend came down and we had the time of our lives. I applied for a transfer at work, got it, and moved,” he said.

A former officer in the United States Navy, this wasn’t Edward’s’ first attempt at leaving Chicago in search of community and liberation as a Black gay man. He tells The Reckoning that a move to Washington D.C. shortly after leaving the Navy would only last a week before he returned home. However, after 30 years in Atlanta, this is the move that stuck and provided him an opportunity to put the trauma of growing up Black, gay, and effeminate—during his formative years—on the Southside of Chicago in his rearview.

‘Turning Pain Into Change’

Edward recalls the verbal abuse he suffered throughout elementary and high school for his sexual orientation and for failing to adhere to rigid expectations of masculinity as a motivating factor to leave Chicago once he became of age.

“It chips away at your self-esteem little by little. That was a big part of why I wanted to leave Chicago,” he said.

Now as a fully realized and successful adult, the pain of his queerness being the butt of schoolyard jokes still lingers in his voice as he recalls being repeatedly called “Burrell the girl” by classmates.

It’s a pain that Baltimore, Maryland native Raven Ekundayo, a yoga instructor and certified life coach for homeless LGBTQ youth, experienced before landing at the more queer affirming Baltimore School of The Arts. This transition marked the beginning of a journey that would ultimately lead him to join the burgeoning Black yoga scene in Atlanta in 2017.

“That school made me feel so free. I can’t think of one time in my ninth grade year where I remember somebody laughing at me,” said Ekundayo. “I was no longer in a school where I was being made fun of every single day. I no longer have any little Black girls calling me faggot all the time. All of that trauma of dudes threatening to beat me up because I talked too white or talked too gay [went away].”

As Ekundayo was thriving in a more accepting school environment, he was also coming to terms with his sexuality and finding the courage to share his truth with his parents, which he says, surprisingly, his father embraced immediately unlike his mother.

“Now that you’ve told us, you don’t have to tell anybody else,” Ekundayo recalls his mother saying. “It sounded very loving and caring, and it took a while for me to realize what that really meant. So she went on her own journey of understanding.”

It was the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy implemented by so many Black parents that required their queer kids to hide a part of their identity for their comfort. But unlike Ekundayo’s experience, Teague says coming out to his parents wasn’t an option.

“When you’re living your life you’re simply living your life. I knew that I couldn’t come out to my parents because my father was a Baptist minister.”

Instead, Teague believed he could ‘pray the gay away,’ and compared his sexuality to alcoholism, which he believed at the time could be cured if the problem was acknowledged and confronted.

“I thought if I admitted that I was gay that God was going to change me or deliver me because I’d come to understand that I was gay, and I was accepting that on my way to whatever else would be next because I was big in my church,” said Teague. “That isn’t how it worked. I accepted who I was and so did everyone else around me.”

“I’ve had so many years of having to dichotomize my existence because of the church,” said Sanders. Like, I was clearly told that God can use the preacher you, the singer you, the prophetic you, but no the gay you.”

Sanders says for a while he’d begun to accept the message from the church that his anointing would require him to live the “life of a hermit.” He credits his move to Atlanta for opening up his purview around spiritual and sexual liberation.

“I would be a very different person today if I hadn’t moved to Atlanta,” he said.

Ekundayo agrees but says although his transition to Atlanta hasn’t been without its fair share of challenges, the idea that there’s space for him and other Black gay men in the city to thrive still rings true.

“If you can make it in Atlanta, you can make it anywhere,” said Ekundayo. “I’ve been able to make my reality what I want it to be in Atlanta, and I don’t regret a thing.”