On Wednesday, March 27, the Pomona College politics department hosted Reverend Don Abram PO ’16, a public theologian and LGBTQ+ community advocate, to talk about Black queer spirituality and his experience coming of age as a queer person in the Black church.
The Politics Department Foster Lecture — held annually to honor Lorn S. Foster, an emeritus professor at Pomona, whose career focused on race, religion and politics — took place in Pomona’s Rose Hills Theater.
“This talk is kind of a tribute to his legacy, where speakers, mostly from minority backgrounds, come and talk about how their involvement in the world has changed them and how they have changed the world,” senior politics liaison Jake Ballantine PO ’24 said.
The significance of the speech’s dedication was heightened by the fact that Foster had been Abram’s mentor while he was a student. Abram acknowledged this, saying his understanding of the intersection between race, spirituality and queerness changed during his time at Pomona and noting Foster as having a crucial role in this process.
“In large part through Professor Lorn Foster and the classes that I took with him, I was able to explore the ways that the Black church has always carried the banner of freedom and liberation for people and in so doing, know that my desire to do the same was deeply in line with that tradition,” Abram said.
Abram began his talk with a statement that invited the audience to merge their understandings of the personal, spiritual and political, moving forward.
“As my remarks unfold, I humbly invite you to promenade through my own lived experience and testimony in the hopes that you might find some unsuspecting gems pointing to healing and liberation,” he said.
He prefaced with a personal testimony about how his identity impacts both his work and understanding of the world.
“You see, queerness haunted me for years,” Abram said. “It lurked in the shadows of my life with little regard for my comfort or convenience. I rejected its alluring embrace with every fiber of my being, but the more I resisted, the larger it loomed. Desperate for relief, I found refuge in a place called the Black church. It gave me deliverance, but not in the way that you may think.”
In 2021, Abram founded Pride in the Pews, an organization that aims to help people understand religion as a social determinant of health for the Black LGBTQ+ community and to equip faith leaders with the necessary knowledge and skills to be allies and advocates.
He shared how Pride in the Pews was inspired by his experiences searching for freedom within the church and emphasized his desire to help others in similar situations.
“Against the odds, I waded through the shame and the guilt and the internalized homophobia to reach the parts of myself I was told to deem ungodly,” Abram said.
He explained how the spaces in his church — from the sanctuary to the bathroom — became a home for understanding himself and his queerness. His spiritual calling to preach the gospel, he recalled, came to him in a dream set in the sanctuary of this very church.
“I awake from that dream seeking to resist it,” he said. “Recognising that if I embraced it, it would cause me not only pain, but the loss of community.”
Abram’s work involves embracing both the side of him that felt called to be a spiritual leader in his community and the part of him that he discovered amidst, but felt he had to hide from this same community.
“I recognize that people see these two things as mutually exclusive — my queerness and my Black religiosity — maybe even inherently contradictory,” he said. “I beg to differ. I see them as mutually dependent and inextricably connected. This is where I find my being the very fiber of the work that I do today.”
He explained how his path has been grounded in the knowledge that, despite antagonism from the church, queer people have always found a way to find their own space within it.
“Tapping into my queerness only steps away from the main sanctuary was really an attempt to create a new sacred space,” he said. “A space that affirmed the totality of my humanity.”
Abram also noted that he founded Pride in the Pews in the wake of the George Floyd protests, realizing that even in the most liberal cities, Black queer populations are still seen as disposable.
“It would be woefully irresponsible for me to suggest in some way that my queer and trans kindred are not still battling what it means to be berated by biblical bullets and doused with transphobic utterances in places that we call sanctuaries,” Abram said.
Abram emphasized that his work relies on one essential premise.
“Black LGBTQ+ communities are indispensable parts of the black church and of this country,” Abram said.
After the talk, some students in attendance stayed behind to speak with the reverend.
“I think it’s really powerful and important to have someone representing these intersecting identities in this way,” attendee Matt Parsons PO ’26 said.
Ballantine said he felt that Abram was a unique speaker because of his extensive real-world experience working within social movements.
“I think it’s really important to shine a spotlight on people related to the field who don’t work in academia and have some kind of other role,” Ballantine said. “A lot of students will ultimately go into roles that are just as important in terms of making an impact and changing the world outside of academia.”
Abram described how he felt returning to campus now out of the closet.
“Being back at Pomona College is so surreal in large part because when I was here, I was not out,” Abram said in an interview with TSL. “I was deeply closeted but the thing I loved about this space was that, even as I wasn’t ready to embrace my queerness, it was incredibly queer affirming.”
Abram also shared what it meant to him to give this talk to his old mentor and to interested students.
“I was in [these students’] position and it doesn’t feel that far from me, even though I’m eight years removed,” he said. “Being able to … share that these were my struggles and these were the questions that I had and the things that remained unsettled for me, but now I am at a place where I am able to live into all parts of who I am without shame.”
He also shared his hopes for what certain students might take away from the talk.
“In some ways what I am trying to say with this talk is that it gets better,” Abrams said. ”Even as you are trying to find your way through all sorts of systems and institutions and normative ways of being, there is light on the other side.”
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