Electric Sexual Healing and Queer Black Religions in Jim Crow New Orleans

This paper examines the religious, racial, and sexual identity formation of 1930s faith healer Prophet Joseph Rajah Lyons, the founder of the Emperor Haile Selassie Supreme NuWay Radio Ethiopia Mystic Lights Baptist and Spiritual Kingdom in New Orleans, Louisiana. Those who interviewed him in the 1930s noted that Lyons’ church was both “strange” and “queer.” Drawing from a wide range of sources, this paper thinks critically about Lyons’ spiritual practice, his sacralization of pornography and male sex work inside of his church, and the criminalization and policing of his esoteric practices as it relates to queer African American religious history. Indeed, Lyons migrated throughout the United States and spiritually throughout the African diaspora and had joined the scores of other religious and political leaders who engaged in “Ethiopianism.” This paper argues that Lyons’ religio-racial identity formation and his transnational politics were intimately connected to his queer sexual practices and the relationship he strategically cultivated between nonnormative sexualities and nonnormative religions in the Jim Crow South.