Sex with him was painful, often impossible. When my shoulders tightened and my back seized, my former partner would comment on my stiff posture or ask why I seemed distant. He was in his 50s and I was in my mid-20s, but the age gap wasn’t the problem. It was that when I was in bed with him, my entire body screamed this was bad and I was giving in to sin.
Sermons from my childhood crept into my thoughts. He knew about my background; I had mentioned I was working through “the religion thing.” When I froze, he joked that I must be thinking about burning in hell. I didn’t laugh. I was too busy thinking about burning in hell. I had given up Christianity during the worst days of the pandemic, but I was learning that leaving an ideology doesn’t mean it leaves you—or your body.
Growing up in the South, I attended a church that placed emphasis on sins of the flesh, particularly premarital sex and homosexuality. There was no coming back from those sins in God’s eyes.
In order to motivate parents to keep their kids in line, the church would shame followers for their children’s actions. Back then, you could be “sat down” or barred from singing in the choir or serving as an usher if your children misbehaved. Having children who misbehaved was almost as bad as the sin itself.
Once, a mother shouted from the choir stand at her daughter because the girl had confessed she might be pregnant. The girl rose, clasped her hands in front of her, and bowed her head. Sitting several rows behind, I imagined I could have been her, a child humbled and berated by adults seeking to maintain their heavenly standing. But mostly, I was jealous of the girl. I wanted to be a “good girl” and, in the words of my church’s founder, a “peach out of reach.” But she’d gotten to do what good, godly girls didn’t. I stared along with the other members of the congregation as she got her spiritual discipline. I didn’t agree, but I didn’t interfere. Nobody did.
A few months before my freshman year of college (“A few months until freedom,” I’d thought back then), the Sunday school lesson was about God’s wrath when punishing sins of the flesh. Girls—the class included both teenage boys and girls—who had sex before marriage were committing murder against the Lord, the teacher told us. I recoiled, not at the message but at my own intentions. I had fully planned to have sex at college. But I didn’t want to be a murderer. I didn’t want God to “make an example of me,” as my grandmother often warned. And so I barely dated in college and avoided being alone with men.
I have plenty of good memories growing up in the church. Fish fries up on the farm at Easter. Singing off-key with my friends in the junior choir. An elementary school trip to New York where I got scammed playing a card game in Chinatown. The Black church, ultimately, is communal. They loved me—still do. And I love them. No one suffers alone and no one gets to Heaven alone.
And that was the problem.
Heaven wasn’t my goal. If instead I just wanted to live a good and free life, I was violating my community’s deepest tenet: that all will know and see God. Their love for me and love for the Word meant hurting me so we could all reap a greater reward. And so I pushed through for their goals, even when it didn’t feel right. “All for God’s glory,” the saying goes.
Until it really didn’t feel right. During the worst days of the pandemic, when the sirens seemed to bleed into each other and the stoops and parks were disconcertingly quiet, I decided that I was no longer interested in the idea of a God. In the quiet, I reflected on mortality and grew to resent this God, the one who had allowed my neighbors to die.
I started dating, having sex, and even making raunchy comments about penises at brunch with my girlfriends. But for a long time, I still believed in the Christian notion of good and evil. And sex felt evil.
But it wasn’t. I saw friends—even unmarried Christian friends—having healthy sex lives unconcerned about sin. What if my labored breathing after dates and pounding headaches after hookups didn’t mean I was going to hell and instead meant I needed help? I reached out to a therapist trained in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, which can help alleviate distress associated with traumatic memories. EMDR made the intense memories of being frightened of going to hell—the “religion thing”—into an emotion that is easier to deal with. Something mildly uncomfortable instead of debilitating.
From that therapist, I learned about religious trauma, the staggering physical, emotional, or psychological response to religious beliefs that was interfering with my well-being. It’s not technically a mental disorder, but experts increasingly recognize that it can impact mental health. A 2023 study found that up to one-third of U.S. adults have experienced religious trauma at some point in their lives. It can manifest as hypervigilance, racing thoughts, and fear of impending doom. Those voices telling me that I would burn in hell that I heard every time I had sex? That was religious trauma.
In order to heal from my religious upbringing, I needed to figure out what a former good Christian girl finds pleasurable. I sought out sex-positive writing by Black women. One piece in particular, by a confident Black dominatrix, introduced me to the idea of kink—loosely defined as sex outside norms or conventions. Communities often form around a certain kink, and it can be therapeutic, according to Jocylynn Stephenson, a licensed marriage and family therapist, because the communities are often refuges for outsiders. “A lot of the people have either experienced or have been the arbiters of a lot of judgment and control around sex,” she says. “It’s freeing to be surrounded by people who are going to come from a place of acceptance first.”
When I was ready to explore kink in real life, several friends recommended Sucia, a group in Brooklyn popular among Black folks. At a happy hour, I met Honey, a Black polyamorous woman who got married to her first husband at 18 purely so sex with him wouldn’t be a sin. We connected as former church girls who had disavowed religion as adults. I got to know Luis, the host of the events, who saw a need for a space for Black people to feel safer in kink.
Through the group, I also met Lorenzo.* We got together for watered-down rum punches at a dive bar. His locs were in a high bun, and his glasses slipped down his nose as he showed me some of the porn on his phone that he’d found interesting as of late. I confided I was interested in attending my first sex party but was afraid to go alone.
Like me, Lorenzo had grown up Christian. A rural deacon’s kid who’d once led Sunday school classes. And like me, it no longer fit his lifestyle, and he’d become agnostic. He said sex parties gave him control over his pleasure and his body—it belonged to him and not a faraway God. Usually on dates, I make a dash for the door after an hour or so, but I immediately felt at ease with him and we hung out for six hours that night and had sex, our breath soaked in rum punch.
The next morning, he reassured me the lingerie I’d picked from Burlington Coat Factory would be fine for the party and said he’d be open to “playing”—i.e., having sex—there. (In kink communities, “play” is often used as a stand-in word but doesn’t necessarily have to include sexual intercourse. It can be flogging, restraints, or even cuddling.)
I spent the day of the party full of doubt. I have a ticket, but I can still get a refund, I thought. I could stay at home. I want to go. If I don’t go, I’ll always wonder what the night could have been. I kept imagining God watching me sin and then punishing me by making the building catch fire or having an old boss catch me.
Ironically, it was gospel music that calmed my thoughts. The same gospel music my aunt played on the radio as we drove to choir practice, the same hymns I hummed as I laid my head on my grandmother’s shoulders on Sundays. I loaded up the Spotify playlist I rely on during tough times—aptly titled WEGONBEAIGHT—and navigated to gospel artist and preacher Carlton Pearson’s “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.”
“We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome. / For we’ll understand it better by and by”
That evening, I found myself in front of a two-story loft in Brooklyn, a coat covering my one-piece red lingerie. The host, a jovial man with a salt-and-pepper beard, said that people discovered the group as they worked through a myriad issues: loss, divorce, sexual trauma, and religious trauma. He told me to explore the space at my leisure and then held up his wrist to my face.
“If you feel uncomfortable, look for anybody wearing a band and we’ll come right to you,” he said. I had been worried about how hierarchies and power would influence a kink space or play party. The reality is that while abuse and mistreatment can happen anywhere, many kink communities do a good job of recognizing the potential for harm and power imbalances. They have women and queer folks on staff and hold workshops about safer-sex practices.
“There’s so much commitment to consent and safety protocols, whether they’re formalized or informal in kink communities,” says Stephenson. “For a lot of people, it becomes a safe place to be able to explore because they’re not being judged, and they know that the people they’re having sex and interacting with are in agreement that there should be rules.”
Hearing the host describe these safety protocols, my eyes began to moisten. What if church wasn’t the only place I could find a community?
I spent the first few hours acclimating. The lights were low and it was hard to make out what was happening. I chatted with the woman sitting beside me about gentrification. A man near the bathroom asked what I planned to study for my master’s degree. I ordered a cocktail at the bar. Nearby, a woman snoozed on a couch. All the while, I watched as bodies piled on top of one another. Bodies contorted in ways I’d never seen. I wanted to be like them.
Lorenzo strolled into the playroom in a robe, greeting friends. Like the host, he was also wearing a band. He sat next to me on a low couch, and we watched a trio of women having sex. My thoughts drifted to our conversation from the prior evening, where he said that his body finally belonged to him.
My mind made up, I told Lorenzo that I wanted to play. By this point, it was late, and while the space wasn’t empty, there were fewer people than at the beginning of the night. It was easier to build the courage to have sex around strangers. The woman I’d been conversing with about gentrification earlier gave me the head nod that seems to be universal among all Black folks, as if to say, Get it, girl.
I led him over to a row of mattresses lining one side of the room. In front of me, a couple was having sex on a massage table, the woman’s moans ringing throughout the basement. On a row of mattresses opposite Lorenzo and me, another woman was sensually riding a man.
Sleeping with him brought me back to the previous evening: a heady feeling of submissiveness but of feeling powerful and in charge, too. What it offered—and what I didn’t experience in my childhood—was choice.
What drew me to kink was not the wild sex or the parties but rather the ability to define pleasure for myself. This man, whom I’d known a little more than a day, felt more righteous than anyone my church claimed was sacrosanct. As he was on top of me (with a hand snugly choking my throat and restricting my breathing), the music from the speakers blended with the moans and groans and screams and cries and smacks punching the air, and I felt free.
Lorenzo and I dozed off for a while before I scurried out of the venue as the sun began to rise. On the Uber ride home, I realized that I might have found the Black, kinky, sexual heaven that I’d been seeking. I had no thoughts of hell.
*Name has been changed.
If you’re experiencing religious trauma, you can find more resources at The Religious Trauma Institute and The Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
