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I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.

I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.

I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

And I think my sexuality was heavily repressed by the church, by the, you know, the design of the mortal sins.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

I enjoyed being in 'The Ten Commandments.' That was a great experience - to suddenly become one of those holy people. I was holier than thou.

My gay audience has been with me from the beginning.

It was when my children were 5, 3 and 10 months old that I just felt the desperate need to get to know God through the pages of my Bible. And as a result, I started a Bible class in my city for the primary purpose of being in it.

As a child, the conversations that I liked to have with my friends - or with anyone, for that matter - were always about religion.