Arts & Entertainment

Sisters in spirit

Gospel music vets Knapp, Becker unite for Christmas album, tour

Published

14 years ago

December 13, 2012

Margaret Becker and Jennifer Knapp
‘The Hymns of Christmas Tour’
Monday, 7:30 p.m.
The Birchmere
3701 Mount Vernon Ave.
Alexandria, VA
$25

Margaret Becker (right) a veteran of gospel music with classic albums like ‘Immigrant’s Daughter’ and ‘Simple House’ in her canon, just finished a Christmas album with Jennifer Knapp, a gospel artist who emerged in the late ’90s. (Photo by Heidi Groff; courtesy Jay Jones Music)

Any touring musician will tell you life on the road — even when you can afford first class all the way — can get to you after years of going through the endless recording/promoting/touring/repeat cycle.

Two gospel music veterans who, at different times and to varying degrees, each spent years out of the limelight, are back with a wildly unexpected joint project — an album called “The Hymns of Christmas.” On it, Margaret Becker and Jennifer Knapp trade leads and harmonies and enjoy what they say is great musical repartee. They’re half-way through a 14-date mini-tour to support it and play the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., Monday night.

Knapp, 38, released her first major label album to the Christian market in 1998 and worked solidly touring and recording through 2002 at which time she went on a long hiatus, moved to Australia and pretty much gave up any thoughts of continuing her career. She came out as a lesbian in April 2010 and released a comeback album called “Letting Go.” She maintains her Christian faith but says, though she doesn’t claim to be a theologian, she believes many of the scriptures traditionally used to condemn gays have been misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Becker, 53, was practically peerless among Christian music women rockers in her heyday. She released her first album in 1987 and though she recorded plenty of ballads and exhibited tremendous songwriting prowess, Becker always rocked harder than her contemporaries like Amy Grant or Twila Paris. Becker enjoyed a great run throughout the late ‘80s and ‘90s but slowed down tremendously by the ‘00s. Her new effort with Knapp is her first new album since 2007’s “Air.”

During a lunch break last week between back-to-back shows in Canton, Ohio and Indianapolis, Knapp fields a bevy of questions on how she has settled into being an openly gay singer, the collaboration with Becker and how it came about and what fans can expect from their show next week at the Birchmere.

It’s a highly non-glam tour and Knapp makes no attempt to hide it. They’re sharing a van and Becker is in line getting lunch at a Subway while Knapp answers Blade questions. Though the interview is with Knapp, Becker quickly follows up with e-mail inquiries later in the day.

“It’s just gonna be Margaret and I with a couple of acoustic guitars, but don’t let that fool you,” Knapp says. “It’s one of the most fun times I’ve ever had and it’s not gonna be some pared down girly acoustic thing. It’s gonna be a really good, full-voiced night. It shocks me when I look over at her and see how much she gives each night.”

Though not as active as she formerly was, Becker still speaks at religious women’s events and participates in hymn recording projects. Her audience is very much part of the Nashville-based contemporary Christian industry, the ranks of which both she and Knapp came through.

The two met in about 2000 when they both participated in a pair of multiple-artist projects and became friends. Knapp, who long has admired Becker, says it took no arm-twisting to convince Becker to record and tour with her, though many gospel fans turned their back on Knapp.

“Fortunately it’s not really an issue we’ve had,” Knapp says. “Tonight’s going to be a prime example. We’re playing at a United Methodist church in Indianapolis. It will be a lovely Christmas evening and the last thing we’ll be talking about is our sexual orientation. It’s a huge step for that church to host somebody like me and just proceed as if it’s business as usual but I think we’re seeing that more and more in terms of the public consciousness. I think we saw that in this last election. It’s great that people can take that and not draw this unusual amount of attention to it. That’s really the extraordinary part of it.”

Becker, in an e-mail exchange, says she’s not finding fans and those coming to the shows to be inferring anything about her life or ministry by her collaboration with Knapp.

“The audiences who are supporting this are music lovers who recognize when the work is symbiotic and complementary,” Becker says. “We’ve played this tour to those people, groups that I consider to be overlapping supporters from both of our bases. They are respectful and come for the music and spirit or the art of the material. I don’t think they give it much more thought than that and to me, that’s perfect. That’s how it should be.”

For the record, Becker declines to comment on her own sexual orientation. “My personal life is private and I’m very happy,” she wrote in an e-mail via her publicist. “I am very supportive of Jennifer and this musical partnership we’ve created and look forward to sharing it with her supporters and mine.”

The album features mostly acoustic arrangements of traditional church classes like “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “The First Noel,” “What Child is This,” “Silent Night” and more. Neither artist had recorded a Christmas album before and now that both are again living in the Nashville area, they decided this summer to go ahead and make it happen.

“We finally said, ‘Let’s just do it, let’s just get it done,’” Knapp says. “There was no pressure to write anything new, they’re all hymns so there’s a great wealth of material there and lots of opportunities for us to harmonize. We just decided to put our money where our mouth was and go ahead and do it.”

Becker concurs.

“One night we just got serious and realized we’d both put off making a Christmas record over the course of our careers, at least the kind that was indigenous to us. That’s where the idea came from. Making music with a dear friend who is also an awesome talent was the catalyst for me. It was fun top to bottom.”

The indie album was recorded on a shoestring with, Knapp says, basically “one mic and one computer.” She says the advance of user-friendly recording software made it possible to do the album without spending thousands. They did some spring rehearsing, hit the studio in July (when most Christmas albums are recorded) and did most of the work in a four-week span. The mixing and packaging came soon after and the project wrapped in October.

“It did feel a little weird at first singing all these Christmas songs while you’re just dripping in sweat in the middle of the hot Tennessee summer,” she says. “So at the beginning, yeah, it took a little time to wrap my head around a Christmas project but pretty quickly it really did start to feel like its own project. It didn’t feel kitschy or Christmasy really to me. We approached it in a very honest sense and didn’t want to make it kitschy. Maybe it’s just because I was involved with it but I really was thinking, ‘Wow, I could listen to this any time of the year.’”

The first half of the show is basically the new album. In the second half, the two revisit their hits, trade harmonies on each other’s songs and keep it loose enough that the set list varies from show to show.

“We’ve sort of got this telepathy thing going on for the last two or three shows,” Knapp says. “We’ll just kind of riff on a theme for a bit and it’s great knowing you don’t have to play it exactly the same way every night or carry the full weight of the evening by yourself.”

Knapp ends the conversation weighing in on a blaze of topics. On whether or not Christians in the U.S. are becoming less rigid on homosexuality, Knapp says there “will always be people who aren’t going to change their minds no matter what.” She says she finds encouragement in the Mainline Protestant denominations that are making gay-friendly strides more and more as time progresses.

Why then, one wonders, have those kinds of churches not spawned their own cottage industry of gospel music the way the evangelical/Bible Belt world did starting with “Jesus music” in the late ‘60s?

“It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years,” Knapp says. “There are thousands of singers who write about their faith from very different viewpoints but I really think a lot of it has to do with the circumstances in that world where the people who run the industry really see themselves as the gatekeepers and a great emphasis is placed on how the individual artist acts and who they hang out with and how you think about your faith. We’ve seen a lot of strong artists pulled from shelves because they’ve gotten divorced or had an alcohol problem or whatever. As a songwriter you really have to keep writing true and honest stories. If you’re only writing music for Christians, by Christians to make more Christians, you kind of lose out.”

Lee Tucker, a long-time gay gospel music fan and Alexandria, Va., resident, says Knapp deserves enormous credit for being brave enough to come out, despite what it might cost her in lost airplay, space at Christian retail and fans.

“I think it’s amazing she took the brave jump to come out,” Tucker says. “It was a big jump for Chely Wright too because a lot of country music is in the Midwest and in the Bible Belt, but it’s even more of a leap for Jennifer because it will totally change her market. If you went into a Christian bookstore right now, you wouldn’t find any of her stuff on the shelves at all.”

For LGBT teens who might be coming up in evangelical households, Knapp says hang in there and remember there are faith-based Christian groups out there that affirm gays.

“Absolutely get online, there are so many people out there waiting with open arms,” she says. “The Christian Network, Believe Out Loud, Soulforce, Inside Out Faith — there are a lot of people out there offering very compassionate, faith-based support. It’s not longer just churches being the bad guys here. A lot of them are starting to get the message.”

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FUND LGBTQ JOURNALISM

Movies

‘Leviticus’ demonizes homophobia for gripping queer horror yarn

A genuinely engaging and terrifying supernatural drama

Published

6 hours ago

June 26, 2026

John Paul King

Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen star in ‘Leviticus.’ (Photo courtesy of Neon)

There’s something about horror films that makes them particularly apt as a vehicle for allegory. Vampires, zombies, ghosts, or seemingly death-proof serial killers can all easily be seen as metaphors for some lurking threat from the “dark side” of our own collective psyche, and stories about them are almost always cautionary tales that remind us that it’s the “dark side” of our own nature that we must confront in order for the danger to be eliminated.

This subtext has always been present in the genre, of course; but with the so-called “renaissance” of horror cinema that has taken place across the past decade or so, modern filmmakers in the genre have made increasingly bold choices with regard to how “sub” it is. “Get Out” or “Sinners” need no explanation to get across their allegorical points about racism, nor does “The Substance” require an expert to recognize its satirical observations about the toxic cultural obsession with youth and beauty. These are movies that wear their proverbial hearts on their sleeves, instead of masking them behind layers of cliched and “coded” plot tropes.

The same can definitely be said of “Leviticus,” the debut feature from Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella, which not only hinges on a conceit that has obvious associations with its not-so-hidden themes but tips off the whole thing by its very choice of title – a reference to the Old Testament book frequently cited by fundamentalist bigots as so-called proof of God’s condemnation of homosexuality, which sets up exactly what we are in for before the opening credits even begin to roll.

Set in a conservative rural town (in the Australian state of Victoria, though it will feel distinctly familiar to anyone who grew up in similar communities anywhere else in the world), it centers on Naim (Joe Bird), a teen boy newly transplanted by his mother (Mia Wasikowska) – who has ties to a fundamentalist Christian enclave there – after the death of his father. Their new life – like seemingly everything else in the community – is tied directly to the church, which makes it doubly inconvenient when Ryan (Stacy Clausen), son of the town’s presiding preacher, invites him for an after-school “hangout” which leads to a furtive make-out session in the town’s deserted mill.

Though the boys promise each other to keep it secret, they are both soon “outed” to their parents and subjected to a ritual performed by a mysterious “deliverance healer” (Nicholas Hope), intended to “protect” them from their “sinful” impulses. Soon after, a series of mysterious and violent encounters lead them to investigate local rumors around incidents involving other local teens – and the revelation that the ritual has summoned a malevolent entity, which appears to them as the person they are most attracted to (in this case, each other) and unleashes its murderous wrath when they give in to temptation. Their only chance of staying safe is to stay apart – unless they can find a way to defeat the supernatural force that has been turned loose against them.

Yes, it’s all very obvious. There is no attempt to mask what Chiarella’s movie is really about, though the word itself – like the biblical book with which it shares a title – is never spoken aloud in the film. It’s hardly a spoiler, though, to confirm that “Leviticus” is a story about homophobia. From its obvious evocation of real-life “conversion therapy” to its more subtle exploration of the secrecy and social shaming that surrounds same-sex love for so many teens growing up in an environment of fundamentalist religious tradition, every nuance of the film’s ingenious premise announces the clear intent of its messaging: homophobia is the true evil at work here, and its deadly power lies in its ability to make queer people afraid of being who they are.

While some might argue that presenting such an “on the nose” allegory in what is ostensibly “just” a horror film is a heavy-handed choice, we suggest – in this case, at least – that it’s exactly what makes the movie work so effectively.

From the very first scenes (after a prologue that ominously hints at the arcane evil that will soon come into play), we are invested in Naim and Ryan, whose tentative-but-joyous afternoon tryst is bound to trigger our own individual memories of adolescent sexual awakening, and whom we hope will be able to navigate their way through to the other side – even before the introduction of supernatural hate demons being summoned to kill them by using their own feelings for each other as a trap. They’re almost a definitive queer “coming of age” archetype, echoing generations of treasured “first time” memories and “what if“ fantasies about what might have been; we want them to be together, to overcome the otherworldly forces deployed to keep them apart – and when their romance is distorted, inverting their natural attraction into fear and mistrust, it’s their own inability to resist the pull they feel toward each other that continues to put them in danger.

That emotional stake is the anchor of “Leviticus,” which lends an imperative to what might otherwise be a campy B-movie thriller and turns it into a genuinely engaging – and therefore terrifying – supernatural drama that is all the more powerful for playing to our hearts. Much of this effect hinges on the chemistry between its two young stars (which hits just the right pitch between irresistible hormonal urge and inseparable soul connection), but it’s also underscored by the irony of their being immersed within a culture that would rather destroy them than allow them to exist outside its traditional norms.

Nevertheless, while “Leviticus” succeeds by making us identify with its cult-crossed teenage lovers, it pays off by delivering not just a genuinely unsettling, profoundly disturbing, and unflinchingly brutal personification of religious bigotry at its most cruelly hateful, but by providing a tense and terrifying horror scenario that works on a pure “genre” level. Simply put, even setting aside any wider subtext about the deadly consequences of homophobia, it’s a creepy, nerve-wracking ride.

A critical hit as part of the Sundance Festival’s “Midnight” section earlier this year, “Leviticus” went into theatrical release on June 19, the latest in a continuing trend of fresh and inventive films that has elevated the horror movie to new levels of critical appreciation. For us, it’s worth singling out as a boldly original expression of queer experience, elegantly constructed from the reinterpreted formulas of a genre that has always had particular draw for those in our community who knew how to read between the lines.

The difference is, this time we don’t have to – the message is spelled out loud and clear, and that in itself is enough to make it feel a little bit like empowerment, at a time when we could all use as much of it as we can get.

Calendar

Calendar: June 26-July 2

LGBTQ events in the days to come

Published

6 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Tinashe Chingarande

Friday, June 26

Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].

DC Bird Alliance will host “Second Annual Ride for Pride” at 9 a.m. at the Yards Marina. This event is for celebrating community, belonging, and our shared connection to nature. Together, we’ll enjoy a guided one-hour boat ride departing from The Yards Marina, exploring the river’s wildlife, history, and ongoing restoration. Along the way, participants may spot Ospreys, herons, egrets, cormorants, Bald Eagles, turtles, and other species that call the Anacostia home. For more details, visit Eventbrite.

Saturday, June 27

Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.

“Sunshine: A Sapphic Pride Day Party” will be at 1 p.m. at Spark Social. This is a patio party for queer women & sapphics 35+. For more details, visit Eventbrite.

Sunday, June 28

Trap Laughsss Pride Comedy Night will be at 7 p.m. at Sid’s Gold Request Room. This in-person event is where comedy meets Pride, bringing you hilarious performances that’ll have you rolling in the aisles. Whether you’re here to celebrate or just enjoy some fantastic jokes, this night is all about fun, community, and laughs. Don’t miss out on the best comedy bash around! More details are on Eventbrite.

Monday, June 29

“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).

Tuesday, June 30

The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community will host a screening of “Swann Queen” at 7 p.m. This is a short film by Lcedeño Miller inspired by the true story of William Dorsey Swann – considered one of the world’s first drag queens. Billy Swann and their brother Dan are preparing to host their third masquerade ball. When the police raid the party, Billy must decide whether to run or resist. Swann Queen is a story about community, survival, and the legacy of LGBTQ+ resistance in Washington, D.C. Screening followed by conversation. For more details, visit the Center’s website.

Wednesday, July 1

Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.

Thursday, July 2

The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.

Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the The DC Center for the LGBTQ+ Community’s website.