Love is easy, says Reverend Paul Anthony Daniels, as a result of “in its most visceral form,” it boils down to 3 issues: spit, semen, and sweat. Okay, possibly 4. Typically there’s blood. “To share love in that way is so visceral.”
I’ve a confession, I inform Daniels. I’ve by no means been in love—not within the Hallmark film form of means, at the very least—however discover myself craving it the older I get, so I’m just a little shocked to listen to him describe it with such candor. You realize, being a priest and all. God is in folks, he says. Which implies, God can be in intercourse.
Daniels loves love. He seeks it in every part he does, he tells me, however particularly in folks. It’s a part of his job as an Episcopal priest and a “mediator of Christ’s love in the world.” Ceremonially, he’s “a steward of the sacraments—the Eucharist, baptism, marriage, confirmation. I invite people into a relationship with God through those sacred ritual acts. But it’s also more than that.”
Rev. Paul Anthony Daniels{Photograph}: Carianne Older
It’s the extra half that’s received me in Los Angeles’ Koreatown sitting throughout from him in his residence as he sips from a whiskey glass, occurring about need, salvation, and all of the irresistible methods folks come collectively. A graduate of Morehouse Faculty and Yale Divinity Faculty, Daniels, 34, just isn’t your common Episcopal priest. He’s one thing of a trailblazer. A rogue in a clerical collar.
Though religion has been central to Daniels’ identification since his boyhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, he additionally grew up with an abiding appreciation for music—Stevie Surprise, Chaka Khan, John Mayer. In 2007, he auditioned for season 7 of American Idol and made all of it the best way to Hollywood Week. “As soon as I walked to the hotel in Pasadena I knew that I was not slated to be one of the young people that they were going to pay attention to,” he says. “All the producers had their eyes on David Archuleta.”
He returned to Raleigh and dug deeper into what finally grew to become his calling. Being overtly homosexual and Christian meant he had the capability to “say and do things that could open doors of possibility for people.” Daniels has since made that into his life’s work. Therefore the entire spit, semen, sweat factor. There’s a much bigger context to all of this, he needs me to know. It additionally helps that he usually offers lectures on these very matters—“sexual socialities as theological questions”—along with being a PhD candidate at Fordham College.
Most individuals in the present day have what Daniels calls a “consumerist devotion built around the consumption of material things—bodies, clothes, objects.” The worst cases of which are on social media. He encounters it on Instagram (his favourite relationship platform) and the assorted hookup apps he frequents. Social media, he says, has turn out to be a “site of worship—pun intended.”
Jason Parham: As a priest who makes use of relationship and hookup apps, how do you navigate your relationship to need?
