This post is the second part of my conversation with Fish Out of Water director Ky Dickens.

I first met director Ky Dickens when I was commissioned to interview her for Jettison Quarterly about her popular documentary film Fish Out of Water, an exploration of the prickly topic of homosexuality and the Bible scored by Kaki King that has been a hit of the film festival circuit and was recently released on DVD. After our initial interview I wanted to talk to her again but in a different way than our previous Q&A. We decided to break the rules; to have a conversation instead of an interview.

As you’ll soon see it went very long. Though my journalistic instincts dictate otherwise, I’ve opted to leave it somewhat intact. It’s lengthy, as much about the interviewer as it is about the interviewee, and at times pretty self-congratulatory. But, I’d like to think, it is also honest and human.

Without futher ado, The New Gay “interview” with Ky Dickens.

It’s 2 AM and my buddy Erik just dropped me off at my apartment after a late post-airport arrival catch-up session over dinner and beer. I open the door of my bedroom and am confronted by the remains of the harried, frantic packing of a morning nearly three weeks ago. I take a deep breath and decide that I can’t deal with it right now; hell, I probably can’t deal with it for a week or more. I strip off my clothing and climb into bed, ready to relent to exhaustion and the culture shock of being back in this room and… fuck, I’d forgotten that it was full of sand after some thoughtless rollicking on the beach right before I left town and that I’d resolved to deal with it when I got home. Oh well; I decide I can sleep in a sandbox for one night – besides, it’s possible that I have literally done just that at some point in my life. No big deal. Still I close my eyes and want to be somewhere else, a place where such mess is earned, where mess means something more than procrastination, an inability to donate infrequently worn clothing, and the sandy reminder of the life I had three weeks ago before everything changed.

“Fags! Repent!”

Oh great – those words. Turning to meet them, I rolled my eyes as those funny, short words echoed and bounced toward me over hot summer-baked pavement. The words were intended to hurt but the insult fell flat. “I’ve heard much worse, and much more creative, fuckers,” I thought to myself.

Still, I couldn’t ignore them. My friends and I were in someone’s crosshairs, singled out as needing salvation. What had started as a normal night migrating from bar to bar in search of new friends and hot beats had quickly become something of consequence. With just two words, a divide was drawn between these strangers and my cohort as cloudy and seemingly impassable as the Guinness I had just gulped.

Last week I came out of the closet about my (no longer) secret love for Christian music. The week before, my column concerned confession. In the spirit of my passion for both confession and music as related to religion, here’s a bit of back-story I don’t often share – when I was in high school, in the thick of my years as a Christian, I interned at an LGBTQ drop-in center that had a hip-hop open mic. One night, I was goaded into trying my hand at rhyming.

I bombed, but kept trying for nearly a year. I think there may even be a video of one of my “performances” floating out there on the Internet. Good luck locating it – I’ve made a concerted effort to bury the evidence since “retiring” from my rap career, as seems to be popular among rappers today.

The attempt, though poorly executed, wasn’t exactly out of left field. I grew up on hip-hop, spending my summers with a stereo plugged in to the outdoor outlet, straining to hear the rhymes I was surely bothering my neighbors with over the roar of the push-mower I sweltered behind. I got a copy of “The Score” the moment it came out, quickly disposing of the Parental Advisory sticker before my mom could spot it. When I felt marginalized as a closeted queer Christian, the prophetic angst of disenfranchised hip-hop spoke to me. Today, anthems like Lupe Fiasco’s “Hurt Me Soul” continue to inspire me to work for a less corrupt world. And still, I’m left to ask: where are our homo hip-hop prophets hiding?

I still remember my first Christian worship experience like it was yesterday. Convinced by a friend to attend a Christian rally, I was quickly consumed by a sea of people with heaven-bound hands, eyes full of adoration for a guitar-saddled man on stage who, from his gentle doe eyes to his scraggly brown beard and flowing hair, served as stock-image Jesus placeholder. As it was, I turned out to be a sucker for the rapture and thrill of spiritual symbiosis set to music and was sold at first hook. And yesterday, I experienced something of a faith flashback.

When I was a young Evangelical Christian, I delighted in the subscription to CCM Magazine that I had gotten as a giveaway at the aforementioned worship rally. CCM was the authoritative source on all things Christian music – it was how I discovered my favorite Christian bands, from Audio Adrenaline to “rapper” tobyMac. Where the Fugees and Garbage made my middle school self feel slightly ashamed for enjoying their “explicit” content, I could enjoy the lyrics of dcTalk guilt-free. Furthermore, like the worship rally, Christian music made me feel like I was a part of something larger. It was one of the ways I most readily accessed my faith life.

As I got older, my religious identity changed and I started to call myself a Secular Humanist. Likewise, my taste in music shifted more and more toward what is often referred to as indie. I continued to seek out musical rapture, but instead looked for it in Minneapolis dive bars, not renovated warehouses equipped with strobe lights and a projector casting Scripture on the wall. I began to wear my so-called obscure music taste like a badge of honor among my hip friends: “What, you haven’t heard of Danielson? Man, you really should check them out. I think you’d really like ‘em.”

Meanwhile, I continued to listen in secret to bands they hadn’t heard of but that I was sure they wouldn’t like – my favorite Christian bands from childhood.

Mom, I know you’re reading this.

Don’t worry everyone – you can keep reading. This isn’t some syrupy son-to-mother ode about how much I love my mother and how wonderful she has been over the years, from helping me come to terms with my queer identity when I was a self-loathing Evangelical Christian to working multiple jobs to support my siblings and I. I’ve done that many times over and I needn’t embarrass her with yet another public account of my cloyingly clichéd “my mother is my hero” bit.

Instead, I’d like to embarrass her by talking about my sex life.

After deciding I wasn’t a Christian less than one semester into my undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by choices.

There were so many religions, and each offered something equally exciting and different. I felt like the cocky star high school quarterback with his pick of the litter, unsure whether to ask the head of the cheerleading squad or the rumored “easy” girl to the prom. Sure, the cheerleading captain had prestige, but the known jezebel would probably put out. And like my imagined quarterback, I wasn’t exactly looking to get married anytime soon.

“Theologians / They don’t know nothing / About my soul,” sings Jeff Tweedy on Wilco’s “Theologians,” a track off their 2004 release “A Ghost is Born.”

Last year I started doing work for Chicago-based NGO the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC). IFYC is an advocacy organization that is working to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. It was started by Eboo Patel, a deeply religious Muslim who is now one of Obama’s advisors on religion and one of America’s Best Leaders according to U.S. News & World Report. He may be all of these things, but the first thing I noticed upon walking into his office for a meeting last June was the colossal Wilco poster on his wall.

There are no Wilco posters on my wall – personally, I prefer Okkervil River when it comes to literate middle-American folk rock. And I’m not a Muslim; I call myself a secular humanist. That means that I don’t believe in god, I don’t go to church, and I use my best sense of reason to decipher what’s “right” and what’s “wrong.”

A good number of my fellow secular friends don’t understand what draws me to religion, and I can’t say I blame them. I always get the same Jeff Tweedy-esque comment when my work comes up: “You know, I just don’t get religious people. And they, certainly, don’t get me.”

Maybe the reason we secular folks feel like religious people don’t get us is that we’ve never bothered to let them. And that, I think, is “wrong.”