Tell me about why you wanted to film âAugustineâ at Stonewall. Does the song have a particularly queer message to you?
Yeah, it does. That song is a really strange journey. It talks about St. Augustine of Hippo, who denounced his Catholicism and went to West Africa, and Nontetha Nkwenkwe, who was a South African prophet who made a church for black people to worship in. The government was so scared that they put her in a mental institution. But what I did in that song was I took a lot of lines from St. Augustineâs writing and tried to twist the words.
Thereâs a large sect of Christianity thatâs against homosexuality, which Iâve found interesting in the later half of my life because the whole thing is about this worshipping of trying to feel a warmth and flesh. [âAugustineâ is about] the idea that this religion based on the idea of finding this love and comfort so within the body would then shut out this very large aspect of love. There are a lot of moments on the album, and âAugustineâ in particular, where I was taking some of the writing that I view as pretty religious and making [the lyrics] more homoerotic.
