Pop Artist Adaline Reconciles Queer Identity With Evangelical Upbringing
Learn more about Adaline’s music here. Find more information about her non-profit organization Bad Believers here.
TRANSCRIPT
Intro - The Golden Child
Shawna Beesley (known by her alt-pop artist name as Adaline) was raised a Pentecostal Evangelical Christian. Her father was a minister who traveled from church to church in the Toronto area helping grow their flock. Shawna loved to sing. Her parents saw her voice as a gift.
They encouraged it with an evangelical mindset, as in, this is your gift that will bring people to the Lord. Right? Like it wasn't just, ‘oh you can sing or you have a pretty voice and that song will be nice.’ It was always, my voice always had a mission.
From a young age Shawna was up on stage singing and leading worship.
SHAWNA: I was kind of like a golden child growing up.
At 13 she led the youth group – sometimes standing before hundreds of her peers.
SHAWNA: And then I think I was full-time leading worship in our main church sanctuaries by the time I was 15. There were some churches that had thousands of people… So there is pressure, whether or not it's explicit or it's implicit, there is pressure to toe the company line in some way or to not step outside the lines.
LAUREL: When you say leading worship, what did that look like?
SHAWNA: You're really taking people through an experience of connecting to God… And in evangelical churches, there's a big emphasis on charismatic connections that involve people raising their hands. Sometimes they're speaking in tongues .... So your role as a worship leader is to kind of usher people through that space and to create intimate feeling moments through music that allow for humans to connect with their greater power. There's really no greater dopamine hit than feeling like you've saved someone from hell.
This is a story about how Shawna found perspective and shed her golden child identity to come out as queer. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
Purity Culture
Shawna Beesley says guiding people through a spiritual experience took a lot of intuition and sensitivity. She says as an empath, it was a role that felt natural to her.
Since I grew up in such an intimate, emotionally vulnerable family, it didn't feel strange for me to sort of hold this space for hundreds of people to be crying and weeping and crying out to God, which when you think of it, it is an extremely intense thing. It didn't feel intense to me at the time. It felt very natural. At the time, God, Jesus was my best friend. So if anything, I felt like this partnership.
Shawna felt many eyes on her. Through her teenage years as her body changed that became even more apparent. In the purity culture she felt an expectation to hide her body so that young men wouldn’t feel tempted to have impure thoughts.
SHAWNA: … and I was on stage so there was like an extra pressure of like what should I wear and I was always really curvy like I remember developing pretty early probably when I was 12 so I didn't really have the kind of body where I could hide the parts of me that were sensual that were visible so I think that was confusing for me. I wanted to be a you know you're kind of like be attractive attract a man but don't be too attractive.
LAUREL: It's hard when you're not up on stage, but to add that, I mean, uh.
SHAWNA: Yeah, men could come up to me afterwards and just tell me your shirt is too tight. Because it was connected to spirituality, they felt this sort of empowerment to be the voice of God when it came to my sexuality and my body.
There were expectations about her body as well as her sexuality. It wasn’t a great time or place to be gay. Shawna never felt that liking girls was even an option.
I feel like I just always knew that it was wrong to be gay. People saying things like, oh, that's so gay in high school …I was fully raised in that narrative, the AIDS narrative, that was something that gay people brought on, that it was a judgment from God, that it's their sin that has caused, I mean, yes, all of those narratives were huge. There was a disgust. That was extremely clear to me, you know, the words like abomination.
Not A Pushover
One day when she was 16 Shawna invited a friend from school to come with her to church. This friend had never been to church. On that day a pastor, not her dad, was leading the evangelical worship.
He had gotten the whole youth group up and he had started on one end and started trying to push us all over or have us all be slain in the spirit, you know, that experience where you see someone touch the head and they fall backwards.
This was when my friend from school was beside me and she didn't know God at all. You know you're 15 and you get called up to the front and you just go. There's a whole group of you. There were maybe 30 or 40 of us standing up there. And you just think, well, what's the worst that can happen?
My friend got so scared that she dug her fingernails into my hand and it started bleeding. You know, like I knew, I knew that it was wrong and that it was masquerading as something else… this was feeling icky. It was feeling coercive. People were not safe. So I knew and I felt like almost like this fire of like, probably at the time I would have described it as a holy rage of just wanting to protect the people in that space. And I remember I stood up to that pastor and I looked right, looked him right in the eyes, just was furious. I just remember when he got to me I just didn't fall that was my form of rebellion in that space.
Shawna went home and told her parents what had happened.
And that was a big turning point for our family. That shortly after is when we left.
But things started getting to me very out of control, where people were being forced to do things, like microphones being put in their faces. There was a lot of manipulation to sort of prove God. And you know, we see this a lot where it's like, people are strong arming this this situation to create credibility when I just don't think it's needed. And I think it for sure came from an egoic space of just wanting to feel important.
So Shawna’s father made the decision that it was time to move on.
My dad is a PhD in theology. He's a bookworm. He studies theology every day… And for him, coming from that academic space, he just was like, none of this is biblical…I do think that kind of Christian experience is extremely addictive. I think it's alluring. I think it is what people are drawn to sometimes even more so than what the scripture actually is. So I'm really grateful that he was able to be like, this isn't right and to move us away from it, as opposed to being seduced by it.
Questions Without Answers
At 18 Shawna went to bible college. She remembers the administration discovered a student was gay and forced him to leave.
It was done so poorly. Even at the time, I remember being thinking this feels wrong. The same feeling I had standing in that line of my peers being knocked over one by one. It was the same feeling. I just thought this is wrong. You know, escorted off campus, couldn't say goodbye to anyone, like almost like they were a criminal.
After Bible College Shawna went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She took an anthropology class and learned there were other perspectives outside of her own indoctrination.
Realizing there's different schools of thought around evolution, around world religions. I'd never met anyone that wasn't a Christian. So it started to feel uncomfortable for me, this exclusivity of Christianity, of certain sects of Christianity that kind of claim that they're the only way to God. It started feeling really uncomfortable when I had to have conversations with people who would ask me point blank, ‘so do you think I'm not going to heaven?’ Oh, something is feeling amiss. So that was really my journey of starting to pull that apart saying something is not adding up. I love these people. These people I'm meeting are wonderful. They're just as loving and kind, considerate and beautiful as my Christian friends. So I needed to start realizing why I was othering them so severely.
For the first time she met people who swore, drank, and had sex outside marriage. So she went to ministers of her faith and started asking hard questions.
There's such a crisis of faith that happens when you have questions and when you go to your pastors or religious leaders and they can't really answer them and that's what was happening. I was going to my pastor in Vancouver and I was saying, what about this? What about that? Well, we don't know the answer so we trust in God for that. And how important faith was. Well, this is where faith kicks in. And I just thought to myself, it just feels too convenient that that's when faith kicks in. Like it just kicks in when we don't have an answer…So then I say, yeah but how do we love this person? Well, we just pray for them to change. And then it's like, well, but they're not changing. They're not changing. So then what? Well, then we just keep continuing for them, pray for them to change. Well, then what do we do in the meantime? Well, they're celibate. Okay, so they can't have a family or fall in love or, no, that's their cross to bear. We all have crosses we bear in life. And I know these narratives like the back of my hand because I used to say them myself. And it's like, at some point you have to ask yourself, well, you just feel like you're almost like a PR agency spinning things instead of asking the tough questions of like, is there a chance we interpreted this wrong?...this is a patriarchal system that we are now like looking through a new lens. Is there a new way we can look at that?
There came a point when Shawna wasn’t satisfied with their answers.
So it just became very clear to me that there were answers I needed that no one wanted to give me. And then that's when things start to get really shaky.
At the same time Shawna began to write her own songs and sing in bars.
“HEARTACHE” https://adalinemusic.com/pages/music
At 25 she had her first experience playing music outside of church. She’d been raised to think that bars were bad. But in her heart of heart’s she knew it could just be another place to hear music.
My dad came and I remember afterwards he started to cry because he knew that Pandora's box had been open and that I was now going to be you know in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll and I think there was a lot of fear around what that looked like.
Curious Feelings
One night in her late 20s Shawna was at an art gallery, when she met a woman with whom she felt an immediate attraction.
I remember thinking that it was shocking, but also interesting. Like I was like, okay, interesting as opposed to pure disgust and fear, you know, which would have probably been my feeling before... I did feel shame and guilt because of how I grew up. You can't fully separate from those narratives. And I was able to keep it in that sort of interesting place for a while because it was not real.
…because she kept it to herself. She’d grown up believing as long as you didn’t act on it, it was okay.
I had never in my life really thought of someone that way ever. Never thought of a woman that way... I also think it had to do with the fact that there were such locked roles of femininity and masculinity for me growing up… I met a woman who was a little more androgynous and had some masculine energy that felt familiar and was something that I was normally attracted to but was a woman and had a lot of feminine qualities too … I noticed that I started doing the like stereotypical grooming things I do when I'm interested in someone, so I started playing with my hair. I went to the bathroom to check my lipstick. I was very aware of her spatially in the room we were in. When she talked to me, I felt like goose bumpy…I got that feeling that I've gotten with men my whole life. And then I just was like, well, you can't really argue with that. It's just like your body is reacting and responding. Luckily I didn't chastise right away. I allowed a little space for me to explore.
Finding A New Dopamine Hit
At 27 Shawna decided she wanted her Sundays for herself and did something radical. She stopped going to church.
At the time it was because I was totally burnt out. Like I don't think that I even realized that I was, I knew I was having some tension between my beliefs and what I felt to be true and what they were telling me was true…I worried people were judging me…If you're not there, then people assume that you're backsliding.... You're no longer a Christian. So I think that was really pivotal for me to just claim my happiness.
But Shawna says something was missing.
The reality is, it's like I was missing my dopamine hits, right? So what's an easy way to get that? I got involved in drinking too much and doing drugs. I just was running away…I was really identifying with the Jonah and the whale story, where Jonah tries to run from God and then God sends a whale and swallows. I just felt this feeling like I wanted to push away from God. I wanted to be separate from it but that it was like really, really hard to run away.
Up until this point Shawna had lived a sheltered life. So she didn’t realize she was getting hooked on cocaine.
I was like, ‘oh, this isn't a big deal.’ And so then you just kind of run and you find a little bit more for a while. But that's where it's deceptive, is it, it ensnares you slowly. I felt myself looking over a cliff's edge and seeing that I could literally fall at any second. My heart was racing all the time. I had a ton of anxiety. I actually talked to my doctor about it, which was super vulnerable because he's like my family doctor from my super religious hometown…there was a very distinct darkness that kind of took over my life.
Shawna had found an escape and a group of friends who normalized it as a way of life.
SHAWNA: When you do drugs or drink, the high comes with consequences. You have to, you know, you're hung over. There's actual come downs from poisoning your body. You know, there's actual consequences, but with like religious highs, there's no real consequence because you're just feeling really euphoric. And so, you know, I was really chasing the dragon, really chasing the dragon, just like, okay, I can't get this hit anymore, where can I?
LAUREL: What did it feel like to move away from family and church? Something that was so much a part of your identity.
SHAWNA: Mm. It's like simultaneously freeing and terrifying. I think the hardest thing, and I still struggle with this, I am not saying that I think Christianity is a cult. I do not think that. But I do feel like I identify with, when I watch cult documentaries or I hear interviews with cult survivors, Sometimes what I feel that I really struggle with is you kind of lose a massive sense of purpose. You know, you're in this system where you really think that you're saving the world, that you are special, and that you're chosen to save mankind. And when you let that go, it leaves a really big hole leaves a really big hole. I noticed that when I was high, all I would do is talk about God. You know? Like my friends were always like, you know, you're always talking about God when you're high. Like one time I looked for God in the spice cabinet. It was very clear to me that I had some things I needed to work out, right?
But Shawna’s addiction had hurt her vocal cords. She suddenly sounded different and she didn’t like what she heard.
I was realizing that it was destroying my career.
“The Secret To A Long Life Is Knowing When It’s Time To Go.”
She’d just finished a record so decided she’d moved to Los Angeles to promote it and to leave the party. At this point she had changed her artist name to Adaline.
I was like the only way I'm going to get out of this is to move because …what happens with a drug like that is you surround yourself with other people and then this is the other sneaky aspect of that drug is that you start to associate people with it and restaurants with it, venues with it. It was like anytime I would step into a certain place or see certain people I felt the desire to do it.
She didn’t know anyone in LA so it was a fresh start. After getting settled she found there was still something missing. She still felt a strong connection to God and the Christian community. It was around that time that she heard about a church where she and other LGBTQ folks felt welcomed.
And I remember walking in the doors and it was just the most insane experience. There were tons of like different kinds of people, lots of transgender people. And the choir was full of gay men with like bright colors and sparkly vests and doing communion together and crying and praying. And it was just like this island of misfit toys you know, the leftovers, like the people who had nowhere to go all coming together and having this beautiful experience that was so healing for me because I thought if these people can find a way to reconcile then I can too.
Coming Out
In her early 30s she met and fell in love with a woman.
That was where everything fell apart for me. That was when I was like, ‘oh no!’ I was simultaneously excited because love is always exciting and terrified…And then it became a journey of, am I gonna have to tell my parents? I Googled gay Christian a million times and just tried to find, just begged for the internet to tell me what to think and feel. I re-read all the scriptures that said it was wrong. That started the journey of me looking into queer theology and starting to kind of really break apart what I had been told and try to find the truth, the real truth for me.
The relationship didn’t work out but Shawna knew it was time to live this new truth out loud. In early 2020, just before the pandemic hit the US, Shawna decided to tell her parents. So she flew home.
It was terrifying. There's no way around it. I was really worried that I would... I didn't think I'd lose them because we're very close. But I did think that I would alter their perception of me. And I knew that it was considered in their minds to be a big sin. And I worried about passing on that shame to them how they were going to have to talk to their friends and their family. And I just didn't know if they would touch me the same or kiss me the same or hold me the same. It's just like, it's like a point of no return.
Shawna kept putting it off until the day before her flight home. It was a Sunday so after they came home from church, Shawna followed her mom into the kitchen.
I was clammy and white and my mom kept looking over at me and asking if I was okay… my mom was putting pizza in the oven and my dad was watching NASCAR or something and I just like stood there and she was like, are you…? Like I was just like white as a sheet. Oh gosh, there's just no worse feeling…It is sickening. But my biggest concern was I didn't want to worry them and I knew that if I like had a full breakdown in front of them that they would get really worried. And then sure enough that's exactly what I did. I was like I'm gonna sit down and be calm so I don't worry them but instead I like fell on the ground and like melted and then my dad ran down and grabbed me on the floor and my mom was like, oh no, and of course their first thing was like, are you sick? Are you sick? You know, and I was just like, oh no, this is exactly what I didn't want to have happen. And so then they just held me for a while and I couldn't speak because I was just crying so hard. I couldn't really get much of a breath and then They kept saying, you know, just tell us, just tell us whatever it is. We'll get through it. We'll get through it. And then I just like, you know, took a deep, big breath and just did it. And then there was like that silence after where you're just like, oh my goodness. Whatever they say next, I will never forget for the rest of my life… So I looked at them and I was just waiting like the most raw state ever humanly possible. And my dad said, today is a beautiful day for our family because now there are no more secrets. And that was it.
And of course we had to process what that meant and there were some ups and downs afterwards of just the learning curve of knowing what it means and what does it mean for our family? But that was like the choice in that moment was to be like, okay, we finally don't have secrets. You're not holding anything from us. Now let's figure it out... So that was beautiful.
Shawna was still worried about how they’d be around her. Would they treat her differently?
I was worried she wouldn't want to share that space with me or she wouldn't want to touch me but she did and she played with my hair and rubbed my back. That was huge. And then the next morning they were very, very sweet. Had coffee ready for me. And that's when I said, and this is another thing I'll never forget, I looked at them that morning and I said, ‘you've never been more Christian to me than you are right now… you're choosing to love me. And I'm sure you're terrified. I'm sure you're not sure what anything is or what's up from down,’ but they were like holding that space for me. It's like that's the hardest love is that love and so when someone shows that to you realize like your expansiveness to understand love it Grows like it's a beautiful thing. It was like a new like a part of love became unlocked for me that I would never have had if I hadn't trusted them or I kept saying I kept trying to protect them from me. What I realized is that if I had done that, if I had never really been honest with them, I wouldn't have gotten to experience their full love.
Her family’s support emboldened her to come out as an artist.
As a musician and as a writer, I started to feel more and more pressure building to be honest, because when you write songs, people ask what they're about. And I kept saying, oh, well, they're about or I'm just being an ally. Or I would like come up with ways to sort of wiggle out of being honest. I had written a one song called Ghost that was about my experience of falling in love with a woman but I hadn't told anyone that that's what it was about.
“GHOST” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOEw7HczVAU
When she returned to LA Shawna decided to release the song on youtube. In the description she explained what the song was really about.
And it sat there for a really long time and then this insane thing happened where the song got picked up by a TV show, an LGBTQ TV show. And then all of a sudden, overnight, as soon as the scene aired on TV, I had thousands of people reading my story. You know, they all fled, they all were looking for the song. ‘What is this song? What is this song?’ So they came to my YouTube channel and they read my story. So I woke up to an inbox with thousands of messages from people all over the world saying, like, ‘this is my story. I'm from a religious home’ or ‘I'm in this country where being gay is, you know is a crime.’ Hundreds of people were coming in like within weeks. So I just was like, ‘we have to do something.’ So it did happen fast because people were coming in and wanting to continue talking afterwards.
In September of 2020, the early days of lockdown, Shawna saw the urgency for people to connect and decided to start a non profit called Bad Believers, an online community that met – and still meets – a couple times a month.
Just making people feel seen and a little less alone. I couldn't find anything like that when I was Googling gay Christian.
Not Perfect
LAUREL: And I'm just wondering, because you mentioned the dopamine hit of saving someone, were you feeling that again? Or how have you dealt with that?
SHAWNA Mmm. Hahaha! Yeah. Yes, that is a really astute observation that I 100% had to check. I am always going to be inclined to want to help people. That is who I am. And I think that's okay. As long as you keep mission in mind … I immediately built a team. I have a, you know, I don't have a degree in therapy or psychology, so I brought someone on who does. I kind of tried to really quickly not try to be the hero in every situation, but instead to bring in qualified people to lead those conversations. I found that when it was me being the one to connect with people, I would set up these expectations to always have to be available. I wasn't actually helping anyone…I knew very early it couldn't be my new stage. That has been a learning curve.
She had to form strict boundaries.
This experience has kind of like kicked the people pleaser out of me. It's like, you can't please everybody. So there's a lot of anxiety around trying to do that. So I've had to put up boundaries. I've had to be okay with maybe people not liking me. Had to be okay to admit when I failed, admit when I've made mistakes. And you just kind of, community is a little messy…When we can admit that it's messy, then we can admit where we need to work on things and where we've made mistakes. When we hold up this facade of perfection within communities, like the pastor's perfect, the congregants are perfect, it's a recipe for disaster. So I try as much as I can to do things differently.
Today Shawna and her team host in person events and retreats. Her dad even teaches bible study to those interested. Shawna has a girlfriend that her parents have embraced.
As far as going to church…
SHAWNA: I don't really have much interest in going into a lot of like non-affirming churches anymore, so affirming churches are churches that are fully supportive of LGBTQ people. That's the only kind of church I could be involved in.
LAUREL: And do you still consider Jesus your best friend?
SHAWNA: I do have a different relationship for sure. I think that I respect so much the teachings of Jesus. I do think that there are so many things that I still resonate with. I think that my relationship was maybe a little bit conditional. I had to do certain things or be a certain way and then if I didn't he was always watching and everything I did was going to be recorded in a book and read back to me when I died. That kind of stuff I've had to let go of so less of a monitoring best friend and more of just a calm presence, a teaching spirit.
“BRAVE” https://adalinemusic.com/pages/music
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
