Little Richard and the Problem of Religious Repression

In September of 1955, Little Richard recorded a single that would go on to become a smash hit in 1956 and shake the world of rock and roll. “Tutti Frutti” became a staple of the new sound and set the tone for what popular music could be. With its nonsense “Awop-bop-aloobop alop-bam-boom” vocal lines, slang like “a-rooty” meaning “all right”, and that wild, syncopated rhythm, it was the right song at the right time to rocket Little Richard to stardom and unsettle the musical establishment.

What makes the song even more fascinating is that those were not the original lyrics. Producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell heard Little Richard belting it out during a lunch break at a recording session. The original words are hard to pin down exactly, but they are usually reported along these lines:

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop a-good-Goddam!
Tutti Frutti, good booty.
If it don’t fit, don’t force it.
If you grease it, make it easy.”

“Tutti frutti” in that setting was slang for a young homosexual. The song, in its first form, was very likely a hymn to gay, anal sex. In the 1950s nightclubs where Little Richard worked, those lyrics had a home. Blackwell knew they would never make it to radio. So he brought in Dorothy LaBostrie to rewrite the song for public consumption.

Little Richard did not simply write one naughty song and move on with his life. His entire story reads like a tug-of-war between a fierce love for God and a body that refused to stop burning.

He grew up in a religious home. His father was a church deacon who also ran a nightclub and sold bootleg liquor. Richard sang gospel, adored the music of the church, and from an early age felt drawn to spiritual things. At the same time, he knew he was attracted to men. He experimented with make-up, played with gender expression on stage, and carried on relationships that he never quite managed to make peace with.

When fame arrived, it brought more than money and screaming crowds. It magnified that inner conflict. On tour he indulged in sex and substances, then swung back into seasons of deep repentance, sometimes walking away from rock and roll altogether in favour of preaching and gospel music. He would condemn homosexuality in one era, confess his desire in another, and seem genuinely torn between the two.

You do not have to share his orientation to understand that kind of turmoil. I have never felt the pull toward homosexuality. I still recognise the raw, human ache in his story. Most of us know what it is to want something so strongly that it feels like a force of nature, while also fearing what that desire might mean for our soul, our reputation, or our standing with God.

That is the point where religious language like “deny yourself” can feel less like wisdom and more like a knife. It is easy to say “crucify the flesh” when you are talking about someone else’s body. It is very different when you are the one lying awake at night, trying to pray away the very energies that make you feel alive.

Growing up Fundamentalist, I was taught that we were supposed to deny ourselves and follow Jesus. One of the Sunday School songs I learned from an early age went like this:

“Jesus and others and you.
What a wonderful way to spell J.O.Y.
‘J’ is for Jesus, for he has first place.
‘O’ is for others we meet face-to-face.
‘Y’ is for you and whatever you do.
Put yourself last and spell J.O.Y.”

Self-denial and repression were baked into my childhood. I had a genuine love for God and a sincere desire to serve Jesus and make him first in my life. What I did not see at the time was that putting yourself last can lead to a very warped way of seeing the world. Slogans such as “believe in yourself” felt almost blasphemous to me.

When my body went through the normal changes that every young boy experiences, sexual desire arrived as an uninvited guest. I had no idea what to do with it. I was taught that this desire was evil. We were not encouraged to find a healthy outlet for it. We were told to deny it. There were always Bible verses ready to be used as billy clubs to knock us into conformity:

“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.” (Romans 6:12–13 KJV)

Damn you, Paul. Do you understand the impossibility of what you are prescribing here?

I was told that if we worked against our very human nature, we would find grace and transformation in Christ that would help us overcome these obstacles. I had called upon Jesus. I had been saved. That special grace, that promised transformation, never arrived. Instead, I found myself stuck in the same weary cycle of lust, shame, repentance, and regression.

What I did not understand as a young teenager was that I was not sinful or broken at the core. I was human. As Wayne Dyer often said, I was a spiritual being having a human experience. Nobody around me explained that sexual desire is a natural, necessary, human emotion. It was not a curse laid upon my body. It was a sign that I was alive.

Little Richard and I could hardly be more different on the surface. He was a black, queer rock and roll pioneer who strutted across the stage in make-up and sequins and screamed his heart into a microphone. I was a white, Fundamentalist Baptist boy in the American Midwest, wearing a suit and tie, preaching from the King James Bible, and trying to keep my hair above my ears.

He played piano in clubs where desire flowed freely. I stood behind pulpits warning people about lust and worldliness. He pushed against the gender norms of his time. I tried my best to embody them. If you looked only at our lives from the outside, you would never think we were wrestling with the same thing.

Under the surface, though, the struggle looks painfully familiar. Little Richard loved God. He loved gospel music. He talked about Jesus. He also loved men. He felt pulled towards sex, glamour, performance, and the sheer thrill of being desired. One part of him wanted to be holy. Another part of him wanted to be alive in his own skin.

That inner split is not unique to him. My version showed up in different clothes. I wanted to be holy. I wanted to please God, obey Scripture, and live a clean life. At the same time, my body wanted what bodies want. Touch. Pleasure. Release. Closeness. I tried to crucify that part of myself because I had been told it was wicked. He tried, at various points, to crucify his own desire as well, renouncing rock and roll, condemning homosexuality, then finding his way back to the stage and to his own contradictions.

We travelled in different worlds, yet we both learned to stand on the fault line between devotion and desire. Religion told us that love for God and love for our own bodies could not coexist. So we learned to live as divided men. One part of us sang hymns. Another part groaned in secret.

That is why I feel such tenderness when I look at his story. I do not have to share his orientation to recognise that tug-of-war inside him. Desire does not become less human because it is directed at someone of the same sex. It is still desire. It is still that deep instinct in us that reaches for connection and pleasure and release. The details differ, but the ache is the same.

When Robert “Bumps” Blackwell heard the original version of “Tutti Frutti”, he knew there was no way those lyrics would survive the journey from nightclub to national radio. So he kept the sound and rewrote the story. The wild energy and nonsense syllables stayed, but the meaning changed. Dorothy LaBostrie turned a raw, sexual song into something radio-friendly. The desire was still there, pulsing underneath the track, yet now it wore a mask that made it acceptable to the wider culture.

Religion often does something very similar with our bodies.

We keep the flesh, because we cannot escape it. We keep the hormones and the longings and the private fantasies. Those come as standard equipment. What the church tries to rewrite is the script we are allowed to speak out loud. The original lyrics of the body are fairly simple. “I want to be touched.” “I want to be seen as desirable.” Instead of helping us understand that language, religion often hands us a new set of words and tells us to sing those instead.

The message I absorbed in Fundamentalism went something like this: Your body is not to be trusted. Your desire is always suspect. Your thoughts are potential sin. Your imagination is a crime scene. So you learn to live in censorship. You still feel everything you felt before, only now you are expected to wrap it in pious language. You call longing “temptation”. You call attraction “a test”. You call your very real, very human urges “attacks of the enemy”.

Inside, the music does not stop. It never stopped for Little Richard either. He could trade the club for the pulpit, the sequins for a suit, the stage for a church platform. That wild, vital part of him still knew how to move. You can rebrand a song or a person, but the underlying rhythm remains.

When I tried to live by “deny yourself”, what I was really doing was trying to rewrite my own lyrics. I told myself that I did not need sexual expression. I tried to convince myself that attraction was dangerous and desire was a hindrance to holiness. I recast my body as an enemy I had to subdue. On the outside, I looked devoted. On the inside, the original song kept fighting its way to the surface.

At some point, that double life breaks you. Either you shut down so completely that you lose touch with your own heart, or everything you have tried to bury starts leaking out in ways that are far less healthy. Secret porn use (Been there, bought the T-shirt). Affairs. Emotional entanglements that you never meant to happen. The song will find its way out, even if it has to go through the cracks.

The tragedy is not that we have bodies that sing. The tragedy is that we are taught to be ashamed of the music.

For me, one of the healthiest outlets I eventually found was writing.

Getting married helped. Having a partner, real intimacy, and a shared life gave my body a home that teenage me could never have imagined. Even so, marriage did not erase desire. It gave it a sacred channel, yet there was still more energy in me than any one role could hold. Husband, preacher, manager, responsible adult. Those are important. They are not the whole of a person.

Some of that leftover energy needed somewhere to go. In my case, it walked onto the page with a bourbon-drinking private eye and a cast of complicated, wounded, hungry characters.

When I write Nick Grayson, I am not just plotting crimes and solving mysteries. I am letting parts of myself speak that were not welcome in church. The smouldering scenes, the charged glances, the bad decisions made in dimly lit rooms, all of that comes from somewhere real. It is not a diary with the names changed, yet it is not completely separate from me either. Desire becomes story. Longing becomes tension between characters. Temptation becomes atmosphere rather than a sermon illustration.

Story gives desire a mask that is honest instead of dishonest. I am not pretending that attraction does not exist. I am not standing behind a pulpit reciting verses while my inner life goes rogue in the background. I am putting that inner life to work. I am saying, in effect, “If you are going to be here, you may as well help me create something beautiful.”

That is one of the great gifts of creative work. It lets us take energies that used to scare us and give them a constructive shape. For years, I thought my only options were to indulge in secret or to repress. Neither of those paths brought peace. Writing opened a third possibility. I could acknowledge what lives in me and let it move in ink, in dialogue, in scenes that might move someone else. Desire no longer had to be my enemy. It could be part of the fuel.

There are parts of myself that I probably do need to deny. Not my humanity, but the voices that taught me my humanity was shameful. The scripts that say, “You are only lovable if you never struggle.” The inner Pharisee that stands in the corner of my mind, arms folded, tapping his foot, waiting for me to fail. Those are the things that feel worth denying these days.

What I do not want to deny any longer is the fact that I am a soul in a body, with needs and hormones and a nervous system that lights up when it feels desire. I do not want to deny the creative fire that rises in me and insists on being turned into stories, scenes, characters. When I honour those parts of myself, I feel closer to God, not further away.

Little Richard never quite seemed to find peace with his own contradictions. He swung between rock and roll and religion, between queer expression and public renunciation. I do not say that as a judgement. I say it with compassion. The world he lived in did not make it easy for a man like him to embrace his whole self. In a different world, perhaps he could have seen his talent, his sexuality, and his faith as facets of one shining soul instead of opposing forces.

You and I are living in a different world now. It is far from perfect. Shame has not left the building. Yet we do have more language, more tools, more permission to explore.

So let me leave you with a few questions, not as homework, but as gentle invitations.

Where have you been taught to rewrite the lyrics of your own body so that other people will feel comfortable?

What parts of you were labelled “sinful” or “dangerous” that might, in fact, simply be human and in need of wise care?

Where is there energy in you that has been bottled up for years, waiting for a healthier outlet, whether that is art, honest conversation, therapy, spiritual practice, or simple, embodied pleasure?

You do not have to answer any of these out loud. You do not have to tell your story on the internet. You do not have to turn your wound into content. Your first responsibility is to your own heart.

If anything in my story resonates with you, I hope it does one small thing. I hope it reminds you that you are not a monster for having desires that scared your religious upbringing. You are not broken for needing touch, or pleasure, or a place for your creative fire to burn.

You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Your body is not the enemy. It is the instrument. Somewhere beneath all the fearful rewrites and censored verses, your original song is still there, waiting to be heard.

Maybe it is time to start listening.

Peace, and keep asking the big questions,

The Sage Wanderer

P.S. - My first novel is now also available on eBook. If you haven’t read it already, I hope you will give it a read before my latest novel arrives this Thanksgiving. And if you’ve enjoyed my books or my musings, I would be over the moon if you bought me a coffee. your support means the world to me.