The preacher who sang "I Was Born This Way"
His 1977 Motown song became an anthem. Then he built up a church and an AIDS project.
On 7 September 2021, a man died in Los Angeles whose song was far better known than his name. Carl Bean was seventy-seven years old and had been ill for a long time.
Bean came from gospel. In the seventies, producers from Motown approached him with a song they were working on. It was called "I Was Born This Way". The recording came out in 1977 and became an anthem in the discos. It said something that hardly anyone put on a record at the time: that you are born the way you are, and that there is nothing about it to correct. Bean had not written the song; he lent it his voice. Decades later the title inspired Lady Gaga's "Born This Way".
He did not stop at singing. Bean became a preacher and in 1982 founded the Unity Fellowship Church in South Los Angeles, which gave rise to a whole church movement and of which he later became archbishop. Many regard it as the first Christian church in the USA to explicitly welcome Black queer people. Bean lived openly as a gay man.
When the AIDS crisis hit Los Angeles, he founded the Minority AIDS Project in the eighties. According to his companions, it was the first organisation in the city to focus specifically on Black and Latino people with AIDS. Bean was also one of the founding members of the organisation now called NMAC, which was then known as the National Minority AIDS Council. After his death, American radio described him as one of the first voices of the epidemic, especially in the Black community.