“Born-again, sanctified, saved-in-the-blood Christian” and folk singer Michelle Shocked will not be appearing at Seattle’s Meander’s Kitchen on April 26. The cancellation was “due to her homophobic performance in San Francisco,” announced the venue on Facebook, adding : “I’ll post more about this later. But no. Just, no.” 699 people have Liked this so far.
As sfist recounted, the singer “literally shocked audiences on Sunday at Yoshi’s San Francisco when during her second set she launched into a hate-filled speech about gays and gay marriage. ‘I live in fear,’ she said, ‘that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry.'”
The New York Times adds: “she also told the audience to go on Twitter and report that she had said God hates homosexuals, though it is unclear whether that remark was sardonic.” If the last time you heard Michelle Shocked was sometime in the ’90s, the NYT article will catch you up on her Pentecostal walk-back from more LGBT-friendly times.
Most of the audience at Yoshi’s walked on her, and they were followed by a string of venue cancellations.
Over at folk-rock ground-zero No Depression, former Seattlest editor Kim Ruehl meditates on what it all means:
Whether she’s struggling with mental health issues, whether she’s trying to distance herself from a past she no longer feels proud of, or whether this is just what she’s come to believe, she was clearly struggling with the knowledge that she’d be playing to a predominantly gay crowd in one of the gayest cities in the country, on the eve of a Supreme Court hearing held to decide whether or not her state was right to try to block LGBT people from the right to marry. If I want to have my rights recognized, I must also recognize the rights of others. That’s the fairness game that comes with freedom.
UPDATE: Michelle Shocked has released a statement saying that she was misunderstood:
My view of homosexuality has changed not one iota. I judge not. And my statement equating repeal of Prop 8 with the coming of the End Times was neither literal nor ironic: it was a description of how some folks – not me – feel about gay marriage.
Compare that with audio of the concert in question.
