Carl Bean
His Motown disco hit “I Was Born This Way” became an anthem – then he founded a church for Black queer people and fought AIDS in Los Angeles.
Carl Bean grew up in Baltimore and came from gospel music. In the 1970s Motown producers asked him to record a song they were working on: “I Was Born This Way”. Bean’s version came out in 1977 and became an anthem in the discos. It said what hardly anyone put on a record at the time: that you are born the way you are and there is nothing to correct. Decades later the title inspired Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”.
Bean lived openly as a gay man and became a preacher. In Los Angeles he founded the Unity Fellowship Church, which grew into a whole church movement of which he became archbishop. It is regarded as one of the first Christian churches in the United States to explicitly welcome Black lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
When AIDS hit Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Bean founded the Minority AIDS Project, one of the first organisations in the city to focus on Black and Latino people with AIDS. It still exists today. In 1987 he co-founded the National Minority AIDS Council. In 1992 an AIDS hospice in South Los Angeles was named after him.
In 2010 he published his autobiography, “I Was Born This Way”. Bean died in Los Angeles in 2021, aged 77, after a long illness. American radio remembered him as one of the first voices of the epidemic in the Black community.