Daniel Franzese is Yassifying Faith

We know Daniel Franzese from his work on stage and screen from his first major film appearances in Bully and of course, Mean Girls, TV shows like ABC’s Recovery Road and Conviction, to his comedy shows and stand-up appearances. After coming out on Mean Girls’ tenth anniversary, he would go on to appear in the critically acclaimed HBO’s Looking TV series and film. He has become a leading activist for the LGBTQ and body positivity communities as well as an ambassador for the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation and LAMBDA Legal, all the while continuing to appear on screen, on podcasts, and in more stage projects. Currently, his focus is on spreading faith as a Christian through his podcast, Yass, Jesus! Dealing with the struggle of religion versus faith, he brought himself into conversion therapy. Whereas many members of the LGBTQ community have walked away from their faith, Daniel has forged his own path and he’s not afraid to spread the word.

With the stigma that the LGBTQ community has in the major organized religions, and with the stigma that religion has in much of the LGBTQ community, Daniel is taking a leap of faith in being out and proud of his relationship with God. If you know Daniel, he is down to earth, can party it up with the rest, loves conversations about the sexual world, and can give you a sassy clap back if needed. This can all co-exist in his vision of faith.

I had a promise to God. I always said to God that if I could just be in the closet and be an actor when I finally came out, my platform would be that God loves gay people too. But that’s not how it happened. My platform was more about the gay glass ceiling in Hollywood and how that affected me. It was just naturally how that happened. I still had this little itch, and I wrote articles about it. But none of those were really getting the kind of attention to what I was trying to say, because I feel like queer people are meant to make that choice between gay and God. As soon as we say, oh, we’re gay, people are like, well I want your God. And you’re like, fine, take it. I feel like we give up God too easily and God is for a lot of people a moral center.

With so much ostracism, damning to hell, and mental and physical abuse towards the LGBTQ community through conversion therapy in religion, how can Daniel still advocate for God?

Organized religion is the problem. It’s people who are using God as a weapon. What we’re dealing with now with the far right and “Christians” is that they’re using God as this weapon against people, against immigrants, against so many different things that are not the teachings of Jesus Christ and not the teachings that are in the Bible.

His podcast, Yass, Jesus!, is all about mixing comedy, Bible stories, prayer time, sexual chats, meditation, and more with a variety of guests with the bold statement that you don’t have to choose between gay and God. Daniel co-hosts the podcast with his bestie, Azariah Southworth. Azariah, a conversion therapy survivor as well, once served as a TV evangelist on The Remix, featured on the infamous TBN network. Azariah’s entire career on Christian TV was pulled out from under his feet as he came out as gay during his time there, becoming the first Christian entertainer to do so publicly. He and Daniel met in true Los Angeles fashion – Azariah was on a horrible date at one of Daniel’s comedy shows. The two struck up a conversation after the show and started hanging out, the rest is history. The two have visceral chemistry together, presenting a variety of ideas and life shares without stepping on each other’s toes or in each other’s spotlight. Not many in the gay circle readily talk about religion, for Daniel and Azariah it was a natural conversation to have.

Whenever I need anything, he is the first person I go to. He never says no, and he never has a chip on his shoulder about it. And I try to repay that whenever I can. And I think we’re good friends because of that reason.

Azi’s experience with entertainment is extensive – working at TBN, getting fired, all of that other stuff – was extremely interesting to me as I grew up Pentecostal. I think we were smoking weed and just talking about God sometimes (we call it Bible Wondering) and we’re like, people should be hearing some of these conversations. We should really be telling other people these conversations. I had been thinking for a long time about having my next podcast be a theological kind of exploration for queer people and Azi was right along with that.

And what an exploration it is. The podcast shares many interesting facts that celebrate our community in the same book that others use to vilify us.

Some of the things that cracked our heads open were that 1946 was the first time “homosexual” was added to the Bible. When they talk about Joseph and his Dreamcoat, the original translation was actually “ketonet passim” which was a princess dress. So, Joseph might’ve been genderqueer or a trans person of color. And when we say “HE,” like with the capital “H,” a pronoun for God, a lot of people think that we’re talking about a male gender, but, the capitalized “He” was actually a pronoun that is genderless. If you think God doesn’t transcend gender, then you don’t really understand God.

We like to look at early translations. We like to try to just try to find the queer perspective, and it’s there. There’s a great story of Paul talking to a eunuch just after Jesus’ death. And the eunuch saying to Paul, “Is there anything about me that Jesus wouldn’t let me be baptized?” And Paul said, “No.” And so said, “Then baptize me right now in the lake.” And he went and did that. What a great affirming story for an intersex person or a trans folk. But I had never heard that story before. In church, they don’t bring that up.

There’s the story of David and Jonathan. If you want to talk about the nail on the head of why I wanted to do this podcast is because that’s a beautiful gay love story that’s in the Bible. That same Bible that tells me that gay love story is the Bible that drove me to conversion therapy. These are perspectives that aren’t told to queer people. They are gatekeeping us from this kind of knowledge.

So how do we know what to pick and choose from the Bible? For those of us that have seen those infamous Leviticus quotes from protestors at our Prides or heard the damning preaching from the pulpit, don’t we have to account for those sections as well? As Franzese puts it, everything has to be put into historical context. The book of Leviticus is a book of laws that were written for the Jews that were living amongst the Samaritans at the time and were losing their identity as Jewish people. They created this book with line-by-line laws to differentiate themselves, including not getting tattoos or eating shellfish.

Imagine a book of law that was written for our time of quarantine that then someone, thousands of years from now, says that this is how we need to live every day. We need to spray our groceries now with Lysol. LOL. That specific (Leviticus) passage was a comment on Greco-Roman culture. It was a comment about how Roman soldiers were taking young boys in so when it said, “one man lies with another,” really what it was talking about was one man lying with a young boy.

Azariah, in his research, shared that the Merit Foundation based out of Chicago did a survey amongst the LGBTQ community and found that 85% of our community comes from faith backgrounds. Have these all been positive experiences? Probably not. But Daniel attests that there is a large faction of our community that is talking about their faith in a positive way. The response the podcast has received, the number of messages they get from listeners, and the conversations the two hosts have had in the unlikeliest of places show that maybe God isn’t so far from our thoughts. Daniel believes coming out as Christian as a gay man is yet another coming out that we’re forced to do. But he believes everyone should, and maybe needs, to be open to conversation.

One thing I said to myself is I’ll never deny God. I don’t care if I’m in the middle of sex.  God is funny. You don’t know where the conversation’s going to happen or where there is someone that needs to have a talk about something or needs a little support.

Daniel feels like his destiny has always been to preach. His parents, previously Catholic, became born again Christians after a not-so-pleasant run-in with a priest who discounted their life in the church over the tab on the collection plate. His mom went where she felt God, something that didn’t sit well with Daniel’s Italian and staunch Catholic grandparents.

My mom had a miscarriage and they said, “Where’s your God now?” And my mom said, “You’ll see, He’s going to give me a special baby.” And when I was born, they named me Daniel with no middle name because Daniel means “God is my judge.” I was sort of a political statement. My life purpose has always been to fulfill this.

More than 700,000 people have been affected by conversion therapy, and that’s just what has been recorded. According to Daniel, the podcast has a number of listeners who have shared their personal experiences with it, something Daniel also personally experienced.

They’re all different ages. Everybody has a different story. Conversion therapy can be all different types of things. Mine was a therapist, I thought I was going to a Christian therapist. We didn’t have a name for conversion therapy. I was just looking for some sort of way to deal with the feelings that I was feeling and instead, I got somebody who alienated me from my allies and tried to convince me to go otherwise. I was in it for six months.

I personally wouldn’t have made it through that time without God. God was with me through that, isn’t that weird? My conversion therapist was telling me that the reason I was having these feelings is that my mom was too open about sex with me. My mom’s version of sexual education was like, “Mom, what’s a blowjob?” And she’s like, “If you’re old enough to know you’re old enough to ask.” And so, when I was explaining this in therapy, he was telling me I should alienate myself from her.  For two months, I didn’t speak to my mom, and that’s the only time in my life that my mom and I weren’t close. And my mom is my greatest ally. I mean, she’s what my comedy’s about, I do one-woman shows as her. You can’t tell me anything about my mother like that. I know who my mother is and I know who God is in my life.

Daniel’s mission is to bring the gay community back to God, no matter their religious experience. He believes the faith is there, whether they know it or not.

I feel like gays find some other place to channel the energy they channel for a leader, and they end up looking towards some pop diva or money or sex or clothing, or the gym is their God, or the gym is their church, or the gym is their temple. They find some other sort of devotion and they’ve been tricked. They’ve been misguided. When you lose your God, what’s left?

I hate that gay people feel that God won’t love them. My mom was with me at DragCon, and next to us was the LGBT center. I shared my table with them so they could get a free table and do some work. My mom said something about God, and one of the guys was like, “God’s not for me. God hates me. I’m gay.” My mom said, “Who told you that? God loves you.” And he started crying and he just needed someone to tell him that. And I think that if I had heard one person just tell me that God loves me this way, that God made me this way, that’s all I needed to hear and not feel suicidal, not feel lost, not worship some false idol.

During the podcast, the duo will showcase prayers that are sent in from drag queens. In a time where drag queens and the LGBTQ community are being persecuted by politicians using the Bible as their campaign, members of our family are still finding solace and a relationship with God.

The number one prayer that we have gotten from drag queens has been to not tear each other and our art down. That is the biggest thing I think that we face right now and that’s the biggest ask from all the queens in the world, is that we can just unite as a group of people and celebrate each other’s arts and differences.

Writing this interview was a tug of war. As someone raised in the Catholic Church for the majority of my growing up, someone who sang as a cantor concurrently at three major Churches in Southern California for 13 years and then was asked to leave those positions because I brought my boyfriend to Church, my experience with religion is tumultuous. As I dealt with the prolonged death of my grandmother, I felt a complete absence and anger with God. I currently identify as an atheist, something I never would have imagined. I still have deep respect for people who have faith and display the best elements of their religion, and I have somehow become obsessed with studying the actual history of the religious texts of many of the founding religions. It is fascinating to me how men have changed and twisted translations and stories to fit their narratives. I have deep respect for Daniel and Azariah for what they are doing in the community, who can be angry about people spreading messages of love and acceptance? They are living by example, who among us can say that? While my natural inclination when people talk about faith and religion is to get riled up and roll my eyes, maybe I need to take a moment to separate faith and religion and figure out what I am really mad at.

Daniel’s message to the community as we enter Pride?

Be yourself. Find yourself. Find God in you and where you are and who you are with. Be you without having to make any adjustments.

Check out Yass, Jesus! pod: yassjesuspod.com

Follow Daniel on IG: @WhatsUpDanny