_{The following story first appeared on The Heights, an independent, nonprofit newspaper run by Boston College students, with which the Newton Beacon has formed a partnership. Stories produced by The Heights have been written and edited by The Heights.}

It’s a Friday night in Miami. Music is blasting, drinks are pouring, and lights are flashing. It’s Black Pride, 2009, and Rev. Brandon Thomas Crowley waits at the bar.

Tasked with getting drinks for friends, he’s startled when a man, drunk and high, looks at him and speaks.

“Sir, I don’t know you, but you’re not supposed to be here,” Crowley recalls the man saying. “You’re supposed to be somewhere else. I think you’re supposed to be preaching somewhere.”

Crowley left the bar for the airport and caught a flight back to Boston. That night—without a sermon prepared—he went before the Myrtle Baptist Church’s committee and preached. A month later, Crowley was elected Senior Pastor of the historic West Newton church, one of America’s oldest Black congregations.

It was six years later, in 2015, that Crowley felt God urge him to tell his congregation that he was gay.

Founded by formerly enslaved persons at the end of Reconstruction, the Myrtle Baptist Church is one of the nation’s few historically Black churches that is “Open and Affirming,” meaning it welcomes LGBTQ+ members and ministry. Its Open and Affirming status, however, was not always the case. It became so under Crowley.

Myrtle Baptist Church Pastor Brandon Thomas Crowley delivers a sermon at the church’s annual African American Heritage Sunday service. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Despite the church’s liberal search committee and membership, Crowley initially felt as though he could not share his sexuality with his congregation, he said.

“They were not looking for a pastor who was gay, and they were not looking for a pastor who was going to push them out of the closet, so to speak,” Crowley said. “They were looking for somebody who just wasn’t going to rattle the feathers to be politically correct.”

Crowley explained that the former senior pastor, who’d served in his position for 24 years prior, told him not to come out.

“I was harassed,” Crowley said. “I was laughed at. We lost members of the church because they thought that I was gay, and they said I was preaching too much about gay rights issues.”

The church then went through the two-year process to become Open and Affirming, which entails a covenant drafted by the church that must record the church as a welcoming environment to gay and transgender members and ministry. Once approved through a vote, the church may be certified as an Open and Affirming congregation.

“So I came out, and we lost a lot of members because I came out,” Crowley said. “Then we started attracting a lot of members because I came out.”

Crowley’s first book, Queering the Black Church: Dismantling Heteronormativity in the African American Church, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. In the book, he seeks to aid other Black churches across the country through the process of becoming welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community.

“I wrote the book because there are Black churches out there who want to figure out how to affirm gay people,” Crowley said. “They just don’t know how to do it.”

In his book, Crowley addresses the history of Black Christian methodology in regard to homosexuality. He writes, in part, with the goal of “queering” these beliefs in Black Churches across the country, just as the Civil Rights Movement dismantled the flaws of American equality.

“And so queering, for me, is about subversion,” Crowley said. “It is about making the least, the most important. It is about turning the center on its head where there is no center and all are equitably treated.”

Crowley, 38, was raised in Rome, Georgia. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in religion with a Moral Cosmopolitan Pastoral Leadership Certificate from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He also earned a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Crowley later earned his Ph.D. in Church and Society and a Master of Sacred Theology with a certificate in social justice from the Boston University School of Theology.

Minister of Administration Rev. Elijah Gipson-Davis said he looks to Crowley as a mentor.

“He’s an inspiration to look up to, one as a minister and then two as an openly queer minister, and then also as an academic,” Gipson-Davis said.

Dr. Brandon Crowley, pastor at Myrtle Baptist Church, speaks at Newton’s 57th annual Martin Luther King Day celebration on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

Myrtle Baptist Church, founded in 1874, was created to be a community within Newton, one separate from the city itself, Crowley said.

“I don’t have an overwhelming story of negativity, but I also am not drunk on any wine of this politically correct New England, Newton, sort of my mindset in which we like to act like a colorblind society where race really doesn’t matter,” Crowley said.

While most of Myrtle Baptist’s members do not live in Newton anymore due to the construction of the Massachusetts Turnpike in the 1960s, Gipson-Davis believes the church to be one of the only remaining parts of Newton’s Black population.

“This church to this day is probably the strongest contingency of African Americans in the city of Newton,” Gipson-Davis said. “Myrtle has been a safe haven for what Newton has become today.”

In addition to his work at Myrtle Baptist, Crowley is a Lecturer in Ministry Studies at Harvard University’s Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., the Crump Visiting Professor of Theology at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and the 2021–2022 American Academy of Religion’s Black Religious Scholars Group’s Scholar-in-Residence.

Administrative Assistant to the Senior Pastor Sister Ayeesha Lane, who has attended Myrtle Baptist since she was 13, said she is overwhelmed with Crowley’s hard work and love for the church.

“He has held every hand through sickness, through death—every hand, through ups and downs,” Lane said. “He does it, and he doesn’t blink an eye. He is the hardest working preacher I have ever met.”

Crowley currently resides in Boston with his husband, Tyrone Sutton.