The Sensual Betrayal of ‘Sinners’

by Michael J. Ivory, Jr.

The day I told my Pentecostal preacher parents I didn’t want to attend church with them anymore, I remember feeling a profound freedom. For once, I chose my Black queer body’s peace over witnessing my existence being raked over hellfire coals. No more shallowed breath at the altar. No more tense shoulders walking down the center aisle.  

Then came a second thought – this is dangerous. The allure of church every Sunday was not that it felt safe, but predictable. I knew the rules. Deepen my voice, say “Amen” to holy homophobia, and rest in the lie that God was pleased with my self-erosion. To honor all of my body’s feelings meant entering the unknown. I knew I was suffering under my self-suppression, but it was a suffering I could predict and measure. I understood the scrutiny of my church elders, and knew what to say to appease my parents. What would allowing myself to exist freely as a gay man offer me? Church certainly wasn’t the only place homophobia lived, but it was the place where I could predict homophobia and contort around its sharp edges. 

So, when I went to see Sinners and watched each scene of Sammie reckoning with his preacher father’s demands, their soil-rich skin framed by the stark white of their church’s interior, something in my body told me I’d been there before. Yes, Sinners is the Hoodoo-driven story of vampires descending on a sweaty, foot-stomping night at a juke joint in rural, segregated Clarksdale, Mississippi, to consume a Griot’s magic. But it is also about a Black man coming to terms with the power – the danger – of his sensuality. Sammie did not experience attraction the same way I do, but his journey to embrace the power to feel mirrors my queer journey of self-reclamation.

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Sinners opens with its ending: a warning. Sammie enters the church soaked in blood, and his father, Jedidiah, takes him into an embrace before he commands, “Drop the guitar, Sammie.” In a later scene, we find that just 24-hours earlier, Jedidiah had implored Sammie to dedicate himself to the church. We do not yet know what the guitar can do or why it is tied to “sinnin’ ways.” Yet as we ponder Sammie’s shell-shocked face, spliced between flashes of a horror we do not yet understand, we wonder if his father’s warning holds some merit. Still, as the camera zooms in on Sammie’s slow-to-loosen grip on the guitar’s neck, we understand that obeying is not an easy choice to make. Why? What could be worth all this blood and betraying his father’s wishes? 

Audre Lorde writes in Uses of the Erotic, “as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…” This, to me, is the essence of my self-realization as a queer person. Queer desire, as a form of the erotic, challenges us to betray what is deemed “normal” (being cisgender or heterosexual) in the name of expressing the unique wills of our bodies. As a Black man, I not only desire the touch of other Black men, but I also embrace the softening of my stance and the sweetening of my voice. 

This is where Sammie and I meet: at the place where two Black preacher’s boys learn to betray social expectations in the name of honoring our bodies. Sammie, admittedly, was quicker on the uptake than me. I spent my early twenties suppressing my desire in the name of holiness, but Sammie found the courage to disobey his father’s wishes for him to self-censor in the name of the church. When his cousins, Smoke and Stack, arrive in town, he joins them, kicking up dust along the unpaved roads of Clarksdale to help them set up the juke joint. And then, he sings the Blues. 

The Blues is a very sensual genre. It does not rush through the scenes of life, and invites the hips to sway through heartbreak and loss. Thus, I find Sammie’s love of the genre to be a beautiful conduit for him to discover himself and, by extension, his Griot magic. Musical acumen is not enough. For Sammie to sing the Blues well, he has to feel. 

This creates an interesting juxtaposition of worlds. In the church, Sammie’s father spurns this emotionality, condemning the Blues as a gateway to “sin”. Meanwhile, in Clarksdale beyond the church, Sammie’s cousins welcome his emotions because on the other side of his feeling is powerful–and lucrative–music. 

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Through this, we glimpse the landscape that Black male bodies and the emotions they hold must navigate. In the church, Black men can only feel and express what gestures to a God that “saves them.” To belong in the sanctuary would mean to suppress the Blues (even as it finds an afterlife in Gospel music). In the juke joint, Sammie’s feeling is unleashed, but it cannot be overlooked that Sammie’s liberated emotions were welcomed as a byproduct of his lucrative musical talent. Of course, this does not mean that Smoke and Stack do not love their cousin. However, by the time we meet them, Smoke is stoic, Stack is wry, and one cannot help but notice that a lifetime of fighting has wrung much of the softness out of them. Sammie, in his open-heartedness, exists as a less encumbered Black manhood. Witnessing this, one has to wonder: where are Black men safe to feel with other Black men without “usefulness” being the facilitator of connection? 

That night, at the juke joint, we witness the power of Sammie’s music as he conjures the spirits of the dead and those yet-to-be born dancing among the living.  Then, we finally see what flashed in Sammie’s memories at the beginning of the film. The vampires descend, and bloodshed ensues, with Sammie as the sole survivor. It would seem that Jedidiah’s warning – that to play the guitar outside the church was to participate in sin and invite harm – held merit. This is the risk of sensual betrayal: when we choose to feel fully, we also face the danger that comes with that freedom. For Sammie, it was vampires. For me, it was queer-antagonism.  

By the time I came out to my mother, pleasure had already unfurled as I pushed past the fear of “sin” into the embrace of another man’s touch. Yet sitting in my mother’s living room, she wrung her hands as she recounted stories of queer men, those she knew and those she had heard about, who faced homophobic violence and death for being themselves. She explained that her past homophobia was not rooted in malice, but in fear for my safety. As she explained this, her eyes mirrored those of Jedidiah. Yet like Sammie, my body could not forget the sensual possibilities. 

For all the risk that comes with betrayal, there is the undeniable possibility of power, creativity, and pleasure. As Lorde puts it, the erotic “flows through and colors [our lives]” and “heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all [our] experience[s].” I have felt the bloom of desire and the freedom of femininity in a man’s body. I have found a new home. Like Sammie, I have sung my joys and sorrows, sweated not in juke joints but in clubs, and remembered the judgment of my church elders while walking into the night anyway.

I have felt full. Yes, I have heard tell of those who grow bloodthirsty at the sight of me. But even still, my hand is gripping my queerness like the neck of a guitar. Because on the other side of betrayal, my body found something it could dance to.

Michael J. Ivory, Jr. is a writer from Miami, FL, living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A Duke University graduate and North Carolina State MFA recipient, he has published with O, Miami Press, Duke Magazine, and Iansá Mag, and is currently working on his debut novel. Michael is also a 2026 Lincoln City Fellow.