Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. “We are taught to say no to a lot of things outside of our faith,” she writes, “but inside the faith, we are told only to bow our heads and say yes.” Eventually, a fellow Mormon woman advised her, with regard to that bad marriage, to “run, and don’t look back.” So she did, becoming the “bad ass” of the last part of her book, when she joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and renounced the church “in the name of the Father, the Son, and Andy Cohen.”Ī thoughtful, smart, and funny handbook for apostates.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. As she reveals without sensationalism, it was her husband who failed, and it was the church that demanded that women accept subservient status and sexual violence. After typical adolescent experimentation, she was haunted by the thought that her parents would believe her to be “a bad seed.” The author structures her life story according to all the ways she failed, sometimes in her eyes but mostly in the eyes of others: bad daughter, bad missionary, bad wife, bad Mormon. A prevailing metaphor comes early on when, forbidden to leave her yard as a very young girl, she opens the gate and is locked out, portending things to come. (“Born in the covenant: Mormon flex,” she writes with typically arch humor.) Her family wasn’t necessarily doctrinaire, but they were undoubtedly observant, while Gay was a born questioner and explorer. Gay grew up in a Mormon family so deeply rooted in the faith that they were enrolled as “born in the covenant,” meaning that her parents were married in the temple. Until it didn’t.” It’s a simple declaration but hard won. “Everything in my life confirmed my identity, my faith, and my future.
A reality TV personality recounts an upbringing in a religion that she finally rejected.
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