The Greatest

David Uptin

In May 2024, Apple Music released their list of the so-called one hundred greatest albums of all time. They generated a lot of discussion by releasing ten albums on the list per day, so anticipation was high for who would ultimately be awarded the Number One spot. When the top ten were finally announced, I scrolled through the list and found myself generally contented where many people weren’t; I was going through a Beyoncé phase at the time, as well as an Amy Winehouse phase, and both had albums in the top ten. Albums widely considered all-time greats, like Songs in the Key of Life, Thriller, and Abbey Road were high on the list, as we’d all expected they would.

To most, the only surprise was the top album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. No one I discussed the list with had any idea who Lauryn Hill even was.

Critical acclaim has always been something which has fascinated me; even though I knew next to nothing about Lauryn Hill, I found myself overcome by a need to hear this album, to know what all the fuss was about, and to see if I could understand why this music had been awarded such a high honour. Ultimately, I listened to the album one day while walking around Victoria Park…

And discovered some of the most religious music I had ever heard.

*

Gay Christian.

It’s a phrase impossible to utter without immediately sending its listener into some sort of spiral, invoking some sort of connotation. To some, it’s a revolutionary phrase, a combination of nouns that by merely being spoken ushers in an era of change. To some, it’s an oxymoron, a reference to two statuses which simply cannot coexist.

On my end, it has never felt like much of a choice.

If you were to ask me which I have been for longer, I simply could not tell you. Theoretically, I was born gay (as Lady Gaga taught us all in 2010), while I was not born Christian. However, I was exposed to Christianity from a much younger age, and faith was something I was aware of long before I was aware of my own sexuality. My parents sang to me every night that Jesus loved me; as a child, the concept of God felt like both an unreality and the only possible reality.

That’s sort of what it still feels like.

I realised I was gay at sixteen, when the urge to turn my eyes upon a particular boy in class became too overwhelming and emotionally charged to ignore. Prior to this point, I considered myself vaguely against queerness, not that I would ever admit this out loud; it was what my parents espoused, and I wasn’t confident enough to stand firmly against it. But the feeling of having my first crush, the rush of realising even a snippet of what all the lovey-dovey teenage songs were about, was all-consuming, and I lost any ability to even try and suppress such feeling.

Since that moment, I have felt as though my body and mind sit in two halves, being pried apart more viciously with each day that passes.

Having that sort of desire for someone, for the first and to date, only time in my life, was an experience unlike anything. I think that is why, though I never even confessed my feelings to this boy, and though I have not seen him in two years, I still write about him. I still check his Instagram story immediately upon seeing it, because it is not him I long for, but the feeling.

My desire is not for him, but for desire itself.

This boy happened to call himself Christian (given rumours I have heard since regarding his behaviour, especially towards women, I question the extent to which he truly adheres to the faith). He wore a cross necklace to school every day, and I devoted more mental energy to the intricacies of his cross necklace than to some of my assignments that year. It was shiny, small, and often hidden underneath the shirt of his uniform, but I would always gaze at the nape of his neck in Literature, checking to see it was there, feeling reassured for some reason when it inevitably would be. I would play violin at my dad’s church, watch him stand beneath the wooden cross dangling from the ceiling, and ponder only that thing which hung around this boy’s neck.

My best friend, who attended a local youth group, casually mentioned that this boy attended the same group. Driven by a sudden urge to see what he looked like when singing worship songs, I went along to this youth group, only to find that neither my friend nor my crush seemed to attend anymore, and I had arrived somewhere everyone had known each other for years except me. Some leaders who must have felt sorry for me came to play Connect Four with me.

I still don’t know why I went back.

I joined a small group led by the guys with whom I’d played Connect Four and became a regular attendee. My friendship group at the time seemed confused and almost concerned by this; they were a vital influence in my life, as the first proper friendship group I ever had, and the first queer and neurodivergent safe space I ever encountered (I don’t know what I honestly would have done without such a space). From a certain point of view, I see what they were perplexed by; was I not going back to the very institution that had caused me (and so many other queer and neurodivergent people) so much grief in the first place?

How could I begin to explain that this youth group was the only thing in my life which felt like it had any purpose?

It had reached a point with my crush on this boy where I had realised that he was almost definitely straight, yet I felt within me no desire to get over him. I felt like my obsession with him had driven me crazy. I could barely focus on my schoolwork (by some miracle, my marks didn’t suffer; that’s what being a gifted kid gets you). The only things I could focus on were thinking of him to music by female pop singers…

And my youth group.

When I stood in that dusty hall, holding my hand up, my heart was occupied by something other than vain obsession. Perhaps I was being manipulated to feel it, but I could sense some pure presence within the fog that emanated from the church’s smoke machine. I saw the joy in the eyes of each person in that room and walked out into the night each Friday feeling soft and content, filled with ideas of how to truly be fulfilled in my existence. It was the most pure, profound emotion I let myself deal with.

Since moving out of home, dating has been something I have tried, and failed, to get right. I started my undergrad degree in 2022, and here I am on the cusp of finishing it. In that entire time there have been men who have caught my eye, but none I have even tried or wanted to pursue. I vaguely, not very seriously, tried my hand at dating apps, and that went about as well as you might expect. There were days I felt stuck in my singleness, trapped by my virginity; nights I lay under my sheets and let my heart wander, wondering what it might be like to have an arm over my bare shoulder.

The thing is, I think I’ve realised recently what may be wrong.

I look back on that high school crush and all I feel is terror. I very nearly studied a totally different course to what I am currently doing because of this boy. He was all I wanted to talk about, to think about, to look at, and he never knew a thing about it. I was drunk on a limerence that fed itself.

There is no way I can ever let myself fall into that again.

I watch so many of my friends, whom I love dearly, lying on sofas and losing their minds because some man didn’t answer their messages. I watch people with so much to offer the world snap into tunnel vision, expending precious attention on a chase that’s ultimately in vain. I’ve spent so long working out who I really am and what I really want out of life, feeling like I am the only one who understands how my soul works; why would I throw all that away? In her seminal 2024 video Twilight, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints states that love breaks down the barriers and membranes marking out the individual; that sounds euphoric, but also destabilising, dizzying.

‘What’s your greatest fear?’ is such a classic icebreaker question, and I’ve never been able to think of an answer; heights are scary, but not that much, spiders are scary, but not that much, et cetera.

I mean it completely when I say my greatest fear might just be love.

*

I entered The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill expecting to fall in love with it (art seems the only thing I am capable of falling in love with) and left my first listen with very mixed feelings. It hadn’t blown me away, and I still didn’t fully understand why this was considered the best album ever by Apple, but the religious references on the album had been ones I had surprisingly connected with. Lyrically, the album felt like something I could imagine the people at my old church enjoying – Hill reflects on the joys of motherhood, thanking God for her child, and in one very controversial track (‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’), calls out promiscuity and hookup culture.

However, my favourite track on Miseducation was the very last, a hidden track that was not on the original release: ‘Tell Him’. It reminds me, oddly, of a phenomenon my mother used to criticise, that of worship songs whose lyrics are so vague they could be about the writer’s lover (she called them ‘Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs’). Hill quotes Bible verses and describes a person whom she loves but who has also been her saviour, leaving the listener uncertain if she is addressing her partner or Jesus. This ambiguity feels almost sacrilegious, but I bizarrely love lounging in it, reclining in the confusion of whom she is truly devoted to.

Strangely, my faith has been fortified since listening to Miseducation. It feels like I haven’t taken Christianity seriously in years, but church has become something I enjoy again; I’ve made new friends there, and we have connected on a level which I did not know possible. Christians keep appearing in my life, and it feels like a message being sent. If anything, church may just be the most relaxing element of my life now; if you were to tell teenage me that, he would think you’d gone crazy.

I don’t know if I will ever find a boyfriend. I hope I will, truly I do.

But what I do know is that when I wake up, when I fall asleep, I want to tell him.

“Tell him I need him, tell him I love him.

 And it’ll be alright.”

Author: David Uptin (he/him) is an emerging writer, currently based in Magandjin/Meanjin (Brisbane) and studying Creative Writing at QUT. He is an editor at the QUT Literary Salon and currently on the Editorial Board of ScratchThat Magazine. David loves writing contemporary, realistic fiction, and is particularly passionate about exploring real issues queer and neurodivergent youth face.

 

Artist: Phoenix Sunrider (they/she) is an aspiring author with several works in the making. They love all kinds of animals, and add as many as possible into all their works whether that be high fantasy, magical realism, or even fan fiction. They currently have no social media platforms, but hope to develop some when more work is completed.

Edited by: Ricky Jade and Georgia Formby