The 30 Years That Brought Us #HB2

I. Hell Breaks Loose

Last year, when the Reverend Mykal Slack was preparing to move south to Durham, nearer to his and his wife’s families, some of his closest friends questioned his judgment. Slack had left rural Georgia twenty years earlier, and it was up north that he had built a career and an identity. He earned a law degree, clerked for a judge, and spent his early thirties attending New York’s Union Theological Seminary.

“I was getting clear about my faith,” he says. “Part of that clarity was understanding that, for me anyway, I must honor God by honoring the truth of myself.”

Slack had long understood that he was male, even though his birth certificate said otherwise. “But I knew enough about the way the world works that I couldn’t share the truth with anybody,” he says. Within the welcoming confines of the seminary, he found the path to authenticity, and in 2006 he came out as a man.