In a hot and dusty room, five stories above West Chapel Hill Street on Monday evening, Katelyn MacDonald stands in front of a massive wooden keyboard and begins to play the bells.
MacDonald, one of the leaders of the LGBTQ group at Duke Memorial Church, warms up with a brief hymn to mark the 6 p.m. hour—“Be Thou My Vision”—pushing the chime’s ten wooden levers like the keys of a cumbersome piano, each lever pulling a vertical cable that swings the hammer inside a bell.
After she finishes playing from the hymnal, MacDonald takes a breath and starts to hammer out a slightly more modern melody on the 116-year-old bells: “HOT TO GO!” The raunchy and ridiculously catchy song by queer pop star Chappell Roan spills out of the Romanesque-revival tower, filling downtown Durham with the sounds of Pride Month.
This month Duke Memorial United Methodist Church racked up around 7 million views on a TikTok, posted by a nearby apartment dweller, that shows the first time MacDonald played “HOT TO GO!” on June 1. Coupled with some behind-the-scenes footage from MacDonald herself, it’s enough attention to justify calling the 1886 church newly viral.
“It was very much me just looking forward to Pride Month,” says MacDonald of her unusual bells ballad. “I [played] it because I wanted to and I thought the city of Durham might enjoy it.”
And it wasn’t just the city that enjoyed it: The bell-ringing TikTok also reached the ears of Kayleigh Amstutz, who performs as Chappell Roan and who is, as it happens, stopping by Raleigh on June 12 as part of her Midwestern Princess tour.
“My jaw dropped,” Amstutz told the INDY in an audio recording sent over email.
The pop star, who is from Springfield, Missouri and has said she grew up Christian and believing that being “gay was a sin,” has been outspoken about her queer identity and support of the LGBTQ community. In recent weeks, she’s used her platform for political advocacy, even turning down an invitation to perform at a pride event at the White House.
“We want liberty, justice, and freedom for all. When you do that, that’s when I’ll come,” she said to the camera (while dressed like the Statue of Liberty) at a concert in New York. “That means freedom in trans rights,” she added. “That means freedom in women’s rights. And it especially means freedom for… all oppressed people in occupied territories.”
Amstutz told the INDY that she was excited to hear the song played in a church.
“I haven’t been that shocked in…” she trailed off, “Probably ever. For the first time, it felt like my song was within the culture for the first time ever. Obsessed.”
A charged Pride Month in Durham
While it was an unconventional song to play on church bells, MacDonald knew she had the support of church leadership.
Duke Memorial, in recent years, has been on the progressive side of the denomination-wide turmoil over LGBTQ policy. In 2020, lead pastor Heather Rodrigues made headlines as one of twelve clergy members who presided over Duke Memorial’s first gay wedding in an act of “holy disobedience,” as same-sex couples weren’t yet allowed to get married in the United Methodist Church (UMC).
Other Methodist groups have been at the center of tension in Durham. Earlier this year, Pioneers Durham—a church and coffee shop on Geer Street—closed its doors after receiving pushback, since its opening two years prior, from the community regarding the church’s stance on LGBTQ issues.
In 2022, Pioneers Church left the UMC. They’re not the only ones: Since 2019, nearly a third of North Carolina UMC churches have disaffiliated, leaving a more progressive group, including Duke Memorial, to steer doctrine in a more inclusive direction.
“I pray that the teenager who is being told they are a sin hears ‘HOT TO GO!’ on our bells and knows they are not a sin,” Rodrigues later tells INDY.
While Durham has a reputation for being a welcoming community, the state has spent the last year flirting with the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor who draws on Christianity to justify calling queer people “filth” and threatening arrest for trans people who use the bathroom of their choice.
And just across the warehouse district, Durham’s First Presbyterian Church had its pride decor stripped down and thrown in the trash, earlier this month.
“It was another reminder that there’s still hate in the world, even though we are a space of inclusion and welcome,” First Presbyterian associate pastor Reverend Esther Hethcox told the INDY. Hethcox said it felt like “an attack on our personhood and attack on our sacred space.”
Together, congregants of First Presbyterian and Duke Memorial spent a Sunday morning redecorating the church on East Main Street. (St. Philip’s Episcopal and Trinity UMC couldn’t join due to scheduled worship, but sent along their best wishes.) The joint congregations, including Hethcox, Rodrigues, and MacDonald, posed for a picture in front of the re-established decor.
Like the leaders at Duke Memorial, Hethcox hopes that anyone passing by the church sees the decorations and understands the message.
“We want them to know that this is a space of radical acceptance and radical welcome and a place where they can come fully as they are—wherever they are on their faith journey and wherever they are in their lives—and that they will be loved fully and wholly for who they are,” Hethcox said.
A bellwether of change
On Monday evening, after playing “HOT TO GO!,” MacDonald closes out her mini-concert with Billie Eilish’s “LUNCH” and Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.”
Next, she leads me up a series of ladders into the metal maze of the bells themselves. As we crouch and crawl between the ten bells—some as small as a human head and others bigger than a bathtub— the city of Durham comes into view around us, and MacDonald reflects on the legacy of Duke Memorial, the United Methodist Church, and what it means to play a song about queer sex on its bells.
“I think that God created people, and created people to be sexual beings,” MacDonald says. “If you think of queer sexuality as sinful, or less than, or not from God, then yeah, you’re gonna want to avoid it. But if you can embrace that as a gift from a creator who imbues us all with various sexualities then I think you can begin to see the sacred beauty in something like a Chappell Roan song.”
In her sermon on Sunday, after helping to redecorate First Presbyterian, Rodrigues addressed the sexuality of the music head-on and highlighted the positive response to the videos.
“In case you haven’t figured it out,” she said, a rainbow stole around her shoulder, “‘HOT TO GO!’ is not a hymn…’HOT TO GO!’ is a song about sex. Is it Christian to promote sex outside of marriage? Is it ok to blur the lines between sacred and secular?”
“The answer to these questions invites us into an ongoing dialogue about what it means to be Church in God’s world,” Rodrigues continued, pacing in front of the congregation. “The answers are layered and they’re storied and they’re complicated and they’re beautiful and they’re messy,”
“Queer people got it. They understood as soon as they heard the church bells ringing out ‘HOT TO GO!’ that this is a church that sees them, that loves them, that includes them.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
