Meet Marshall Bang (a.k.a MRSHLL). He’s a Korean-American singer from California on mission to conquer South Korea’s music scene as an openly gay Christian K-pop superstar.
After appearing last year on “Show Me The Money,” Korea’s version of “The Voice,” Bang is about to debut his first solo EP next month, which he says will have an R&B flare to it.
The singer grew up in a conservative Christian community outside of Anaheim, California. His mom is an evangelical Christian pastor at a megachurch for Korean immigrants.
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“Church is supposed to be a place where you can really be yourself but because certain subjects are untouchable,” Bang says in a new interview with KPCC. “being gay was one of them.”
Growing up, Bang avoided thinking about his sexuality by focusing on his music–singing in church choir and making YouTube videos singing covers of songs by other musicians.
“I just kind of pushed everything down and suppressed it,” he recalls. “And if anyone, you know, accused me of being gay, I would just be like ‘No, no.'”
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After high school, he enrolled at Biola University, a Christian college in La Mirada, Californi, where he continued to sing and co-founded a dance troupe.
A few years ago, a TV producer found some of his old YouTube videos and offered to fly him out to Seoul and compete on a talent show. He didn’t win the competition, but decided to relocate to Seoul. It was around this time that Bang says he began coming out, as well.
Related: Watch the decidedly sexy debut from Holland, K-pop’s first openly gay star
He recalls, “I spoke to my mom in Korean. My Korean was just absolutely terrible. It’s very pre-schooly, like ‘Mom, I like boys.’ And so I think she was, like, kind of confused.”
“There isn’t a lot of material out there for Koreans about what being gay is. And there definitely isn’t anything within the Korean Christian community on LGBTQ stuff.”
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Bang says his parents are still processing his sexuality, and continue to pester him about getting married and starting a family.
“If being gay is a sin, I don’t understand why being gay is so much more worse than lying and cheating and all these other things that people readily accept in Christianity,” he says.
Fans have already gotten a taste of the R&B vibe that will be featured in Bang’s forthcoming EP in his recent collaboration with DJ Friz like on the song “Dive.”
Listen below.
Related: K-Pop’s Jo Kwon Addresses Criticism Surrounding his Drag Queen Role in Musical ‘Priscilla’
Vince
Interesting and I guess it’s more of a cultural difference like the Immigrant Factor. I don’t see white Christians here warming up to that though.
Paco
“If being gay is a sin, I don’t understand why being gay is so much more worse than lying and cheating and all these other things that people readily accept in Christianity,”
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Because Christians are the ultimate hypocrites. The only sins that are forgivable and basically ignored as being sins, are the sins they are committing on a daily basis.
That’s the problem with man made religions claiming “God’s Law”. There really is no God to hold them accountable. They can do and say whatever they want no matter how many lives they destroy in the process.
Vince
I don’t argue with them anymore. I’ve never once convinced any of by using logic and reason. Ignorance is their bliss and I just let them have it.
However i do have respect for guys like this that try to work from within. Good luck though. Lol
Cylest Brooks
Funny story.
I have attended the Milwaukee Pridefest event every year for a long time. Every year there are protesters that stand outside and make a scene, with cops on horses standing by in case things get out of hand. One year I decided to approach one of these protesters to see what rhetoric they used to justify their presence. I knew the woman I approached because she also protested an abortion clinic where I had volunteered as an escort.
She was not prepared to talk to someone with an education in Christian Education, and I backed her into a corner several times. In true Bigot style, when she finally realized that she had no ground to stand on… she literally just turned her body 90 degrees and started yelling at other people walking by.
Just straight up refused to acknowledge that I was there and that I had just disproven everything she stood for.
Point being: there is no point talking to them. They don’t care about what’s real, or what’s true. They care about their own bias. That’s it.
Vince
Also there’s a famous saying. If you could reason with religious people.. There would be no religious people..
Mike
I’m gay and Christian, and I go to two churches that are very welcoming of LGBT Christians. One has a gay minister on its staff, and both have celebrated gay weddings. This is in NYC, but gay-friendly churches are popping up in many place. Of course, there are churches that hate gays, but they’re gradually withering away, because Christian Millennials are much more pro-gay than their elders, and they’re taking over.
People like Paco and Vince need to stop focusing on the idiots in the news and look at the Christians who are actually in their communities. I think you may be pleased at what you find.
irbaboon
When ever christians act nice to gay people it is only because they are trying to proselytize them
irbaboon
He is cute, but him being christian just ruins it for me.Being a gay christian is like being a Jewish nazi
Hussain-TheCanadian
With all due respect, your comment is quite ridiculous; Jesus, and frankly the new testament, says nothing about homosexuality, regardless of what Christian churches have preached throughout the ages.
Being a follower of Jesus is a spiritual path, to be a better person, to be with the might creator in the hereafter; that is obvious if you bothered to read the four gospels, its a shame that it needs a Muslim to remind you how ludicrous your opinion is.
chris33133
When I read stories like this one — and the comments that, invariably, they provoke — I like to think of them (the stories) as being about intersectionality and not about their particulars. Some gay folk cannot find a home at the intersection of two spaces (e.g., a fundy Xian family and being gay); and others, like this pop staff, try to manage the competing demands at the intersection of multiple spaces.
I think that is exhausting. I’m glad that I’m rather shallow and that I stopped overthinking trivial stuff like contradictions bother me. I just get on with my life.
In the words of Mary Poppins, who we all know to be “practically perfect in every way,” “I never explain myself.” It’s so much easier that way.