Hillsong Boy

This is the story of Scott Parker who spent 20 years in Hillsong reaching the heights of Christian celebrity as a star singer. Welcome to the alluring world of megachurches, which make such great dramatic backdrops with their evangelical bigotries and financial secrets, their effusive theatre and enveloping community – and especially in Scott’s telling, since he’s also queer.  

On the day gay conversion therapy was made illegal in NSW, Scott tells his overcapacity audience how he disguised his secret, prayed desperately not to masturbate and shut his eyes to temptation. 

]He starts off singing his greatest Jesus hits, unsuccessfully rousing us to sing along, before an offstage interviewer asks increasingly penetrating questions about Hillsong ways, its queer intolerance, its leaders and cult conformity. These he bats away with a mock boyband innocence, and (sincerely) celebrates what communal fun all this is since he joined Hillsong aged 13.

It’s a witty script by Scott Parker and director Felicity Nicol, spiced with memories of being exorcised of his homosexuality by other male teenage believers rubbing oil on each other in the shadows, and later on his knees sublimating his lusts into a desperate need to rub bodies with Daddy God (as some Hillsongers call Him).  

We see Scott’s solo singing getting crazed and – suddenly and inexplicably – he’s out of Hillsong but also out as “bisexual or pan sexual”, arguing that it was his very queerness which gave him the resilient shield to protect him from their hooks.

Hillsong Boy is the first showing of a work in progress developed by producer Robbi James and part-funded Brand X.   Scott’s story is still oddly fractured, missing key opportunities to share intimate connections about his family and upbringing, his sexual explorations as a Hillsonger, how his co-religionists reacted to his exposure and his departure happened.  All we know is the bald fact that he’s since been rejected by all his family and Hillsong friends. 

So how does that feel?

This entertaining and important show now needs more candour and varied moments of drama.

Martin Portus

Images by The Flying Nun by Brand X and Kate Williams.