The Church Queens Gambit

EeastBayExpress.com – By Rachel Swan

Gays marry the black church in a new play by Thandiwe De Shazor.

Thandiwe Thomas De Shazor should have been at gay meditation last Wednesday night. Instead, he was loafing around his West Oakland apartment, contemplating his most recent convenience store purchase — a box of macaroni & cheese — with an air of self-reproach. “My mother would kill me,” he said. “She has this thing against boxed soul food.” De Shazor’s mother is a strict churchgoing woman, someone who married right out of high school, didn’t pierce her ears until she was about thirty, and just about fell apart when her then-eighteen-year-old son told her he was gay…