Leviticus: Faggot

The fifth track on Peace Beyond Passion, written by Ndegeocello alone and produced by David Gamson, with strings arranged by Paul Riser. It tells of a young gay man whose father throws him out of the house and whose mother prays for him to be saved. The Houston Press summed it up as a man whose self-worth is destroyed by his parents' hatred. The title points to Leviticus, the book of the Bible most often quoted against gay people, though the lyric never quotes it. Over Oliver Gene Lake's drums and Federico Gonzalez Pena's Rhodes, Wah Wah Watson's guitar carries the song into its climax, and it closes on the spiritual Swing Down Sweet Chariot.

Ndegeocello explained in 1996 that the titles are bound up with what the songs address. She told the Houston Press that "those terms can strip away your identity so that you become only that," and told Rolling Stone's Ann Powers that the title shows a man who was called the word and had his identity stripped away. Powers noted that the title raised eyebrows among gay listeners too. Stanley Collins later called the song her most scathing critique of theology used as a weapon.

The video

Kevin Bray directed the video, the only one made for the album. It opens with the young man being thrown out of his home and ends with his apparent suicide. The Box aired it in full, MTV cut a shot of a razor blade, and BET did not air it, its music director saying the problem was strictly the word in the title. Ndegeocello called that a crock of bull and said the channels that cut or skipped it had missed the point. The Counter Narrative Project later said it broke new ground in telling Black gay men's stories on video.

Afterlife

The single reached 15 on the Billboard dance club chart, with Glee Club remixes by Teri Bristol, but the Houston Press wrote that timid radio programmers let it die quickly. It won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Music Song in 1997, and anniversary pieces in 2016 and 2021 treat it as a landmark Black queer record. On stage it closed her sets at North Sea Jazz, Toronto and Darien Lake in 1996, and setlist.fm logs it as late as Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2019. The first upload in the hypersongs web is the album version. The second upload is the 1996 music video, which uses a shorter edit of the song.