From ex-Gay ministry to gay bops: Meet the queer musician turning trauma into club anthems
From seminary school to bops about butts
Mark
Surviving an evangelical upbringing that wants you to “pray the SSA away” isn’t easy. For Andrew Padilla aka Cain Culto, that harrowing experience informs the genre-busting, queer-centric music he makes today.
From last year’s earworm “KFC Santeria” to his newest bop BIMBAMBAU, the Kentucky-by-way-of-Florida musician’s rise proves the power of fighting back against religious trauma. If you haven’t joined the cult of Cain Culto, you’re not paying attention.
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As a younger man raised in a mostly-white Kentucky suburb, Culto stood out. He was forced to attend a Brazilian ex-gay ministry by the church that wanted to break him of his “SSA” tendencies. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
“I remember I first connected with this one guy over Zoom briefly. He was essentially a counselor for people who are attracted to the same sex,” Culto tells Queer Kentucky in a new profile. “And I remember leaving that Zoom call, thinking… ‘he was the success story?’”
Culto survived the harrowing experience and is now actively fighting against the anti-gay propaganda that put him there. “There was no one affirming me in my journey of leaving Christianity to accept my queerness,” he recalls. “It felt like everyone thought I was insane.”
It wasn’t easy for a former youth pastor who once considered going away to seminary school. But when he finally got the strength to come out, things changed for the better. “Even just like, something as simple as a jock strap,” he recalls, “I’d be like, “Oh, that’s so cringe. Like, why are people literally showing their a** in a jock strap?” He says of his early days out of the closet. “And now that’s a whole part of Cain Culto in all my videos, I’m leaning into queer symbols, and how that feels empowering to me.”
Obviously, it wasn’t an easy transition. In 2021, Culto ditched his Evangelical upbringing for good and started embracing his queerness, along with his Colombian-Nicaraguan roots. After an emotional breakdown that had him questioning everything, he started making music under his new persona. The music he learned to play as a Christian kid–including his insane classical violin skills—were now a super gay rebuke of the church’s anti-gay leanings. Out of this rebuke, Cain Culto was born.
Culto’s religious roots still had a place in his life, only now, they were tools to fight against oppression and anti-gay shame.
“Cain Culto, as a music project and…my artistic practice, is trying to undo these things, the things that I was taught to be ashamed of, to be afraid of within myself, embracing those things truly, finally,” he says. That undoing is also what paved the way for Culto’s bouncy, beat-driven bops that reference anime, tarot, witchcraft, and getting his nails did. And his “classical music about butts,” naturally.
Now, with his addictive beats and in-your-face style, he’s poised for a world takeover. “I’m trying to write something new over that narrative in my own life that doesn’t end in tragedy,” he says.
By doing that for himself, he’s helping countless others see a path forward.
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