Brit Barron on the 'grief' of leaving a world she loved for the person she loved

I grew up evangelical in America in the 1990s, which meant I was deeply, structurally uncool in middle school. No cable TV. No idea who Carson Daly was. While everyone else was watching MTV and absorbing what was happening culturally, I was at church. Which I loved, genuinely and without irony, even as I understood on some level that it was not helping my social standing.

I went to a Christian college. I stayed in the faith. By the time I was 26, I was a pastor at a megachurch, and I mean a proper megachurch; lights and lasers and fog machines, the full production. I was good at it. I enjoyed it. I had built my entire life, career, and community around it and I felt, mostly, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Except there was always something missing. I couldn't tell you what. I didn't have the language for it.

Then I met the creative director of the church.

She was the most wonderful person I had ever encountered and I fell in love with her completely and immediately, which did require me to update some fairly significant assumptions I had been holding about myself. In hindsight, and hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. There were signs. I had signed an abstinence pledge to stay away from my boyfriend at the time. No problem! Easy! Done! Not a struggle at all! Turns out that was an important clue.

Anyway, I was gay. My wife, as she is now, was standing in front of me. And I knew, I knew immediately, what it would cost.

Gay and megachurch pastor do not go together where I'm from. The life I had built, the community I had poured myself into, the career, the identity, the whole architecture of it; I understood that choosing this love would mean losing all of it. And I chose it anyway. Because when you're given the chance to choose between what you've been told to love and the love you've actually found for yourself, there's really only one answer, even if it's terrifying.

It wasn't easy. I have to be honest about that, because the warm-resolved version of this story can make it sound cleaner than it was. Leaving was grief. Real grief, for something I had genuinely loved, even knowing it couldn't hold me. Joy and fear arrived at the same time and took up residence together and didn't leave for years. I was free and I was lost and I was building something new and I was mourning something old, usually all within the same hour.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started making a show.

Because that's the thing about loss, real loss, the kind that costs you something, it's where art lives. Not in the tidy version you tell people at dinner, but in the actual experience of letting go and not knowing what comes next and finding, slowly, that you're still here. That you're building something. That you can take the pain and turn it into something to share.

My show, Church, was born from a question I kept asking myself: what if I could rebuild the thing I lost, but only keep the parts I actually liked? The community, the music, the sense that you're part of something bigger than yourself… without the parts that required me to be someone I wasn't.

It turns out you can. You just have to burn the whole thing down first.

The show is about faith and identity and what happens when the community you were born into can't hold who you're becoming. It's about grief and joy and fog machines and falling in love. It's about building something new out of the wreckage of something old.

And yes, there’s also a whole lot of jokes. Because while all of this was sometimes painful, life is also, and I cannot stress this enough, objectively hilarious.

• Church is at the  Gilded Balloon Teviot at 12.40pm throughout the Edinburgh Fringe from August. 5.

Published: 23 Jul 2026