Everyday Heroes: Rev. Duncan Teague

It’s a curriculum vitae that many public health advocates would envy, with enough interpersonal connections to fill a phone book. But what makes his profile even more impressive is that Teague -- who came out as gay as a Kansas City teenager, majored in theater arts at a conservative Catholic college in the Midwest, then moved to Atlanta, a Black gay mecca -- considers himself an accidental LGBTQ health advocate.

“Had you told the ‘theater queen’ in 1980, ‘You know, you’re going to end up in Kenya doing (HIV-AIDS prevention) work as an ordained minister,’ I think I would have laughed,” says Teague, whose parents raised him according to their old-school Baptist faith. His activism on behalf of the marginalized, he says, stems in part from those childhood lessons, and his own spiritual journey as an adult.

“I thought it was just my being, first, a good Christian, and then a good person,” says Teague. “And then being a good spiritual person became a career.”

It all started not long after Teague graduated from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas and moved to Atlanta in 1984 at the suggestion of a close relative. Though he was working in a series of punch-clock jobs -- waiter, Kinko’s staffer, office clerk -- waiting to break into the Black theater community, his timing seemed prescient.

“Within two years of moving here, there was this pandemic that had started, and it was called the HIV and AIDS virus,” he says. “I was starting to see it, feel it, live in it, lose friends. And I started doing what I could to help.”

Teague began establishing himself in Atlanta’s Black queer community, then volunteering at community organizations like Black and White Men Together, an interracial gay men’s advocacy organization. Within two years, Teague was working with local nonprofits like AID Atlanta; by 1988, he was representing the region at national AIDS prevention conferences. Within a decade, Teague was working with AIDS researchers at Georgia State University and the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta.

It was a surprising turn, even to Teague.

“My undergraduate degree is not in public health. It is not in epidemiology. Not even in health sciences. It was in theater,” he says. “I got a little part time job at this little agency (Black and White Men Together) that had two full time employees, and a bunch of volunteers and a few half time employees or consultants. And that changed my life. And I’m still doing that work.”

In 1999, however, Teague’s life took another unexpected turn when he was invited to join the interim leadership team of First Existentialist Congregation of Atlanta, a Universalist church undergoing transition. The work rekindled a long-held interest in joining the ministry, so Teague enrolled in Candler School of Theology at Emory University, graduating in 2011.

Not long after he was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 2014 -- and founded a UU church in the West End, Atlanta’s majority-Black community -- Teague underwent surgery for prostate cancer. True to his twin callings in public health and faith, he transformed a personal health crisis into a teachable moment for Black men.

“From the pulpit I talk about being a prostate cancer survivor,” he says “I talk about what especially black men and older men need to do about our prostate health and our health in general. And it never fails: when I say it out loud, some person comes up to me and thanks me. Because they haven’t heard it said enough from a pulpit.”

Next year will mark his 10th anniversary of being cancer-free. And, as he reflects on his career in public health, Teague considers himself supremely blessed.

“I think I’ve made some wise decisions,” he says, noting that, back in the 80s, the AIDS virus claimed many of his peers as young men. “I certainly didn’t make all the wisest decisions sexually, but I ended up being a gay man of a certain age,” with a loving husband and a career that is fulfilling, if serendipitous.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I have chosen my work, and sometimes my work has chosen me.”