Beyoncé finally won Album of the Year. It hardly captures her importance…

I once heard a joke that every gay man is assigned at least one diva to whom he will be tethered for life. Once tethered, he will waste no opportunity to explain her importance, recreate her signature dance moves, or show her best performances and videos. These stans’ fervor — the Beyhive and Little Monsters, to name just a few — was on full display during Sunday’s Grammys telecast.

During the Grammys, much attention was paid to whether Beyoncé would win Album of the Year for her country-tinged, hip-hop, soul-honed album Cowboy Carter after previously losing the award for a stream of monumental, norm-defying releases. After her industry-changing self-titled album, her blistering exegesis of her marriage in Lemonade, and her revelry at the discotheque on Renaissance, she finally won.

In many ways, the show’s outcome was unimportant. Because of Beyoncé, boys like me, especially a Black gay boy growing up in a devout Christian household in Atlanta, have been able to live a little more fully, with or without the world’s celebration.

The soundtrack of my youth was filled with the testimonies and wails of Black divas. I can hear my mother singing along to Aretha and Patti. I knew the lyrics and the wails to “Ain’t No Way” and “Somebody Loves You Baby” just as well as or better than I learned nursery rhymes. My father owned Whitney’s I’m Your Baby Tonight and Janet’s Rhythm Nation 1814 on cassette, which were eventually unspooled and unlistenable from overuse. My maternal grandfather apparently loved his wife, kids, and Diana Ross.