Singer Quindon Tarver died Friday in a car crash on a Dallas highway. He was 38.
He was best known as the choir boy who sang covers of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and Rozalla’s “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good)” on the soundtrack to the 1996 Baz Luhrmann 1996 film Romeo + Juliet.
Before that, Tarver appeared as a choir boy in the controversial 1989 video for Madonna’s hit “Like a Prayer.”
They were apt roles for Tarver, who began singing as a four-year-old in the church where his grandfather was the pastor. “It was something that flowed from me,” he told Australia’s ABC in 2017. “It was something natural.”
Tarver released his only album, Quindon, in 1996.
His was not an easy life. Tarver alleged he was sexually abused and then ostracized for speaking out. “I had been molested, I had been raped, I had lost my career, which is what I had dreamed of doing all my life,” he recalled.
Tarver turned to drugs and alcohol. He tried out for Season 7 of American Idol in 2008 (he was eliminated during the “Hollywood Week” round) and attempted suicide in 2012.
In 2019, Tarver publicly came out as gay in an Instagram post wherein he wrote: “Never stand in the shadows when you belong in the light!!!”
Last October, he released the single “Stand Out Ground” to protest police brutality.
"Life is precious & time waits for no one," he wrote in an Instagram post last month. "If there’s anything that you’re holding on to that’s not conducive for your overall well being I CHALLENGE you to release it."