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Queer Theology & Bisexual Jesus with Benjamin Perry
2.2k Plays3 years ago
Follow Benjamin Perry on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FaithfullyBP
Some queer theological resources recommended by Benjamin Perry:
1. Radical Love by Patrick Cheng
2. Indecent Theology by Marcella Althaus-Reid
3. The Black Trans Prayer Book ed. by Dane Figueroa Edidi & J Mase III
4. Bad Theology Kills by Kevin Garcia
Two Bi Guys is now sponsored by Zencastr! You can get 30% off Zencastr for 3 months with promo code: twobiguys -- or just click this link: https://zencastr.com/pricing?coupon=twobiguys&fpr=ex42o. Start recording your own podcast or meetings today!
This episode is also sponsored by Vinovest. Discover wine investing with Vinovest -- get 2 months of fee-free wine investing with this offer link: zen.ai/twobiguys
It's about time for modern religion to not just accept queerness but to celebrate it -- and that's exactly what Benjamin Perry, a Bi+ Minister as Middle Church in New York City, is doing. In this episode we chatted about Benjamin's journey toward a bisexual identity, opening up to his wife and the experience of being married and bi, how he found his calling in theology and began to blend it with his burgeoning queerness, coming out in a religious community (a surprisingly positive experience for him), and the inclusive mission of Middle Church and how it reflects God's queerness. We also discussed the possibility that Jesus and his disciples were bisexual/fluid/queer, what the backlash to this "controversial" idea tells us about religious fundamentalism, and why queerness should not just be "acceptable" among the faithful but why it's actually vital to understanding God's love, community, and compassion.
Two Bi Guys is produced and edited by Rob Cohen
Created by Rob Cohen and Alex Boyd
Logo art by Kaitlin Weinman
Music by Ross Mintzer
We are supported by The Gotham
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Two Bye Guys' and Zencastr
00:00:00
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Hi everyone, this is Rob. You're about to listen to Two Bye Guys. But first, did you know that in Season 3 I started using Zencaster to record and produce this podcast? And then this season, Season 4, they've become a sponsor of the show? It's true, they're a sponsor and I'm very excited to be using their product and to be sharing it with you.
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As I've explained, the reason I switched to Zencaster is because of their sound quality. Everything gets recorded locally on both ends, and then Zencaster compiles it and does post-production. But did you know it's also quite easy to use, much easier than anything else I've tried? Here's how it works. I go to zencaster.com, I've got my dashboard, I make a room for each episode or each interview I want to do,
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Speaker
Then I send that link to my guest. And unlike Zoom, it doesn't have a day and a time. It's just a link that's available whenever. If we have to reschedule, we use the same link. When we get there, it's like Zoom or FaceTime. We can see each other. There's video. It's like we're in a little green room and we can chat. We can go over what's going to happen before we record. I hit record. We do the show. That part's up to you.
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And then when I'm done, I click stop. I can still see my guest. We can debrief. We can chat for a minute. And it usually takes about 10 seconds for the tracks to upload to the cloud. And then I wait a few weeks or months before I start editing because I procrastinate. But that has nothing to do with Zencaster. Zencaster makes it very easy, quick. I highly recommend it. I want you to have the same easy experience as I do for all my podcasting and interview needs.
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Speaker
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00:02:01
Speaker
It's funny, my partner kept joking. She was like, what's that podcast you're doing today? Gay Boys? I was like, almost. Gay Boys podcast, welcome. I'm sure that exists. No doubt.
Introducing Reverend Benjamin Perry
00:02:24
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Two Bye, guys. I am very excited for today's episode, another religious-themed episode, although I've had a lot of fellow Jews on, and today we have Ananju. We have Reverend Benjamin Perry. A colonizer in your beautiful podcast.
00:02:44
Speaker
Yes, welcome. Reverend Benjamin Perry is a minister of outreach and media studies at Middle Church in New York City. He's also an award-winning writer focusing on the intersection of religion and politics.
00:03:00
Speaker
something we love to discuss here. His writing can be found in outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Huffington Post, Sojourners, Bussell, and Motherboard. He has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and New York One. He holds a degree in psychology from SUNY Genesco. I also hold a undergraduate degree in psychology, even more in common. And
00:03:22
Speaker
and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary, which was where we shot my first episode of television of Law and Order SVU. We probably crossed paths back in the day. I can't tell you the number of times I'm watching SVU and I'm like, oh, a rape where I used to, that's where I proposed. They're like, oh, there's a horrible murderer. I have so many lovely memories having brunch.
00:03:46
Speaker
We had somebody jump off the roof at Union Theological Seminary. Very- Yes. Such fun stuff. Yeah, I was at Union during that episode filming. That was mine. Everyone was holding up the signs and stuff. Yes. That was I wrote them. See, we were on campus at
Queer Inclusivity and Personal Journey
00:04:03
Speaker
the same time. Look at that. Hudson University. Exactly. Don't go to Hudson U. Wow, okay. It's really dope. So much in common already. I still have more of your bio to get through though.
00:04:14
Speaker
Benjamin is a passionate advocate for building church that lives into God's blessed queerness. His two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show, which I will also ask about. So welcome officially to Two Bye Guys, Reverend Benjamin Perry. It is so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, nice to finally meet you. I didn't realize our paths crossed 10 years ago. I just know you from Twitter the last couple of years, but nice to finally virtually meet you. So let's start how we always start. Tell us what pronouns you use and how you identify on any spectrums you'd like to identify on. Sure. So yeah, I'm Reverend Benjamin Perry. I use he-him pronouns. Identify as bisexual.
00:05:05
Speaker
It's interesting. I've been reflecting a lot about bisexuality, pansexuality. If I'm going to be really super honest, I don't know that I have a strong understanding of the differentiation there. I'm bisexual because those are the words that I grew up using to describe and knowing and understanding myself. Basically, I'm using that to describe the fact that ever since I
00:05:28
Speaker
knew that I was attracted to anyone, those attractions definitely did not correlate with gender in any which way. So that is sort of where I find myself in the sexuality matrix. My place in the gender spectrum is complicated. I generally have been identifying as a cis man even though that
00:05:49
Speaker
Label feels less and less secure these days And I think if I'm being super honest I'm probably more actually in sort of a he they space and certainly in a lot of my queer relationships and a lot of my queer friendships I have been much sort of more upfront about my own discomfort with
00:06:13
Speaker
not in discomfort, but just saying, like, using masculine language feels like it has less and less purchase on any understanding I have of gender, not that I
00:06:24
Speaker
I just don't know where I stand vis-a-vis gender these days, which is partly why I haven't sort of come out and been like, I'm non-binary because that almost feels like a definitive statement of gender in a way that I don't know that I really have a definitive statement to make. So whatever that's worth, that's sort of where I fit in the gender place.
00:06:44
Speaker
This whole episode is just going to be me agreeing with everything you say. I have a feeling because listeners can't see me nodding and smiling to everything you just said. I've been going through almost the exact same thing. I feel
00:06:59
Speaker
comfortable in my maleness, and I've never really quite doubted that. But I'm also, the more I learn and the more I interrogate that within myself, the more I don't really care what gender I am, or why do I feel comfortable in that? And it just makes less sense to me to even identify as anything
00:07:23
Speaker
Well, I think and part of it for me is like, what are those traits that I'm identifying as like, essentially male? And I'm like, I don't even know what that means. Right. Right. It's like, well, yeah, I guess I feel like a cisgender person, but like, what does it mean to be a man anymore? Yeah. And I've also been socialized to be a, you know, a cisgender male. So it's like how much of that is just, you know, not having gross dysphoria with the way that I have been socialized and how much of it is an actual identification with some sort of like, essential maleness, which I don't really feel like I feel.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah. Fascinating. Okay. You're helping me put some words to this stuff because I've talked about this in Alex too on the podcast and it's hard to find the words sometimes for it because it's very nebulous. It's very ephemeral because gender is nebulous. There you go. That's the answer. Cool.
00:08:12
Speaker
Okay, so why don't you take us back a little and tell us how you came to your bi identity? When did you realize and what was that process like in terms of getting to where you are today? Yeah, so I mean, I realized that I was bisexual very early on. I mean, I think like many people do as you start being like, wow, physical attraction, that's a thing. People are interesting to look at. I definitely was like, oh,
00:08:42
Speaker
other people seem to really be in certain lanes when it comes to who they are attracted to. And that was never the case for me. I think that I also very quickly gained an understanding that homosexuality was not a thing that one should aspire to. And so, you know, I have I think most of my early formative memories around
00:09:10
Speaker
being bisexual are memories of noticing like, oh, this part of me isn't welcome here. I've brought this up in some other places, some other podcasts, but I have this really distinctive memory of being in second grade and Super Smash Brothers had just come out.
00:09:30
Speaker
And this kid in my class was just using like all of these gay slurs to describe Samus or something. And I just, I was like, this like totally ridiculous, absurd memory. But at the time, like what I got from this, like,
00:09:46
Speaker
And I'm sure he barely knew what half of these words meant. I probably barely knew what half of these words meant. But when he's calling Samus a faggot and stuff, I was just like, oh, there's some stuff here that I had enough understanding of myself and who I was in the world and enough understanding of the world at large that I was like, oh, this is a part of me to keep to me because I don't want to be the target of Ira like Samus.
00:10:12
Speaker
And so for a very long time after that, I just had my own internalized understanding of my sexuality in the world. And then I had the way that I went about the world. And so I didn't have my first relationship with a man until I was in college. That was when I started to be more sexually open to those urges that were always in me.
00:10:37
Speaker
But I didn't come out publicly for another decade after that. And so for a long time, I had this relationship where I was very much out to a lot of the people closest to me in my life. So like my best friend who I've been friends since I was three and my partner, Erin, who I ended up marrying, I was always very upfront with her. A lot of like the queer communities that I have cultivated around myself, people who I
00:11:03
Speaker
know me and see me and for all of me and have for, you know, since I was, you know, an 18, 19 year old kid and coming out into the world and looking for some some affinity. Like those folks have always known who I was.
00:11:17
Speaker
But I had a lot of internalized homophobia. I certainly was not ready to be publicly in a relationship with a man throughout the sort of 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old years when I was most involved with men sexually. And then I met my wife.
00:11:38
Speaker
which was fabulous. It was my first year of seminary. I was like 20, I guess, to just turn 22. And we fell in love like super hard, super fast. And I was just like, oh, this is the person for me. And then I had this really, you know, these new complications where because I was at uni-theological seminary and I was really digging into gender and queer theory in a way that I hadn't previously. And I was really starting to do a lot of my own internal work and break down a lot of that internalized homophobia. I had this like, this,
00:12:08
Speaker
real change in the way that I understood my own sexuality and much more comfort with being bisexual and to a point where I definitely would have come out probably and would have been in open relationships with men except
00:12:23
Speaker
all of a sudden I was in a relationship with this woman and then I was possessed with all these new fears where I was like, oh, do I deserve to be part of the queer community, at least out loud and openly? Am I taking up space by identifying as bisexual when I'm in a nice hetero-passing relationship?
00:12:42
Speaker
is the queer community for me. And so I was really wrapped up with a lot of those new anxieties for another like four or five years.
Public Theology and Advocacy
00:12:51
Speaker
Until finally, I was at this point, I graduated from Union Theological Seminary. I had done a couple of years in editorial. I was back at Union doing public theology for them.
00:13:02
Speaker
in their communications department, and the Methodist Church made their decision to more deeply entrench their homophobia, joy of joys. And we had a lot of folks at seminary who were in the Methodist ordination process and were queer and were understandably devastated and didn't know if they could get ordained now in the tradition that, you know,
00:13:22
Speaker
called them by name and the tradition where they heard their call from God. And so it was really just really wrought and emotionally devastating time in the community. And so I was like, I need to do something, like in the community needs to do something to respond to this, particularly because union is such a
00:13:42
Speaker
safe haven for queer people of faith. I think when I was there, we had done an informal survey. It was about a quarter of the people who are seminarians at Union identified as LGBTQ+. It's a very queer seminary. We're like, well, we can't just be quiet about this.
00:13:58
Speaker
And so we have together this beautiful package called Queer Faith where I was just beautiful portrait photography by Muhammad Mia who's a fabulous photographer and was an intern in the department while I was there. He took these gorgeous portrait photos and then we combined it with people's stories, just people talking about their own faith, their own queerness, how they see their queerness as a reflection of the divine.
00:14:28
Speaker
And we got like 40 some odd seminarians and faculty and staff to be really open and bold at a time of a lot of pain. And I watched all of these seminarians who had so much to lose, people who were just starting their ordination process, who were in the process of going through all of the
00:14:52
Speaker
interviews and hoops and tests and everything else that they make you go through to get ordained, which being openly queer can really complicate that process a lot. And I saw them being super brave in public and saying, you know what,
00:15:12
Speaker
queer people have always been ministers. We will always be ministers. This is who I am. This is who I am called as." And I was like, I can't be quiet anymore. I can't just be like watching from the sidelines being like, yay. I was like, I need to actually say who I am and what I stand for in the world as a part of this project I was editing. And so I came out publicly and it was beautiful. I'm like, of course, all of the fears that I had and all these anxieties I had were based in nothing. I had all these queer friends who, you know,
00:15:40
Speaker
or folks in my life who didn't know that I was bi, were like, yay, we're so happy, welcome. All of this fear was all in my head. And so now for the last several years, I have been really fortunate to work at Middle Church, which is a gorgeous, wondrous queer community, just full of amazing humans. And I get to do all sorts of wonderful queer theology in the world. And I'm so, so happy that I am finally being open about who I am.
00:16:13
Speaker
I want to get to your work and your religious life, but I have a few questions about some stuff you talked about because it's stuff I'm always curious about. When you say you came out publicly, how did you do that? As part of an editorial piece that was read by thousands and thousands of people around the country and everything from exaltation from liberal swaths of
00:16:37
Speaker
the religious world to like searing hatred from evangelicals. So real low pressure.
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, you came out. So you basically did it aside from your wife and maybe a few friends all at once to everyone in a very public way. Yeah. And so the piece was dropping on a Thursday or something. And so that Monday through Thursday, I was calling my grandparents and calling my parents, calling all these people in my life who I didn't want to learn from an article.
00:17:08
Speaker
So yeah, I had like this mad cap like three days of just like coming out to everybody and it was really beautiful I got to hear my you know grandmother say that she loves me so much and that there was nothing I could ever ever do that would come in the way of that and she was yeah, just just all these conversations that made me weep
00:17:26
Speaker
So it was actually so beautiful to get to have all of that just jammed in three days. That's very nice. It kind of forces your hand, but it turns out to be a positive thing. It's funny because I did the same thing where I was on this episode of Slut Ever. We recorded it and I knew it was going to be public and on television, except it wasn't three days later. It was like seven months later.
00:17:51
Speaker
So I was like, okay, it's gonna be out in seven months. I have seven months to go down my list and tell everyone. To go back a little, I'm always curious about this. When you said you had your first experience with a guy in college, had you been dating or had you been with women before? And was this like a new thing? Yes. So was that like, had you been thinking about it? Or was it like,
00:18:16
Speaker
kind of fraught getting into or did it just happen or what was it like? You know, it's funny. Like it was fraught in the sense that I definitely like, like there was like one guy who I think, you know, if I'd have been in a different place in my life, we'd like might've dated because we actually really liked each other. And he was really frustrated that I was definitely not in a place that I could just be like, yeah, let's go out on a date on campus together. Like I just wasn't there.
00:18:42
Speaker
I didn't have a ton of internal hang-ups. I was pretty confident that I didn't want this to be a public thing, that this is a private thing for me. I just needed to be in this space right now. I hope you understand. But for me personally, I was jazzed.
00:19:02
Speaker
I was in college. I was having a great time. I was meeting folks. It's interesting that I'll have certain members of certain kinds of really potent fears about the ways that I didn't want things to happen or that I was
00:19:17
Speaker
And I think part of that just once it's big and out in the world, you can't take that back. And so I think that certainly obviously that speaks to a degree of internalized homophobia and a degree of not being ready to do something that you can't undo. But in terms of just the joy of private expression, I was there.
00:19:41
Speaker
I mean, we do have a lot in common, although this is not one of those things because I identify with what you said, like looking back, for me, there were signs of my queerness or my attraction to men at a young age, but I really didn't let them integrate into myself. I
00:20:01
Speaker
I internalized the homophobia and I pushed it away. I remember the thing that sticks in my mind is being a 13-year-old and looking at Abercrombie ads. I remember I would always buy stuff at Abercrombie and save the shopping bag because it had all these pictures of men and women with their shirts on, the shirtless men with the abs, but also the women too.
00:20:28
Speaker
there was some part of me that knew I was attracted to everyone on those shopping bags, but I didn't let myself think, oh, that might mean I'm queer or bi or anything, or I might want to have those experiences. I still just was like, well, you're either gay or straight, and I'm probably straight. I didn't let myself go down that road, and I kind of wish I had
00:20:55
Speaker
I think that in part, some of this is like me painting it in retrospect because I think at the time, if you had asked me when I was 18, I probably would have been like, oh yeah, I'm straight. I just have sex with men sometimes. It's like, you're not straight. That's all right.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah. We could really get into that topic. But there's too much to get to. But I just got into a Twitter argument with somebody about straight guys who have sex with guys. Anyway, let's not get into that today. I have another question about your story. So you met your life in your early 20s. Yeah.
00:21:37
Speaker
Did you come out to her right away or when did you tell her and how did you frame it for her? We've been dating for a couple months and I was just like, listen, this is who I am. We have a lot of those conversations when you're first getting to know somebody and you're sharing things and you're
00:21:57
Speaker
you know, lots of like 3am chatting in bed kind of talks. Like I don't remember exactly the context, but I was just like, listen, like you need to know this about me. That doesn't mean that I don't love you. And to her credit, Erin is a phenomenally wonderful person. And there was never even a moment where, you know, she was like, oh, does this mean that like, you're gonna cheat on me or anything? Those kinds of conversations I hear other people have. Like, yeah, she was just like, yeah, I mean, she went to Sarah Lawrence, like,
00:22:27
Speaker
There it is. She's a writer. She's an author. It wasn't a big deal. That's awesome. I've interviewed a lot of bi married guys who have really struggled with when and how to tell their wives. Sometimes it's like that and it's all good and other times it's not. I'm thankful that I did it that early because I think it would have been more of an awkward thing between us if I had been like five years in.
00:22:54
Speaker
Oh, hey, honey. Guess what? Because then I think it would have been like a why is he telling me now kind of thing. Whereas because it was so early, it was just like, yeah, we're sharing stuff about ourselves. I grew up in Westchester. I've had sex with men. Did you grow up in Westchester? I did. I grew up in Catona, New York.
00:23:15
Speaker
Oh, I grew up in Larchmont, New York. Oh, hilarious. Look at us. Yeah, I think that some people who wait and come out later, I get it because it's a tough thing to do, especially if it's not something you've totally figured out for yourself yet. You want to figure it out before you bring someone else in. But I think there are people who
00:23:39
Speaker
they don't like a wife who might not care about someone's sexuality as long as you have a good relationship with each other. But then the question of like, why couldn't you share this with me for so long? Because that becomes the that becomes a thing because the partnership kind of, at least in my mind, a primary partnership should be the person you can be yourself with and share everything with. Absolutely.
00:24:09
Speaker
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00:26:08
Speaker
let's talk a little bit about your faith and your work.
Reflecting on Religious Upbringing
00:26:11
Speaker
Love it. So I read that your lovely piece about being a bisexual minister. So tell us a little bit about as you're growing up and realizing your bisexuality, your queerness, how did that fit or not fit with your religion and how did that eventually lead to the work you're doing now?
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I was really, really fortunate, and this is something I always try to say when I'm, because the spectrum of queer experience in religious spaces is so wide and goes from the kids who are fortunate to grow up in middle right now to people who have been just horrendously abused by religious communities.
00:26:53
Speaker
I find myself very much in between those two experiences, and so I never try to talk about religious trauma in ways that frankly doesn't belong to me because that wasn't my story, and I'm really, really grateful that it wasn't. I grew up in a pretty sleepy Presbyterian church. It was very lovely. I loved my minister. My family were not particularly
00:27:16
Speaker
highest, but we went to church every Sunday and we're very involved. And my dad did a lot of the mission stuff and my mom led a choir. So I don't know that I had a really super deep faith growing up, but I knew that church was always a place that I was welcome. It was always a place that I was loved. Even in times when I was being bullied by other people, church was always a safe space where I knew that I could go and I could belong.
00:27:40
Speaker
Specifically, as it relates to sexuality, obviously, I think part of what made me feel welcome there was that what was not there, namely searing broadsides against my humanity. So I was very fortunate. I never heard things like, oh, if you're gay, you're going to go to hell. That kind of language was not in the church that I grew up in. And actually, my pastor
00:28:07
Speaker
did some things that I remember as a kid that really stuck out to me because I think these days they would not be recognized as mounting the barricades with the pride flag, your level of celebration. But for example, the Presbyterian Church at the time was the big crisis then when I was growing up was over gay ordination.
00:28:30
Speaker
can gay people be, not as ministers teaching elders, but as like ruling elders, can you be an elder in the church and be gay? And so the church nationally had not voted yes yet. So officially you were not allowed to be an elder in the church if you were a queer. And my pastor said, fuck it.
00:28:54
Speaker
we're done waiting. These people are our leaders in our church, they're elders in our church, and we're going to make them an elder." And so he made one of my parents, good friends, an elder in the church. And it was a big deal. The church nationally was not happy. I think if they had really pushed it, he could have lost his ordination. He didn't. But it really, I mean, sort of burned him and his relationship with the broader church. And so I
00:29:22
Speaker
It was an acrimonious time when I saw somebody who led my church and who was the religious figure who meant the most to me, drawing a line in the sand and saying, listen, I don't care what the national church says. I know it is right. I know what God is calling us to do and we're going to do it. And that made a real impression on me. That being said, I didn't hear a lot of like celebration of queer people in churches. There was definitely like a, it's okay if you're gay.
00:29:50
Speaker
kind of sentiment but like in the same way you might be like it's okay if uh you know you have red hair like
00:29:59
Speaker
But not as like a recognition that it's like, oh, that's a really fundamental and core part of what makes you a human. And it's actually a wondrous gift from God, something that you've been blessed with, something that like a gift that you offer the church, a different way of moving in the world, a different frame, a different lens, a different way of relating to other people, like none of that. Like there was no like queer theology. There was just like, we're not going to persecute you. And we're going to do what's right in terms of including you in the community. And so that's sort of the container I grew up in.
00:30:29
Speaker
And as I grew older and certainly as I went to seminary and stuff, that just wasn't enough anymore. It wasn't enough to be not kicked out of the door. It wasn't enough to be accepted. I wanted spaces that celebrated me in the same way that we celebrate straight people. That shouldn't be too much to ask.
00:30:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I really identified with all of this, like, growing up in my temple in Larchmont, like,
00:31:00
Speaker
was very similar. I think everyone was accepted and the whole sort of fundamentals of the religion I grew up with was community and love and peace and acceptance. And we did all these interfaith services with a Black Christian church down the road and really sort of ingrained in me to celebrate difference and celebrate diversity. But
00:31:26
Speaker
there were no queer people in the temple that I knew of explicitly. It was never mentioned explicitly. It was never, you know, specifically celebrated. And so I think it just sort of contributed to this overall invisibility of queerness for me growing up. And so, yes, it wasn't as bad as it is for many people. And I do, I agree with you, like, I feel very lucky that
00:31:52
Speaker
that wasn't in that situation. But it also didn't really give me many access points to say, Oh, that's my kind of Judaism, is that queer kind of Judaism, which is what I have realized lately. Or to see yourself represented in folks who are elite. And that's why I decided I was going to be that kind of minister. I was going to be a minister that
00:32:17
Speaker
like little queer kids in a congregation could look up to or, you know, and I get messages from like folks all over the place and like Kansas or something. And someone who finds me on Twitter and says, you know what? I didn't know that I could be Christian and be gay. And that is huge. It's huge to be particular and specific about who we are and proclaim those identities as holy because it means that somebody else who's growing up is going to be able to see themselves in somebody who wears a collar.
00:32:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Okay, so then you decide to go to Union Theological and you had all this in your mind when you got there like this is the type of minister I want to be or did it kind of form as you're studying and
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I kind of ran away to seminary. I didn't go with, I'm going to be a minister. I had been working in pharmaceuticals. I was doing neuropsych stuff. I felt really uncomfortable where I was. I knew I needed to sort of figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. And I was like, seminary, that's a place where people go to find themselves. If you're listening to this,
00:33:21
Speaker
don't go to seminary for that reason. Not a good choice. It happened to work out really well for me, but like really can't prescribe it. But yeah, so I went ostensibly under the auspices of like, oh, I was going to be a hospital chaplain because that felt like kind of similar to what I had been doing and was like not a total radical departure and something I could defend to my parents. I was like, listen, I'm still going to be working at a hospital. I'm just going to be doing something different.
00:33:46
Speaker
And I got to seminary and I had the huge fortune to study under folks like James Cone and Cornel West and you know, these just giants of black liberation theology that shaped my understanding of what it means to be a Christian.
00:34:02
Speaker
in really profound ways. And all of a sudden, I found my heart lit on fire by an articulation of the gospel that I just had never heard before. And so that's why I say that when I was growing up, I was not particularly devout. I was not particularly pious because I just hadn't heard a form. It was like a lot of like, love your neighbor. And I was like, yeah, good. That sounds great. That's important. And I still believe. It's not that I don't believe that anymore. It's just that there was a sort of
00:34:26
Speaker
say like a muscular Christianity because that's like the wrong adjective, but it was forceful in a sense that was like God has ordained the world for certain kinds of just relationships. And when the world violates those relationships, we have a responsibility to put them right.
00:34:43
Speaker
And that was a shift in my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian and certainly what it meant to be a minister that was really important. And so then as I started thinking about the ways that I had been heard by the world, thinking about the ways that I had suffered religious violence, not in my own community, but certainly just by living in America in a place where I certainly heard lots of people saying things like, if you're gay, you're going to go to hell.
00:35:06
Speaker
just in the broader context. And I said, you know what, this is a place where I actually have a particular unique lens to offer the world. This is a place that I have pain that I want to share in hopes that other people don't have to experience it.
00:35:20
Speaker
that's so nice. That's how I feel too. It's like it took so long and so much work to get to this point and now I feel a responsibility to kind of pay it forward and give the next generation that sort of leg up. Yeah. They're going to do all sorts of kind of like fabulous things that go leagues beyond the theology that I'm doing. They're going to be like, oh yeah, that Benjamin Barry guy, what a sleepy old cod jerk. That's the goal.
00:35:45
Speaker
Exactly, exactly, which would be great to see, like the queerness we can't even imagine yet. Exactly. Even more radical than ours.
00:35:58
Speaker
I want to read something from the piece you wrote, and then there's multiple things in it that are really interesting that we can talk about. But I think it's related to what you're talking about and the queerness sort of inherent in a lot of religions. You wrote, I'll never forget the moment when in my first semester I opened Patrick S. Cheng's book, Radical Love, and read
00:36:21
Speaker
quote, Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise, end quote. The words hit me like a thunderclap. Cheng wrote so movingly about how the biblical story shows God violating fixed and unjust hierarchies, how God's incarnation of Jesus resonates with LGBTQ coming out narratives, how God revels and is present throughout the wide diversity of human sexual experience.
00:36:44
Speaker
my mind and spirit reeled. Could God be queer like me? Suddenly I saw myself reflected in God's glorious image in a way I hadn't since I was a child. So, okay, there's multiple things in there we can talk about, but I had kind of had this vague idea in my head for myself about how my Judaism feels queer in a way that I never realized and couldn't put a finger on, but now
00:37:13
Speaker
my queerness and my reformed Judaism feel very overlapping and interconnected. So was that the same experience you had or tell us about that realization? Absolutely.
Queer Lens on Religious Narratives
00:37:25
Speaker
I mean, it's one of those things that like, you know,
00:37:28
Speaker
It's like those pictures that you're supposed to see two things in and you're like, you're looking at it for a while and you can only see the one thing and you're like, ah, I can't see the sailboat. And then all of a sudden something clicks and now you can only see the sailboat. You're like, I can't see the goblin anymore. And so I look at the story of Jesus Christ, you have this, violating the barrier between divinity and humanity, being incarnated amongst folk who are
00:37:58
Speaker
brutally oppressed by empire to use vulnerable love to shift the way that people relate to one another. And I'm like, oh yeah, that is a queer story. Jesus comes out of the divine closet, kicks down the door in Bethlehem and does something new and radical that makes people see folks in different ways that violates fixed categories between Samaritans and Jews and blurring all of these boundaries in the way that,
00:38:27
Speaker
I would say that queerness as a political understanding very much does. This disturbing of fixed hierarchies, this eradication of fixed categories that we're supposed to rigidly identify in like
00:38:43
Speaker
that Jesus is shocked through with all of that. Once I started seeing and understanding Jesus that way, I was like, oh, yeah, no, I'm not going to be able to go back and understand God any differently. Certainly, it gave me a feeling of being palpably blessed in the way that God has created my own
00:39:02
Speaker
identity and sense of being and the way that I exist in the world to offer particular gifts to communities that need them. I was like, oh yeah, no, I see it now. Right. I can't say it much better than you did, but it is. It's like, to me, that queerness and it relates to my politics in that way of like,
00:39:24
Speaker
looking at oppressive systems and unfair hierarchies and kind of trying to make radical change through love and acceptance. And I mean, I didn't learn the Jesus story growing up. I learned other stories, but I know enough now to see how much sense that makes that that really is what the story is about. And then also, so many other stories in the Bible, too, when you look at it through the lens are like,
00:40:06
Speaker
encounter the work of Jay Mase III. He's a fabulous theologian. He co-edited the Black Trans Prayer Book, really fabulous resource if people want to check it out. But he does a beautiful telling of Joseph as a trans narrative and talking about like, oh, here's this son of Jacob who
00:40:21
Speaker
Oh, it really is about fixing oppression through love in a way.
00:40:25
Speaker
all he wants is this princess dress. And if you look at the Kitenepasim, like that language that we oftentimes translate as like Technicolor dream coat, whatever, what have you, the only other time that phrase is used in all of the Hebrew Bible is to describe the dress of one of the princesses in like chronicles, forget the exact text, I think it's chronicles.
00:40:46
Speaker
And so you have this boy who really wants a dress, gets it from his father. His father loves him, gives him this dress, and his siblings beat the shit out of him, throw him in a ditch, and leave him for dead.
00:41:01
Speaker
And then Joseph doesn't stop being Joseph. Joseph doesn't let that trauma keep them from dreaming, but instead goes into his hardship in Egypt and uses that prophetic gift of dreaming to become exalted, to become the Pharaoh's right-hand person. And then all of a sudden, Joseph's brothers
00:41:23
Speaker
are forced to go and confront Joseph and they don't even recognize Joseph because Joseph has stepped so fully into just the beauty of their being that all of a sudden they don't even recognize who
00:41:38
Speaker
they had beaten and left in a ditch. And then Joseph, from a position of power, is able to mend that relationship and dictate the terms by which that relationship is healed. Makes the brothers go through all of these series of tests and trials to show that they have repented, to show that they have remorse for the violence that they committed. And so, yeah, I hear a story like that and you're like, oh, wow. Yeah, no, I can't read Joseph the same way anymore. So I just won't
00:42:04
Speaker
not gonna do that. You're blowing my mind right now because at summer camp when I was like 13 years old, I was in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I played Benjamin actually. Yeah. And yeah, oh my god, I never
00:42:19
Speaker
would have thought of that in that way, but that makes so much sense. Are there queer versions of the Bible or resources that study all of these stories in that land? Yeah, there's all sorts of fabulous collections of queer theology resources and stuff. I'll try to give you some so that we can link them in the podcast notes. Okay, we'll put some in the show notes. Exactly, so I can direct some folks to some really wonderful ones. But yeah, I mean,
00:42:47
Speaker
And so that's what's so funny to me is you have this text, the Bible, you might have heard of it, that is wondrously queer. And then you have so many people who get so offended by even the suggestion
00:43:04
Speaker
that Jesus might have been something other than a strong, red-blooded American. It's hilarious to me. I know that when you were sending over stuff for preparation of the podcast, you would lift it up this thread I did on Twitter at one point. And this is like, I should be really clear. I woke up in the morning. I always had been reading Indecent Theology by Marcella Ahasri, which is a great queer theological book if people are looking for one.
00:43:35
Speaker
And in that, Marcella talks about a bisexual Christ, and it just sparked some theological imagining in me that I was like, I'm just going to throw this onto Twitter and see what people think. And why did people have thoughts? And so I mean, in the thread, I'm literally just
00:43:53
Speaker
saying, what if Jesus and the disciples had a relationship that was a more complicated and less platonic relationship than we would understand now? And I think that because heterosexuality is such a modern invention, the likelihood that a bunch of dudes wandering around the desert sleeping with each other and stuff like, ah, you know,
00:44:22
Speaker
Is it super far fetched to imagine that they might have kissed each other, that they might have cuddled, that they might have had sex? I don't think that's this wild and crazy conception. And so I put this out in the world and instantly the evangelicals caught it and I was getting all sorts of death threats and just the lovely things that happened when your tweets fall into the wrong hands.
00:44:46
Speaker
The thing that was wild to me is so many people were accusing me of violating the Bible by talking about something that's not there. I'm like, listen.
00:44:58
Speaker
So, yeah, I don't know what Jesus' sexuality was. I'm just saying, let's suppose, like I'm just imagining, and preachers do this all the time. That's half of what preaching is, is you take what's on the page and then you have some imaginings about what isn't on the page. You speak into those gaps where the Bible, because the Bible has lots of gaps. That's one of the beautiful things about it. That's why we're still talking about it 2,000 years from now. Exactly.
00:45:24
Speaker
And so I just was offering a possible world. And the very idea that that would even be possible is what makes these people so angry. And that's how you know that this is not about like, oh, did it happen? It's about I will not tolerate a conception of God that includes queer people.
00:45:47
Speaker
Right. And especially when you think about what you said, the fact that heterosexuality has not been around for thousands of years. It's a relatively new invention, but people seem to forget that or never knew that to begin with. But the idea that what you're talking about was possible is so much more likely than that it was impossible. I mean, there's no evidence that it didn't happen. And so
00:46:13
Speaker
There's no evidence either way. It's a story. The idea of me even supposing it is a violation of worldviews that hold queer people as anathema.
00:46:28
Speaker
And so people can try to twist themselves into knots talking about like, oh, I love queer people, but this is beyond the pale. I'm like, no, actually, you clearly don't really love queer people because then you wouldn't have such a visceral bodily reaction to the supposition that Jesus might have been one of them.
00:46:47
Speaker
Right. It's actually kind of telling. And this was one of the first articles that came up when I Googled your name was some guy's response to you. And I just found his objections to it hilarious. But actually, I don't want to read his objections. Can I read the tweet thread, actually? Because I think it's so interesting. Sure. You kind of went over it. But so you tweeted.
00:47:11
Speaker
Queer communities offer a beautiful lens through which to view the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. I already like it because it's
00:47:21
Speaker
it's a new lens and it is a beautiful, like what's the issue with it? It's a beautiful way of looking at them. Okay, the lines between affection, attraction, intimacy, and sex are far blurrier than white evangelicals would like them to appear. Let's talk about a bisexual Christ. We just talked about that on another episode of this show about the blurring of all those lines, okay?
00:47:43
Speaker
Continuing, as Marcella out this read notes, all theology is sexual. Our broader culture has crafted Jesus from our own assumed heterosexual constraints. We projected them into Jesus and taught him them.
00:47:56
Speaker
But what if we cast these assumptions aside? The neat, clean lines between heterosexuality and homosexuality are a modern convention. They try to enforce order and discipline on unruly appetites, love and lust. How different the beloved disciple appears if we free ourselves from that baggage. And then, the truth is, Jesus and his disciples' ministry is no less holy if they occasionally had sex with one another.
00:48:20
Speaker
or if he had relationships with the beloved disciple on Mary Magdalene, or if they expressed affection that fell somewhere between sex and platonic affection.
00:48:29
Speaker
another blurring of the lines. What if Jesus cuddled Peter on a cold, lonely night? What if John and Andrew's relationship occasionally entered the erotic? What if Judah's final kiss was one last reminder of others they had shared? Are we supposed to believe these circumstances are impossible? Are they so far-fetched as to be beyond consideration in a religion that freely accepts divine impregnation? So, I mean, yes, I couldn't agree more. And what I really love about it is these blurring of the lines of like,
00:48:58
Speaker
this idea we have currently, not just heterosexual, homosexual, but we also look at, like, okay, this is a marriage, and this is a friendship, or this is like a work relationship, and this is some, you know, a therapist. But like,
00:49:13
Speaker
to me, it's all kind of fluid. And especially with a close friend, why couldn't there be intimacy? Or why do we kind of break these things apart and separate what type of relationship is acceptable and what isn't? It strikes me as something very natural and normal that Jesus and his disciples might have had fluid types of relationships. That's what made them so strong and connected.
00:49:41
Speaker
Well, and I think it also speaks to like, at least the reaction to it speaks to this real aversion to intimacy that so many men are afflicted with. Like, it's interesting all of all the things I said in that one of the lines that like people that the evangelicals kept like DMing me and saying awful things about was the suggestion that they cuddled. I don't know what it was. There's something about that word that was just setting people off. And I was getting messages like Jesus and the disciples did cuddle.
00:50:13
Speaker
But dude, we're not even talking about bisexual Christ at this point. We're just talking about a fully healthy and emotionally whole person. How dare you suggest that Jesus was an emotionally healthy human being who could express physical affection with people who he loved and lived as a community with for several years.
00:50:38
Speaker
Right, right, right. Well, you're a psychology major like me. I think that gets tied up in masculinity very much of the way to be a man is you don't have affection or intimacy with other men. Is that something that you've seen in religious communities or how do you preach the opposite of that?
00:51:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so there's like a great book, Jesus and John Wayne, that just came out recently that just talks about how like Jesus has been identified as this American alpha male, if you will. And so I think you know, part of it is it's not just an aversion to intimacy, it's actually a
00:51:18
Speaker
identification of masculinity with aggression and violence. That is a very American thing. And so when you've done that, when you've said that what it means to be a man is to exert your will upon the world, to change it through force, to shape the world. And again, this is a super Christian narrative that
00:51:37
Speaker
God has given the world to humanity, specifically to men, to shape and to force. We are supposed to subjugate and hold dominion over nature. Wives be submissive to your husbands. I'm not trying to remember all the things that they say. I don't care. You have this whole worldview of what it means to be a man is to take your own will and use it to force the world to bend towards it.
00:52:05
Speaker
and that is an incredibly violent way to go around the world. What a destructive way of understanding yourself and one that just shuts off all kinds. Of course, you can't be intimate. Of course, you can't cuddle with somebody. Of course, because that's vulnerability and weakness. When you have
00:52:22
Speaker
this savior ostensibly at the heart of your faith who is not incarnated as a warrior. Certainly, if you look at other religions like the Greek face that were going around at the time, Apollo comes into the world, drinks ambrosia and sprouts into a fully grown man and then like two days later kills a dragon. You could have had that kind of savior and instead you have a baby who
00:52:49
Speaker
can't really do much of anything and who has to be carried by his parents away from Herod who was trying to murder him. That's your savior and yet you're going to say that Jesus is supposed to be this example of using will and violence to shape the world. It just doesn't square because it's not true.
00:53:12
Speaker
Yeah, there you go. But try telling that to some evangelical Christians. Do you think it's getting worse lately, at least in the political sphere?
Shifts in Christian Narratives
00:53:21
Speaker
Because you're right, if you go back to the story of Jesus, what I know is it's not about toxic masculinity, it's like the exact opposite. And yet, the sort of political policies and candidates that come from a lot of
00:53:36
Speaker
hyper-religious communities tend to be kind of very toxic, masculine, authoritarian. It's not going in the right direction in some ways. How do you see that? Well, and I think that like something that if I'm just sort of reading the tea leaves on sort of Christianity broadly at a national level, I think one of the interesting things that's happening is you're having this real bifurcation of Christianity where for a very long time you had sort of a mainline Christianity that wasn't
00:54:05
Speaker
this sort of toxic evangelical religion, but also didn't want to go toe-to-toe with the evangelical claims about what it meant to be a Christian. And so you had a general sort of understanding that right wing email angelicals were allowed to dictate what it meant to be Christian in the public imaginary.
00:54:29
Speaker
And then very fortunately, I think over the last 10, 15 years, there has been, and obviously people were doing it before then, but really there's been a swelling of folks in more liberal and progressive Christian spaces to push back against that narrative and to do so explicitly using the language of our faith. And that has done something interesting to the state of US Christianity where
00:54:54
Speaker
One, it means that evangelical Christians can't just go out in the world and say, oh, we need to ban abortion because that's a violation of people's religious freedom. You're like, oh, not my religious freedom. Actually, you restricting access to abortion violates the religious autonomy of my congregants who want to have a decision whether they can co-create life with God. And so all of a sudden, people who are used to being the only voice in the room
00:55:24
Speaker
about what it means to be Christian are no longer the only voice in the room, and they are really pissed off about that. So for a very long time, evangelical Christians just totally ignored mainline Christianity. And over the last 10, 15 years, it's been getting louder and louder, and they can't ignore it anymore. And so what they have started doing is just getting increasingly violent in their response. And obviously, it's not just a
00:55:49
Speaker
All of this is happening in a broader context of political polarization and the radicalization of the American right. It's all mixed up together. But I think that there is this really interesting faith story happening at the heart of this too, where people are scared. They see an articulation of Christianity that used to be theirs and theirs alone, at least in the way that they understood it.
00:56:11
Speaker
all of a sudden, they can't speak with the same kind of authority and have everybody just say, yes, this is what it means to be Christian. And that terrifies them. And so then they end up making death threats to nice pastors on Twitter who were just musing about a bisexual Christ. CB I love that. I love that idea of using the text and the religion itself as the justification for embracing queerness and this radical love.
00:56:40
Speaker
And I think the other thing that is important about it too, and at least where I am more and more now, because now I get these blog messages from folks who are like, come on my YouTube channel. We're going to debate homosexuality in the Bible and stuff. And I'm like, nah, I couldn't even care a little bit about doing that. Because I don't want to have those conversations anymore because they're not interesting to me.
00:57:08
Speaker
I'm done debating the same three or four texts in the Bible and coming up with historical reasons for why I think your modern interpretation of this is a text condemning homosexual people is wrong. I'm just bored. That's not an interesting conversation to me anymore. More than that, I just don't want to have debates about the humanity of myself or people I love and people I care about and people I'm in community with.
00:57:31
Speaker
And so at a place like Middle Church, I get to have way more interesting conversations. We just finished this incredible queer self-care series in January where we had the poet J. Hume talking about trans people as cathedrals and cathedrals as trans. And we had Sarah New talking about
00:57:47
Speaker
cultivating transgenerational queer affinity with ancestral worship. We had a wonderful conversation on sex positivity, and somebody talking about the ways that queer people find ourselves at the intersection of grief and life and death, and how do we use narrative to restructure our relationship with grief. These are way more interesting conversations to have than like, was Paul really home? I just don't care. Just don't care.
00:58:19
Speaker
Actually, that was going to be my next question. Can you talk a little more about like middle church and how queerness or your bisexuality or just queerness in general is integrated into what you do there and what's the response like from your congregants?
Middle Church as a Queer Haven
00:58:34
Speaker
Yes, I'm incredibly blessed to work for a church that is deeply queer. So middle in the mid 70s, like early 80s was dying.
00:58:49
Speaker
probably had 20, 30 people left who were going to church there. They'll quote me on the numbers, but it was pretty anemic in terms of the size of the congregation, like a lot of mainline churches. And then the AIDS crisis happened, and middles right in the middle of the East Village. And the minister, who was the head pastor at the time, this guy, Gordon Drot,
00:59:16
Speaker
became known as one of the only places in the city that would offer the kinds of care to people dying from AIDS that they deserved. So they would do funerals when no one would do funerals. They would do pastoral care visits. They would go to the hospital and they would offer the kind of care that, of course, God wants people to have, particularly when thousands of people are dying. And it transformed the community all of a sudden.
00:59:43
Speaker
the church had new life, it had new purpose, and it had a ton of
00:59:49
Speaker
like queer folks who became a really integral part of who middle is and that it also just like lit a fire under the work that the church does and so became this huge artistic hub for all sorts of creative expression. You know, we have like members who were in different Broadway shows and so they do incredible music and the gospel choir is absolutely just off the wall, which was founded by a guy who unfortunately died from AIDS during the early 90s.
01:00:18
Speaker
But so you have all of these just these queer stories that are just wrapped into the DNA of who middle is. And then, you know, after Gordon Drought left, Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis, our current senior pastor came in and she's been there for 18 years and has just, you know, blown the roof off the place. You know, that's a really bad metaphor to use when our church has burned down. But I mean, but she I mean, she just, you know, took a church that was already, you know, had lots of queer people in the congregation.
01:00:48
Speaker
and said, you know what, we are going to be the place that builds a giant pride float and wins an award at pride for the best float with the gospel choir singing, wrapped in pride flags. That is the church that Middle Church is. And so they hired me with the full expectation that I was going to bring the fullness of my career. How I actually met Middle was, remember that,
01:01:14
Speaker
that project I was talking about where I came out, that queer faith project. We did it originally as an online photo journalism essay. And then the reception was so big. People were just overwhelmed by it. We were getting so much love from all over the country that we were like, we have to turn this into an actual exhibit. And so we got the photos all professionally printed and framed.
01:01:38
Speaker
and printed out all the narratives, and we wanted to do the launch at a church. I thought it was really important to do the opening of this beautiful gallery exhibit.
01:01:52
Speaker
in exactly the kind of place where folks on the right say that we shouldn't be ordained. But I was a little bit worried because some of the reflections are pretty graphic. And I definitely was not interested in putting it up at a church where I'm like, oh yes, you can have the respectable queers. We'll put that.
01:02:17
Speaker
80% of the people up on the wall and the 20% that you find objectionable, we won't put them up.
01:02:24
Speaker
like I was not about that life. And so I was looking for a church that would hold all of it. And someone said, Hey, have you checked out metal church? Like they might be interested. And I, I emailed Jackie and she was over the moon. She was like, absolutely. Not only are we going to do a, an exhibit, but we're going to put it up for three months and we're going to do a huge launch party in the middle of pride and Titus Burgess is going to sing and it's going to be a whole thing. And so like, you're like, Oh,
01:02:52
Speaker
Oh, okay. So that's how I like, that was the first time I walked through the doors of middle was to set up for this, this beautiful exhibit. And so, you know, when they called me finally to actually be a minister there, it was under the full expectation that I would be bringing the fullness of my queer self into that space.
01:03:11
Speaker
And then I would get to do all sorts of really creative queer programming. And I've gotten to do some beautiful queer storytelling. Because I love storytelling. That's something I feel really called to. And so for the last two prides, we've put together these beautiful queer faith packages on YouTube. The first one was just different queer ministers. Actually, it's interfaith. So it's like different queer clergy from a variety of faiths talking about their story and how they became to be ordained and how they understand their queerness.
01:03:39
Speaker
as a part of that. And then last year, we did a beautiful thing on... It was like a love letter to trans kids after just the fucking miserable years we've had in the last couple of years of all of these different trans and non-binary faith leaders from different traditions telling people that they were wondrous and holy and blessed. And that is the kind of work that I get to do at Metal that makes me just overjoyed to wake up every morning and get to do it again.
01:04:08
Speaker
Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah, I can tell it's like very much affects you and is meaningful. Is that something you've seen in the congregation? Like is a lot of the congregation queer also? And are you seeing more trans and non-binary identities? Are there young people in the congregation? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just, it delights and overjoys me that
01:04:31
Speaker
they get to come to a church that says, you are not just welcome here, you are celebrated because you are absolutely, fearfully and wondrously created in the image of God. You have so much to offer the world. You have so much to offer this church and the very parts of you that other people say that you should be ashamed of are the parts of you that are glowing brightest. That is the divine image glowing in you.
01:04:57
Speaker
queerness is a gift. For me, for so long in my life, it was a liability or this thing that I felt was not integrated or holding me back. And yet, once I kind of acknowledged it, explored it, and really integrated it, it's not even a peripheral part of my identity. It's my superpower. It's the thing that helps me be authentic and live my fullest life. And
01:05:26
Speaker
really is an asset and a gift. Don't hide it under a bushel. Yeah. I want to read one more thing you wrote. It's basically what you just said, but you ended that article. As a minister, I feel a deep responsibility to preach the queerness of God's love in all its transgressive glory. I want every LGBTQ child to hear that not only is their identity not sinful, it is a wondrous manifestation of the divine.
01:05:53
Speaker
I just love that. And I like that you use the word transgressive too, because so often we look at religion as the opposite, as religion is the thing that should keep us within the bounds of what we should do. But actually, it can be quite transgressive of oppressive dominant structures and give people a community and hope.
01:06:14
Speaker
If you think about religion in the truest etymological sense, it means to bind together.
Religion and Community Binding
01:06:21
Speaker
That's where it comes from is to bind people together. I think that the calling of religious leaders looking out at a country and a world that has been so horrendously shattered
01:06:37
Speaker
is how do we take those shards and put them back into stained glass windows? How do we create something out of all of this brokenness that reminds people just how wonderful they are? Yeah, that's beautiful. And yeah, I also just think for me growing up, my Judaism, the thing that I really loved about it was the community and the connection and the actually
01:07:03
Speaker
being together in a room and all saying the same words together. I didn't really care what the words were often. It's just that feeling of being in that like-minded community that is supportive of each other and is there for each other and just feeling that energy of everyone praying together. That community really affected me, and there's so much related to queerness in that.
01:07:32
Speaker
we should end but I said I would ask you about the Seminary Drag Show so I have to ask you about it. What was that like and you won? Yeah, that's a great place to end. Yeah, let's end with my moment of glory. So I was a first year student at Union and at that point I had been this sort of years running Seminary Drag Show and I said, well,
01:07:58
Speaker
I'm a musical theater kid. And at this point, also was just starting to come into my own more in terms of my own queerness. And so even though I wasn't out publicly in the seminary, I was like, no, no, I'm going to bring it.
01:08:13
Speaker
I'm bringing in this drag show. And so yeah, I had some wonderful friends. Actually, the person, it's really funny, the person who did my makeup for that performance is Reverend Natalie Renee Perkins, who is actually one of the other ministers at middle. So funny how life brings you back into touch with people. But yeah, so I
01:08:38
Speaker
I performed under the Dom de Guerre Princess Split Timber and I did a wonderful dance to Ain't Misbehavin' that I sort of around a chair and I remember the part that I was most proud of, I spent far too long choreographing this thing and I rehearsed it and I had this moment at the end of it where I had been dancing around this chair sort of for a lot of it and then at the very end I sort of inverted myself on the chair and
01:09:06
Speaker
I had sort of my legs going straight into the sky in this little black dress, and my arms outstretched in sort of this inverted crucifixion. And everybody just went wild. It was a beautiful... And then I won. I won first prize. Look at that. Amazing. Very transgressive.
01:09:29
Speaker
Lovely. Okay, that's amazing. That sounds like it was a fun time. And that's a lovely place to end. So congratulations on winning the drag show. Hopefully more to come. Yeah. And I hope it's just a reminder to folks that like when you live into the fullness of who you are, it offers you an opportunity to do things that are way more beautiful than the boxes that you've consigned yourself into.
01:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, and on top of that, I think that sometimes it's the very things that we are most scared of that will actually be the most rewarding and fulfilling. Yeah, and that they'll make us come alive and help the world come a little more alive in the process. Exactly. Oh, I love that. Well, thank you so much, Benjamin Perry, for being on Two Bye, guys. And I thank you for sharing your story with us today. Thanks so much for having me on the show.
01:10:21
Speaker
By the way, we forgot to mention, you can also follow Benjamin Perry on Twitter at FaithfullyBP. That's FaithfullyBP for Benjamin Perry. Two Bye Guys is edited and produced by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our music is by Ross Mincer, our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, and we are supported by the Gotham, formerly IFP. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.