Spirit in Action

Gender Outlaws in the Bible

Peterson Toscano, using wit, humor & theater, illuminates non-conforming gender roles in the Bible, reclaiming existence for a variety of folks ignored & silenced by the mainstream. With his winning humor and incisive vision, Peterson found acceptance for his revolutionary insights when presenting at the joint 2012 conference of the Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion. His newest theater production is Jesus Had 2 Daddies.

Broadcast on:: 26 Jan 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ We've got a great talent and a great thinker here with us today for Spirit in Action. Peterson Tuscano joined us in 2007 to talk about the XK survivor movement, but also to share about his stand-up comedy with a profound edge. He's back today because he's a layperson doing some cutting edge looking at non-standard sex roles in the Bible. Actually, in a presentation he did to the joint conference of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. He called it Transfigurations Transgressing Gender in the Bible. This is profound stuff, folks, though Peterson has a gift for taking deep subjects and making them fun and sometimes even hilarious. He gives us new eyes to see wrinkles in the meaning of the Bible, that we've been trained to miss, and has all kinds of possibilities for alternatives to oppressive literal or fundamental takes on the Bible. Always a pleasure to listen to, laugh with, and ponder alongside. Peterson Tuscano joins your Wisconsin-based and cold weary host from his temporary location in California, by phone. Peterson, I'm delighted to have you back for Spirit in Action. It's great to be back. Thanks so much for having me on. You've had five and a half years since I spoke to you on this program. What have you been doing in the meantime? Wow, I could do that long. Wow, I guess so much has changed. I'm doing different shows than I did at that time. I've laid down shows that I was doing at that time. I think since that time, I've premiered four shows. So I guess the re-education of George W. Bush, I can see Sarah Palin from my window. And then I've launched into this whole other area of biblical scholarship mixed with comedy, mixed with a one-person show to come up with some sort of biblical comic mid-trash. That is being accepted as scholarship into pretty Tony Blake's, and I'm really excited about that. And I'm looking forward to talking about your presentation at the conference last November. But one other item that you didn't include in your list of things you've been doing, and it seems a rather important one, you got married. I did get married. You have this past summer, a little quicker meeting in Tinsdale, Pennsylvania, to my lovely partner, Glenn Richth, who I met at a big I-F-G-C gathering in 2008. And so we married this summer and live in central Pennsylvania. Now I was living in Hartford, Connecticut, the last time we spoke. I hope that Pennsylvania is treating you well. I realize that Glenn's university-level teaching position there kind of fixes where you'll have to live. And listeners, if you missed my interview with Glenn Rediff just over two years ago about his memoir of Growing Up Gay in South Africa, right up to the end of apartheid, you can find Glenn Rediff and listen on northernspiritradio.org. In any case, you're happily married, but that doesn't seem to have nailed your feet to the kitchen floor. In fact, you seem to travel quite a bit, including the fact that you're doing an extended visit to the Pacific coast at the moment, aren't you? Yeah, I'm here on a three-week trip. Glenn was here for a part of it. Actually, he had to go back to teach. He's actually starting writing his new novel this week. So I feel like I'm home with someone who's pregnant, great with book. And this is about to give birth or a gestate or whatever happens to books and someone's good. So he's back home. But yeah, I've been on the road a lot. I had a month-long tour in England, Ireland and Malta back in September. And I've been doing more like mini tours so that I'm home for a nice stretch of time and then I'm away for three weeks or a month. So I'll be in North Carolina in February and LA in April. And then I think I have her for college. It'll be for three weeks to march into April. Well, Peterson, the reason I was so eager to have you back for spirit and action is because of this new exploration of biblical material you've been doing, opening up new venues as far as the points of you and the Bible about those who don't conform to gender norms. As you know, I heard you present some of this material as part of the five days of Bible Half Hours. You shared at the summer 2012 Friends General Conference Gathering. Even though I was leaving folk dancing till late at night at that gathering, I eagerly got up every morning to be there for your 8 a.m. presentations. This body of material was, I believe, a vital ingredient in the presentation that you made to the rather notable Bible Conference in Chicago in November. Tell us about that conference. So the conference was the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion Conference. It's the big mother load conference for Bible Scholars that 8,000 come from all over the world. You know, it's, I guess, like the Bible con. These are the people who are doing serious scholarship in all kinds of areas. And I was thoroughly intimidated to be invited to do my presentation about gender variant people in the Bible. Because that's what I look at, people who don't fit the traditional gender roles and presentations, gender vendors in the Bible. So I thoroughly terrified to present my work and then have it peer reviewed in front of my face by five scholars who reviewed it in advance. Oh my goodness, that's harsh, isn't it? Don't they all have degrees like PhDs and theology and all that? And they're all, like, published and they're all, like, right to textbook. So, you know, I thought, well, this could possibly be my last gig performing this work because it could get so slammed into the ground that that's the end of that. One of the things you're known for is your humor. Humor with the purpose is I've seen it. Humor that leads us to get a glimpse of things we'd otherwise miss. But it's still humor and this doesn't sound like a festival for stand up comedians. Was humor okay in that setting and were you allowed to throw in that as part of your presentation? Yeah, I mean, I think partly because we're doing scholarship, but also I remember in the evangelical churches that I was a part of for so many years. And there was always lots of humor from the pulpits, lots of Bible jokes and telling the stories. So many stories are really funny and really weird, like weird little details. Like, okay, so you have this, you know, one funny, I think a funny Bible story in the middle of a tragic Bible story is Jesus is arrested in the garden. And it's chaos, right? They arrest Jesus and you've got disciples running here and there's one young man who's wearing a linen cloak. And the soldier grabs the young man and the young man pulls away the guard still holding the cloak, but the man runs away naked and pulls the cloak right off of him and dashes off. And I just love that detail is included in that story. You can almost imagine, I don't know how much of it actually happened that way, but just a year later when the people were getting together, like remember that fateful night when our rabbi was taken away. Yes, we do. But you know, and so and so, like he got like, he was running around naked. Oh my God, you can almost imagine something like that. And I don't know, I just find that those little moments can be lost in reading it. And sometimes they're just silly. Sometimes they really actually add to the insights of the text. Do you perchance know who Joe Wenke is? Because I'll be doing an interview with him for Spirit and Action shortly about his new book, You've Got to Be Kidding. It's a subtitle, A Cultural Arsonist Literal Reading of the Bible. And it's like some of what you do, humor with a thoughtful agenda. I'm sure you'd connect with it automatically, the way he sees with fresh eyes, some of the strangeness and the humor in the Bible. Is this someone you know? For all I know, he may have been there at the November conference. He may have been at the conference along with the 7,999 other people. I have not run into him yet, but I'm definitely going to keep my eyes open now that you mentioned this. You know, my work is very much comedy based, but it's also theater based. So I get a lot of my insights by acting out scenes in the Bible, either by myself or staging it with other people. And I see stuff in the text, both funny and serious, that I haven't been able to find when I do traditional study methods. Now the title of the presentation you gave at the conference was Transfigurations Transgressing Gender in the Bible. You know, that's real mouthful. And I'm not sure that all folks are going to grasp immediately what the full implications are. Would you talk about at least one of those gender transgressions we can find in the Bible? Yeah, to break it down very easily. The Bible is a series of books. It's not just one book. It's a library, really. It was written by different people over different periods of time, totally different cultures, different languages. So there's a lot happening there. But often there are messages that are put out there about gender, like rules, about how many women are supposed to act. Models of what men are supposed to do and when they're supposed to do. So since the rules are often so clearly delineated, it's not too difficult to see if somebody is misbehaving. So I put on my little gender lenses and I asked the question, who in the text is transgressing and transcending gender? Who breaks the rules and who rises above them? And I discovered that some of the most important people and the most important Bible stories are gender transgressors. And in fact, it was because of that in some ways that they were able to do what they were able to do. And I could do a very simple, straightforward example, the book of Esther. The book of Esther is in the Hebrew Scriptures and it is a book of exile. The Jewish people are in exile and you're in Persian court. And this is wonderful character Vashti, the queen, who refuses to be paraded around naked in front of the men and she gets deposed. And so there's this crisis in the palace. There's no queen. And so there are these eunuchs. The eunuchs were very large teachers in the ancient world. So these were castrated men, often castrated before puberty. And as a result, they were experiencing male puberty. They retained high voices. They didn't get the body hair, the spatial hair that comes with puberty, the muscles and the prominent brow. They looked and sounded very different from the men and women around them. They were, in many ways, a third sex or a third gender. And they were in between the world of male and female. In the book of Esther, you have 12 different eunuchs who are named, who are critical to the whole story. The whole thing was all the part without these eunuchs. There's some are assassins and some are guards and some are advisors. And there's this one named He-Guy who goes and finds Hadassah. And see, it's renamed Esther. He gives her beauty treatments. He puts her on a special diet. He prepares her to go to the king. She is very well pleasing in the king's eye. And she becomes queen. And then I'll hell break loose because there's someone in the court who doesn't like the Jewish people and has to eat it to utterly destroy them. Now Esther is in a pile place of power, but she's sequestered in the women's quarter. And the only person who can go back and forth between Esther and her relatives outside of the court and so the king's people and set up some lunches is the eunuch. And Esther ultimately saves her people. But she only can save the people with the help of this surgically altered gender variant person who was able to be her messenger and her helper, her groomer and all of that. And right in the center of the story is this person that we so often overlook. And a person who, if they walk into most religious spaces today, would probably not be made very welcome. In the same way that a lot of people who are transgender right now, they find themselves on that unsure ground, especially around religion. So that's one example of gender variants in the Bible. Out of that, what do you hear as the message to the Bible? Does that mean that someone who's a eunuch is acceptable? Or I thought a eunuch was in some way, I don't know, unclean or ritually unclean? Well, I think it's always challenging, you know, when people look at the Bible and ask, well, what does it say about this? And what does it say about that? You know, at the bottom line, it doesn't say anything. It's a book. It doesn't speak. It has to be interpreted. The notion has to be translated first into a language you understand. And even in that translation, you end up with more of a commentary than a translation. Because people have to insert their own meaning to what something is, before, you know, even just put into a different language. And so it becomes really a ten of a dicey thing. Now, in the law, the Jewish law, there are definitely prohibitions against eunuchs and people with cross genitals are considered an abomination. Yet in the Book of Isaiah, there's this incredible passage of welcome and acceptance and affirmation, specifically of eunuchs. Isaiah 56. And in a way, it's almost as if the text is correcting itself and saying, no, this is really the updated message here. And I love that, but you can see that within the text. And I want people to see that, that things can be corrected and moved on, so that in one place, the eunuchs were complete outsiders. Then, by Isaiah 56, they were welcoming, by Acts 8, there is this wonderful character of a black African surgically altered gender variant, a person of faith who's a civil servant who was one of the first converts to Christianity. It just shows a radical acceptance. So you see within the text itself, a change, a progression of understanding and acceptance. You know, there's one Bible passage that so many people know, but I think that not too many people grasp the full implications of the story of the good Samaritan. Jesus chooses this individual from Samaria, these outliers of the Hebrew world, not Kuth, not Kosher, not acceptable on the heretical edge of things. Jesus chooses this Samaritan as the hero of that story, as an example of what a really good person does. Maybe it's like that that we do hear these stories over the generations in thousands of years, and then we end up with the old prejudices being debunked. Well, that's what I like about acting out some of these stories. And the narrative story, I think, speaks so much. I mean, I'm gay, and I'm a Christian, and so I've lived with lots of years of direct oppression from people, people I love, even, who use the Bible as a weapon to beat the snot out of me. And then so it became, you know, having to fight for my very humanity within the faith tradition that I chose to be part of, and I guess I could have left, but that didn't feel like an option to me in particularly at the time. And so I think people get stuck on, like, a particular little law, but I think it's so much more instructive to look at a story and see what's actually happening in the story, and what about this person and their lives and their bodies? What does the text tell us about them, and does that, in a way, help a person who may be stuck on an issue have a broader understanding of it? And at the end of the day, I don't think people should need a book to tell them how to beat decent human beings to each other. But there are people for whom the Bible is very important. It is their guidebook. In some cases, they're somewhat held hostage by it. And so if they can see in that text a way forward to be a better neighbor, well, then I think it's useful to have those conversations. Let's go back to a little bit of your personal history. If people want to listen to that interview that I did with you back in 2007, they can just go to nordinspiritradio.org and search for Peterson Tuscano. And in that interview, you talk of some of your history, but we'd like to recap some of it now. You grew up Catholic, and when you were 17, I think you had a religious experience, a conversion experience, just sitting in your room, and you became a devout Christian, a devout evangelical Christian, as opposed to your Catholic upbringing. Could you flush out for us a little of the history of that from when you were 17, up until you finally accepted yourself as gay? Yeah, I had a true, deep conversion that was religious and cultural, so that by the time I was going to college, a Christian missionary alliance college, I'd be trained as a missionary. At that time, I was born again evangelical, conservative, fundamentalist, republican Christian. While Reagan was president, and the moral majority was on the rise, and AIDS had just hit big, and was not even called AIDS, it was called grid, the gay related immune deficiency. I was the gay cancer, or as it was also known in my circles, God's condemnation against homosexuals. So it was a very, very charged and terrifying time for a young person like me who was gay. It did not seem safe to be gay in this world or the next. And so I lived with a lot of fear and a lot of shame, and I saw the, you know, I lived outside of New York City. I saw the newspapers, the screaming headlines, thousands and thousands of people dying, gay men, and there was a lot of hysteria, and I absorbed all of that with my own insecurity and self-hatred in fear and desire to please people and want to be a good son to my parents, assuming they would be happier if I were straight and gay. I got into my head that my number one goal was to destroy the gay and me, and I submitted to all kinds of treatments and counseling sessions and bizarre experiences to try to do anything to fix what I saw was a problem. And I spent the next 17 years doing that, married a woman at one point and went to the mission field, and every day though, the real life I was living was one of trying to deny this reality and fight off anything that's with gay in any way. Even creativity, which I stopped using my creative mind. And it nearly destroyed me. And then finally, like that conversion experience some of the years before, I sort of had this revelation of, you know, what are you doing? This is madness, but for whatever reason, it took me a very long time to figure that out. I'm sure glad you did figure it out. Could you recap also where you went from there? I mean, you decided that you could accept yourself, what does that mean that you did? Well, you know, most people think of a coming out experience as some sort of like a triumphant party thing. For me, it was almost like accepting a diagnosis of cancer of like, okay, you've got the gay, all right? You're going to have to live with it. Because in my head, I still, you know, was brainwashed in so many ways and thought that it was just a terrible thing to be gay, but what are you going to do? That's what you got. And I needed to renew my mind, get a new script in there. So I did begin to meet people who didn't fit the normal stereotypes of what I was told gay person was. All kinds of people, you know, and all different ages and backgrounds and parents and grandparents and people who guys were into sports and who were gay. I mean, things that seem so silly now and I think about it, but at the time it was a revelation to me, all those folks. And then I started to realize I'm a person with a history. I'm a part of a people and I have ancestors, queer ancestors, gay ancestors, like Walt Whitman and so many others. And I began to read their work, Audrey Lord, wonderful lesbian voice out of the 60s, 70s, and the 80s. And in reading their words, it just helped me to find clarity in my own life. And then I had the issue of my faith. I was told you can't be gay and Christian, both from conservative Christians and from progressive liberal gays. But I had to admit that there was something about me that, you know, I didn't have to be Christian, but I had to be spiritual. I had to be a person of faith because it's just how I'm wired. Some people just are. It would be far easier if I weren't, but that's how I am. So I had to find a way forward and ultimately I got hooked up with those Quakers. Oh, no. I know, right? The shame. And it was the silence of being a Quaker meeting that helped. I had been pummeled with words and I just didn't even had to pray in my own words anymore. And sitting in silence was just so lovely. And it has been, and I've been a Quaker now for 12 years, going on 13 years. So I'm really excited about that. That I found a way forward to affirm that part of me and not have to just closet it and kind of exchange one identity for another. But I can be given to have intersecting identities. In case you don't know it already, I'll remind you that you're listening to Spirit in Action. And I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host for this Northern Spirit Radio Production on the web at NorthernSpiritRadio.org, where you can listen to and download more than seven and a half years of our programs. Find links to and information about our guests. Plus, we welcome, welcome, welcome you to post comments and make this communication two-way. And while you're there, there's a place to make donations on the site. Also, I want to remind you to support your local community radio stations. They do such an invaluable job of bringing alternative and diverse programs to you. Please help them out. Today's Spirit in Action guest is Peterson Tuscano. And among his many exploits, and you really want to seek out this material, his performances, his talks. Stuff like the re-education of George W. Bush, or doing time at the Homo Nomo halfway house. Or Jesus had two daddies. That's his most recent one. They're all gems, and there's a treasure house of laughs, meaning and thought in each of them. So maybe you'd like to find out when he'll be in your area performing. Or maybe you'd even like to set that up so that he'll enrich your community. You can find him at PetersonTuscano.com, or just follow the link from NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Front and center for today's visit with Peterson is his November 2012 presentation at the Joint Conference of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. A paper he presented there called Transfigurations Transgressing Gender in the Bible. I want to revisit that presentation, Peterson, in part because I think you don't have the credentials to present at that kind of conference. You talk about feeling intimidated. Were there other presenters who didn't have the piece of paper to say they were experts, or was the authority of what you shared? Was that just sufficient to carry the day? Well, I believe the vast majority of people who had PhDs or PhD candidates and they were presenting work from their dissertation. I was so different from the rest of them on an independent scholar, so I'm not associated directly with any institution. And I don't have a master's or a PhD, and my biblical studies have been in a very independent sort of way. So one of the big questions I had going in was, "Do I have the academic stuff to do it? Maybe I don't have the credentials, but do I know what I'm doing? Are my interpretations sound? Is my ex-stetrical work acceptable?" And I've done work in lots of great seminary, Chicago Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt. I've presented high school and theological places like the Lambeth Conference in the UK back in 2008. But this was a test, and I passed. The scholars there were very pleased with the scholarship, and they found that it was very well grounded. And then I got high praise from really respected biblical scholars who even said that I showed them things that they hadn't seen before. And that to me was exciting, and in part it's because of my study method, which is both traditional tools using ancient languages and looking at the text and other history and all, but then also using computer to try to dig out deeper understanding of the text. And then see, once I find something, will that actually fit with the scholarship and what's in the text? Again, I think I brought out things that have been overlooked and were able to present it in this performance lecture style that helped people to hear it in a first new way. You use the term midrash earlier, and that makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, that's from Jewish tradition where people kind of live into the text, live out an understanding of these ancient writings as they retell the story, and that's clearly what you're doing using theater. Is there a Christian equivalent of midrash? Yes, in some ways, I think there's a lot of imagination that goes into many sermons, and sermons get a bad rap because they can sometimes have a very oppressive message or they can have the same message and there's no room for new understanding. I think the big difference is with Jewish midrash, you can have multiple interpretations of the same story, and as long as you're not using the text to harm someone, it's a valid interpretation. While when I was in the evangelical church, there was typically only ever one approved interpretation of the story. And if you deviate it from that script, well, then that was problematic. So I see that's a big difference there. In the period where you were an evangelical Christian, and maybe still are, you certainly were in a boat with a lot of fellow travelers who believed in a literal, inerrant Bible. How did you see it at that point in the past, and how do you see it now? Well, it's a very perfectly constructed world, the evangelical world of biblical literacy, in that you're looking to the text for an answer, and if you question the answer that you get, the response is yes, but it's in the text, and the text is true, how do we know that? Because the text says that it's true, so we can trust it. There's no particular logic that goes on there, and for people who think that evangelical faith is a very simple theology, it's actually very, very complex because they make pieces that really don't fit together particularly well, fit together. I mean, you know, very obviously, like in the gospels, you have the same story told two or three different ways with different details, yet they're all supposed to be true, and there's all sorts of work to make them fit together, it just don't fit. But the problem is that there's a lot of fear that if you deviate from the biblical literacy, that you're in some dark spiritual waters, a dangerous place, and that fear keeps people from creatively thinking and critically thinking, and it also causes huge divisions, because once you step over a certain line, you don't really want the rest that you're going to be rejected by God, but you're definitely going to be rejected by your friends and the church, because suddenly you're suspect, and you're no longer really welcome. You're a heretic in one way or another, and then you're shunned. So you lose your friends, and you lose your church, and you have to find a new home, typically. The biggest challenge facing the Christian church today is not the issue of homosexuality or the gays or the nation of women, or these big things that you hear about, it's about the inerrancy of scripture and the divinity of Christ. That's what they're really fighting about, but other people get the collateral damage thrown onto them, because they become the scapegoats until the churches are ready and willing to really deal with those issues. To be clear, during those 17 years while you were in the fold, did you accept the literal inerrant Bible creeds, and when you left there, did that necessarily change for you? I wholeheartedly believed and taught and preached and held fast the idea that this is truth, and this is an errant truth, and it should be taken literally, but I had to bump up against reality, and biblical scholarship and historical scholarship proved that that isn't correct. I didn't understand, actually, in all those years, where we got the Bible and how the process, that there was a process that this book had a history, that there were councils of people who had to decide what to keep and what to throw out, that a bunch of stuff got thrown out and a bunch of stuff got kept, and then there were even questions, like the book of Revelation almost didn't make it, and when they were making all these decisions, that the earliest text, I didn't know this, but they didn't have any punctuation, they didn't have any chapter breaks or verse breaks, but they didn't even have punctuation. It was one big line of text, and depending on where somebody put a punctuation mark, would change the meaning. And I didn't realize, too, I learned this from Brad Erdmann's book, wonderful books about text, that describes often who wrote these texts, the teller illiterates, they literally were just copying, and so they could make mistakes and not actually realize, unless they just visually saw they didn't know the meaning of what they were saying. Margin notes got added into text over the years. We don't have two transcripts of the Christian scriptures that actually agree with each other 100%. We have no originals, and so how could I, realistically, say, I believe that it's an errand, when there clearly are errors, textural errors, and that's just the reality that has to be acknowledged. When one does acknowledge that, then I just think it helps to take away some of the fear involved in this, I think, her radical doctrine of an errancy of scripture and not even a biblical doctrine. I'm sure, as a gay, that you've experienced years and even decades of oppression from people who use the Bible as a bludgeon to say that that person, that act, is unacceptable, horrible, heretical, pointing at other people, of course. Are there parts of the Bible that you would have preferred, at least in the past, to have just cut out and tossed away and then say, "Okay, maybe now I could be okay with it. Has that ever been your temptation?" I mean, there are a lot of people who just want to throw the whole thing out. Well, you know, I think of the Bible as a beautiful mess at times. I don't think women do so well in the Bible, always. There are a lot of nameless women. Women don't have much power in many places and are treated horribly. There are moments of unbelievable violence. People do some really awful things. And then in the midst of all that, there are some very amazing, powerful, moving stories that are so profound to the human experience that they become archetypes for us. And, you know, Joseph and his brothers, who do awful things to him, and then he turns around and he's able to forgive them and become almost like the matriarch of the family, bringing them all together again. That's a very powerful story. And so I don't feel the desire to hack up the Bible. Thomas Jefferson did that and others have tried that. I think that's fine if people want to do that. I instead want to look at it a little bit critically and take a story like Sodom and Demora and say, "Well, what are some other meanings we can tease out of this?" Like, for instance, from a female perspective, what's the story look like and feel like when a lot offers us to virgin teenage daughters, to this mob who want to break these angels. And then Lot's wife is cruelly punished as she's leaving the city and she looks back. And we don't know why Lot's wife looks back. If she's punished, she's turned into a killer assault according to that story. But perhaps she was looking back at what she left behind the other women and their children who never even considered in this census of good and evil people where God destroys the city because they couldn't find ten good people. The women weren't even considered, and the children weren't even part of that equation. Then you can begin to take the story and look at it from other ways. But it does mean being critical of all the characters, including God. And the character of God in that story doesn't actually come off of very well. And if you look at it just as a story and you can say that, I think that's really helpful. And it helps to see that even in the Bible itself, God changes. Can you give us another example of the material you included in your presentation about gender variants that you did at the Bible Conference? Sure. I mean, I talked a lot about UNIX, including the two Ethiopian UNIX that are in the Bible. There's the one in Acts, and there's another one in Jeremiah. I think the one that moves people the most is a story that's well known to many Christians and even some non-Christians. It's a story of the Last Supper. So Jesus is going to get arrested and executed and leading up to that at the time of the Passover. And the Passover is a feast that goes on over multiple days. So it's not just one meal during that time. And they didn't have a place where they were going to have to Passover. There were no advanced plans. So one of the several asks, you know, "Well, where are we going to do it?" And Jesus said, "Oh, great. Go into the city. You're going to find a man carrying a picture of water. Follow that person home. Say to the master of the house that we have meat of a place." And they're going to find an upper room, fully furnished, and set up preparations there. That's where we'll have our meal. Well, it's a strange story. I mean, for one, it's a very busy time of the year in Jerusalem that there are empty rooms lying about his questionable. You know, so maybe Jesus had planned ahead without his disciples knowing. But secondly, why is a man carrying a picture of water in a society where only women and children carry water? Now, now slaves would carry water, but that's not the Greek word that appears in two of the Gospels. The Gospels tell these stories. It just says a man. And if it were a really common practice, well, how would they know which man to follow? Because there would have been like 50 or 100 or 1,000 of them. It had to be a rare act. So it was a class transgressive act because three people didn't -- three men didn't do that. And it definitely would have been seen as a gender transgressive act. Men don't do that. So it would be like almost saying go to downtown Chicago. You're going to find a man with a business suit, red pumps, a floral hat, and a big purse. Follow him. That's where we're having our meeting. And I don't know why in this story that man is carrying a picture of water, why that was the signal. If it was something personal to them that they identified as female, they didn't mind doing female work. All I know is that when Jesus needed a place for what turned out to be their last meal together, that he said, look out for this gender vendor, this gender outlaw, this person who's acting weird according to gender. Follow that person. That person led them to the room. That led them to their last meal together. That leads millions of Christians today to the most holy moment of service, holy communion. Right in the middle of that, if it's a gender-bariumed person, that story needs to be told as much of it that we know of. That is amazing to me. Of course, I've read that passage before, and the significance went right over my head until you talked about it as part of last summer's Friends General Conference Gathering Bible Half Hours. And thing, light went on for me. There's something there that most, maybe all of us, have just lost right over. I imagine that insight really has to grab people's attention, even for scholars. How did they react when you shared that? Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that people take notice of all kinds of people. I've had many transgender women come to me and say that was the moment I started crying when I heard that story. I had a wife of a person who transitioned from male to female who was very supportive of her partner's transition and accepting her partner now as female. But when she heard that story, it just kind of helped her to have a better image of her now wife and just, I don't know, we worked for her at some psychic level to really give her a breakthrough. I think what is most satisfying to me is lots of straight people who are not trans are really moved by some of these gender stories because they themselves for much of their life have felt bullied because they do things, or they say things, or they wear things that is considered wrong for them. And there's all this gender policing going on, and I think we're all very much tied down by these gender rules regardless of who you're partnered with and how you identify. There's a bit of a gender tyranny that happens on every level in almost every place in our society. One of the things that amazes me about your current ministry, Peterson, is that you travel now, I think, among some of the most liberal, both politically and theologically liberal, circles. FGC Quakers certainly tend in that direction. There is, in these circles, a general lack of affinity for the Bible. People don't need a book to tell them what's right from wrong, and yet you're carrying this message which invites people to look deeply into the Bible. You're, I think, maybe reclaiming a resource, but what's your experience with that? Do you get a lot of feedback or maybe a lot of blowback from people saying, "Why are you talking about that stupid Bible crap? Let's just talk about something that's real." Yeah, I mean, it often happens before anyone actually sees the work when they just hear about it. It may have even happened in the show today at the top of the hour when you were talking about, you know, Bible stuff that I do. I'm sure there are people who are like, "I'm just not down for that." And I think there's lots of reasons, many of them very valid reasons for that, maybe they'll have been traumatized by this book. And, you know, just a mention of it is, you know, just like bringing this horrible bully from their past and their faces. Other people are just so thoroughly frustrated that public discourse is so narrow and so undermined by people who go to position. Well, the Bible says, and then you can't go any further with that. And that is thoroughly frustrating, I get that. And I guess why I like to do what I do is I like to give some people hope that we can have people conversations that include the Bible, particularly because we still live in a society that this book is not just very important, but the most important thing in many people's lives, including policymakers. And so it's almost like needing to learn a second language so that one can communicate biblically with people who need that. And if, unfortunately, I'm sure I would like a different world that people would need to have that, but that's where we're at. It's like the parents of a transgender man I knew in Sweden, so he transitioned from female to male, always knew he was male, although he was born female in a signed female at birth. And later in life, he transitioned and lives openly as male. And his parents who are evangelical, Pentecostals, love their child, but there was always this reserve and this holding back because in their heads, what their kid was doing was sinful. And not only sinful, but dangerous for his family, his children, and for the future and going to heaven. This is what they firmly believed. They didn't even want to believe it, but they couldn't help it. This is what they believed. So I was in Stockholm and they were able to come to my show, and I didn't tell them it was okay to be trans. I just simply told them Bible stories of people who didn't fit the traditional roles, who were gender variant and surgically altered, and essential to the story. And it gave them an on-ramp to get closer to their kid, to love their kid better, to then to open them up even to then read about the science and read about other narratives. It removed that stumbling block for them. And I think that's a good use of the work if it can do that. If it could get people a few notches ahead, if it opens up their brain a bit, then I think it's a useful tool. And I'd agree with you on that. Again, I heard you speaking at the FGC Gathering last summer at the Daily Bible Half Hours, and I saw a transformation happening in people's eyes and hearts as we were sitting there. I felt it myself. Could I tell you about that? Because I saw that too. It kind of took me by surprise. And here's a confession. I find that performing for Quakers is the most stressful audience performed for. Quakers can be the most difficult and judgmental audience members. I think sometimes because they can be just as literal as fundamentalist but indifferent things, like they sometimes miss the nuance of satire and irony and humor, and can get so caught up with words that they miss the point. And not all Quakers, but there's always enough, and they're usually vocal, that they'll come to me afterwards with all sorts of neatly little detail things of issues that they had one person complain to me because I talked about a character once you attended suicide with Tylenol. And they came to me afterwards and were upset because I had product placement of Tylenol in my play. How much did you get paid for that, Peter? How much did you get paid for that? I went with great fear and trepidation. I know there are a lot of people who don't like the Bible to begin with, and there's lots of territory I'm treading on, gender, and all sorts of stuff. I can get so kind that people pissed off. And I went thinking, "I want to do this mostly academic presentation to help friends understand a little bit more about the work I do and how it works." It turned into like full blown ministry in a way that I don't even think of myself doing, where every day immediately afterwards and all through the day, people came to me in tears about how deeply they were touched and removed, the story spoke to them and reminded them about something that you haven't dealt with in years. I'm like sitting there, "What's going on? What the heck is happening here?" And then people just kept coming to the Bible, "I don't like more and more and more." And at 8.30 in the morning, it's an ungodly hour to do anything, but there we were. And so it was a very strange experience for me, a wonderful one, and turned out to be positive in all of my fears. I didn't have to worry about it anymore. And I'm sure it makes the name of Peterson Tiscano, ripe to go down, at least in Quaker history, that you can get by without having someone coming up and hitting you with the niggling details, whatever. There was a time over the past five and a half years where it appeared that most of your stuff was political. You know, I can see Sarah Palin from my window or the re-education of George W. Bush. And I enjoy political stuff, especially when spiced by the kind of depth that you bring to any of your performances. But I sense that you're less on a political bent right now and that you're moving in a different direction or that you have moved in a different direction. Am I right about that? Has something changed for you and where are your leadings taking you right now? Well, you know, the re-education of George W. Bush, and I can see her selling her from my window, actually they sound very political. In fact, that's why they were very hard to book, even in a time when people were really, really concerned about conservatism and book Bush and all. What they really were were personal stories about my own family embedded in a political comedy, because really the overarching story of both of those had to do with my mom's death from lung cancer. And that was the real story arc. Now, if you tell people you're going to come to a play that deals with someone losing their mom to lung cancer, they're not going to come. So if it's a political play with real political content, they're going to come and then they're going to get this very much more complex message of this conservative Republican woman who was also very wise and it creates some cognitive dissonance. And so that's what was going on with those plays, and it's interesting since that time my father also died of lung cancer. Very recently, in both cases, my sisters and I were able to be with our parents when they passed away in their home just as such an amazing and horrible privilege to have that experience. So no doubt that will come up again, that topic, but I think that the big movement that I have had with the shift was moving away from my story into other stories. Transfigurations is not any of my story directly. Yeah, I was a sissy growing up and there's some of that there, but this is really based on other people's stories, interviews. I did lots of trans people that I weave into the play. And the other issue that really is sort of gripping me to the point of really changing everything for me and every level of my life is this recent science that has been released about climate change. Starting from September and through just like a week ago, that it's far worse than anyone imagined that humans are definitely responsible and we have a very small window to turn it around before we get to a potential place where we've gone too far. And the planet will become virtually uninhabitable for our children within the next 70 to 100 years. And this is terrifying, overwhelming stuff that has gripped me and caused me to think about me as a very clear personal decisions about it. And wondering what is my contribution to a time in history very much like World War II when people are called upon to make great sacrifices for the future generations. And so I don't know what that's going to look like in my work. I know my life, it makes a difference. I've reverted back to a virtually vegan diet. I'm very seriously considering not traveling by air anymore, which I travel from here work. And so I've already have a book in LA showing LA in April. I'm going to take the train from Pennsylvania. And I'm going to do it in a very public way to begin raising awareness of talking about this, that something serious has to change. I'm an individual and national and international levels. It's that serious. It very well will be, I believe, the most important issue of our time is that it eclipses all others. And there will be lots of social justice issues within that particular support. We'll suffer the most, but everyone will suffer. And so there's something that needs to be done. I don't know what that looks like. My husband's a writer. I don't know what that's going to look like for him. But definitely what it means is I'm going to educate myself more and figure out how can that infuse my work and maybe even change to even a totally different career so that we can work in my own community and other places to help prepare for this. You've got an amazing road behind you and in front of you, Peterson. We've been speaking with Peterson Tuscano on the web at Peterson Tuscano.com or on Twitter at P2Sun as in the letter P, the digit to S-O-N. Look there to find his past presentations. Info on his Bible work and his latest performance. Jesus had two daddies. It's an amazing body of work. You've put together Peterson real creativity and insight and AIDS to help the world move forward in peace and understanding. I honor that work in your ministry. And again, thank you for joining us for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much, Mark. It's really been great and I appreciate your interest and your insightful questions. You got me thinking about some stuff and I appreciate that. I'll take you out for today's Spirit in Action with a portion of a song by one of my personal favorites, Church of the Brother and Peace Studies professor and musician Andy Murray. Kind of dovetails with today's biblical learning theme. The song is "I Learned It in Sunday School." See you next week for Spirit in Action. Here's Andy Murray. When I was one day past 19 in Love and Green and seldom seen without a song, a working too long, there came to me a successful person and with no arm twisting and no soliciting and a quick and nice with the free advice he said, "Son, you want to get it right, then you got to fight. You got to get in line for glory and night cause the world belongs to the bedding and toughen whatever you get won't be enough. Somebody somewhere somehow someday is waiting around to take it all away so get yourself ready. Yes, I said, "I guess he said you guess." I said, "Yes, I don't believe all that." I said, "What you get is what you seek and the world belongs to the gentleman." Meek and somebody tries to take what you got if you got a lot, but you better take stock and watch your greed if they're in need because somehow, somewhere, sometimes someday the high and the low will be called to their knees. And as to account for the least of these, he said, "Son, you've been hypnotized to socialize and calm you down and further more than to do." Where did you learn such things? On a whirlwind tour, some satellite country or a non-credit course, a liberal arts college or a reading in the New York magazines, I said, "No." I learned it in the sun to school, I learned it when I learned to go then will I learned it in the business show play in the bathroom, don't show up at all. I learned to sing and bass and the church is just viral. How great thou art, I learned it in the sun to school. Everybody's something, got the big arts, full red, yellow, black, mixed up all white, all children and brothers sing outside and I learned that in the sun to the school. A voice behind said, "Right on, brother, the right is wrong." And the rituals suffer they had their day, they'll have to pay, well a lot is canned, the curtains ring. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]