Talking about a Queer Quaker Response to Climate Change

Last year I visited Guilford College in Greensboro, NC and presented the first inklings of a talk around the odd question, What is a Queer Response to Climate Change? As a gay guy, a person of faith from a Christian background now sporting Quaker bonnet and Friendly ways, I daily feel pulled in many different justice directions as my social media feed gets bloated with scores of vital worthy causes–LGBTQ Rights, immigration reform, the reform of the prison industrial complex, anti-racism work, women’s rights, and a constant stream of environmental concerns from anti-fracking to anti-wind farming (because a handful of Quakers I know are concerned about the danger to bird populations.)

So many issues, so little time.

In Quaker circles we talk about having a leading–a deep feeling, interest, fascination, and need to devote time and energy to learn and act around a particular issue. For me that issue is Climate Change with the many human rights, ecological, and political aspects connected to it. But I come to this leading through the lens of being a gay guy, interested in gender issues, passionate about transgender rights, and out of a faith tradition that informs much of what I do.

So no wonder the way I see Climate Change is through those lenses. This multi-focal world view gets revealed in an interview conducted by the Guildorian on March 8 of last year. My ideas have expanded a great deal since then, (and I have three new presentations to prove it) but re-reading the article I see the seeds already sprouting and metaphors and ideas about Queer Climate Activism forming.

The author, Josh Barker, asks, Can you briefly summarize the Queer Quaker response to Climate Change?

First I speak out of a childless gay perspective that for me climate change is NOT all about the children. Some folks don’t have children or grandchildren yet are very concerned about the plight of the planet and lifeforms on it. I then got on to say,

We see the world in very different ways, often because of our experiences. We know what it’s like when people tell lies about us, and there are a lot of lies being told about climate and there’s a coordinated effort to misinform people. That sounds familiar to me as a gay man.

To address the climate also means really thinking outside of the box. Thinking about future living, what will that look like. It may mean alternative families where lots of people live together with a lower carbon footprint. The gay community has been doing that for a long time where many of us create our own families and pairings of units of families.

So, there are very specific things like that, and even thinking outside of the box how we can actually partner with conservative people, because this is what is going to have to happen.

Looking at a carbon fee and dividend scheme could be a very useful thing. Using more nuclear energy, which is blasphemous to many liberal Quakers, is much less carbon-intensive then anything we have going on, particularly in this period.
So I don’t know if there is a particular queer Quaker response to this, but I think of my great, great, great grandfather Walt Whitman who had Quaker grandparents, who had an epiphany at one point in his life. And I think, “What would Walt Whitman do today?”

That gives me a little bit of guidance as I try to navigate what I’m going to do.

Who knows where a leading may lead, particularly when we experience the first inklings of an idea, the beginning stirrings of passion, the formation of an odd question, and a growing concern that may become a life’s work?

Generational Curses–Unearthing Naughty Gay DNA?

For nearly 20 years I attempted to rid myself of my desires for other men. Christian ministers from multiple backgrounds each tried their hand at providing me with the miracle cure I wanted. They could not accept that one could be a happy, holy, healthy homosexual; instead they felt that these man-on-man desires sprung from a poisoned well.

A popular source of gay desire and gender non-conforming behavior was demon possession. Demons were like a virus or sexually transmitted disease that one catches and then infects the soul. I endured at least three different exorcisms, one so wild that the neighbors, fearful that someone was being murdered, called the police.

Gay Conversion “therapists” routinely blamed my parents for my gayness;

You must have had an overbearing mother and an absent dad, and that sent you down on this sinful homosexual path.

This sort of Re-Fried Freud slammed both strong women and their gay sons. My dad, a former US Marine who ran a business from our home with my mom and therefore always around, exasperated with one ex-gay counselor rooting around for familial causes to my same-sex attractions blurted out, “My son is gay; you can’t change a zebra’s stripes.”

When all else failed, and ministers could find no obvious origin of gayness, some then travelled back in time and asked me about my ancestors.

Did you have anyone in your family who was ever involved in sorcery, bestiality, or Free Masonry? You see, you might be suffering from a generational curse that has been passed onto you form one of your parents.

Particularly in the Pentecostal Holiness and Charismatic Churches I attended throughout the mid-1980s to late-1990s the concept of Generational Curses was BIG. We would have whole prayer sessions to try and unearth our families’ naughty DNA with hopes of finding the strand that led to our current sin struggles. Ministers based this teaching upon the following Bible verse:

Exodus 34:6,7 And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,

Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

Don’t think that mothers were off the hook; later translations replaced “iniquity of the fathers” with “sins of the parents.” (And who said church folk didn’t believe in equal rights for women?)

When it came to being gay, the Generational Curse Theory was yet another extreme stretch to discount the reality that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people exist in the world as part of the delicious diversity of life.

Lately though I have been thinking about Generational Curses in regards to the environment. How do our ancestors’ former actions affect us today? Seeing that CO2 is a stock fuel that remains in the atmosphere for up to 100 years, how do our policies and practices regarding greenhouse warming fossil fuels affect future generations?

Over at the Facebook some of us started a rich conversation about this concept of Generational Curses. We raised questions about areas in society where such a concept might make sense–addiction, economic injustice, etc. and where they most certainty do not.

What about you? What are some of your thoughts, insights, and experiences about Generational Curses?

From Homo No Mo and Beyond–Web Launch!

Back in October 2002 I sat in my tiny apartment in Hartford, CT considering a play I had in mind which would reveal to the world the 17 years I spent receiving gay conversion therapy and especially the two horrible years I endured the notorious Love in Action ex-gay residential program in Memphis, TN.

I did not feel I had to speak out, but that it was an option if I wanted. I also sensed that I was looking at a five year commitment. As I sat in my room, I said yes, I would produce the play and walk down that path. Almost immediately and over the next six months, ideas came to me about how to create the work, how to present it, how to pitch it, how to promote it. It was like a vast file was downloaded into my mental hard drive.

Peterson officially comes out of the closet in January 1999

In February 2003 in Memphis, TN I premiered, Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House, then spent the next five years traveling through North America, Europe, and Africa telling my story and connecting with others to learn about their experiences. With the help of my friend, Christine Bakke, a fellow ex-gay survivor, we launched the Ex-Gay Survivor Movement

Then in 2008 five years was up. We had accomplished so much in that time, and I felt released from the work while also sensing a leading to new work, particularly a need to address the oppression against trans* people at the hands of gays and lesbians and by churches. This led to the creation of Transfigurations–Transgressing Gender in the Bible, a blend of performance and scholarship that looks at non-conforming gender outlaws in the Bible.

Art by Mila and Jayna Ponder

Again I felt like I knew what steps to take to let the public know about the work. I understood I needed to get to seminaries and places of worship–Christian, Jewish, and Muslim–to share some good news about gender non-conformists in the Bible who stand as the most important characters in some of the Bible’s most important stories. For the past six years I have been doing this work, and I expect I will carry on doing it. This summer I will finally film the play and then have it available for distribution.

But something new started up for me a little over a year ago. After reading, listening, and having some long teary conversations with my husband, Glen Retief, I became alarmed about the reality of Climate Change and what it means for us as a civilization. I understood that I wanted and needed to respond to the growing crisis in the only way I knew how–with art.

I have spent the last year researching climate change and how to communicate effectively about it. I am creating a new play, Does This Apocalypse Make Me Look Fat? A Comedy about Broken Bodies–Large and Small, which will premiere in the early fall (Details TBA).

Decked out in Eco-Drag, wonders, “What Would Walt Whitman Do?”

As I ask questions like, What is a Queer Response to Climate Change? What role will you take on a new planet? How will churches and other places of worship refashion themselves to be relevant in a new climate? I also have gained insights into how to get this work out to the wider world.

So I have pulled together a dream team who have partnered with me to advise, contribute, reach out, and create with me. Over the next few weeks I’ll introduce you to the various team members. And today I launch my new and improve website replete with new presentations as well as tried and true performances. A podcast is in the work and lots of social media. My hope is to create a hub where we can talk about climate change as a queer issues, a pastoral care issue, a human rights issue, and as a community issue. There is so much we can do and so much we will do to face this crisis with creativity, wisdom, and love.

Welcome to the new site. It’s good to be back!

(Original art by Kevin Miller)

The Voracious Hunger for Life

That winter death looked straight into our eyes and stared long, without faltering. It wanted to hypnotise us, like a boa constrictor hypnotises its intended victim, stripping him of his will and subjugating him. But those who sent us so much death miscalculated. They underestimated our voracious hunger for life.

-Poet Olga Berggolts reflecting on winter of 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad.

In my newest play, Does This Apocalypse Make Me Look Fat? A Comedy about Broken Bodies, Large and Small, I look at all kinds of survivors as I consider what it takes to remain human in the midst of suffering and fear.

Does this Climate Change Activism Make Me Look Straight??

Sometimes I feel like the only Climate Gay in the Village. Sure there are LGBTQ folks concerned with accessorizing their carbon footprints and buying trendy eco-friendly products, but when it comes to climate change, it seems most of us live on another planet

No doubt we have been preoccupied with fighting for our recognition in a world that treated us like toxic waste. Not that long ago whenever a major weather catastrophe hit, Christian ministers lined up on TV to declare that homosexuals magically stirred up the waters. That or they proclaimed we incurred the wrath of a God who seemed far more concerned with butt action at a New Orleans bath house over the weekend than to what we have been spewing out of our chimneys into the atmosphere for the past 100 years.

Yes, we have been distracted with a protracted fight for our basic rights and protections. Today many LGBTQ people throughout the developing world face severe, consistent, cruel discrimination, and a dismal lack of basic rights. This is also very true for trans* people in North America and Europe. Sure we can say that for some of us in the LGBTQ Rainbow Collective that “It Gets Better,” but we all know there is work to do.

So who has time or energy for climate change?? We are busy fighting for our rights or with caterers over the perfect gay wedding.

We are in a funny time in history, a time when LGBTQ people in the developed world have more rights and protections than ever before. We also live in a time in which we have altered the chemistry of the planet to such an extreme extent that if we don’t act immediately to stop the insanity, we are looking at a dire, perhaps impossible future. Great, I can get gay married just in time for the end of the world. The worse part is that me and my “gay lifestyle will likely get blamed for it! (As opposed to our fossil fuel lifestyle and overpopulation of the planet.)

For me there is something decidedly queer about Climate Change, yet when I attend Citizen Climate Lobby meetings and Climate Rallies, I feel I am swimming in a sea of white, gender-normative, heterosexuals. Nice people, but we need over voices from other rooms.

I am a climate queer actively looking to develop Queer Responses to Climate Change? What about you? What might those responses look like?

Anti-Fear Messaging: A Queer Response to Climate Change

Studies show that scaring the shit out of people does not work. In fact, fear tactics may even encourage the denial of climate change in those scared shitless. Reading a piece in the New York Times, Global Warming Fear Tactics, I was reminded yet again that when talking about Climate Change, one must not lead with the dire doom and gloom dangerous end-of-the-world scenarios.

“Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Over the past year I have been musing over a query that at first seemed to only make sense to me, but as I explored it and shared my thoughts with others, they too began to see the point. I wondered, What is a Queer Response to Climate Change?

I know that many see Climate Change as a scientific issue and a policy issue. In many ways it has become a political issue drawn by party lines (although there are still Democrats silent on the issue or deniers themselves.)

But I see Climate Change as a Human Rights issue and one that requires a great deal of imagination, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking. For those reasons and more I see that transgender, bisexual, queer, lesbian, gay, and asexual folks are specially situated to address Climate Change and the many issues connected to it.

Over the next year here on this blog, in Climate Stew, my podcast that will be availible in the fall, and in my new play, Does This Apocalypse Make Me Look Fat? I will seek to answer the question, What is a Queer Response to Climate Change? As I do, I will avoid fear-based language as much as possible. Fear shuts down the brain, while hope and solutions opens us hearts and minds.

So What thoughts do you have? What might be a Queer response to Climate Change?

Facing the Unimaginable

At first I could not comprehend that my mom was actually dying. None of us did. She was never sick before, always the strong one taking care of all of us. Some realities are too big to grasp. Once we did understand what was happening though, my father, my sisters, and I found inner reserves of strength, courage, creativity, and caring we did not know we possessed. We became her primary caregivers. It was difficult and painful, but also a great honor to do all that we could to help her when she needed us most.

From that time I learned lessons that I remembered six years later when our father was sick and dying. I recognized sooner this time the crisis that we faced, the seriousness of the situation, the reality that this illness might end in death. And sadly it did. I miss both my parents terribly everyday, but I feel grateful that my sisters and I were able to understand the diagnosis, and that we did not pretend. We accepted the reality that a great change was happening in our lives. Pretending everything will be fine or that it will just go away or that surely technology will fix it for us would have kept us aloof, unavailable, unengaged when our parents needed us to be most alert and active.

For the past year since my father’s death, I have been researching climate change and the rapid deterioration of the atmosphere and the oceans resulting in recurring severe weather events, drought, floods, the extinction and the threat of extinction to some animals and plants, and already the disruption of human lives and even loss of lives. These days I am drawing once again from those inner reserves I discovered during the times my parents were so ill. I have been looking at the diagnosis regarding the planet, and the prognosis is currently grim, not yet hopeless, but dire all the same.

Climate Change to me is very much like living with a seriously ill parent. The reality of a sick planet is almost too great to take in. The earth seems too big to fail. It’s easier to assume all will be okay and to escape into Facebook or the latest YouTube craze or Tweet my way to distraction. But right now I’m beginning to understand that my attention is required. While it is a difficult reality to grasp, I accept that the climate has already changed and will continue to change. As we face these facts, we will find the strength and the will to act. We will have the great honor to help when we are needed most.

Train Travel with my own little black box

Recently I announced I grounded myself from all flights within North America where I do 90% of my work. On Tuesday I will take the bus from home to Harrisburg, PA (1 hour, $18 one-way) then spend the night with friends, so I can get my 5 AM train to Burlington, NC (11 hours with 90 minute layover in Philadelphia, $107 one-way)

What I look forward to on this particular journey.
1. Hanging out with friends in Harrisburg who I don’t get to see often. We will have a nice dinner and catch up

2. 11 hours in a train. This may seem awful to some, but I am reading an amazing memoir by Japanese poet, Mutsuo Takahashi, so look forward to long stretches of uninterrupted reading. Also, I have about 60 pages of my own memoir completed and need to do some edits. I expect to get through most of it by the time I pull into Burlington.

3. I purchased a fetching bento lunch box along with a set of travel cutlery and chopsticks. The bento box has little compartments for rice, vegetables, tofu, etc, stuff I like to eat but they surely do not serve in Amtrak’s Cafe Car (Although they do offer Annie’s Vegan Burgers–which they ALWAYS overcook in the microwave.

I most definitely will NOT miss going through airport security along with the car ride to the the airport, the two flights and then long car ride to my destination

Bento box arrives tomorrow. Yay.

The Peterson No-Fly Zone

Over the last two months, I have made a drastic and dramatic decision. No, Glen and I are not adopting a human child; our cats, Wally & Emma, are more than we can handle at the moment. And, no, I am not coming out more, although there is always room for more coming out.

For those who do not know, I am a performance artist and queer Bible scholar who travels throughout North America presenting at universities, seminaries, conferences, theaters, and churches. I live in Central Pennsylvania, a gay Quaker in Amish Mennonite Country, and I communte to California and Tennessee and a bunch of other places to do my work. And within that context, I have made a drastic and dramatic decicion.

I have decided that for the next five years or more I will not travel by plane within North America. No more flights from Pennsylvania to San Francisco or Vancouver or Memphis or Mexico City for business or pleasure. Other than in the case of an emergency, I have officially grounded myself.

Why? Short answer: It’s because of Climate Change and the excessive individual role flying has in pumping CO2 and other Greenhouse forming gases into the atmosphere. I have already flown much more than the average earthling. My individual contribution to the climate change compared with most people is off the charts, even with over ten years of being a vegan and seven years living without a car. For me, I cannot ethically fly any longer.

I recognize that this choice in and of itself will not drastically change the world at large. Nations, lawmakers, institutions, and businesses will have the largest impact in addressing the current global climate crisis. I have little to no power over what they choose, but I exercise vast amounts of agency over my own choices.

And with a choice like this, well, the world becomes a different place for me. In fact, it opens up opportunities previous unknown to me. (More about that in a future post.)

Notice I stated I will no longer fly within North America. I said nothing about flights to Europe or the UK or South Africa. The grief at the thought of possibly never seeing some of the dearest people I know, people who happen to live in Sweden, Malta, Northern Ireland, Wales, England, South Africa, Spain, and Norway, seizes up my heart and brings a tight sob immediately to my throat. I do not know about that yet. I understand that longer flights oddly have less impact than multiple shorter ones (something to do with disproportionate amount of fuel needed in take off and landing.) I know that I could also look into purchasing carbon off-sets to help balance out the carbon I expend. Today I do not have to make those decisions.

Instead today I am looking into train schedules for trips to Greensboro, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, and I’m planning a bus ride to Nashville. The choice to ground myself limits me, and it opens doors.

I welcome your comments.

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Tag: climate change

(Original art by Kevin Miller)