Peterson Toscano's A Musing

Yesterday, my final full day at Lambeth, flew by quickly with lots of highlights. I returned to the Changing Attitude/Integrity Bible study where they continued to looked at John 9 . This time we considered how the man born blind grew to understand Jesus through sharing his experience with others. The night before I had dinner with a friend who is disabled and often uses a wheelchair. She and another friend, a wheelchair user, recently traveled from England to Ireland on a holiday. They took the journey with a personal assistant to help out along the way. On their return to Heathrow, the airline temporarily misplaced both their wheelchairs. They sat in airport issued equipment while attempting to sort things out with a Heathrow employee. My friend said that throughout the entire exchange the employee spoke rudely, but more shocking still, the Heathrow employee never once looked at my friend or the other person also sitting in a wheelchair. He dealt exclusively with the assistant as if...

I blogged last week about how deeply moved I felt when I heard the recording of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1958 address to the FGC gathering of Quakers. Today over lunch with Lynn , a Friend from Hartford Meeting, I shared my notes from the talk and felt inspired even more. Something else stirred; the reminder that King had as a mentor in his life a man named Bayard Rustin. In fact, Rustin wrote many of King's speeches in the late 1950's. I spent the afternoon in the garden re-reading two books I have about Rustin. Bayard Rustin is one of the most important figures of the 20th century. A Quaker, an African-American and openly gay, he served as an architect and inspiration for the direction of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. In fact, he was already writing about racial equality and non-violence as early as 1942 in his article The Negro and Non-Violence . He stated, Nonviolence as a method has within it the demand for terrible sacrifice and long suffering, b...

I once got into a big fight with a friend of mine, another white gay guy. After reading about a Black minister spouting off anti-gay remarks in a service, my friend pronounced, The Black church is so homophobic . Me: Yeah, but the white Evangelical church is much worse. He: How can you say that? Read the ugly things this Black minister just said. Me: Yeah, I know, it is awful, but he is not running a multi-million dollar para-church organization that reaches millions of Americans through daily radio programs. He does not have weekly briefings with the president in order to influence policy and legislation that affects LGBT people. He does not influence local and state and national elections through his nationally televised sermons. He does not have the economic and political resources to sway members of congress. He does not regularly feed thousands of ministers, youth workers and Christian counselors lies about LGBT people. He is being loud and ugly, and that is wrong, but the folk...

Something is terribly wrong is happening right now in the white gay community in Hartford, CT (where I live). A white drag queen (who identifies, by the way as a Quaker Minister) is coming to Hartford in 'blackface' as a welfare mom with 17 children, calling herself Shirley Q. Liquor. And many (but not all) white gay men do not see a problem with this. As a Quaker, as a white man, as a gay man, as a comic performer who plays many characters including Black women, I can say that this is wrong on so many levels. That the performer and the venue will not back down or listen to reason, reveals the arrogance and ignorance so often among privileged white gay men. We cry victim because of how we have been oppressed, yet we refuse to see the oppression of others and our own contribution to that oppression. Local activists (mostly young people) have begun actions including a myspace page Ban Shirley Q . The local press has covered the story . And True Colors , an LGBTIQ organization for...