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...

Fruit Flies--as in the insect drosophilidae--not savvy straight women who enjoy hovering around fabulous gay men. Yesterday a reporter from ABC contacted me to ask what I thought about a new study that reveals the sexual orientation of fruit flies can be changed. My immediate response was that I am not a scientist and had not yet been in contact with the fruit fly community, so I wouldn't want to speak for them. But as a vegan, I have personal knowledge of drosophilidae in my fruit bowl, and as an ex-gay survivor, I know about the desperation to change one's orientation. But how deliciously ironic that they did a study about orientation on fruit flies. Aw, those poor gay fruit flies being type cast in a fruity role once again. But as I spoke with the reporter, he asked about humans and how some people may respond to this fruit fly orientation switching news. In my mind and heart I traveled back to when I was 19 and longed for a cure. I would have done anything and everything to...

This morning I did two performances of Queer 101-Now I Know My gAy,B,Cs at a high school in Greensboro, North Carolina. The show looks at homophobia, identity and activism through the word and lives of lesbian and gay poets. Although it was INSANELY early in the morning (don't they realize that most youth do not fully function until 11 am?), the students responded well and asked great questions. After the second show, some students approached me to chat a bit about the show, queer issues and their lesbian, bisexual and gay friends. One female student told me that some of the guys at the school felt anxious about the show thinking that I would talk about gay sex and then try to convert them to being gay (the famous "gay agenda"). Not the first time I have run into this assumption both from students and parents. I am so glad that at one point in the play Chad, one of the characters, rattles off his list of what he is looking for in a potential mate. Of course he would have...