 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ interview show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont which we recognize as being unceded Indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with P.J. DeRoshers, a visual artist who explores their non-binary humanness through art. P.J. creates images, builds installations, and immersive experiences of their gender and a life well lived. Welcome, P.J. Thank you, Ann. I'm happy to be here. This is a return visit. You last came. It is a return. Yeah. We're 30th, 2019 and a lot has changed since then. I know so much. Yeah, we've all been through a lot. Let me read from your artistic statement if I may. Please do. Their media originates with photographic self-portraits printed on transparency film. P.J. then builds creations by layering the transparent images and connecting them quite often using finger-printed scotch tape and fishing line to found objects. These pieces can often be found installed within the natural beauty of Central Vermont, where they photograph and film these beloved creations to become gallery accessible and presented for your viewing pleasure. In the last interview, just to have a little bio, I learned that you were born in New Hampshire, spent some time in California, and have moved back to Vermont with your daughter to spend some time with your mother. Yes, correct. Central Vermont is your primary artistic venue. It definitely is. One reason P.J. has been kind enough to join us is to celebrate show that's currently at the front gallery called P.J. de Rocher's To See and Be Seen. Now, this is going to be at the front gallery. I was privileged enough to go to the opening. It's a small gallery, and every inch of the space is used creatively. So when you go, you have to be really attentive to all the found objects, maybe, that appear. You are going also, okay, so this is going to be up between November 5th and November 28th and 2020. So this will give our audience plenty of time to stop in and see it. The only caveat is that the gallery is only open on weekends, so keep that in mind. Friday evenings, yeah, Friday evenings from four to seven, Saturdays and Sundays from 11 to five. One other thing I'd like to alert the audience to is an upcoming artist talk that P.J. is going to deliver on Thursday, November 18th at 7 p.m., and this is going to be a Zoom talk. Correct. And if you go on P.J.'s website, we will display throughout. You'll get the Zoom link. Yes. So I'm going to try to tune it. That should be, maybe we can have a little preview on this show. That'd be great. There are several continuities in your work that I have observed, but before we get to that, one is this deconstruction piece, because when you last came on the show, I believe you presented it, and it was a flat object. And let me read, if I may, a little description about it, and then we can show it in its new incarnation. And you can talk a little more about it if you would. I will. And this is in your voice. Deconstruction, unbeknownst to myself at the time of building, deconstruction was the exploration of my gender. I came to notice during my daily photographic process of seeing myself that the images I was taking had transitioned from being whole body and face portraits to images taken only of parts of myself. Seeing only parts made me curious what I wasn't wanting to see or attempting to see within myself. I decided I'd build a full body image in the form of a map on my studio to see what I could see. I then abstracted from these images and built a life-size mobile made out of transparencies of each of the photographs to install in nature to seek a deeper understanding of what I was processing within myself at the time. Upon reflecting as I made the work, I began to understand that I wasn't a woman. Indeed, I am a non-binary human and this work reflected to me the deconstruction of my womanhood and redefined my gender in this spacious light-filled land of being non-binary. I love that phrase. As you can see in the video that we're about to look at, the rigidity and fracturing of my womanhood juxtaposed with the fluidity and multi-dimensionality of my non-binary self. Let's look at this 22-second clip. That is so interesting. Tell us about it, PJ. Well, I like hearing the words that I wrote a while ago and I think that they still ring true. I definitely had just right now a bit of an emotional response to hearing them reflected back to me. I think reflection is such a huge part of my art. When I made this deconstruction piece, I work to see in general. I'm working to see. I want to see what's going on. Images, photographs, and ways to take them and manipulate them really help reflect back into me what's going on. This particular piece, I feel, opened me to understanding the non-binary landscape that had been seeking to be seen, I think, for quite a while, if not forever. There just weren't words for it when I was younger. I guess I'm always pleased that I do take the time to pay attention, and I definitely looked through my photographs at that time before I even built the image and was really interested as to why just months prior, years prior, I would take full-body images and why for about a six-month period of time I was only just taking snippets of myself. It really was in that understanding of myself that something was going on and then making it to something was I able to have that reflection back that there was a part of me that was breaking down and breaking apart and that there was something to be found like kind of in a new terrain. I often describe my gender to me most often feels like a really vast expanse and the concept of sort of or the trappings for me which felt like like a womanhood to have those sort of break apart and fall away has been really freeing and to really make art that is like not only like my experience of non-binary voice but sort of creating openings for others to enter into my world and my understanding kind of of of gender because gender really is your own understanding like we get labeled certain things but you know I may look and appear a certain way but it's really how I feel and define it for myself and that is you know for everyone in general and I think like my in my art making this art and sort of like taking a stand about it that I've decided that I'm going to be free in my own expression that I hope that it has that impact for others and that it is an opening and a welcoming and a and a like a deeper a deeper understanding so that piece is very near and dear and so special to me and that's why in my current show I made a film of multiple installations that I did of that piece because I feel like the current work the to see and be seen show that's up at the front in Montpelier, Vermont and my show and like everything like it feels like it started there like that feels like a starting point to me so it's continuity and expansion yes and that theme is reflected also in what seems to me a new project a project I hadn't heard of yet which is a non-binary tarot yes it's also featured in the show and yes I read your description of it and you know when you last came on the show you told me about iPhoneography which was a new concept I'd never heard and now a new concept I've never heard is Soul Tarot so please tell us what is Soul Tarot? Well Soul Tarot is a concept that I learned from one of my teachers Lindsay Mack and Lindsay Mack is a beautiful soul and they're a beautiful teacher of they have a website Lindsay Mack dot com and they teach a class called tarot for the wild soul and I love Lindsay's approach in that which is very akin to my own approach in how I learned tarot as being a reflection of where you're at right now and that in my 20 years of reading tarot have I I have never ever seen it as a way to like fortune tell only as a way to see so it's another way to see and have reflected and so I really resonated and learned so much from Lindsay around Soul Tarot because it's really just helping us grow and expand deeper and listen to kind of who we are beyond sort of who we're told to be and and here and and hold those parts that we were told to be as well like it isn't about being different it's about being who you are and making choices on on what you want to grow and what you don't want to grow and so that would be my words for to describe Soul Tarot and Lindsay may have completely different words so I would just encourage folks to really check out their website and take anything that Lindsay offers if you're interested in in tarot or just in deeper listening to yourself well when we pick when we let the show one of the people we go into the show with remarked that the regular tarot is very gendered yes so your idea of subverting that dynamic is really creative and original tell us how you happen to come upon the idea of a non-binary tarot well as a person that's non-binary and a person that has used tarot as a self-reflective tool for 20 plus years there's a labor that's involved when you read more gendered cards and sometimes like a gender could feel really good like I really want to feel like King Lee today or I feel more masked today like there's times that that fits and sometimes it's just nice to have a space that is completely I don't want to say like gender neutral but you know that when you pick up my guidebook or when you pick up my cards that there isn't going to be an experience of being misgendered or hopefully there isn't and that's just something like as a non-binary person that I deal with daily and I really like the idea of having my spiritual practice and my reflective time being a place where I don't have to make something fit for me that this is just going to fit and so my hope is that it has a fit for a lot of folks whether you know I mean specifically for like non-binary people but for other people as well that are questioning or just are sort of tired of of a traditional patriarchal sort of way of being which tarot hasn't always been that way but it has definitely merged into that so I that's sort of where that came from really is just wanting a space where I don't have to correct anybody where I can just be seen and it deepens the practice for me and that's I mean I'm just interested in understanding more about myself and interested in being able to be present in the in the moment with what is the more that I grow in age and I find the tarot really a beautiful way that helps me hold space with things that are uncomfortable or things that I'm growing. Is that the deck displayed behind you? Yes it is so these are the original the originals these are images that are printed onto transparency and then I hung them on the wall behind me as I completed each card and kind of each suit so this is the completed deck that hangs behind me and there's a printed version that's in my show and two prototype decks that are made one that I use daily because I'm learning this new deck and how it works and one that I have for use in the show for folks to start getting some reflection from and for me to get some reflection from on kind of like how how it works what what it's doing how it's holding space what kind of what the deck has to say as a whole because the cards are individual art but the way that it works together is it's a whole piece and so that still is is emerging. We've sent us two individual cards to look at yes look at this first card it's death and the what the guidance the saying the epigraph is all good things come to pass what's ready to take its leave and this is the first card and your it's seasonal you told me a little about that as we look at it. Yeah so the death card is actually the first card that I made for this deck and I made it during this time of year not last year but the year before last and I kept some of the major cards I shifted some of the names around them and some of them I kept the same more of the traditional name and I and I kept this name because I think that there is something really important about um kind of honoring like what comes to pass and and sort of saying saying it like it is and so in this card you can see um kind of embedded into the leaves there is a shadow kind of of my back so it it does sort of talk about this card talks about the decompensate the the decomposing of what once was and then there's also an image of sort of of of a rising up in the middle of the card and that both of those happen at the same time and so this time of year fall is quite the death time of all the leaves coming down and coating the earth and being ready to be be composted but then there's also this level of vulnerability and exposure with that coming down like if you literally think of a tree and like what is what is being born or what's what's talking to you about wanting to be born so I love this I love the images in this card but I also love the meaning of that those two things happening at once like the coming down and the laying down in the emergence in that let's look at the next card you sent us this you say this is your favorite card this is my favorite time shatters matter perspectives and beliefs we've outgrown I love that too tell us about this card is so this card is the 10 of windows and windows like in a traditional tarot suit windows would be the suit of knives and typically this card is pretty like traditionally pretty lots of big swords stabbing someone in the back and the person is laying down and it's a very violent image and so I'm surprised that this is my favorite card to tell you the truth because in a in a traditional tarot I would have kind of a more of a pulled back response to that that imagery is challenging but what I like about this this card is it captures that the ending and like the last breath you know because you can see the the nine windows coming down and then there's this new emergence of of sort of what's left so 10 cards have a lot to do with similar to the death card in that they um talk a lot about like what's present and what's come to pass and so there's something to me that I love about there's some softness in that windows that I really love because those periods of time we need a lot of softness we need a lot of care and so I like the colors in that card the pink door like really reflect that care to me and there's like a softness around the window and and kind of a letting go of those black shapes to me are a lot around like kind of those automated thoughts or ways we're supposed to think or ways we're supposed to feel and so when I talk about like time shatters brain matter like I think about our brains and our brains just get stuck sometimes and so this 10 card is a real like it's going to shake some of those loose and so here you know we're going to see those you know kind of tumbling down and and that is an experience of like a 10 of windows experience. Well one thing I noticed about the deck is that it also reflects continuity and expansion there are golden portals there are ribbons there are chairs your work is continually evolving it seems. Yes what I one of the things that I I love is that this deck was waiting for me in my camera roll so and what I mean by that and one of my one of my teachers one of my photographic teachers or photography teachers Catherine Just would say and that her teacher would say Sieg Harvey that our work is ahead of us and so there is a way when we work that you don't really know like what it's about like and I really trust that so a lot of times when I work I'm like oh I'm going to cut a golden circle and like pop it out on the snow because I can't stop thinking about it so I'm going to go ahead and do a series on golden portals and I and I'm like oh that's cool that's fun I'm having a great time like and then come to find out that golden portals actually was hanging out waiting to become one of the suits in this deck so each of the suits in this deck represents a a body of work that I have done I did a body of work with the chair a body of work with the ribbons the windows emerged out of another 365 project body of work so I these really feel like I feel like this deck has been talking to me for a long time before I even knew that it was there and so when I decided you know a couple years ago that I was going to make one it took me a while to get the the I don't know if get out of my own way or to decide that I was going to give myself permission to make it because a lot of the images have me in them and so that part felt a little that felt uh that was interesting to navigate through until I said you know what it's okay that's where we're going and everything all of the all of those images have all been in my phone so to speak like they've all been there so a lot of the self-portraiture that's part of this are images that have been there or continue to be generated to be there to make this deck so so to me it really does feel like such a culmination of um you know a good seven-year cycle of work of artistic work. E.J. Jarosz, thank you for your art and your vision and thank you for joining us. You're welcome. Thanks Ann for having me. Hi everybody and welcome to all things LGBTQ. I'd like to introduce Casey Whiteley who is an environmental activist here in Vermont so hi Casey how are you? Hi how are you? Thanks for having me Linda. Oh yeah this is great so um just so the audience gets to know you a little bit you are originally from Vermont so where were you before Vermont? I grew up in southern Pennsylvania down by the Maryland line and I came up to Vermont for the in college to be a canoeing counselor actually at a girls camp up in the northeast kingdom at Lake Willoughby and I fell in love with everything about Vermont at that point the hiking and canoeing and you know the lakes the rivers all that so I think that kind of solidified my my interest and just my connection with the natural world that I'm that's so important. Gorgeous yeah and then when I got out of college I moved back to that same area and I've been here ever since so. So did you study environment or science in college? No I was just I was just a plain old English major you know you just read a lot. So so what drew you to environmental issues and your deep commitment to trying to improve people's lives in this area? Well I think I I think always since you know my you know early 20s when I first came up here I've always had a respect and sort of sense of wanting to protect and keep the natural environment pristine and I think the thing that really I would say kind of turned me into an environmental activist as an older adult was after right after I stopped working full time about 10 years ago there was a push to bring tar sands oil which is from Canada which is a very abrasive liquid down through the northeast kingdom reversing the flow of what was the Portland main to Montreal pipeline and I saw where it was going to go through in the northeast kingdom and that's like the area where I lived in for 20 years and I was like oh my gosh if we have a spill in victory bog nobody's ever even going to know about it you know so I got involved then and that's how I got connected with an organization called 350 Vermont which is like the state chapter of a national organization that was started actually by one of our really highly respected Vermonters Bill McKibben who lives in Ripton Vermont and has been a middlebury professor and a writer he's been writing about this stuff since the 80s about the danger that you know humans are causing to the planet so I got involved with 350 Vermont and I've been involved with them ever since I'm on their board and we I've been out to Fort McMurray, Alberta where the tar sands are for a peace walk with the indigenous people out there I've been to Standing Rock um so the environment and specifically protection of our water is very very important to me and and now we get to the subject of what you've been focusing on focusing on of late which is Leigh A. J. Leigh J. Tell our audience I mean like I said I I I didn't know anything about this I had no clue so I'm sure there are many people who do not so if you just give us a sure a little bit of talk about what this is and how it's affected Vermont's environment well and don't feel badly if you don't know much about this because most people don't unless you're from a place where this has been a big issue it's just started to bubble up to the surface here in central Vermont and specifically in Montpelier but Leigh J is um well first of all the um Vermont has only one landfill and it's run by a obviously a private uh business called Cassella and it's up in the Newport Coventry area um and it sits uh on the back bay of Newport where these where three rivers come in and feed the lake meant for Magog which is a 31 mile lake that is mostly in Canada well Leigh J is kind of the it's the liquid juice they call it garbage juice that that accumulates when everything sort of drips down to the bottom of the landfill and they draw that off and they put it into big tanker trucks and they haul it off to wastewater treatment plants well the problem is is that there isn't any treatment well first the problem is the Leigh J has a family of chemicals in it called PFAS PFAS and they contain a lot of different toxins but they are called forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment and in fact they what they say is they bioaccumulate so when they take this leachate which has got lots of this toxic waste in it to the land to the to the wastewater treatment plants it doesn't get taken out it just gets discharged into whatever that body of water is that the treatment plant goes into now in the case of Newport it goes into Lake Memphermagog basically it goes into the Black River and the Barton River which feed into the lake and they have found PFAS up way up in Canada in in Magog which is the other end of the lake 30 miles up the problem is is that Lake Memphermagog is the drinking water supply well it's not the only problem but it's the drinking water supply for over 170,000 Canadians so you know it's poisoning their water supply so right now there is a moratorium on not taking any leachate because of this danger the Newport treatment plant isn't taking any leachate and Essex Vermont which was another big receiver of the leachate decided last February or March 2021 that they were no longer going to take leachate until there's some treatment to take it out of it because they're putting it into the Lake Champlain watershed now at issue for us here in Montpelier is that we are taking a lot of this leachate and it's being dumped it's being discharged I shouldn't say dumped it's being discharged after the organic materials are taken out it's being discharged into our dog river which is just a little hop skipping a jump away from the Winooski River so it's all going into the Winooski River and eventually down into Lake Champlain now one thing they discovered up in Newport is that it took about two years it takes about two years for that leachate for the PFAS to travel that far up the lake with the lake currents or whatever so it's you know it's a it's a process that really needs to be monitored and we need to be testing what the level of these toxic chemicals are in the leachate that we're discharging into our watershed our Winooski watershed but we're not so anyway what I would like your listeners to know is that the Montpelier City Council is just sort of getting a handle on this issue and they are meeting next Wednesday to talk about an agency of natural resources draft discharge permit that would increase the amount of leachate that Montpelier is taking from 24,000 gallons a day to 60,000 gallons a day that's more than doubling the amount of leachate and the reason why we're you know they need a place to put this stuff and two of their big receivers aren't taking any Plattsberg takes it and I believe Concord New Hampshire takes it so really Montpelier is left holding the bag for this and I guess what I want to give my opinion about is that I feel like the state of Vermont should be responsible for what happens to our solid waste and not leave it up to a private for profit multi-million dollar company that's their job is to make money and instead it's falling back to small municipalities like Montpelier to deal with this stuff and really I don't think I think that's a bum deal it's it's it shouldn't be up to just Montpelier to say yes we're going to take all of this leachate from the state's only landfill I think I would like to see Montpelier draw a line in the sand like Newport and Essex have and say we're not going to take anymore leachate until there's a way to treat this stuff and make sure that we're not poisoning our waterways um the one of the things they found in Newport are fish that have been caught that have cancerous lesions on them and we don't even know what is happening below below us on the Winooski River in Montpelier because nobody's keeping track of any of this stuff so is there a way to treat this now there is not a proven confirmed safe way to treat it right now there is research going into it and the and and President Biden's EPA is definitely working hard on this um right now there there are different sort of test pilots that are going that are that are being tried but there's no um one of the ways is to to find a way to dry the leachate and then store it in a compact way somewhere safe so it's not in the anybody's waterway but one of the problems with that is I think it requires incineration which releases a lot of these toxins into the air now there was a huge big uh front page article about what happens what's happened in North Carolina with all of the PFAS that have been discharged into the Cape Fear River and poisoned the drinking water supply for people and down there and they find they found that like most of us actually when you get a blood test we have some level of PFAS in our blood streams because of all the uses that it's had for like over 50 years I mean Dupont has been making this stuff since the 50s it's in Teflon it's in stuff that makes your raincoats um water resistant it's in firefighters foam that they use there's a big problem on US military bases with trying to get rid of um toxic PFAS on the on the military bases and they're trying to deal with that but anyway it's it's um it's not just a problem here in Vermont but we have an opportunity to make sure it doesn't get as bad as things are other places like North Carolina and that's why it's important for the agency and natural resources to hear from people no we don't want to expand we don't want to expand the amount we're taking we want to stop taking it it's dangerous and then what would happen to it though I mean is if Malpillia refuses to take it I think it just it forces it's it puts a lot of pressure on the state to come up with a plan for what to do with it right now in this draft permit they're giving Cassella the green light to pilot test a treatment plan up in Coventry and of course the people who have been fighting this up at Lake Mentor Magog are saying no we don't we don't want you to do that here in fact we want you to over you know the next couple years we want you to shut down this landfill altogether yeah yeah so well that makes sense so we want to put pressure on the state to take responsibility for this and take it off the shoulders of you know relatively small communities who are strapped for cash anyway like Malpillia and we'll make sure to put up all of from all of Malpillia's council people that would be great so our audience will know how to contact them to talk about this issue and when the people people can people there's a zoo people can zoom into these meetings too so you don't have to show up in person and it's a particularly difficult time for people to want to be with a crowd of people so um so they would just go on to so next Wednesday what is the date for that that's the 27th that's October 27th and then the night after that there's an in-person meeting that the agency of natural resources is hosting at their building out on the I call it the three mile bridge road it's out by the um it's out by the railroad station it's called the annex and they're having it and you can zoom you can zoom into that as well okay so I'll make sure you have uh that information okay great and and um so people can just show up and yeah online they want I mean on zoom if they want okay great that would and that would be really great if people could do that just to show that you know this isn't just a like check off the box and we're doing this you know I know it's really important yeah you know water drinking water everywhere in the United States to me like Flynn I mean I think that was caused by different issue obviously but yeah you know the water that they were putting into the water system was polluted yeah so and you know the answer to all this shouldn't be just to buy water in plastic bottles it's like we should have clean water to drink you know yeah um and so I let me just ask you now if our audience wants to read more read uh up on these issues more and other issues do you have any books that you might suggest that people read I have I have two and this one is um is called all we can save truth courage and solutions for the climate crisis and one of the things I like about it is that it's written by two women scientists and the contributors are all women and um they're essayists and poets and it's a it's a it's a wonderful book in the sense that you're not going to be totally depressed when you read it so and that's the trouble with like I mean you know the planet right now is in such sad shape that it's hard to think about things globally and not get depressed so and then the other book I really like is this book called braiding sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and she is a a scientist and a professor and a member of the uh Potawatomi nation over in New York state and this book is more about just what are like what a what an indigenous relationship with the natural world is and it's reciprocal and it's not exploitive and so she just she's a wonderful writer and it's a it's just a it's I'd say it's almost more like a spiritually oriented book than um scientifically about you know here's this bad thing and what you should do about it yeah so I like I love those two books I would recommend those two books okay great so let's all try to go to these meetings and zoom in if you don't want to go in person great and um is there anything else you'd like to tell the audience before we leave no I think that's I think that I mean for this for this particular issue I think that would be you know we've pretty much covered like why why the what's the urgency of it and it is really important yeah so okay well thank you okay well thanks for having me Linda this is a very timely opportunity to get the word out and um I'll see you on Zoom oh great okay all right so anyone who is part of the central Vermont LGBTQ community knows that there was an email that went out recently promoting a new LGBTQ plus affinity group that was coming together sponsored by the uu church and it was entitled queerality get your attention so here to talk to us about queerality and how it came about is Verdes Lavar Robinson who is an intern at the uu church in Montpelier welcome Verdes thanks for having me thank you for being here thank you for agreeing to do this as I said before this is an example of faith so I think where I would like to start is talking a little bit about you because you have a degree in voice you you were associate professor tenured in history and african-american studies that's not necessarily the route that gets you to a master's in divinity in ordination yes how did that happen oh long story I'll make it brief though um because I tell it a lot because everyone asks that and and that is uh so I grew up in western new york which is Rochester so nowhere near nowhere near the city it takes me the same time as to get to the city as it does to Vermont believe it or not so uh so western new york home of the snow buffalo wings all that great stuff and I grew up in a holiness pentecostal family um and we we were very um a poor so it's a part of the christian the protestant charismatic christian um faith that believes in speaking in tongues and dancing and um as a way of rejoicing and things of that nature so um and all the gifts of the spirit and all of that so I grew up my father was a pentecostal preacher um my mother was a deaconess in the church and uh I grew up on the front row seat since birth almost basically and um and then in high school so I got really really involved uh we were always in church Wednesday night service Thursday the night choir practice Friday night um terry services what they call it to commune with the holy spirit and then all day sunday and evening um I was always in church so um but then I started to come out to myself around I want to say uh sophomore year or junior year and in the pentecostal faith and also in the afric-american community um homosexuality is not um accepted it's not welcomed um and um but um I wasn't to musical theater at that time so I was in the performing arts so you know I felt very very comfortable coming out to my friends but not to my family I didn't do that too much later um so being in the performing arts I ended up going into my into my first passion which is music always been music um music is in my veins um and so um I got duped strict into going into a conservatory about in boston university school for the arts at the time now it's college of fine arts but um I was the only african-american in my class and um and there was very very few of us who were doing classical music so what prepared me for that and one thing I did not tell about my journey I'm talk trying to go through it very briefly because all these 43 years it seems like done too much um was that I was bust from the uh from the sets from this um urban populations to the suburban populations so a lot of times I was the only african-american in my class so I got used to navigating in those different environments those different communities going to church and in a black community going to school in a white community so um that led me into born and becoming the opera star all right so I have a degree in music um but then when I graduated I grew up financially insecure and I was not going to be financially insecure in my adult life and that's going into performing so I did my second love which was history so I went back to school got another bachelor's degree and um went on to the master's degree and then um eventually um found my way getting another master's degree in african-american studies because I didn't believe I got enough of african-american history and studies from my history degree I didn't get any hardly um and so I went back and while I was getting that second degree I became a history professor at a community college so you've touched on a number of things here that I want to sort of look back to Pentecostal I'm I'm familiar with the basic framework because there was actually a Pentecostal evangelical church in Plainfield Vermont when I was growing up and I would attend some of these summer revival camps the the transition from that to be UU church oh yeah I can see it oh yeah not mainstream religion really doesn't treat LGBTQ plus practitioners all that well how did you reconcile that within yourself and then decide I want to be a leader for people who are probably not that represented within our faith communities yeah so uh with that Pentecostal past and upbringing and I came out and I was out in college but I still had the fear of God literally in me so that prevented me from becoming a part of any community or even being myself so um after after that I came back home and you know I was home so um so I went back into the closet um and anyone who had known anything about me we just kept it hush hush kept it secret and so I changed the way I walked I changed the way I spoke unfortunately in order to conform and um and then I became a minister I became a minister um and I became a minister because I had this innate skill skill for teaching like no one taught me how to teach but I was very very effective teacher in for college and that translated very very nicely into ministry and I was called into the ministry the way that Pentecostals are called so I had a conversion and I had like this this this this spiritual event that said okay yeah okay I'm caught into the ministry and that's where my book I'm saving up for my book your own personal road to Damascus story yeah yeah yeah and I was just like and you know and when and when I started to really really conform is when you know when everyone else is shouting in the church and they're leaping for joy I I was let weeping I was let weeping because I knew who I was and it was unaccepted and so I would cry every single service every single service as a minister um so it got to the point where I was about to be engaged to a nice young church lady and her father who was also a Pentecostal preacher just loved me because we were the same height I'm very short you can't tell but um it just got to that point and I was like I can't do this I can't do that this to her and I cannot do this to me so um I was about 30 I was at 30 years old my 30 year birthday and I was like I can't do this anymore and I left the church and I tried to find my way around to liberal Christian churches but there was something that was just like look if I'm gonna abandon my church abandon my ministry why don't I start from scratch do I believe in God do I believe in Jesus do I believe in you know what is this I was learned all this time and I'm now I'm leaving it behind me to create who I am and live in my own um skin and be and love me for me but I need but I need a religious um community to affirm that to say that it's okay and that was the UU church for me and um yeah and it was just one service just one service the first service I attended and someone had from the pulpit they were interim minister and he had made a anti-Christian joke and I was like okay this is not the place for me you know like say a Christian joke at the pulpit you know I thought this was like an inclusive church you know I see crosses and stuff like that and Saint Paul you know you know on the windows but you know now they say anti-Christian joke that has to do with history but that's another conversation of the UU church but um but in coffee hour I had make it and I had made a joke um there was like a lot of there were some church ladies that were around and that made a joke that you know because because this this older gentleman had asked me he was like are you gay and I was like okay really I'm in a church in the coffee hour and this older elderly elderly gentleman said you know one of my elders asked me if I was gay and you know what I said you know what yep I am this is see what he was saying I was gonna say nothing like the opening volley in this new community of faith is challenging everything that got you there and thank you so much for identifying coming out at 30 because I think that there are people from within the LGBTQ plus communities you know that don't that are reluctant to talk about what it took for them to get to the point where they could come out but you've reclaimed your life in a very positive manner yeah so you've been at the UU church here in Montpelier for about a year you had shared that it's a two-year internship that's a two-year internship. Queerality yeah why now and what was the prompt to start this well it was one thing about the church that I come from and this this goes into why I'm doing this now and that I you know there was a a pride flag in front of of the church and I was like okay I feel welcomed but it wasn't You know, I had mentioned that I was gay and then I had jokingly told the church ladies that my previous religion told me that I had a ticket to hell and that you know, I had a demon evil spirit in me. And I started laughing and they were just like, so each one of them grabbed me and held me. This is pre-COVID, but they held me and they started whispering in my ear, affirmations. Each one of them did that and I just wept. I just broke down. And then from that moment, I was like, okay, I'm going on this journey of healing, trying to heal. And that's what queerality is about. It's about that, cause we like to do and go for our sexual identities here and our spiritual identities over here and they never mingle. We never want to do that. Even when I was doing my learning and service agreement for my internship, I left anything about LGBTQ out and my committee was just like, wait a minute, how come you let, you put BIPOC stuff, you know, you put everything else, but you left, I mean, even, you know, subconsciously I was doing it. And I was like, you know what, now is the time. Now is the time to say, yep, you're queer and you're a spiritual being. Yes, you're queer, you're lesbian, you're gay, you're transsexual, you're bisexual, you're questioning and everything else intersects, all of that asexual and you are loved. And that gave me the ability because I had that moment in that journey for 13 years to be like, this is essential. My first sermon as a layperson because I didn't have the credentials to be a minister and the UU church, that's why the MDiv, you know, is that my first sermon was, this church saves lives. And it's not just the church, it was that the fact that they welcomed me, but not just that because a lot of churches welcome people but are they going to affirm? Are they gonna say that you're loved? Are they gonna say that we're holding you? We may not understand, but we love you and we care about you and we're gonna try to understand as best as we can. We're gonna try to be empathetic. We're gonna try, retry, try, at least that goes to some type of action. And so this church, the Unitarian Church of Montpelier is a welcoming congregation. You see it's pride flag and now the progress flag. Just came new, new progress flag blowing in the wind every single day rain or shine along with the Black Lives Matter flag. And we're proudly, proudly saying you can come in. You're a BIPOC person, you can come in. We are a queer person, you can come in. But not only that, but we will affirm you and this is what reality is all about. So I want to thank you for your personal journey that's continuing your efforts to reclaim your life and truly integrate it and being willing to take us along for the ride. So with that, thank you. Good luck with the new Queerality Group. I'm gonna check back in with you in a couple of months and see how it's going. Yes, yes. So and good luck on your spiritual journey. Thank you. It's a journey that I'll keep on going at it and it's keeping me alive day to day and just meeting great folks like yourself is affirmation enough. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.