In this special end-of-season episode of Quakers Today, host Peterson Toscano explores the intersections of faith, sex, and gender. As an “Interval” between Seasons 5 and 6, we hear from LGBTQ+ individuals about living their truth with integrity within their spiritual communities. We feature insights from a pioneering transgender priest, a Quaker healer and musician, a best-selling queer author, and voices from the Southeastern Yearly Meeting.

This Season of Quakers Today is sponsored by:

• Friends Fiduciary
• American Friends Service Committee

Transgender Identity and the Church

Rev. Dr. Tina Beardsley, one of the first transgender priests in the Church of England, discusses the evolving challenges trans and non-binary people face within both society and the broader LGBTQ community.

“The trans experience is often about a journey toward wholeness that the church is only beginning to understand.”

Healing Through Song

John Calvi, a Quaker healer and writer, tells Dwight Dunston the story behind the music he composed during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis to provide comfort and spiritual grounding. This excerpt comes from the Pendle Hill podcast, The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. 

Takeaway: Music can serve as a vessel for collective healing during times of profound community trauma.

• Link: John Calvi’s Website

Horror as a Tool for Hope

Queer author Ryan La Sala discusses his new eco-horror book, The Dead of Summer, and explains why “scary stories” are a necessary outlet for processing real-world anxieties.

• Takeaway: We need stories that acknowledge the “horrible times” we live in to find the courage to move through them.
• Link: The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala 

Community Beyond the Binary

Peterson shares audio recorded at the Southeastern Yearly Meeting, capturing a celebration of community that transcends traditional gender binaries.

“It was a celebration of community that transcended traditional gender binaries.” —Peterson Toscano

Thank You Notes from the Future

Last month, we asked: If you received a thank-you note from 100 years in the future, what are they thanking you for?

• Teacher Margaret (Email): Was thanked for providing a “sheltering wing” for a child in turmoil whose descendants are now thriving.
• BearCloverCA (TikTok): Thanked for planting native plants and minimizing waste to preserve the Earth.
• Diana Deluxe: Standing up to Federal Tyranny in Minnesota and Protecting Neighbors 
• Daniel Cummings: for not giving up 
• Blue Ariel Silk: for standing up for Ukraine
• ROmAnA (Social Media): Thanked for breaking a cycle of trauma and being a “good mom.”

Question for Next Month

What insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today?

Share your thoughts:

• Leave a voicemail: Call 317-QUAKERS (317-782-5377)
• Email us: [email protected]
• Social Media: Respond on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

---

Online version

---

 

Transcript

S5E7 Sexuality, Gender Identities, and Quakers

Tina Beardsley: If people are, uh, quite binary, like I would say I am, then you do have to be prepared to learn really from other people and listen to their stories.

Peterson Toscano: In this episode of Quakers Today, we hear from LGBTQ people about their experiences of faith, sex, gender and community. Reverend Dr. Tina Beardsley, one of the very first transgender priests in the Church of England, tells us about her journey and the challenges trans and non-binary people face in society and within the LGBTQ community. John Calvi, a Quaker healer and writer, is also a singer-songwriter. He shares with us the song he wrote during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Queer author Ryan La Sala chats with me about his new eco horror book, The Dead of Summer. Ryan explains why scary stories are especially needed in horrible times. And you will hear audio I recorded some time ago at Southeastern Yearly Meeting. For me, it was a celebration of community that transcended traditional gender binaries.

Peterson Toscano queerizes the Quakers Today podcast for this episode

I’m Peterson Toscano. This is season five, episode seven of the Quakers Today podcast, a project of Friends Publishing Corporation. This season of Quakers Today is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and Friends Fiduciary. Hello, friend. This episode was inspired by the March 2026 issue of Friends Journal, entitled Gender and Sexual Identities. As a storyteller and audio designer who happens to be gay, I decided to queer the Quakers Today podcast for this episode. That means it may sound different. I’m, um, playing with sounds and music as part of the storytelling process. So if you have earbuds or headphones, I encourage you to use them for the full experience.

Peterson Toscano: Oh, and this episode will be longer than our typical ones. But don’t worry, next episode, we’ll be back to our normal length.

Peterson Toscano: Also, I’m stepping outside the Quaker world to gain insights from another faith tradition, the Church of England. In a moment, you will hear my conversation with Reverend Dr. Tina Beardsley, an Anglican priest.

This episode contains deep and moving stories about LGBTQ people

But first, here’s a heads up. This episode contains deep and moving stories, and some of them are painful to hear. We LGBTQ people have a long history of struggle and resilience, of inequity and liberation. It’s easy, particularly these days, to point out where governments and the wider society have oppressed LGBTQ people. But what about the discrimination and oppression some of us face from other queer people or from Quakers? Just like the historical and contemporary queer experiences, this show will contain a mix of challenging and uplifting elements. So thank you for taking this ride with me today.

Tina Beardsley is an Anglican priest and an openly trans woman

Peterson Toscano: Tina Beardsley is one of those people who surprises you. She’s an Anglican priest, a theologian and an openly trans woman. She’s been doing the work long before it was safe or even imaginable to some. Tina was ordained way back in 1978 and spent over 20 years as a parish priest before moving into healthcare chaplaincy. She eventually headed up a multi-faith team at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. All this while transitioning right in the thick of it when bishops were unsure and the church was, let’s just say, not exactly ready. But Tina did it anyway.

Tina Beardsley: If people are, uh, quite binary, like I would say I am, then you do have to be prepared to learn really from other people and listen to their stories. We evolve, let’s put it this way. I think I evolve in my understanding of myself. I guess I’ve come to a fairly sort of binary position where I see myself like as a woman with a trans history. And I can also recall being at, uh, Greenbelt, the Christian Arts Festival, a few years ago on a panel, I think there were three or four of us. I was the old one, a friend of mine was the middle-aged one, and then there was the young one and they were non binary. I couldn’t see the audience because we had lights shining in our eyes. But our prep for this panel had been really fun. And I remember thinking, oh, wow, the future is non binary. I thought, this is amazing. Then I thought of the bishops who were all my age, and I thought, they’re not going to like this one little bit. This particular priest, young priest, he had organized an event and they’d invited a non binary priest to speak. Proved very controversial indeed. Some of the pushback he got was actually from older, uh, gay male clergy who were known to have partners, but the partners never went to events. You know, you didn’t know their names. It was the friend who lived at the vicarage. But they were the most critical of this event. And somehow this non binary priest proved a real trigger for them of something beyond their experience. Or something almost about shame, really. I’m not quite sure what, what it was.

Peterson Toscano: This reminds me of some event that you and I were at that I think you invited me to, where it was Church of England queer clergy. And I remember I learned there about how cisgender gay men were some of the strongest opponents to the ordination of women.

Tina Beardsley: Mm. Is that.

Peterson Toscano: Am I remembering this correctly?

Tina Beardsley: Yes. That group, it had been very well supported, but then it split. So when women were ordained and it was decided to admit lesbian clergy to that group, that group left, which is sad really. I suppose they could see that women would be invited to celebrate mass or whatever. Maybe that’s why they went. It seemed that what we had in common as a, uh, group that was experiencing oppression in the church, it wasn’t sufficient to keep the group together. One of the leading opponents of conversion therapy, Jayne Ozanne, she has a national profile in encouraging a ban on conversion therapy here. She was an advisor, uh, uh, on the LGBT advisory panel to the UK government, but she resigned. The reason she resigned was because they were not listening to the trans people in that group. The narrative there is that yes, we’ve got to ban conversion therapy for lesbian and gay people, but actually they talk about transing the gay. This is the narrative. And uh, I think what Jayne was saying was they’re not listening to trans people. The organisations they are listening to are the very gender critical groups. Trans people are, uh, reluctant to appear in the media and debate their own lives or they’re just not invited. You’ll have television and radio discussions about these issues in inverted commas and you won’t hear a trans person’s voice. Our, uh, media is incredibly gender critical. You know, the Times, the Sunday Times, I think somebody did a study and there were over a thousand articles in 12 months about trans people. We’re a tiny, tiny percentage of the UK population and most of it is negative. So people are being drip fed this stuff, uh, all the time. You know, it’s misinformation, it’s not right, it’s far-fetched and it’s far from our reality, it’s just not true.

But it’s being said very persistently, persuasively, strongly all the time. And so I think it’s hard for people if they’re within those circles to differentiate. So I think being very careful about what you say. Yeah, going back to critical, I think we have to be critical. The allies have to be critical of what’s coming, coming at them, uh, through mainstream media. I mean there’s a high profile case in the UK where uh, a young trans woman took her own life. The mother is a doctor, a very well informed person about lots of medical things, but was repeating at uh, the meal table the things she was reading in the media. The trans daughter had not come out. Now that the daughter has taken her own life, she carries enormous guilt for the things she said. Ill informed, not knowing what her daughter would be thinking, feeling. The UK population are, ah, pretty liberal on the whole around these sort of issues. They’ve either got somebody trans in their family, in their workplace, in their social circle, in their church, people are out nowadays in a way that they weren’t in the past. So therefore they’re not going to be taken in by this stuff. But I think it is really hard if it’s coming at you all the time. So, understanding the misinformation, I mean, some people would say, don’t read all this stuff in the paper. If your friends say things that are, uh, uh, repeating it, challenge it.

Peterson Toscano: Some gay men will have experienced criticism because of gender non conformity.

Tina Beardsley: And this is where we need to approach it a little bit more compassionately because what we found was, and uh, this is something you yourself have spoken about quite movingly about your own childhood as well, that when you’re young and your trajectory is, you’re going to be attracted to someone of the same sex. That isn’t necessarily very obvious as a young person. What can be obvious is this gender non-conformity. And so some of these gay men will have experienced criticism, anger, uh, from parents, correction of behavior because of their gender non conforming patterns of speech or the way they played and so on.

Peterson Toscano: I get that I was bullied for being a sissy long before I realized I was gay. So I shoved everything in the closet. My orientation, sure, but also that soft, flamboyant, tender part of me. Years later I came out as gay. But that sissy boy, he stayed gagged and bound deep inside to be whole, to be strong. I had to go back for him. I had to rescue that sissy boy and make space for him. In my adult life, I’ve heard gay men talk about trans women and non binary folks with contempt. Sometimes to their faces, but often behind their backs. And when I hear it, I wonder, are they actually just talking to the parts of themselves they still hate? The parts they were taught to hide or destroy? So many of us carry old wounds and sometimes instead of healing them, we pass the pain along. A gay man who once got punished for being effeminate learns to hate anything that reminds him of that weakness. So he unloads that hate onto a trans woman or a femme gay man, or anyone who dares to be both queer and free.

Tina Beardsley: How can we talk about these things? Because we don’t talk about them. And then it will come out in these distorted reactions and responses. When you hear what happens to people who are vulnerable, maybe because they are having to transition without hormones, and it’s very obvious that they are not conforming to gender stereotypes, then they can be on the receiving end of the verbal and even physical abuse. There are these people who are saying these negative things within the LGBT community, but in fact the majority of LGBT people in the UK are, uh, affirming. This was proved at Pride when a small group tried to head up the parade with anti trans banners and were removed. They do not represent the majority. They do not represent most people in Britain. It’s just that they have very loud voices. And, um, because of funding access to the media.

Peterson Toscano: That was the Reverend Dr. Tina Beardsley, a priest, theologian, and co-author of the book Trans Affirming Churches. Tina has been serving as an Anglican Minister for nearly 50 years. 

Coming up later in the show, we’ll hear from a young queer writer. Ryan La Sala explores the modern struggle for LGBTQ safety through the lens of eco-horror. And I asked him, um, why isn’t the world horrible enough? And I love his answer. 

Queer Quaker Elder John Calvi and the Ones Who Aren’t Here

The March 2026 issue of Friends Journal on gender and sexual identities has a recurring theme. As we look at the present and future, we have the privilege of looking back to queer history and our LGBTQ elders. John Calvi is one of our queer Quaker elders. John Calvi is a healer who has spent decades releasing physical and emotional pain as a massage therapist specializing in trauma. Many of you may know him for his powerful witness against torture, or through his books and his many contributions to Friends Journal, but John is also a musician. Dwight Dunston, the host of the podcast Conversations for Radical Hope, recently sat down with John to discuss his life and his song, ” The Ones Who Aren’t Here.” It is a tender, powerful piece of music that bridges the gap between those we’ve lost and the hope we carry forward.

Dwight Dunston from  Pendle Hill’s podcast asks: I’m curious about the origins of that song

Dwight Dunston: I’m so grateful I got to listen to your song, ” The Ones Who Aren’t Here.” I’m curious about the origins of that song for you, how that song speaks to you today, and what it mean to carry memory and love across time and loss?

John Calvi: Yes. Well, that song is very special. In my life, I was in my 20s, and I was not out to my family, although I was so different and I was so gay that you. You really would have to be very committed to denial to not be able to see it. Um, I was very different from everyone else in the family. What happened was one of my brothers outed me to my father, who was a violent alcoholic. He outed me while they were having a drunken argument in the bar that my father owned. So it was a perfect storm of sorts. I was told I could never come home again. And at the time, I was traveling around and singing at gay coffee houses, doing mostly my own music. And this song came to me. There were so many people. There were so many people who would never get to a gay coffee house or a Gay Pride march or other places where they could experience gay community. This was a huge grief for me, um, while I was thrown out of my family. I confess that it wasn’t that bad a family to get thrown out of. The separation actually was very helpful to me. But I’m thinking about the people who never made that leap. And so, in writing that song, I was thinking about all of the people who were staying in the closet. And the closet is so fierce, it is so fiercely woven into the subconscious that we’re not even aware often as to how strong that prison door is and how it can alter our thoughts and our perceptions. And so, as you begin to lay down the various pieces and parts of the closet, this liberation continues and gets stronger and goes on. And I’m so happy that this song has traveled so widely to so many places and used in so many different kinds of events. It’s used at weddings, it’s used at memorials, is used at gay pride marches. The wonderful recording by Meg Christian. The wonderful recording by Suede. All very strong and very clear. When Suede was performing the song at first, back in the late 80s, she would hand out a postcard that was addressed to President Reagan saying, please do more about the AIDS epidemic. That was such a fierce time. And so it began. It began to be used as a political song, along with something that was very heartfelt. And when I hear it now, sometimes I think about how far the song has traveled. As Pete Seeger said, you build a good building. It can be used for a lot of different things over time. Um, I heard it the other day while I was driving, and I just burst into tears to think about all the pain to go through to compose that song. Because it starts out like a lot of good songs, where you name the trouble and then you name the resolution. Um, that’s a very hopeful thing to do, but you have to go through hell to get there. There’s another song on one of my songs on YouTube you can find called A Little Gracefulness. It was recorded by a group called the Short Sisters, dear friends of mine. And it was all the rules I put together to be able to go into work in a crisis situation and do your best. That was also very helpful. Me, when I began working the AIDS wars back in 1983, uh, when things were just so fierce, putting together that song was a very good way for me to maintain, um, my disciplines of how it is. You go into work in a situation where you’re never going to be able to do enough. You’re not going to be able to change things to where everything is okay. You might be able to help a little bit if you’re really careful and you’re really graceful. And that’s what it was like for me from ’83 until we got to about 2000 where we finally had some drugs that really worked. My best friend, it was too late for him. Um, he was still alive at 2000, but he was too ill for those new medicines to help him. Mhm.

Dwight Dunstan: You don’t mind me asking, what, what was his name?

John Calvi: William J. Kreidler. He wrote a best selling book on nonviolence in the classroom. At his death, it was estimated that his book on nonviolence in the classroom was in 55,000 classrooms around the world. Wow. Quite an accomplishment. His speeches are collected on a website that can be found and you can still hear his beautiful wisdom. 

Dwight Dunstan: I’m just sitting under the weight of the, uh, grief and the tenderness and the resilience and the joy and abandonment and building a new community. All of that. Just when I think of this song, the ones who aren’t here.

[SONG “The Ones Who Aren’t Here,” written and performed by John Calvi]

The Ones Who Aren’t Here

By John Calvi

I’m thinking about

the ones who aren’t here

and won’t be coming in late,

home all alone

and the family

and won’t be coming in late.

Wish I could know

all the lovers and friends

kept from gathering.

I think of you now,

the ways you can go,

we’re all of us refugees

 

Telling myself

and the family,

my friends and the folks on the job,

one by one

and it’s never been easy

and me and everyone changed.

The hugs and the tears

when they show you their hearts

and some never speak again.

Every pot off the wheel

can’t bear the kiln,

every love can’t bear the pain.

 

So let’s pass a kiss

and a happy sad tear

and a hug the whole circle round

for the ones who aren’t here

for the hate and the fear

for laughter, for struggle, for life.

Let’s have a song here for me and for you

and the love that we cannot hide.

And let’s have a song

for the ones who aren’t here

and won’t be coming out tonight.

The segment comes from a recent episode of Pendle Hill’s podcast, The Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope

Peterson Toscano: That was John Calvi in conversation with Dwight Dunston. That segment comes to us from a recent episode of the Seed, Conversations for Radical Hope. It’s a project of Pendle Hill. You can find the Seed wherever you get your podcast or online at pendlehill.org to learn more about John’s healing work and his writing, visit john calvi.com Calvi is spelled C A L V I johncalvi.com I’ve also placed links to his work and to the seed in our show notes. Just visit quakerstoday.org..

Queer Author Ryan La Sala and The Dead of Summer

Ryan La Sala is a best-selling and award-winning queer author. He writes about surreal things happening to queer people. Ryan identifies as queer and is the author of Beholder, Reverie, and Bedazzled. His debut horror novel, The Honeys, is in development to become a major motion picture. Ryan joined me in the studio to talk about his most recent book, The Dead of Summer. 

Peterson Toscano: You’ve written a, uh, very queer horror-driven book. Your newest book. For Americans, especially groups of marginalized people, we’re living in a contemporary horror story. Mass migrations, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, and incredible climate change denial. So we why write horror genre when life is so frightening?

Ryan La Sala: Because life is so frightening. Because we need the ability to talk about the things that scare us. Some people find it really hard to kind of look directly at things and monsters that don’t necessarily have a face. But if you hold up the dark mirror of a horrific story, it gives a focal point to start to address things that are malignant in our own world. Hopefully, it gives us some bravery and some idea of how we might also endure or might also survive to the other side. If I had to write the genre of my own life growing up, like, there’s a lot of joy there and a lot of queerness and a lot of theatricality, but it would have to shelve it in horror because it was defined by a sense that I was being stalked by a monster that I couldn’t really even see. And many queer people have to commingle their joy and their victory and their triumph with a sense that at any moment something horrific could happen to them. A large part of why we have community is because we need sanctuary and we sort of provide that to one another. It’s a little bit familiar to me to put characters into these positions. And yet the characters I don’t think would make it to the end or be able to be as fantastic as they are if they weren’t queer, if they weren’t approaching problem-solving through a, uh, queer lens. So The Dead of Summer, right? It takes place on this queer community haven called Anchor’s Mercy. These places, they exist, right? Like Provincetown is, is the version that I sort of am familiar with. The tourism’s good for the economy of these places. But there is sort of this, like, sense of invasion. And so that’s why when writing this book, especially a book about contagion and outbreak. I didn’t want the queer community to be saddled with the stigma of causing this. Ultimately, the community does take measures to stop the spread of something in their community, but it’s the bachelorettes who resist and defy the stay at home order because they’ve got to have their karaoke and they’re the birthday girl and you know, what have you, right? That entitlement to these spaces. And it ends up imperiling everybody. Ollie, the main character, he’s born and raised on this island, and has kind of watched his mom time and time again put on this big show every summer for people, and now, now she’s sick. And Ollie thinks that there’s something about the island that is making just the townies sick, just the people who can’t leave it. His journey is figuring out what that could mean and how to get to the bottom of it and how to take those secrets that are kind of rotting beneath the soil and pry them to the surface.

Peterson Toscano: You have been calling it eco-horror.

Ryan La Sala: Yes, ecological horror. It’s not just that there’s something in the water kind of rising out of the ocean to spread across the land. I’m also talking about, like, the ecology of communities and how the ecology of, like, a queer community has to deal with its own types of invasions. Eco horror often looks at mankind’s balance against nature when it’s pushed a little bit too far and when nature lashes back out.

Peterson Toscano: There’s so many things I really love about The Dead of Summer. I love, maybe because I’m an old queen myself, the characterizations of the older queer folks on the island.

Ryan La Sala: Yeah, uh, you know, you don’t see that many depictions of, like, intergenerational queerness all in the same story. I wanted to set down a cast of characters where you’ve got generations, even when those generations are gone. Right. You’re able to access their stories. A lot of these generations had to make really hard decisions in order to just survive past that particular point. Part of Ollie’s story, at least for me in this, is coming to terms with the hard decisions that people before him had no choice but to make so that a sanctuary like his could survive to the point that he’s able to take that torch, make the same sort of hard decisions, and hopefully keep this place alive and available for future generations. If you’re looking at the COVID you’re gonna notice that there is this really sort of beautiful coral bursting out of a human, like, figure that’s intentional. I chose something sort of pelagic in nature, something cnidarian as the specific section of taxonomy where you’ll find, like, jellyfish and sea anemones and corals, because they are an animal, but they require symbiosis. They require a really delicate and elegant balance between themselves and their own ecosystems that, when that’s tilted one way or another, they can grow out of control or they can bleach and whiten and vanish. I wanted to create something kind of delicate and kind of beautiful that is still scary, that is still monstrous. Something we haven’t really seen. I mean, when people read or write about, like, zombies or things, uh, that come back from the dead, it’s always the same colors, right? Uh, but I wanted to create something kind of bejeweled and encrusted and oceanic that felt completely new, yet a little bit familiar at the same time.

Peterson Toscano: And a bit snotty, too. At first.

Ryan La Sala: They’re called weepers in the book, if you’re curious. And Ollie’s got a sadness in him that he really can’t keep inside any longer. When the book begins, the monsters that he ends up confronting are these weeping, ecstatic beings.

Peterson Toscano: And you can potentially touch the ooze, but if it enters one of your orifices, your eyes, your mouth, whatever, you’re infected. Which reminded me about how horror movies in the 90s had a lot to do with body fluids as we were dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis. So many of the scariest creatures were oozy.

Ryan La Sala: Vector for Contagion. That is based in tears that drown you from the inside out, to me, began as, um, a metaphor, but it definitely has real world inspiration.

Peterson Toscano: That was Ryan La Sala speaking about his eco horror novel the Dead of Summer. Learn more at ryanlasala.com. We’re nearing the close of this episode and you are about to hear audio from the most delightful folk dancing experience I ever witnessed.

Check out the March 2026 issue of Friends Journal for LGBTQ perspectives

But first, I have recommendations for you. There are many voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non, binary queer people who we could not include in today’s show. So I encourage you to look at the March 2026 issue of Friends Journal. It’s available for free online at friendsjournal.org and here is some of what you will find in it. Mico Sorrel shares a lifelong journey of gender nonconformity, moving from a, uh, 1950s childhood to find peace in an identity that is both. And rather than either or. Ted Heck and Jim Fussell look at the stories of trans and intersex Friends showing how living one’s gender truth is a profound act of Quaker integrity. Michelle Downey challenges meetings to move beyond just tolerating LGBTQ neighbors and instead start treasuring them as a vital part of the community. Petra Doan introduces the Queerness Committee. She reimagines the traditional clearness process to help trans friends celebrate their identity as a gift from the spirit. Brian Blackmore uncovers the forgotten history of the Civilian Readjustment Committee, which I didn’t know about. The Civilian Readjustment Committee protected gay men from imprisonment as far back as the 1940s. Esther Mombo explores the struggle in African Quakerism, the struggle to balance inherited missionary rules with the fundamental Quaker value of equality.

Music recommendation that beautifully complements the themes of today’s episode

To find those articles and more, visit friendsjournal.org I also have a music recommendation that beautifully complements the themes of today’s episode. I’ve been listening to the album Laughter in Summer by the black trans music pioneer Beverly Glenn Copeland and his wife and creative partner Elizabeth. Their music has a quality very similar to John Calvi’s. It’s gentle, deeply moving, and it carries this tender spiritual weight to it. This particular album is a powerful chronicling of their decades long love story and it also serves as a beautiful correction to history by highlighting Elizabeth’s vital contributions to Glenn’s art artistic legacy, which have often been overlooked in a world that can feel fragmented. Their collaboration is a testament to the enduring power of partnership and the ways in which love can be a form of creative resistance. I highly recommend spending some time with their work. Look for Beverly Glenn Copeland’s Laughter in Summer. Wherever you listen to music, I have a link in our show notes, quakerstoday.org.

Quakers Dancing at Southeastern Yearly Meeting

Peterson Toscano: Let me set the scene for you. I travel down to Florida to attend Southeast Yearly Meeting. It’s an annual gathering of Quakers from Florida and nearby states. I was a guest speaker. We spent time in worship beside a lake quietly patrolled by alligators. They tear terrified me. We dived into conversations about Quaker faith, the state of democracy in the US and our favorite flavors of ice cream. Quakers, long known for silent worship, know how to kick up some dust, whether at a protest or a yearly gathering. So after the serious talks and long hours of silence, one night we pushed the tables and chairs to the edge of the room. The music started, the square dancing began and as always, the Quakers broke the rules. Even on the dance floor I saw men dancing with men. Gender non binary couples, boys in skirts, a grandmother spinning in her wheelchair, a grandchild holding on tight.

[Audio from a Square Dance at Southeastern Yearly Meeting

Season five of Quakers Today was sponsored by Friends Fiduciary and American Friends Service Committee

Peterson Toscano: Thank you so much for listening to this very queer episode of Quakers Today. Season five of uh, Quakers Today was sponsored by Friends Fiduciary. Friends Fiduciary unites Quaker values with expert investing. They serve more than 460 organizations with ethical portfolios, shareholder advocacy, and a deep commitment to justice and sustainability. Friends Fiduciary blends Quaker values with smart mission-driven investing. With a 100% Quaker board, they help over 25 faith-based groups invest ethically and affordably. Join over 460 organizations investing with integrity. Learn more at the FriendsFiduciary.org that’s FriendsFiduciary.org 

Season 5 was also sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. The American Friends Service Committee works at the forefront of social change to meet urgent needs, challenge injustice, and build peace. AFSC helped thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees during World War II resettle in the U.S. Today, AFSC works toward a future where everyone can thrive, has access to legal status, and is safe from detention and deportation. Learn how you can take action for immigrant safety, dignity, and well-being. Visit afsc.org/stronger immigrants. Learn more about this and other initiatives and actions at afsc.org 

Many thanks to AFSC and Friends Fiduciary for being our sponsor for this season, and they have committed to sponsoring Season six, which will begin next month. The entire season will focus on Quakers and money. Joining me as guest host will be Diana Yañez. Sweet Miche is well spreading their wings into some new ventures. Sweet Miche, you will be so missed, and hopefully you will pop by and visit us, please, from time to time.

Thank you to Sweet Miche 

Peterson Toscano: I want to thank you, Sweet Miche for your many contributions as host and as producer and for just joining me on this journey of telling stories with Quakers and non-Quakers. It’s been such a joy, and it’s been great collaborating with you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Quakers Today. 

Question of the Month

Stick around, and you’ll hear answers to our monthly question about the future. I love your answers. You will hear answers to the question. If you received a thank-you note from the future, what will they be thanking you for? But first, as we look ahead to season six, we’re preparing to talk about money.

What insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today

We’re curious what insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today? Think about your home life, your meeting or your work. Where did you find a better way to think about money and what does that practice look like? The question again what insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today? Leave a voice memo with your name in the town where you live. The number to call is 317-QUAKERS. That’s 317-782-5377. 317-QUAKERS plus one. If you’re calling from outside the USA, you can also send us an email [email protected] or just comment on one of our social media channels. I have all of these contact details in our show notes. Just visit quakerstoday.org. 

Quakers Today question about the future

Here are answers to last month’s question. 

If you received a thank you note from 100 years in the future, what are they thanking you for? 

Our first answer comes from an email. Dear Teacher Margaret, I am holding my 2 year old grandson ad the 5th. Thank you for providing a, uh, sheltering wing, caring ear and advocating for my grandfather when he was nine and his family was in turmoil. When asked about the people who helped him to live a good life and work to heal the earth, my grandfather mentioned you. He told me you predicted that he would blow up the world or save it. Because of you, my grandson is here and has a better world to live in than my grandfather did. Sincerely, AD III 

From TikTok, we got a number of responses. Bear Clover CA says that they will be thanked for planting native plants, buying secondhand, keeping my dogs on a leash and staying on the trail while hiking, minimizing waste, donating to PBS, NPR and wildlife rescues, and volunteering for Wilderness Trail restoration. 

Diana Deluxe wrote Standing up to Federal Tyranny in Minnesota and Protecting Neighbors 

Roma A that I was a good mom. That’s all I care about. I had a horrible mom myself. 

Daniel Cummings for not giving up 

Blue Ariel Silk for standing up for Ukraine

and from Anonymous, planting trees and milkweed. 

Thank you for those responses. I would love to include your comment or even your voice in our next episode. 

What insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today? 

Don’t forget you could leave a message at 317-Quakers or email us podcastriendsjournal.org or leave a comment in our TikTok or Instagram account. Thanks so much for listening.