Photo by Ssphiehs3 from Pixabay
By Lauryn Longacre, Staff Writer
What makes a person an activist? Some might visualize one protesting with picket signs as the ideal activist. However, for one man, activism comes in the form of theatre.
Peterson Toscano is Susquehanna’s activist in residence, and has spent this entire semester giving lectures and weekly LGBTQ+ friendly bible study hours at Susquehanna.
After spending 17 years of his life trying to change himself through conversion therapy, Toscano now stands as an LGBTQ+ and climate change activist, using his artistic expression to protest.
“For a big part of my life, I was a born-again Evangelical, conservative, republican, antigay Christian while also being gay and trying not to be gay,” Toscano said, “and that clearly shaped my world because I emerged from that having to question everything.”
Toscano said that his experience in conversion therapy led him to the national stage where he began to speak on national television and around the country about the issues involving conversion therapy.
Through his public speaking, plays and the internet, Toscano sparked the creation of the conversion therapy survivor organization known as the “Beyond Ex-Gay Movement.”
“People began to connect for the first time who had these shared experiences, and we began to tell our stories on our own terms,” Toscano said. “It was really the first time historically, that it was easy for somebody to put their story out in the world.”
Toscano attributes the beginning of his activism to Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard who in 1998 was murdered in an anti-gay hate-crime.
“I had only been out of the closet maybe four months and a gay pastor came to me and said ‘hey, Judy Shepard is coming, you seem like there is something creative and artistic about you, would you be willing to write a poem about the LGBT community here in Memphis?’”
At first Toscano was discouraged because he was from Connecticut and had just recently came out, but the pastor introduced Toscano to “this whole huge rainbow” of people in the LGBTQ+ community.
“I ultimately wrote a choreopoem … and I cast all these different people…It wasn’t the first time I did something publicly, but it was within this community context and that affirmed me as an artist,” Toscano said. “Which was important because all those years in conversion therapy I was not allowed to be creative.”
According to Toscano, the conversion therapy survivor movement actively changed public discourse about conversion therapy which pointed back to the Beyond Ex-Gay Movement.
Along with being a playwrite, Toscano is also a Bible scholar, and speaks on behalf of LGBTQ+ stories in the Bible.
His play, “Transitions,” showed a new perspective of transgender, queer families and the breaking of social and gender norms in the Bible.
“I was able to speak to a whole generation of up-and coming Bible scholars and queer people of faith and queer Bible scholars, and now there is just so many of them,” Toscano said.
He also said there are more than just one way to be an activist. Some ways to be an activist according to Toscano are through baring witness, public speaking, using arts and “craftisvism” and through lobbying.
“We live in a time today that it’s hard to imagine a hopeful future,” Toscano said. “I think we have our future selves cheering us on and maybe even thanking us for things that we’ve done to make the world a better place.”