Answer the Call: Faith, Queerness & the Work of Deconstruction

Faith isn’t always a fixed thing. In this episode, multidimensional artist Avery Youma joins me to explore queerness, spirituality, and the ongoing process of becoming. We get into belief systems, the courage it takes to question them, and the quiet, often tender work of redefining faith on your own terms — with touches of divine femininity and plantcestry along the way. This one is an invitation to find what truly aligns. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Wait, is this kind of can you all hear me?

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Okay. Here we go.

SPEAKER_03 0:28

Hey, sweet peace. Welcome back to another episode of Just a Dash. It is truly my pleasure to be back with another conversation. I'm really excited about this one, which I know I say for every conversation, but I truly, truly enjoy that this season I'm getting to speak to people who I deeply admire, who I'm deeply inspired by, and who I have the true honor of getting to engage with so often because they are people who are, you know, my friends and part of my chosen family. So really excited to dive into this episode and also really excited for the arrival of spring. I think that there's something so special and so I would guess I would say reverent about the seasons. I think that as someone who grew up in South Florida, a lot of the time what I was experiencing was warm weather and warmer weather, hot weather and hotter weather. You know, like there wasn't that much of a distinction between the seasons. And so one of my favorite things about moving to New York and creating a home for myself here is also honoring the seasons. You know, we've been, when it comes to winter, I do think it's an opportunity for us to hibernate a little bit, to be inside of our own minds, inside of our own systems, inside of our own structures and frameworks, and allow ourselves the opportunities to reset, to release, to relax, you know, and and not perfectly. I struggle all the time with just letting myself be. But I feel like that's something that nature often teaches us is to just be a little more still. And with the arrival of spring, I think one of the most beautiful things is starting to see the blooms, starting to see the greens emerging, starting to hear the birds chirping. I think it's a reminder of resetting and allowing ourselves to feel refreshed. And so I know that I've been in sitting in that sort of space, and and so I just want to offer, you know, that that spring awakening to all of us, and I hope that energy finds you as you're listening to this conversation. Another thing that I've really been thinking about, you know, kind of going off that wave of everything I just shared, is that my podcast is kind of like my personal diary. It is a time capsule of my life, you know, very much my experiences, my inspirations. And even the way I release episodes really mirrors how I've always journaled throughout my life. I was never the young girl who wrote every single day, like in a lined notebook and all her thoughts and poured into it and fantasies. I don't think that I had that kind of discipline. I think it takes a real discipline to sit down and journal every day, and I think it's so admirable. And honestly, I think it's also because I was such an emotional child. I feel like I feel a billion emotions in a day. That's obviously a huge exaggeration. But I think on average, I think as a water sign, I'm gonna be real. I think I'd probably go through about at most on a rough day, 50 different waves of emotions. So it felt like journaling was something that also couldn't capture everything I feel in one sitting. But I will say this when I do write, it is usually when I am at the height of extremes, right? When I'm at my wit's end, when I'm in the middle of an existential spiral, or on the other side of something super beautiful, when everything feels super aligned and expansive, and I'm in a euphoric state. And if I'm being real in this moment right now, recording this episode, I'm in a mixture of both. You know, I know I talked about spring and the beauty and seeing the blooms, but I'm gonna be honest. I entered March on a real high. You know, I was coming off of full award season, just feeling really proud of myself and moving with momentum. And when everything quieted down, when everything powered down, I found myself sitting in the silence. And it rattled me, y'all. I think it opened up a lot of the spaces I had compartmentalized, you know, and I was facing parts of my mind that you kind of put on the back burner. I know for me in particular, grief has a way of doing that. I'm three years into understanding loss. And what's been most, I think, unsettling about it isn't the newness, it's the integration. Learning how to hold joy and heaviness and the height of an award season and the lull of what comes next at the same time without trying to make one cancel out the other. So March became this like foggy testing ground of faith for me. Not the first time that I've been in a liminal space, you know, at this point in my mid-30s, I've gone through it a number of times, but the first time I've really tried not to control how or when I come out of it, to just be in it, to practice stillness, not in theory, but in real uncomfortable time. And in that, I've been thinking a lot about faith. Not as something fixed, not as something you arrive at once and hold on to forever, but something that is constantly evolving, something deeply personal, something you return to, you reshape, you question, and you rediscover over and over and over again. That has always been my experience to faith as I'm learning to live. And for me, faith has become less about an organized practice or inherited rituals, even though that is still part of my life in many ways, but it's more about whatever brings me back into alignment with my truest self. Whatever reminds me that there is something greater than me, even when I cannot name it. It's the quiet belief that there is meaning in the in between, that there is care in the unseen, that even in the uncertainty, there is something out there holding me, holding space for me. And I think we're all in our own ways trying to find practices and ways of being that allow us to feel most like ourselves, more open, most bright. So I hope this conversation invites you to consider that for yourself. What does faith look like for you when no one else is defining it? And that brings me to Avery. Avery is a multi-hyphenite artist, a spiritual humanist, and someone whom I just feel deeply connected to. And it's not just in thought, but in spirit, in our souls. We're both Cancer Suns and Virgo moons, which, if you know, you know. There's a shared emotional depth, there's a sensitivity, there's just a way of moving through the world that often feels like two sides of the same coin. And I've really come to believe that friendships like that are divine, the ones that reflect you back to yourself, the ones that challenge you, that expand you, and that offer space for your becoming. Avery's life and his work sit at the intersection of faith, of identity, and inquiry. He was raised within the structure of the church, and he once imagined a future rooted in it. He since stepped into a process of deconstruction and redefinition, and just I find has carved out a deeply personal understanding of spirituality outside of traditional religious spaces. Through art, study, and lived experience, he explores how faith, sex, gender, and even consumer culture shape the way we move through the world and how we might begin to reclaim those narratives for ourselves. So this conversation isn't about having the answers. It's really about what it means to question, to unlearn, to sit in the in-between and become more comfortable with it, and to trust that in doing so, you're already on the path back to yourself, to your highest self. So I really invite you to listen with an open mind, take what resonates, leave what doesn't, and maybe let it expand how you think about faith, how you think about self, about what it means to feel aligned. And if this conversation meets you where you are, share it with someone who might need it too. Leave a comment, a review, or just let me know what it stirred up for you. I always love hearing how these moments land. All right, let's get into it. Oh and I'll just let's see what my T says today. My T says the one who listens understands.

unknown 9:45

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 9:46

Wow. Cheers. Cheers on it. Okay, so with that being said, Avery, I'm very, very thrilled to have you here. Welcome to Just Attache. How are you feeling today? Let's start there.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

I feel great today. I feel like I'm holding the reins of a couple different things, but not like in a strenuous way. So I'm like kind of alert and managing different things, but also kind of on cruise control, too.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

So it's an idea. But also in it. Yeah. I feel like that's a very good explanation of 2026. And also, I do. I I feel like sometimes it can feel like we're just going through the motions. And I think sometimes you have to realize that that is the pattern and the flow until your brain plugs back in. And sometimes that's an ebb and though. Like it's not, it happens at the same time. So I totally get that. And I also feel like that's a good space to exist in with this conversation, which that being said, today we're exploring a very expansive topic. Okay. And it's through the lens of your experience, which I do think is uniquely your own, but I also think it reflects something many people of the LGBTQ community, queer identity, navigate in different ways. And that is their relationship to God. That's their relationship to spirituality, to faith, and to religion. And I think there's so much of that history that lives not just in society and the ways that we're conditioned, but it also ends up overlapping with our inner self. And it ends up shaping your identity, your belonging, and how you move through the world. And I imagine just from the things that you shared with me, your journey has been full of a lot of deconstruction. When I met you, I instantly knew that you were a spiritual person, but to have learned the history in the last few years, it has really shown me how it's just a space that is never rooted in one idea or one concept. What really draws me to your perspective is how you connect the things that people don't necessarily see as a part of that world or a part of holding all those things together. So sex, religion, spirituality, dating, even consumer economy. On the surface, those things might feel separate, but I feel like the way you move through the world really highlights how interconnected they all are and how much of it is negotiated and shaped and sometimes imposed upon us. I feel like so much of your experience really highlights that. So I know that that's already a lot to hold. I do want to step back for a moment and ground us in your specific experience. And feel free to fill in the gaps here. But this is based on what you shared with me. You were raised within a very structured expression of Christianity. I think one that really emphasized rigid ideas around gender and identity. And that path led you to Cedarville. Am I saying that correctly? There's so many places I hear from, like, oh, I'd never heard of that before. And Cedarville is one of those places. It's a private university which was originally affiliated with the conservative Reformed Presbyterian Church, which is now known as the Presbyterian Church in America. So I feel like very similar to your upbringing, that environment was deeply connected to broader evangelical leadership and ideology. And you also shared the Nashville statement with me, which was supported by your university and heavily supported, heavy hand, I feel like, in even being involved in a lot of the language that we see in that statement. And again, not a resource that was familiar to me, but it's essentially like you described it as a bill of rights. It's a formal declaration outlining a pretty strict binary view of gender roles, expectations, and behaviors that are intended to reflect a sinless approach to manhood and womanhood. It was pretty convoluted to read through. I'll just say that every statement I was reading, I was like, so what does that mean? It was really hard to really even understand a sense of self as someone who, you know, it was it was so fascinating how it was meant to be a set of guidelines, but I didn't feel very guided by it. And so that's something that, you know, I want to speak to you about. But in that sense, you know, it doesn't just live on paper, it is a it shapes culture, policy, and how people are treated within spaces, you know, and you experienced that firsthand. You navigated your identity in an environment that ultimately couldn't make space for you. And you wrote an article about cutting ties with the university after essentially being kicked out, despite being a pretty beloved leader on campus and being in the midst of planning so many things that were already, you know, unfolding. And I just want to say every time I read that article, I feel like your portrayal is just so incredibly honest and grounded, especially given how young you were and what you were up against. And there's just a different level of resiliency and bravery that I experience each time I read it. And in the years that I've known you, what's always struck me is your ability to still maintain a relationship with something greater, even after experiencing so much harm in the name of faith. So that to me says a lot about who you are and your definition of spirituality. And so, with all of that, let's jump into it. I don't know if there's any gaps that you want to fill with what I share.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Two things really quickly. What you mentioned about the natural statement was a cool call out that it felt very distant from the human. Yeah. And you just think, because I know with your production background, you know there's a million different ways you can formulate copy. It can be for a broad audience, it can be really specific, it could be for an event or to help describe the ethos of a big organization. I feel like the Nashville Statement was intentionally really broad, so it's actionable across a lot of different contexts. You're not supposed to really feel the humanity in it because that gives it's almost like a judicial statement where like different thought leaders or religious leaders can use something like the Nashville Statement to act on. I'm I'm envisioning, you know, different churches around the country that are just down at the like ground level where pastors are dealing or counseling people in their church, they can use the Nashville Statement to help guide them. So I think it's intentionally, you know, it's a little distant.

SPEAKER_03 16:33

I think also what was so interesting was I'm gonna actually read one of these because the statements that were confusing to me. So this is one of them. We affirm that sin distorts sexual desires by directing them away from the marriage covenant and towards sexual immorality, a distortion that includes both heterosexual and homosexual immorality. We deny that an enduring pattern of desire for sexual immorality justifies sexual immoral behavior. So something like that, I'm like, okay, you're saying that regardless of your identity, being, you know, flagrant in your immorality is not acceptable. But then I see here we affirm that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism, and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness. That alone, I'm like, okay.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

That's a big statement.

SPEAKER_03 17:30

That's a big statement. And also you just left out the heterosexual immorality that you were just speaking to previously. So is it also sinful to approve of that heterosexual immorality? Like there, the emphasis and where it's placed, like differs with each statement. Which to me, you know, I was raised Catholic and I have my own quarrels and you know, quandaries with Catholicism. But I find it fascinating because statements like that go against the very basics that I learned, which was love thy neighbor. You know, do not be the first to cast a stone. If there's these constant dichotomies, how are we supposed to know what's true, what's real, and how to actually treat our neighbor, particularly when their identity differs from our own, and we don't have enough knowledge around how to approach those subjects in the ways that we're being taught God ultimately would, which is through a lens of love. Yeah. But everything is, you know, moving against that. So I want to actually dig into my first question with you that kind of ties into all of those different spaces, and we can really the table is set, child. Have fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Or we're gonna get into it.

SPEAKER_03 18:41

We are gonna get into it.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

I think also people will be very surprised to learn different things about you as we as we move through this conversation because you are really in the weeds, and it's an kind of quiet, fundamental idea of my spiritual journey growing up that I don't talk to a lot of people about, but it's funny to me. In the back of my head, I think being so involved with church as a kid and as a young adult is the reason why I'm a non-Christian today. Like my church experience was self-refuting, like being inundated in it, getting the language, the culture, the the transactions of you know, power, whatever it might be. Sitting in that is the reason why I don't believe in a lot of it now. And and part of it, of course, is just kind of the culturality of it all. Is like in high school and in middle school, my parents were heavily involved in church that was inner city, predominantly black. But then we went to a private high school that was a lot like Cedarville University that was predominantly white. And people don't like to name it sometimes, but you have tenants of church and tenants of religion, but then you have the cultural experience that maybe you don't exchange in words, but it's felt and it's just as much of law, I feel like, in those places as anything else. So I went from a predominantly white private Christian experience to learn and get educated, and then I got bussed into the inner city of Columbus, Ohio to our black church, and even just that, I like to use that analogy before where like the car ride was spirit to me because it transported us from one church space to another, yeah, one belief ecosystem to another. But as a family, we learned how to be chameleons and and find ourselves in the world navigating different church spaces. I don't believe you can be a Christian if what you hold in one place can't be held in another place.

SPEAKER_04 20:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

You have to compensate. It's it's the cognitive distance of it all. There are literally tenets of your faith that you have to let melt off when you leave one church space and you enter another. If you're gonna be hospitable, you're gonna play the game, you're gonna interact with people in a respectful way, you have to sort of let certain assumptions go. Yeah type experience.

SPEAKER_03 21:19

I think it's interesting what you're describing that I I don't think is named very frequently, but there's a sort of code switching that you're doing between spaces. Even as you're saying that, this is similar. I remember, you know, growing up in Catholic church, there was always a space between you and the person sitting next to you. It was far more reserved. Versus on my birthday, my mom would always take me to a Haitian church. Oh yeah. Very, you know, expressive, wailing, crying, everybody screaming at me.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Yeah, using the New York Samuels. That was a nasty vibrato. It took me out. I had that vibrato. I'm a hoe.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Listen, the neighbors are vocal. But they it was similar, actually. That was the sounds and church shots. But it was such a different experience. And it was like almost a mind meld of learning to exist within different faith practices, even if they were believing in the same scripture. Because even the way I had to learn that even with different priests, that was that was one of my biggest issues, where you're taking the word of God, but it's your interpretation of it. And, you know, one priest would be incredibly loving, and then there will be another priest that was like, you're burning in the cinders of hell. And it was like, well, what is the reality of God's word? You know, and how am I supposed to know what's actually true? And I said this actually in the bonus episode, but I do think religion gets so influenced by man-made things and man-perceived ideas that you kind of lose like what is the actual word of God and like the etymology of what you're listening to. So, because what you're saying now, you're you're laying the groundwork of the faith and the environment you were raised in. How would you describe your relationship to faith and spirituality now? And how does that differ from what you were taught it was supposed to be?

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Well, a couple things that you just said, the man-made structures that are imbued in religious space. And then also something you mentioned about when we were talking about the Nashville statement. I do think to some degree in religious spaces, the unspoken thing that a leader might be sending to non-leaders is to quiet is like to quietly dim down or numb your internal sensors and antenna and your own impulses and those little pings of questions or those little pings of this doesn't feel right or this feels weird. Over time, people that live in those religious spaces are quietly asked to dim down those little impulses or dim down those little internal sensors because, you know, it's like uh something like the Nashville statement kind of suggests to you that you need to report to a leader in order to really get real insight about how to live around queer people or live with queer, queer feelings inside yourself. You kind of allocate some of your stewardship of yourself to an outside system or an outside person.

SPEAKER_03 24:31

I see. Yeah. Do you feel like, and I don't know if you're comfortable speaking a little bit about your experience at Cedarville, but ultimately you went to a peer, you went to someone whom you trusted to share your feelings about your identity with them. Is that because of that mindset? Like you go to someone for that sort of guidance?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Not even. No. And this is what's really, I think, unique about my church experience growing up. I'm, I think, a third generation church leader.

SPEAKER_04 25:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

And I don't really identify as a church leader anymore, but I'm just referring to like when I was in that space. Yeah. My grandparents on both sides, mom's parents and dad's parents, were all four elders of a church that they helped start from the ground up, like got the building renovated. Yeah. The whole big legacy. And then when my parents moved from DC to Ohio, my parents were both heavily involved in church leadership for years. But then once me and my brother were in high school, they helped to start their own church. So in high school, my dad was like an administrative pastor at first and then became the senior pastor of a church that started in an office building. We were in the community room of an apartment complex for a while, and then we got a big church that an older congregation couldn't manage anymore. So they gave to us. Wow. And I'm also cis male. Yeah. So it's always has to be it always has to be stated that, like, when you are male in these religious spaces, you are just gonna have a different experience. So I think I was pretty brazen and quietly rebellious, like subversive when I was in high school and in undergrad. But I had a black, you can't tell me nothing, dad, that was a church leader in the community. Yeah. So I'm going through these spaces as a queer person, but also really protected in ways that I didn't understand at the time.

SPEAKER_03 26:30

You said, you know, it's a different experience as a cis male. What do you mean by that? How is it different for you?

SPEAKER_01 26:38

I was able to say, fundamentally for me, the monotheistic religions that are really popular. You think of Islam, you think of Judaism, you think of Christianity, exalt, support the mobility, and support the efficacy of cis men, period. Children and women are accessories to the exaltation of men, period. Yeah. And I like to say it in those terms because it's easy for sexism to use neutral language nowadays. It's not neutral. It's like accessibility, information, education, access to different things is the difference between having a life that feels like a full life and a life of guardrails and a lack of safety. Like, I also think a lot of institutions that are male-centered over time have naturally taught themselves how to limit the voices of people that are being harmed. So I think there are a lot of just institutions in general that if you are femme, if you are a woman, if you are a child, it's just there are more natural instances of you being harmed in different ways and it not being recorded, it not being escalated. The people that did it are too important to the fabric of the of the community or the institution. So they can't be, you know, there can't be real consequences for them. So before I even get into my unique experience, I just know the way I moved would have been different if I wasn't a cis male. It would have just been different, period.

SPEAKER_03 28:18

And you and because of age, I think because of experience and just being born into it, you don't you're not even aware of it until you're out of it. How you exist within those protections. Like you were speaking, you know, just moving through it, growing up in it and having your father in it, you know, and the position he was in.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Yeah, I was really, really, really targeted in high school because of my sexuality, but it wasn't until I got older that I realized part of why I was targeted was because I had a faith leader father. Right. And my high school was a Christian evangelical high school, and our our principal was a pastor, a local pastor in the community. So he had like authority because of his spiritual institution outside of the classroom, and then also because of what, and his mother founded the school. So he was a legacy pastor and principal for this small Christian school in Columbus, Ohio. In a lot of ways, my dad and the principal of that school had like a male educated, spiritual leader connection where they were trying to see each other, you know, iron sharpens iron, that kind of male thing.

SPEAKER_03 29:30

So this, okay, there's so much like of what you're saying where I feel like, yes, you are incredibly protected by the institution and by the legacy of what your family created, but at the same time, you're realizing there's a part of you that really doesn't fit into it, or at least can't, yeah. I don't know if it's measure up or will fit the bill. There was once a point in your life where you thought your identity, your future would be rooted in the church. For sure. So what shifted for you? And what did that process feel like as it was unfolding, realizing that maybe this is not where I'm meant to exist in? What do you do with that? Especially, I don't know if you were the only one in your family to feel that way, but it seems sometimes that you are the black chic. So, how did you reckon with that?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

And I don't want to, I told myself, I was like, what are your intentions for this podcast, Avery? One of them is not to speak too much on my family's experience because I know even if I feel strongly about things that they went through, it was still from a limited perspective of when I was genuine in that moment. Yeah, so I don't know the fuller scope of how they were navigating things, but it's funny. It was actually funny. My mom one day looked at me and said, I know sometimes, Aver, you feel like the back black sheep of the family, but the least she looked at me, she was like, Believe me, you're not. And she was talking about my dad. My dad feels like the black sheep of his immediate family. Just, I mean, a small example of just like my aunts and uncles on my dad's side are all like church leaders in their own right. But when my dad was running his church, one of the tenants of Church of Christ is that you have to name the church after the street. My grandparents go to Sioux and Road Church of Christ. When we moved to Ohio, we went to Gen C Avenue Church of Christ. And then when my parents started helped to start that church, they led, we did Family Fellowship Church of Christ. And my grandparents never, the years that my dad was a pastor, when my grandparents, when his parents, not even just my grandparents, but his parents came to Ohio for like graduations, whatever it is, they never on a Sunday would go to my dad's church and watch him preach. They wouldn't even step foot in the sanctuary if it was during service time. And partly it was because the name was wrong.

SPEAKER_03 32:00

Did you understand? How old were you?

SPEAKER_01 32:02

And like I understood all of it because it was normal. The tension was normal. Like we lived with just a lot of tension. And a lot of church groups, but then specifically my church group, a part of their claim to fame is creating separation between themselves and other groups. I think people start to separate themselves and do the us versus them game in order to compensate for how to achieve holiness.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

I can, you know what? It's so interesting. And this is such like a it's a little bit of a tangent, but I feel like it's an example of that. I remember when I first moved to New York, I was having so much trouble with deciding what church to go to. Something that felt aligned with who I was, but also I was raised within the Catholic faith. We've talked about enough. That whole process of it's so difficult. It's really difficult. And you don't want to spend, you don't want to get attached to a place that doesn't feel aligned with you, and you're just going just because, at least for me, because I felt like that was a lot of my experience growing up. And I'm a person who everything I do, I do think I like for it to have meaning, you know, and for it to have a certain value. And I'm not just going, speaking of, going through the motions. And there was just a point where I just wasn't really finding a church space to connect with. And I was feeling guilty about the fact that I wasn't going to church on Sundays, you know, because that was such a part of my routine growing up. Um, and such an outlet, you know, it was the way that I reset myself every week, you know, and the way that I kind of plugged back into what really mattered, let go, did my prayers. And I remember I was having a conversation with my mom about it. And I said, I just feel so guilty that I'm not going. And she goes, You should feel guilty. And, you know, it was like, it kind of hits you where I was like, oh, I think that's the issue, is that I associate with my faith with guilt. I associate it with if I do X, Y, and Z, I'll make it to heaven.

SPEAKER_05 34:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:04

If I'm behaving X, Y, and Z ways, I'm doing better than the next person. You know, I I remember looking at Facebook statuses from back when I was like freshman year of college and saying, like talking shit about people who were hooking up and how they're not respectful of themselves. And like that's not a way to be like seen in the eyes of a higher power as respectable. Just a lot of things that were incredibly judgmental. That's such a good example, though. But was just such a projection of like wanting to feel like you're enough or that you're meeting the standard of what it means to be a person of faith, yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

And just really quickly, I don't want to maybe jump too quickly into a different subject, but just to call it out, even when you were doing the intro earlier, the ways I just enjoy thinking about like sexuality and sex and religion and spirituality and your inner voice, but then also labor complexes. Yeah. That's the same dynamic sometimes that we get into in corporate and labor spaces. Yeah. Where it's like it's really abstract to think about not just am I doing a good job at work, but am I doing enough of a good job to not be in the company's be in the red zone. Right. So there's that that it's almost, I would say, in a lot of ways, it feels parallel because there's that space at work where even if you're doing all of the politics, it never feels like it's enough. There are still ways that you could not be meeting somebody's mark. Yeah. So you start to negotiate with team members and with activities to compensate for something that's very subjective. Yeah. And what you ex what you just said about those Facebook posts, we do similar things at work.

SPEAKER_03 35:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

To stay within the lines, stay within the confines, each leaders, but then you can kind of shirk off other leaders. Navigating spirituality is a lot like that too.

SPEAKER_03 36:00

Yeah, I actually I really love that you made that parallel because I do think the places, at least I can say, I feel like for a lot of people who are black, a lot of people who are children of immigrants, your faith spaces are very much like spaces of discipline, you know, spaces where you learn routine, where you learn values, where it shapes your identity in a lot of ways. And it shapes the way that you look at authority, at the way that you look at your own voice and how much space you have to be vocal, to talk about subjects that are uncomfortable, to talk about things that are shifting within your own body as you're going through puberty. All those things end up becoming really enmeshed.

SPEAKER_04 36:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:40

And it is a lot of undoing, unlearning as an adult in spit like workspaces and how you engage with people, how you measure your own qualifications, if you're doing well enough, you know, why you're doing something, why you're valued, you know, all of that I do think takes shape from faith spaces. And at the same time, with what you were saying about your dad being very protective, I do think for a lot of older generations, they're working with what they know. Absolutely. They're they think they're being protective. They think they're setting you up for an environment that's going to be harsh. And so we need to make sure that you're aware that you can't behave in these certain ways or that you have to mute these certain behaviors or these certain forms of expression within yourself. Like it's not that it's coming from even a place of unkindness, you know, like it is coming, I would say a place of love, but a place that might be a little bit distorted because it is also stemming from fear. So I think in that same token, your mom has framed your dad as being, you know, sort of black sheep. So in a way, you had an example of what that tension looks like, what it looks like to not be fully accepted, but to have to play the game. Play the game, you know. So when did you realize that I have to play a different game? What did that feel like for you, you know, within your immediate family, but at large as you started to make your way, uh forge a different path for yourself? Did it start at Cedarville when you wrote that article and realized, okay, I'm being kicked out of this private Christian university. I I can't be a church leader, you know, they won't let me be.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

I will also say I it's I love this embodiment that I'm in with this lifetime as a cis male and as queer. Being a black man, you have to look at all your compartments, the ones that you can locate within yourself. It's we we we joke about DL culture and and like other things, even just this idea that black men can maybe be in marriages or relationships and they just check out when it comes to different subjects or different stressful things. Like there can just be things going on with the black man that nobody knows, even to him. He can just repress things. So it's hard to know what I was up to, what my goal was, what I was doing, the different seasons of my adolescence and then young adulthood. Yeah. Because you're trying to get by in the environment, you're trying to get by in the family, you're trying to get by religiously and spiritually, also in these scholastic spaces. So I was doing a lot of concealing, a lot of compartmentalizing, and doing things quietly subversive. I feel like I had a very, I had like a helicopter family growing up. We went everywhere together. We would pile in the car, drop everybody off, and then pick everybody up at the end of the day. So we moved as one unit. Truly all water signs of one place. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_03 39:46

Flowing together constantly.

SPEAKER_01 39:48

So I learned there was there was just moments where I was like, I don't have a choice. And you get this. There's a lot of times as kids, you don't have a choice. Yeah. So I learned how to gain my power back a little bit with the lack of agency on top of it.

SPEAKER_03 40:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

So, and uh, this is something I have to actually work on all the time as an adult too. Like, I have to have a strong no, because if I say yes to something, but I don't want to do it, I can quietly working against the progress. Like I don't show up on time, I don't have to do the research. Because you're not in stumbling.

SPEAKER_05 40:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

And I would do a lot of that growing up, like self-sabotage type stuff. Yeah. But um, I realized it wasn't so I there's a part of me that feels like it was never gonna work for me. She always knew that under some aspect of this that isn't gonna work. Yeah, but then you have that kind of hustler get through a mentality where you're like, well, I'm gonna make it work.

SPEAKER_03 40:45

Yeah, regardless.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

But you don't ever expect the entire thing to work.

SPEAKER_03 40:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

So, but I go back to that image of like us being in the car together and going from our high school to then our church, yeah. Where my parents also knew it wasn't gonna work. Yeah. If and this is like church leaders too, like if a church leader actually opened up their brain and shared all of their beliefs or all the things they really thought about their church congregation, they would get popped. Like it wouldn't last. So you learn as a leader what not to say. Yeah, what, and then you think, like, and I've heard the I heard these conversations growing up in our living room. It's like we can't tell them that. We can't let them know that. That's true. You were hearing the behind the scenes. You're also managing people's their bandwidth for real information, right? Their bandwidth for how much they need this to be. You're managing their need for this to be predictable.

SPEAKER_03 41:42

Did you ever hear like how they would communicate ideas around homosexuality or around um things that were just outside of like what would be traditional?

SPEAKER_01 41:53

I lucked out in that sense, and I don't think there was an intentional effort on the church leader's part. We really didn't do a lot of teaching at the pulpit on queerness or homosexuality. At the two, like my two childhood churches, the ones that my the one that my parent helped to start, and then the one that we landed at when we first moved to Ohio. Yeah. They didn't really hit it unless it was like you're talking there, you know, those lists in the the epistles.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

Yeah, a whole list of- But it was almost unspoken, it feels like it's it's almost like it doesn't need to be said because of everything that is being said.

SPEAKER_01 42:32

For sure. And I think church leaders have two realms. They have the pulpit to send out mass media messages in the moment. Yeah. And then they have all the business, the phone calls, the dropping in and office hours, the politics of the behind the scenes during the week stuff. I can imagine then that's where the homophobia sets in for some churches, is like the business after Sunday. Yeah. What has me, I do want to lean back on the thought though, that like a black man right now who's an adult, who's so who's been on the earth for like maybe two or more decades, everything actually swirling inside of him, the rage, the vision for himself, the desires. Yeah, there is not actually a place where he can show up fully 100% authentically as himself.

SPEAKER_03 43:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:24

And there'd be a pace, a place to embrace that.

SPEAKER_03 43:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

So I think that was also the way I just moved through church space as a queer person. Even just my dad. You were just grounded. He wasn't showing up fully as himself. And that was an expectation. You don't really expect black church leaders to say what they really think, how they really feel, how burnt out they actually are, how depressed they actually are, how overwhelmed with their own sin experience they actually are, their finances, their family. We need the church leader on Sunday to give us hope. Right.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Our our understanding of what's so there's no space for that sort of reality to be on display.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

So it wasn't sometimes this extra thing with me being queer or non-Christian because I already understood that we couldn't you couldn't resale that.

SPEAKER_03 44:15

That is such an interesting conditioning. It's almost like it was separate. Like it you're inadvertently being a black man being raised by a black man. Well, I think I think all black people have conditioning around masking in different ways. And yours just feels a little bit more insidious, like insidious because it's almost by example that you're witnessing it. And so it's like you grow up with the idea that this is the way to evolve, this is the way to be perceived, this is also the way to survive. And it almost becomes this weird mechanism for how you explore your own identity and the spaces that it can live in and it can't live in, and that being the appropriate way to handle it.

SPEAKER_01 44:58

And I think the saddest part for me now that I'm looking back on it was just that the thing that stands out for me is I really at certain points in my childhood and early adulthood did not have a single context where I could unmask because I got in trouble a lot in high school because of my sexuality. But my dad was an active church leader at the time. Right. So there was one time where I was like telling him, hey, this is what's gonna happen. My principal told me to talk to y'all about this, these are the consequences, and his reaction was, Well, what are we gonna tell the church? Wow. I was suspended from high school at one point because I was coming out to friends and I got back to the principal.

SPEAKER_04 45:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

And as a consequence, me not being in school, my dad had me be a secretary at another church in the in the community for a couple days. But he told his church leader friend that I was doing an out-of-school project. So they didn't know I was actually in trouble. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:01

They thought it was like it sounds like when, first of all, I think what's wild about this is that we're in the same age range. And I feel like listening to you, someone would think that you're talking about something that's taking place like in the 60s. So it's it's wild to be thinking about that such it seems so archaic, but in reality, these are modern day experiences that people who are millennials were having growing up, which is kind of insane.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

Because that's also partly why it didn't work on me, is because the time that we grew up, yeah, our access to inf for information year to year increases and expands almost exponentially. Right. What we can get at our fingertips. So them trying to condition me in that way, yeah, mapped on top of the changing of the times, was a little absurd sometimes. You have to accept hide the absurdity of church sometimes to be in it. And that's what gave me a little bit of space to not let it break me.

SPEAKER_03 47:02

That feels divine. It does. It feels divine that I think the irony for me, a lot of the times when people talk about God and people talk about Jesus, Jesus was a rebel. Like in every single way, he he was going against every law of the time, he was going against every idea of society of the time, even his treatment of women, when you actually look at the scripture, when you actually look at the language, who he was engaging with, the poor, the sick, those are the people that he was drawn towards. And so I think there's a great irony in people trying to act as though Jesus wouldn't be embracing the people who exist outside of the fray. When in reality, that was the point that those people contain the most humanity. They contain the most potential for growth, for evolvement, for understanding the most dire of what it is to live a life and to grow and to, you know, just I think find connection within what really creates a human experience. So I think you existing in a framework where you're being peddled one idea of what it means, you know, to live at the highest level in God's eyes, and it being in complete contradiction to what the reality of the language tells you, and then actually having access to witness something outside of your own experience, it's like you're moving ahead. You're already jumping ahead. And the and I can imagine that's so jarring because the people around you are not embracing that, they're not making space for that. It makes me curious though. Did you formally come out to your family? Like, how did they receive your sexuality given that they the background of being, you know, in being church leaders, having a legacy of that? It's not really like, and it, you know, it wasn't like new wave Christianity. This is not Hill Song. Okay. You know? So I'm like, how did they you're you're talking, you're like you're well, it's funny because you're talking about their response to certain circumstances you found yourself in, or the fact that you were sharing with your friends, you were coming out, but was your family like, don't say these things out loud? Did they ever try to quiet your identity in any sort of way? Was it in an unspoken way that they did?

SPEAKER_01 49:26

So I would I like to think that there was a defining moment with my parents inside the house where they dis didn't discipline us if we tried them or pushed back. But I think it's because they were stoking that spirit that you that people want cis males to develop, that they push against the environment, they spe they use their voice, they if they don't agree with something, they they they put together a reasonable enough retort to make it make sense. Like if my if we pushed back on our parents in high school and it kind of made sense, they would let us run with it because I think that's how you raise you you you the people claim to raise boys, right? Just given a lot more space.

SPEAKER_03 50:11

It's almost attached to masculinity and being authoritative.

SPEAKER_01 50:15

So I did take some of that into other spaces where I'm like, I do feel like one of the smarter girls in the room. I especially came to spirituality, like growing up in high school, being queer in predominantly white spaces that didn't even understand not to touch people's hair. Oh, like there were just a lot of cultural, there was like a lot of cultural full faux pas on top of the spiritual full faux pas. So there was a little bit of arrogance that I walked with in those spaces. But I will say coming out, it's hard to know how my parents would have handled it otherwise because it was always in the context of me getting in trouble. So I couldn't really bring it to them as like a hey, this is what it is. It's like, hey, I have to tell you something because interesting. So push comes to shove. My principal, who's also a pastor, finds out that I'm coming out to friends. I think it was my sophomore year of high school that my principal was basically like, you need to tell your parents, or if you don't, I'm gonna tell them. So then and then shortly after I came out to my parents, we had to have a meeting with my principal and the guidance counselor. So that was always the context. It was like, and a lot of people that grew up in church can relate to pastoral counseling when things happen inside your family, they want to keep it hush-hush, but then they just have meetings inside the pastor's office to counsel you. That's how they handled it. Did it feel like a sort of conversion therapy at all? And this is what's so wild. They were pushing kind of a sort of conversion process with me that they kind of had the school handle. But when we were home, I just have a black mom that worked a nine to five and cooked us dinner. Like we were a regular black family in the house. Yeah, we weren't even that religious, they were just like parents that grew up in urban areas that were raising a family, trying to keep their kids, their boys on the straight and narrow. And when we honestly, when we went to our church institutions, whether school or actual church, we played the game. And then looking back, I don't think my parents were that concerned about their own holy holiness. They were concerned about keeping their church spaces together because they're in ministry. So I think what hurt them most about my sexuality was just that it impacted their church networking, their church business. Yeah. So it was a lot with school. Like there was a time where I had to write a letter to my graduating class and read it to them in our library, basically apologizing for coming out and kind of giving a defense as to why that's bad and how I'm gonna do it better. And so the school handled a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

And did you, when you in that experience specifically, did it feel more like a performance and you knew inside that this isn't real? Like I'm doing this because I have to, or did you actually believe like I need to be apologizing for my actions, for my behaviors?

SPEAKER_01 53:20

I don't, it's there was just so many layers because I growing up, I loved my principal. He had the smoothest voice and he was a preacher, and he was so charismatic. And he he was one of those people, and I know anybody that went to Tree of Life Krishna schools, I'm saying lame child. If you if you tell them to describe Todd Mare, our principal, he seemed like Jesus. Like he was perfect. You growing up at that age, I did not think he sinned. He didn't give like it didn't seem like there was any misplaced element of his life.

SPEAKER_03 53:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:56

And when you're a kid, you're not like, man, fuck this system. You're like, damn, I'm fucking up.

SPEAKER_03 54:01

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

You internalize a lot of that. So I just thought I was fucking up a lot.

SPEAKER_03 54:07

Right. And it was tied to this part of your identity, your sexuality. It's interesting to me because when I met you, you seemed like such a fully formed person in your identity. I feel like you really just always explored your femininity. I mean, one of my favorite stories is I don't know if you remember this, but I had just had this eye surgery in child talking about another life. I thought I was able to grab an Uber on my own after eye surgery. And one of my friends was like, Um, no, I'm gonna give you a ride. Thank you for that friend, Angela. Okay. And I'll never forget, she drives up to 1282 and I can't see anything. I've got these big black glasses on, and she goes, Who is that beautiful black man blowing bubbles outside?

SPEAKER_02 54:54

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 54:55

And we weren't even friends at. We hadn't even really spoken. And I said, Oh, that's Avery. Like I already knew because there was just always this softness that I associated with you. And it's interesting because I'm listening to you now, and like the way you were raised, the environment, the way that you keep mentioning, you know, being a man in this space is like there seems like there was this hardwiring around masculinity. So I'm just very curious around where you learned to embrace the femininity, where you gained access to that. Because to me, as a woman, I find my femininity to be a a space of divinity for me. Curious where where did you find where was that access point? Where where did you finally, where did your spirituality meet that?

SPEAKER_01 55:43

I'll answer that two ways. And and hopefully the first thing I'll say kind of harkens back to something I didn't answer a little bit ago. I don't think all church space all church spaces in our country identify as evangelical, but evangelical, the churches and schools I was involved in all identified as evangelical.

SPEAKER_03 56:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

And that's your that's your baseline. That's a specific thing where I think evangelicalism emphasizes marketing and impact, sharing the message, the whys, the how, sharing resources. It's very like mass communications based.

SPEAKER_03 56:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:26

Going to Cedarville University and also going to my high school, my junior year of high school, we had apologetics, is like teaching you how to be an orator and how to you have they gave us a flip book with all the different arguments for Christianity and for God.

SPEAKER_03 56:46

They're almost like an ambassador.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

They gave us true, it's like brand ambassador work. Yeah. They gave us a big book to help debunk evolution and support creationism. So they would have like insects and different animals that were like, this animal, like the bombastic beetle, what? It mixes chemicals, it sprays chemicals outside of itself. That when they mix, it has a combustion effect on whatever it's trying to get away from. And basically, they're like, there's that middle chamber that keeps those chemicals separate, but evolution isn't possible because a bug would have never been able to develop that middle chamber and keep it from combusting over time. Something would have had to create it specifically as that insect as long as we've known it. But we did a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 57:35

Wow. I'm and these are the things you say where I'm just like, how again, like I'm just in awe of the person that you are. You are. I am. You're talking about bombastic beetles. Like you're talking about bombastic beetles. I'm like, what the hell? I and listen, again, I grew up Catholic, but there was never, I also similarly I think to you in some ways, like I lucked out. My dad was definitely far more progressive in a lot of ways. And so while I was going to like CCD, like I was going to religious school after public school, I was also allowed at home to kind of ask questions around evolution and around science. Like these concepts weren't made to like be separate from each other. It really is this subjective journey that I was allowed to witness and therefore discover for myself that I don't feel many people had who grew up in very like fundamentalist Christian-based environments, you know, where we're even using animals to, you know, defend, you know, gender or identity or evolution or like, you know, debunk science. Like it and and when you're doing that with young minds, the amount of deconstruction work that you're doing, I'm sure even at this, even at this age, is like it's kind of it's an incredible thing that you can you can joke about it because I'm sure at some point it was very serious to you, it was very real. So sorry. You just walked back into it.

SPEAKER_01 59:08

You said it was dead serious, serious, you know, because it's like it was a school of thought, it was like it was a school, it was an institution, and they had their target. Yeah, you were institutionalized. So I don't think that's that's an exaggeration to say. Absolutely. How could I what like how was I identifying as openly gay? I didn't know identify his fear at the time. I don't I don't think I knew what that was, but I identified I was openly gay, literally my freshman year when I first went to Cedarville.

SPEAKER_05 59:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:39

So being in high school as a gay kid, learning apologetics, yeah, and learning how to, they were trying to train us both schools, Cedarville and Tree of Life Christian schools, were trying to train us how to be masters of debate, masters of rhetoric, how to hold court, yeah, and kind of be the commanding force with a lot of people having a lot of different thoughts. They told us how to hold, taught us how to hold that kind of space. Yeah. So I went to Cedarville with that. So I was in my dorm room with a bunch of like all white friends and all white guys in the dorms, identifying as openly gay, holding court. And I could, I was okay with people being gagged, people being confused, because I knew I was. You like a little bit. Because I knew I was effervescent. Yes, and that and people could, and this is the thing about spirituality, people can feel before they read.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:35

So before they understand about enough, like people could feel that they felt safe around me before I started talking about homosexuality. Yeah. So that also created a dissonance within them because they're they're they're trying to push their rhetoric up against how they're feeling.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

And I would give people permission to be confused and frustrated.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:56

Which is a safe space.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:58

Ironically, they would be in there. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:00

And what's funny is again, it's like aren't you practicing faith better than the faith leaders?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:06

They're training us how to be faith leaders, they're training us how to be masters of rhetoric. Yeah. And so if I was in a room with 15 guys, and one person came in and he was the rebel rouser and he didn't care about being politically correct, he would butt up against the the room that I set. The straight white guys were under their own socialization process too. So them all being in my room, being able to have those exploratory conversations. I came with a the church gave me a lot of tools that if they knew who I actually was in my soul, they would have never let me stay in their schools to develop those tools of holding core to kind of put a mirror in the faces of people that they were trying to prop up.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:54

It's it's fascinating listening to you because it feels like you always existed within your identity, but not you didn't always own it as it being yours. It was always in service to something else or in service to someone. It's almost like they recognize that too, that power. Yes. But they realize that the threat of that power is you recognizing it. Yeah. And that's why they couldn't let you have it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:21

But I will tell you, because I think the reason why I got in trouble at Cedarville was because again, I was more concerned with rhetoric than their idea of what holiness looked like. Rhetoric can keep you in a space long if you can argue and debate stuff. Because I would say when I was 20 years old, my dream, if you would have asked me what my dream was, it would have been to be a worship pastor. I would have been openly gay, but I would have been celibate choosing not to have sex with men or be in a relationship with men. And that justified me being brazen enough to tell you I'm openly gay because I'm taking the right steps to make sure I'm not living in sin or I'm not doing something that would extricate me from the space I'm trying to minister in.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:04

So I had already done work to my light, so to speak, instead of you came up with the solution already for the fragmented in the space, but still be able to move in a space. And that's how I compensated for it. And I think that's what really threw off the leadership there because this is a kid who's been in leadership spaces for years, that's in a lot of ways lives as a countercultural entity in these spaces who has figured out how to rhetorically hold space, hold court, listen, in order to keep space there.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

You're you're playing the game better than they are.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:38

That's how I learned to like still be excited about my future, yeah, but also compensate for the things that didn't work for the room.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:47

So when it kind of came crashing down that that strategy wasn't gonna play out, wasn't gonna work either way, you know, when you're you're kicked out of cedar. That was not the worst part either. What was the worst part?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:00

The beautiful part of my journey was that I was always excited about singing. So when my parents had their church, I would sing at their church. And I had people that were my parents' age, people that watched me grow up, yeah, that were also involved in my singing journey, whether they were on the craze team with me or they were they just watched me grow up.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:20

So when I first went to college, each time I was a part of a gospel choir, and our gospel lead was incredible, just like a music savant, and he was great at teaching, not just music. So I became a better singer every semester. Yeah. But then on the summer vacations and the winter vacations, I would be back at my home church, and they would always be like, Avery, your voice is different, something changed. Yeah. So I was feeling affirmed that at school I would get the training, and then on breaks, I would be back home and I could kind of display how I've gotten better. That was like a beautiful affirmation for like older black folks in church and me. So there was a time where push comes to shove, child. It happens everywhere, but a lady that had watched me grow up saw that I was gay. I don't think I was really coming out at my home church. She just peeped it, started gossiping to a lot of leaders in the church, and push comes to shove. There's a day when my parents bring me into their room, and they had to tell me that I had to step down from singing praise team at their church.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:31

And they were weeping, like weeping. But at this point, I had gone through enough of that. That's consoling that. I was like, y'all, I understand. I figured this time will come eventually. It's okay. And I was consoling them in that moment. So I was losing those battles in really sacred places that watched me grow up and knew me. I can be a stranger at a Cedarville. Yeah. But but I was getting kind of turned away at places that my family had like a legacy into. That was the thing that like tore me up.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:59

Yeah. I feel like you've danced around it a little bit. And I and I think it's fair because I don't think that I don't think timelines are linear. I know for me, like I remember when I moved to New York, you know, 21-22. I can say that it is the last 13 years living in New York that I really developed large parts of who I am and who I resonate with most in my identity, in my sexuality, in my visual appearance. Like, I don't know if I was really given the space to explore myself until I broke away from everything that I was attached to.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:38

You know, and I don't know that I was doing that knowingly. I think I was chasing one thing and it ended up turning into many different things, you know? So I don't know if it's even fair to ask you, like, when did you know when is because it's like it was just happening, you know, as you were growing, as you were evolving. There is no way, as I'm listening to you, that all those different things that your condition within that you hear about, that you're straddling, that you're grasping to understand, doesn't leave an imprint on you. You know, where do you still feel the imprint of how you were raised?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:13

Oh, that's a nasty old question.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:16

Even as you've created something different for yourself, where does it still live for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:21

That's a good question. The first impulse I had when you said, even when it looks different for me, in some ways it doesn't look different for me. I like to meditate on the idea that we are involved with systems. Like the irony of that scripture, like we don't wrestle against flesh and blood blood, but against principalities and this and that. It's like not a word, our systems are that. So I know it's I have to remind myself, and this is I feel like a point of just healing in life. When you have wounds from a parent, when you have wounds from a school, yeah, all of that happened within a greater context. Like my parents didn't introduce me to anything that wasn't already in the ecosystem.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:10

And wasn't introduced to them.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:12

Yes. So when I think about my family in those terms, it's like I'm not necessarily choosing something different for my family. I'm choosing something different when it comes to these greater societal norms. Yeah. It's much bigger than the just the pressure I feel from family necessarily. It's interesting now because I think, and you mentioned deconstruction before. My parents have gone through a deconstruction that I don't think most people my age will ever experience with their parents. The kind of deconstruction I feel like I've seen in my parents, I feel like I'm seeing mainly in our age group.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

So that really has given me a lot of space. Like that's probably the where I get a lot of my space from, is that my parents don't go to church anymore. Yeah. They don't, they just don't lean into the tenets of religion. They do it their own way. They do all of their spiritual stuff their own way. It's like they don't really report to something on the human level that's like above them.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:17

When did that start? Were you already an adult living in New York, or did that journey start?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:22

It started a long time ago because again, it's it was also where the economic met the spiritual and religious. Because my parents were responsible not just for a church in high school, but they were responsible for the staff. There was it was the minutiae of it all. Like my parents had to get ready. Cause you know this, even in your event planning and event coordination work. There's that one stakeholder that you know was gonna probably pop in at that time, and you have to pivot your energy a little bit to appease them. Then once they leave, you can go you do your thing over there. Like so they were very frustrated and worn out that entire season of their lives. And that was a uh key point of their deconstruction.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:06

Even as you're saying that though, when you're talking about, you know, everything that they've had to balance, you know, you're you're talking a lot about what your family has experienced, but I feel like I see that in you. I feel like I see you constantly balancing different stakeholders and constantly balancing emotional capacities and bandwidth and how you're presenting yourself. Even before we were just talking about management, you know, and showing up in a space and how much you're responsible for.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:33

I think I mentioned the stakeholder thing too, because it gets lost sometimes just how inherently political church is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:41

Because I think and I think that's your lens. I think I think you look at politics life through a very political lens.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:49

Politics, I feel like distilled in just one phrase, what I would say politics is to me, is just managing interests.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:57

And that's that's definitely I think how you see my like Yeah, that's the imprint I would say on you. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:04

So I got to see my parents had to manage these interests in this space that was a legacy space for them. Yeah. And watching the fatigue and watching how it didn't work, that gave me a lot of freedom to not have to do that same kind of toilsome work of managing interests in a church space for uh in a part-time or full-time capacity. It just gave me space to not have to do it the way they did it because they were kind of demonstrating to me, my brother, that it didn't work for them.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:34

Yeah. And I can see how you've taken all of that and now you've like imbued it in your own way and through your own practices, through your own meditations, through your own, even through music, I feel like, through art, through dance. Like there, there's still that lens of holding space for all those different stakeholders. Yeah. And also where your voice lives in that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:54

But I will say what's, and I I love that you worded it like that, because you asked me earlier about where my femininity found its voice. Yeah. Started in high school, where I discovered that once my parents went to sleep, spirit could kind of arise in me and had more voice. I could be curious, I could be to get feminine. Yeah. I and this is back in the day when everything was 24 hours. So there was a Kroger not far from us when I was in high school that was open 24 hours. So I would walk there and buy makeup there. And I used to be so anxious and scared, and maybe just the eyeliner pen this time. Don't stay in the I own for too long. Go walk over there to that area, walk back, grab something, then come back. Like I played, I did that dance so strategic. Yeah. I would do the craziest makeup and put on the craziest outfits in the middle of the night. And I got to explore my femininity when everything else felt like it was asleep. So I feel like for me, that's where divine feminine first started creeping in for me. And then even just my spirituality, I love where my spirituality is today, but the foundation, to be honest, is divine feminine.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:06

And it feels poignant now because divine masculine has an obvious platform in our society and culture. So to find space to explore what divine femininity is for anyone of any gender has been such an exciting journey for me. And I would say, in the same way, plancestry. I don't know if you know about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:32

I feel like you were the first person who I heard that term for. I'm sure I heard it from someone else within our circle as well, but I feel like you're the one at whom I hear it from the most. And it's interesting that you said that because the next question that I wanted to ask you was as you began to rebuild, what did you find yourself reaching for, whether through art, study, spirituality, or even your relationship to your body, and what does that look like for you now? So mediums and practices.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:59

Well, I think there's a baseline I believe that there's no separation between the body, spirituality, culture, um, the communities we're in, I believe it's all one experience at the same time. So when I sing, when I dance, even if it's just to dance to like to get my joints going, if I'm having like some lower back pain, whatever it is, all of it, like if people are going to the gym as a routine and moving their bodies that way, all of those are spiritual experiences. And sometimes we're even just using spiritual tools that we don't realize are spiritual tools. Maybe we're we just relate that we're hearing ourselves better or that we feel better or something feels crisper. But I think regardless, and that's why I think we have to oof child. I'm just one soapbox, please. Please go for it. As black people, we have systematically been there are systems in place that try to keep us from certain levels of education, certain levels of access. Yes, slavery, but then even after slavery, but just the entire project of trying to limit black advocacy. I feel like we just have to be reminded constantly that the impact is language. There are words that we don't have. There are traditions that we probably had before that the language has been lost, even the ways we feel about ourselves or our neighbor. We don't have things to explain or define those things. And we have to give ourselves grace. Like in our spiritual practices, I call it unintelligibility, like um Judith Butler Undoing Gender, where she said systems create a space so that everything in the thing makes sense and out of everything outside of the thing doesn't have uh a mental structure for it, doesn't have words for it. So things become unintelligible over time. In my spiritual practice, sometimes I'm like, Avery, Avery, no words, no words. Just feel it. Or like even if you want to pray or you're thinking about something, you're meditating on something, I try to get myself not to grasp for words or not to grasp for to make sense. Just sitting in something, I feel like is a perfect spiritual act because it also allows for me to compensate for all the things, all the spiritual traditions, all the things that just have been through genocide and through other things, yeah, systematically removed from what my brain can actually get access to today. Yeah. There are so many things we don't have access to that would help us to know our spirits, know ourselves more, know this moment more that are not in the landscape. And I feel like my spiritual practice, I try to compensate for that.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:15

I think that's so beautiful. I listening to you, it was really um affirming for me because I remember growing up feeling so self-conscious around prayer and how I was supposed to pray. And I used to feel bad because I wasn't on my knees. All right, you know, and I wasn't saying very specific things and asking for very specific things. And am I praying correctly? Like, am I am I supposed to be manifesting? Am I supposed to be praying for other people? If I forget a family member, like there were so many things there was almost a pressure around praying. Yeah, something that I realized along the way was that I'm always talking to God. All right. I am always praying because I am always talking out loud to higher consciousness. And it became such a realization for me in terms of how I embody faith and spirituality in myself and how it just exists within me, what people are attracted to, what I sometimes refer to as being spooky, like all that sort of language that has been at odds. I'm like, it's all the same thing. And there was a point in my time where I really wanted to study theology when I was in high school. I wanted to be a theologist because it was kind of insane to me that people didn't realize all the similarities across so many different faiths. And one of the things that always stuck out to me in the Bible was the disciples going to different places and speaking in different tongues. And it was like if if stories are being passed down word of mouth, that means they become open to interpretation, they become open to perception. That doesn't mean that at one point it didn't all stem from one source. Yeah, it's the same way I think about astrology. When people say, I don't believe in it, just because you don't believe in it doesn't mean it's not happening. It's all happening, it's all existing. People are all exist on this scale of spirituality and faith, yeah, whether they believe in something or not. Not believing in something is believing in something, honestly.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:17

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:17

So it's just like you you can tell yourself, you know, what doesn't exist, what does exist. And in the meantime, you're moving through it, you know, and it's all a practice within itself. So I think it's beautiful that you kind of see it all as this shape-shifting experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:33

It has to be for me. You can't, I feel like you can't, and I'm the way I'm framing it, I don't want it to seem like I'm like coming for a certain type of black person. It's just how I want to word it. But I feel like right now you can't be black and not have a vivid imagination for your spirit, for your family, how you move through the world. Because again, so much was brought to our doorsteps to serve a greater system, but in that our own efficacy, our own being, our own health, our own wealth was not a part of that bargaining shit for what we've been taught for the last millennia. So true.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:20

I do want you to talk about plancestry a little bit more and how you discovered that and where that fits into the equation for you.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:28

So Plancestry fits into that a bit, but that's kind of how I approach my spirituality. But to what I was saying before about what is intelligible, what can I put my mind to and what can I not? That's why I believe in Plancestry. It was brought to me by a tarot reader who's trans. And they, it was cool how they did their tarot work because they brought their trans identity and their plancestry identity into it. So that was maybe five or six years ago when I met them. How I view it is probably maybe different than the actual school of thought. Okay. So it's just kind of how I've I've come to conceptualize it, where basically you pull themes for divinity, themes for spirituality directly from the plant kingdom. So the thing that helps me the most, I would say, with plant cestry is my concept of death. Because I, for me, I'm like, all these different religions, all these different beliefs, what do they converge on? What's the point? How have they stayed true for so long? True in the sense that how have people been abiding by them so consistently for so long? Yeah. I think a lot of religions help us cope with death, help us conceptualize death, this training ending of things, what comes next? The big unseen. I think plants help me the most compensate with my death concept. Also, what scares us with death is not just death and ending, but the stillness.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:07

To not move, to not have animation anymore. Yeah. And plants have kind of this thing to them that seems dead because they don't move.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:17

But there's so much activity outside of our perception. So, and it's also that concept of the life cycle where as soon as a tree falls in the forest, it's starts to decompose. So, in that framework, there's literally not a time where plants are not alive. Yeah. Because the minute something quote unquote dies, it's of service to a greater living system.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:38

Yeah. So I maybe I've been practicing plancestry all along.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:42

That's exactly how I think. And just uh even if you take it to the Genesis creation story, or you take it to what a lot of scientists that are not creationists say, plants came first. So there was life on Earth before humans, it was predominantly a plant system. Yeah. So that I think that's literally where it comes from. The plant session is like plants are our first ancestor. Yeah. But then from a spiritual perspective, even just like plant medicine or plant characteristics, I love looking at maybe the different characteristics of plants and then pulling those out for like a spiritual practice too. If this, even in when you look at adincra symbols like African symbols, the fern is one of the aduncra symbols. And because of how it's built, it's the aduncra symbol for resilience. And if if somebody identifies with the fern adenchra symbol, it means that they're resilient and they can get through things. So kind of that example of just like the symbolism that helps me structure my life and keep me encouraged. I pull from plants. And then also it helps me with death. This idea that even though I have this sense that this human body will die and be done, it's continuous in a different way. If the life force and the life energy that my body holds right now will serve a different purpose outside of what this consciousness is right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:07

I strongly believe that. I mean, I believed it beforehand, but I think when you firsthand experience loss, like it becomes something that you ponder on more. And it's such a part of my, I don't even grief is like doesn't even feel like the all-encompassing word anymore because it's it's not entirely. I think grief is like always attached to something that's negative. And for me, there's a different sort of life force that I'm experiencing. Sure. Where I feel a different energy in a different presence where my mother is alive in a different way, just not in the physical sense, you know, but there are other ways, other experiences where it becomes very evident to me that that energy has sustained. And it's so corny because I'm sure it's also so whitewashed when we think about Disney's Pocahontas. But I was thinking about that song where she's talking about every being, every living, breathing plant having a voice, having a spirit, having a name, which pulled me back just into a very indigenous way of thinking, which pulled me back into just, you know, being a you know, a child of Haitian immigrants, growing up, so much was put into plants. I remember we had uh hibiscus street. When I wasn't feeling well, my mom would pluck a flower and put that in water and boil it. I learned so much about earth being a healing factor, earth being something that you respect, earth being something that you return to. Yes. Not just when you're living, but when you transition. You know, it was just such, it is such a, you know, I think people think it's silly when someone says touch grass, but that's a real thing. You know, it's a real thing to go and being out in nature when you realize how much of it you share within your own, you know, cellular makeup. And something beautiful I always love to say, I know like Ash Wednesday is something I still have retained from Catholicism. And my favorite part of that was the phrase to dust you were made into dust you shot return. And I always would switch it up and I would say of stardust you were made. I think it's very easy, and I think it's a very Western culture thing to think that everything revolves around us. But when you really zoom out, you are part of something so much larger than yourself and part of something that you really don't have a semblance of how it all works or integrates. So even when I'm looking at faith, I'm not behaving a certain way to ensure I get to heaven.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:24

I don't know what's out there, I don't know what comes next. But I do know from what I've seen, even from like you're saying, the cycle of nature, that it starts over again and it brings something new each time.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:36

And I think even just quickly. Something about genocide right now, too, that feels helpful because just natural disasters. You see the devastation that happens in nature, alas, but in a weird way, if there weren't humans to experience a disaster, nature wouldn't describe it as a disaster. It wouldn't describe it at all. It would just have serious, yeah. And styles that that helps me, even just being a part of communities that are so targeted in a in a compounding way with queerness and then with people of color communities around the world right now, experiencing different kinds of genocide or different kinds of like mass control. What would you even call it? Just different ways that they're we're being impacted as people groups on a large scale right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:28

Mass propaganda?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:29

Yes. That it helps to know when you think about a natural disaster that regardless of how it all sells when the storm is over, yeah, it's all of use and like it's all going to lend to something else. Cause I think when things that are this big and this heavy happen, we're quick to hope for some kind of a solution. I don't think solutions will come in our lifetime or maybe ever for some of the bullshit we're dealing with now. Yeah. And I think Plants History helps us know. That it's not just okay. It's just what it is. Yeah. It's like I don't need my faith, doesn't need it to put a doesn't need a bow.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:10

Yeah. I don't think anything you're saying removes the responsibility of justice. Yeah. You cannot control every factor of how life unfolds and what you are met with, you know, in your lifetime. And I think that's it's a fine line and it's it's part of the human experience, learning how to balance that, you know, especially in the world that we live in today. There are so many connections between religion and consumer culture and identity. And I think sometimes we're we're constantly weighing what makes someone a better human than the other human being, and who are you supporting and where are you buying from and what are you doing? And it becomes again this way of that we're measuring ourselves against each other, which is systemic and which is intentional. Yeah. So breaking out of that framework, breaking out of that mindset is as much of the work as it is having faith and doing the justice work. So it's so my question for you is where do you see those systems shaping how we understand ourselves and how we move through the world? And do you think they're beneficial to us?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:21

I would say my challenge is I hope I get the term right. I think it's the Protestant ethic.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:29

But in the early Americas, and I I think it's really strong now, because now you would call it prosperity gospel. Okay. But centuries ago, the Protestant ethic, I believe, is when if you're doing, if you're disciplined financially and economically, and you open your businesses, you make your money, you invest your money well. If you're doing well economically, that is also evidence that you are doing well in the eyes of the divine and in the eyes of God. Now, and it creeps in, like prosperity gospel sounds kind of wild. Like, why would God over all these, over all the cosmos and over all of the evil that's happening right now, all the suffering, careful? I if I earn some income mobility over here, like why would that be God's concern?

SPEAKER_04 1:30:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:24

But it our language betrays us sometimes because we will pray for certain advancements and also expect certain advancements from God, or we say, Oh, well, I've been steadass, I've been praying, I've been this and that. So God's gonna reward me. Yeah, it betrays us a lot.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:40

I think we gotta kill the American dream.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:44

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:44

We all have it. I feel like black people especially have it. There's even this nuance of a lot of black people right now feel like they don't need to tap into what's happening in the world because we've suffered in a really significant way over the centuries. But there is this sense that my life is supposed to be comfortable. My life is supposed to increase in comfort, increase in safety, increase in security. And I think what's happening with our administration right now, what's happening globally, is that that sense of safety or comfort or mobility was propaganda in and of itself. There were people, there are people who will never there are people who came to this earth and will, from the day they were born to the day they die, will only suffer because of where and how and why in the systems that be. So, why if you grow up in a sense of comfort in America? Are you it's almost like you're more tethered to this sense of evading risk and danger and poverty or whatever it is, then actually connecting to the divine. We're more connected, I think, to this temptation of comfort than actually to the divine here in the West.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:52

So I think sometimes what keeps us from actually connecting, actually mobilizing, actually hearing and opening our hearts and spirits is because we have to abandon our comfort zones. And that sometimes I feel like within us to want to be comfortable or want to be stable is more powerful than like when we pray.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:16

You know, yeah. When you pray, you expect certain things to happen. But when it comes to you giving up that nine to five, and not saying people need to give up their jobs, and it's like the what are you willing to risk kind of thing. That conversation is very hard for people in the West, especially people who historically have suffered here because we feel like it's our time to be elevated or get comfortable. And I'm like, but in the grand scheme of spirituality, yeah, it's it's a little the the picture's a little bit bigger than that, and your neighbor across the globe might be suffering this whole time. Yeah. So we we watched our That's So Raven, we had our lunchables, we went to high school and had this idea that there will be something exciting after us. I feel like we've been comfortable long enough.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:00

And that's what I'm asking myself. What am I willing? Am I willing to suspend this idea? Maybe I won't get married, maybe I won't own property down the line because what's happening on earth might get so severe with these powers that be that we need to answer the call.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:13

Woo! Oh my gosh. Now that was a word. That was a ministry, if you will. And I'm gonna leave it at that because I do think that is an incredibly powerful space for people to reckon with, but also to ponder upon and think about what does faith look like to them? What does it look like in practice? What does it look like in belief? What does it look like in history? What does it look like in ideology? And what does it look like in effort? Yeah. What does it look like in reality? You know?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:48

If I could leave folks with anything, just gonna do an exercise. Try it out and see what comes up. Because it's cool to ask yourself stuff to see where your values are. And maybe ones that we've been programmed to have, we don't realize are there. Yeah. On a piece of paper, you can ask yourself, what is the purpose of my faith for me? And what is the purpose of my faith for those around me? If you really sit and answer some of those questions, and if you're honest, put your first answers down. You could really see a lot of bias, a lot of belief systems that you may judge in other people as uh old school, you see a lot of that stuff come up on the paper.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:26

I love that. Okay, that's the exercise that Avery's leaving you with. Okay. So, as you know, and I I mentioned this before, this season is really shaped by the concept of home. So, as we close this out, when you think about home now in your body, in your relationships, in your spirituality, what does that mean for you at this point in your life? What does home mean for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:51

Home for me is shadow work.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:56

You think about the re- I shuddered.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:59

I think about how like shadow work has a lot to do with rejected parts of yourself, repress repressed parts of yourself. But home is everything. You have the things you want your house guests to see, you have the thing in the closet that you don't want your house guests to see. So, home is like, in a lot of ways, safety for me, comfort after a long day, all those good things. But it's also all the other stuff. Yeah. The shit under my bed that was supposed to leave last season, like whatever that one person in the house that you want to avoid today because you don't have enough in you to deal with X, Y, or Z or their boots.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:40

So home for me is shadow work. And I would say for my faith, I before I transition, I want to be in love with every part of me, even the taboo parts, the parts that are ugly, the parts that I don't want to embrace. I want to be a witness to every fabric, every little thread of that in my quote unquote home.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:06

Wow. So what do you have going next for you? What are you working on, or what are things that you want people to know? And where can folks find you? Ew. You love that sound. That's your vocal stem.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:19

I do, I do, I do. So I also identify as an artist. Yes. I'm having like a very big pause. Oh, you're in like hibernation mode. Yes, a very big pause moment, but it happened in part because of so many of the genocides happening right now. Yeah. Me sitting with the genocides and then me sitting with my voice as an artist and what I want to put in the world. I was like, I don't have an ethic for my art right now that matches the time. So I need to pause so that when I do produce stuff again, it can, it can hold all of that stuff. Because it felt maybe even a little outdated. Maybe the way I used to put stuff out there before just hasn't evolved enough for me to be actively coasting right now and putting things out there. So you can't really find me, baby, unless I want to be found right now. My Instagram is at yuma70.h Y-O-U-M-A. Yes. And that's one place to find me until I'm ready to be found, I guess you can say. I'll have other things to put out. Working on a zine right now, always in the studio learning how to audio engineer and record music, and I'm a vocal producer. So, you know, you'll hear me sing a little something in your ear down the line, but none of it is ready to be seen or heard. So follow me on Instagram, and then you can follow the other beautiful things down the motherfucking line.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:44

Yes! We're here for the collaboration. Thank you so much, Avery, for joining me for this episode of Just a Dash. I really can't wait for people to explore everything that you shared. It really is always so fascinating just getting a peek into a corner of your mind. And I love you so dearly, and I appreciate you so much. And thank you, thank you. We did it. We did it. Wherever you are in the world, just give me a period. And that's it.