BRATTLEBORO — Through his innovative one-man show that combines scholarship and activism, Peterson Toscano wants people to look at the Bible in new ways.
On June 15, at 7:30 p.m. in Brattleboro's Hooker-Dunham Theater & Gallery, the comic performance artist and writer will present “Jesus Had Two Daddies: A Ridiculously Serious Look at Scripture,” which explores the bizarre, quirky and, at times, disturbing world of the Bible.
Drawing on his skills as a character actor and scholar, Peterson unpacks both well- and lesser-known Bible stories through the lens of his unconventional Bible scholarship as he uses comedy to bring new insights to ancient Biblical passages.
Peterson comes to Brattleboro as part of the monthlong celebration of LGBTQ Pride, memorializing the June anniversary of Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in 1969.
Last year, Toscano's presentation of “Transfigurations: Transgressing Gender in the Bible” was a big hit with Brattleboro audiences. In that earlier work he interviewed transgender and genderqueer individuals and wove their experiences into the stories of transgender and gender-variant people from Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
“In some ways, this new show is different,” he says. “It is much funnier and is autobiographical.”
Unlike “Transfigurations” which focused solely on the Bible, “Jesus Had Two Daddies” also brings Toscano's own life story into this one-man drama.
As he takes his audience back to the time when he lived as a closeted man desperately trying to “de-gay” himself through various ex-gay treatments and prayers, Toscano examines his first (heterosexual) marriage, his Pentecostal church experiences, and his trajectory of faith.
“Jesus Had Two Daddies” weaves together personal and Biblical narratives to create an entertaining and thought-provoking theater experience that believers and non-believers alike will find hilarious and insightful.
Toscano is a theatrical performance activist who uses comedy and storytelling to address social justice issues.
Since 2003 he has traveled in North America, Europe, and Africa performing in diverse venues and speaking in the media. He writes and performs plays that explore LGBTQ issues, sexism, racism, violence, and gender.
Throughout his career, Peterson has used storytelling to educate and instigate broader understandings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues. He raises questions about the intersection of faith and sexuality.
The creator of the plays, “Doin' Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House” and “I Can See Sarah Palin from My Window,” Toscano is internationally renowned for his unique brand of performance art. As someone who lived nearly 20 years as evangelical Christian, Toscano connects regularly with evangelical and conservative Christians around lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender concerns.
His religious years ran the gamut.
Toscano grew up a Roman Catholic - “I received communion and was confirmed and the whole bit” - but in the 1980s, when he was 17, Peterson became a born-again Christian.
During that era particularly, he says, he desperately did not want to be gay.
“Remember, this was a time of the beginnings of AIDS, which was called GRID then, the gay disease,” he says. “I lived only 100 miles outside of New York City, and I really didn't have any gay role models, except for one person at school who was openly gay. But this did not work out too well either, because he was consoling and hitting on me at the same time, which confused me further.”
Toscano went through an array of programs to “cure” him of his problem. He spent 17 years and more than $30,000 on three continents attempting to change and suppress his same-sex orientation and gender differences.
“I tried gay conversion therapy, Christian discipleship, 12-step programs, ex-gay support groups, even a Pentecostal exorcism,” he says. “Why did I do this? Because all the evidence I knew at the time said that I would be a more valuable person if I were straight.”
He finally made it out of the closet.
He lived in New York City, England and Ecuador, was married to a woman for five years, and faced years of failure as each cure for his homosexuality failed. Finally, Toscano enrolled in the ex-gay residential program, Love in Action, in Memphis. Although he now feels his experiences in Love in Action “felt like ... a Biblically induced coma,” he graduated from it nearly two years later.
However, in January 1999, Toscano finally came out and accepted himself as a gay man.
What made him decide to come out then?
“I was simply exhausted,” he says. “I mean that in both senses of the word: All my options had been exhausted, and I myself felt personally exhausted; that is I had no more energy. I was depressed. I came to realize my search was not changing me and was actually doing me harm.”
Toscano started getting what he calls “real” therapy, and to his surprise found that it helped.
“I was very suspicious of the therapy process,” he says, “and I was very hard on my therapist. But my therapist put things in a different perspective, and led me to new scientific studies of homosexuality that shed a new light on matters.”
Toscano also read as much as he could on the subject, “radically changing” the way he thought about homosexuality, he says.
Shortly after he came out, a gay pastor in Memphis asked Toscano to write a poem about the gay community.
“I told him how I could never do that since I knew hardly any gay people,” he says. “So he arranged me to interview many people in town, and I discovered an amazing gay community, so much more complex and diverse than I ever imagined. What came out of that experience was a performance poem, my first stage work.”
Since that time, Toscano has worked to undo the damage of gay reparative therapy in his own life and work, and he has raised awareness about the harm that comes from seeking to suppress and change one's sexuality and gender differences.
He says his work on gender variance and the Bible has garnered much attention and praise from Bible scholars, and he presents at seminaries, colleges, and theaters.
Although he keeps it a rather private affair, Toscano has not turned his back on religion. Now a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), he lives in Sunbury, Pa., with his husband, Glen Retief, author of the Lambda award-winning memoir, “The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood” (2011).