A Place to Belong feat Brandon Beck – Jonah 2:5-7

What this episode covers

It’s another exciting podcast as we feature another guest who has been a member of the Sanctuary Collective (since 2016!). This week, we have Brandon Beck who is an adult educator and trans student advocate from Central Texas. Listen on to hear about his journey and fight for a place to belong. We hope that you’ll enjoy these types of podcast episodes — we’d like to do even more interviews with listeners, as well as activists, musicians, parents, and more. If you do, and would want for us to continue doing this work. We would appreciate it if you visit and support us over at patreon.com/queertheology. Episode Transcript Brian: Welcome to the Queer Theology podcast! Fr. Shay: Where each episode, we take a queer look at the week’s lectionary readings. We’re the co-founders of QueerTheology.com and the hosts for this podcast. I’m Father Shay Kearns  B: And I’m Brian G. Murphy. FS: Welcome back to the Queer Theology podcast. We are super excited to be doing another guest episode. We’ve got a great guest on for our podcast today and we’re excited to be able to continue to be sharing these interviews and diving deeper with some of the people from our community. Thanks for being here today and Brian’s going to introduce our guest, and we’re going to get rolling. B: Yeah, I’m super excited to be featuring another guest, and as we said recently, we’re hoping to continue this trend of doing extended episodes and being able to bring on guests. That’s why we are in the midst of a Patreon campaign, so if the podcast has been meaningful to you, if you could support us at patreon.com/queertheology that will be super helpful. Hopefully we can do more of these in the New Year. But today, we are joined by Brandon Beck who is a long time member of Sanctuary Collective. He teaches adult education in Central Texas.  Brandon, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Brandon Beck: Thank you for having me, Brian and Shay. I’m glad to be here.  B: Awesome! To just get started, we will keep it simple. Can you share with us your pronouns and some of the identities that are important to you. BB: I use he/him pronouns although, I really am struggling with the idea of pronouns right now. So we will just go with he/him and leave it at that. Although that could be a much longer conversation as I’m sure you both know. I identify as a trans man and a queer person, and have affinities with poly communities although, I am celebate right now. B: Great! Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about, I know this is a big question so it might require a little bit of editing, but tell us a little bit about your faith journey as a queer and trans person? BB: I was raised by atheist parents, and so, clung very strongly to that atheist identity until well into my late 20s. In my late 20s, I came to religion as a salvation from drug and alcohol addiction. My drug and alcohol addiction stemmed from a mental illness that I have and I found that all of that wrapped up in my gender and sexuality, was just something that really wasn’t separate from faith, and spirituality, and religion. That having not allowed myself and opportunity to explore those things as a younger person was something that I needed to forgive myself for and make amends for, and move on from. I got into religion in my late 20s through Celebrate Recovery which is a Christian-faith based 12-step recovery program and found after I had done a lot of healing through that, that there wasn’t room in that program for me as a person with queer identity. So I took some time and developed my own ethic of care and my own theology around LGBT identity.  For a long time, thought that I wasn’t going to find a place with other people to celebrate that theology. Found Sanctuary Collective, Queer Theology and am now an active lay leader in my Episcopal church here locally. I have come to realize that there are other people in the world who share my beliefs about God, and faith, and the spiritual journey that I’