Queerfully Made

Follow Queerfully Made on Spotify so the next episode lands in your queue.Most conversion therapy doesn't look like therapy. Professor Tim Jones spent ten years proving it.Tim worked out he was gay in a university library, went looking for help, and spent a couple of years trying to be straight. Then he spent a decade researching what had happened to him and to thousands of other LGBTQIA+ Australians. His team's work found that the ordinary, everyday practices, the prayer meeting and the pastoral care chat and the pressure to marry someone of the opposite sex, did more damage than the extreme cases everyone pictures. All three of us at the table had been through a version of it. None of us had a name for it at the time.Professor Timothy Jones is a historian at La Trobe University and President of the Australian Queer Archives. He led the research behind Improving Spiritual Health Care for LGBTQA+ Australians: Beyond Conversion Practices."You'll know a good church by its queer fruity people."Heads up: this episode talks about conversion practices, religious trauma and suicidality. Look after yourself.Find us on Instagram and TikTok @queerfully.made

Follow Queerfully Made on Spotify so the next episode lands in your queue.Aaron studied this man's textbook at Bible college. Twenty years later, Rev Dr David P. Gushee is on the podcast telling us about the dinner that changed everything.A man he had never met took him out, quoted Gushee's own book back at him, and told him he was being a bystander when it came to LGBTQ people. Gushee did not argue. He said the man was right. What came next was Changing Our Mind, the book that cost one of America's most widely read evangelical ethicists his place in the evangelical world.We talk about the harm he watched up close, why sexuality became the hill the church chose to die on, and where he is actually seeing things change. It ends with three answers we did not expect: what he would say to a young queer person sitting scared in an evangelical church, what he would say to that church's pastor, and what he would say to the pastor who already agrees but is too frightened to say so."You don't have to do anything to be a bystander. You just keep standing by."Rev Dr David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. His new book, Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees, is out this week with Orbis. Find him at davidpgushee.com.Content warning: this episode discusses suicide and religious trauma.Instagram and TikTok: @queerfully.made

He got death threats for a joke. He left the synagogue two days after his bar mitzvah. And he might be the warmest person to ever tell you religion is a control system.Aaron and Ben sit down with Reuben Kaye, cabaret superstar, comedian and drag artist, for the most provocation-forward conversation of the season. Reuben is unapologetically anti-institution, but underneath the edge is something that sounds a lot like this show: systems, not people. The ones caught inside are victims too.We get into the joke that broke the internet, the night he talked a man out of setting him on fire, and the difference between personal faith and the institutions built on top of it.As Reuben puts it: "be a good human. everything else is dressing on the salad."Follow Queerfully Made on Spotify so the next episode lands straight in your queue.Find us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube @queerfully.made

You can leave church and still lose the community that came with it. This episode is about what comes after.In the final part of the ReMade series, Aaron and Ben talk about the very real grief of losing church community, and the equally real work of building something better in its place. They get into the difference between community and control, why you only really need about five good friends, and the four words (borrowed from Simon Sinek) that might change one of your friendships: do you have eight minutes?This is a hosts-only episode, no guest, just Aaron and Ben closing out the ReMade series (Rediscover, ReWilded, RePlanted).“it was never community we were scared of. it was control.”Instagram: @queerfully.made  ·  TikTok: @queerfully.made  ·  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@queerfullymadefollow queerfully made on spotify so the next episode lands in your queue

He trained for ten years to be a minister and thought he'd do it for life. Then Matt Glover backed marriage equality, and it cost him his church.Aaron and Ben sit down with Matt, a former Baptist minister who supported same-sex marriage years before the plebiscite and lost his role, his career, and a community for it. He'll correct you on one thing though: he wasn't fired, he resigned and walked away. And he says he'd go back to that room today and say thank you.It's a conversation about allyship that never felt like a stand, the difference between a job and a calling, and the friend named Finn who gently detonated everything Matt thought he knew. Matt is now a counsellor, and he shares what he sees most in his room today: spiritual abuse and deconstruction.As Matt puts it: "It's okay to not know things and just be kind."Follow Queerfully Made on Spotify so the next episode lands straight in your queue.Find us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube @queerfully.made