(9s):

Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy. And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how Tuning in each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. You all are in for a treat. Today we have Adam McLean joining us for a conversation about lots of things. The big one, the center of it is shame and it’s inverse, or, well, I guess we’ll find out if it’s in the inverse pride. I know that as L-G-B-T-Q people, almost all of us probably struggle with shame in some way, shape or form.

(56s):

And I’m really excited to have this conversation with you, Adam, to bring sort of a new light to the various ways shame shows up in our lives and in particular in this new millennium. So you’re the founder of the hashtag PostShame, the Post Shame org website. You’ve also got a podcast, Find Your Light with Adam MacLean, where you have these difficult conversations around shame and leadership and self-acceptance. And I know from your work that a big part of that is developing tools to help people examine the things in their past that they might worry about, and then proactively share those stories themselves and, and doing so transform the stories and their narratives around those stories. And so like, wow, such important, I would even call it holy work that you’re doing.

(1m 42s):

I love, I love the idea of calling it holy work. My long journey around being okay with using words like secret and holy and divine. I’ve, I’ve arrived in my forties being like, those are okay. Words to say. So I’m really having that, that’s that, that you’re, that you’re doing the type of work you’re doing and, and you’re stitching together all these sometimes disparate subjects. But it turns out we’re all, we’re all going in the same direction. We’re all trying to focus on the same thing. And dissolving shame turns out to be, I think, the great work of our time. Yeah, it’s been so misapplied, it’s been so misutilized, and I think in a lot of sacred spaces, especially like churches, sometimes it can be so weaponized and how cool that you’re leading a movement of people who are kind of squaring their faith and their sexuality and making it make sense.

(2m 40s):

So thank you for the work that you’re doing. Well, You’re welcome. Thanks for being here. So you kind of keyed us into perhaps like a little bit of your backstory when you said you’re recently arriving to this place where it feels comfy to describe your work as as holy or sacred. And so can you share a little bit about your background that maybe made those words for a time being like not feel so safe or comfortable or accurate? Right. Well, I’ll start with The Birth of Post shame.org. I wanted to run for office. And in 2016, after the first time that Hillary won more votes than Trump, just a reminder, she won more votes, but she wasn’t allowed to become president. And I was like, the world’s on fire.

(3m 20s):

It’s time. I’m just gonna have to run for office. So I started to do opposition research on myself and assemble a team and like put things together. And I realized that I had all these naked images of me on the internet, some consensual, some non-consensual, and this was something I needed to deal with. And during the process of trying to figure out how to reconcile all that and make it so I could run for office, I realized that a bunch of millennials and Gen Z folks were kind of opting out of politics writ large because the internet is such a scary place and your whole past gets piled onto the internet. And then it’s just this scary place to kind of try to be a human. And yeah, I know. Yeah, the internet’s a scary place.

(4m 1s):

So I started in what I really thought was a very secular endeavor, you know, kind of coping with online shaming how who gets shamed for what and why online. And the, you know, the conversation essentially became what is shameful. And I was like, oh gosh, yeah. I don’t think being gay is shameful at all, but that’s because I’ve had this like, you know, evolving life where as a teenager, okay, quick, quick, quick story time. Go back to like, me as a teenager, I grew up Episcopalian in Buffalo, New York, and I was going to confirmation class because my Jewish friends all had bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

(4m 48s):

And I was like, that sounds like an amazing party. I don’t understand why I don’t get one of those. And then my friends at, at the Epi Episcopal Church were like, well, you can get confirmed. And I was like, do we get to have a Bar mitzvah? And they were like, not exactly, but you know, go get confirmed and you know, we can have a party. And so I start teaching the confirmation classes and the person teaching them was like, all right, go home and please get