This week we are joined by Rev. Benjamin Perry on the podcast. Benjamin is author of “Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter,” and an award-winning writer. His work focuses on the intersection of religion and politics. They hold a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary. He is married to Erin Mayer, they live in Maine with his brother and best friend. They are the editor of the Queer Faith photojournalism series, curator of an art exhibit by the same name, and a passionate advocate for building Church that lives into God’s blessed queerness. His two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show. In this conversation, Benjamin discusses their journey as a queer minister and author, exploring the intersections of queerness, spirituality, and social justice. They share insights on the importance of emotional expression, particularly through crying, and the need for progressive voices in the face of rising Christian nationalism. The discussion also delves into Benjamin’s book, which examines the cultural stigma around crying and advocates for a world where emotional vulnerability is embraced. We explore the multifaceted nature of crying, discussing its physiological and social implications, the shame surrounding masculinity and emotional expression, and the intersection of queerness and vulnerability. Benjamin emphasizes the importance of grief and emotional balance in a world filled with anger and anxiety, advocating for a deeper understanding of our emotional lives and the connections they foster.
Takeaways
- I have to come out as queer and Christian.
- I joke that I professionally fight with evangelicals.
- Crying is a deeply human experience.
- We need more prophetic voices.
- The answer to hypocrisy can’t be silence.
- I didn’t cry for more than a decade.
- What would a world shaped by more open weeping look like?
- I made myself cry every day for months.
- I became a person who cried more easily.
- We need to create moral clarity. Crying serves as a physiological release and a social signal.
- Emotional tears contain higher concentrations of stress-related proteins.
- Crying can create unexpected connections between individuals.
- Public crying often invites empathy rather than judgment.
- Shame around crying is often rooted in societal norms and expectations.
- Men experience a double shame regarding their emotional expression.
- Crying can be a radical act of vulnerability and authenticity.
- Grief is a natural response to love and loss.
- Balancing grief and anger is essential for emotional health.
- Crying can be a deeply queer act, challenging societal norms.
Chapters
(01:56) Introduction to Benjamin Perry
(04:54) Spiritual Journey and Queerness
(15:10) Intersection of Religion and Politics
(27:15) Exploring the Book ‘Cry Baby’
(32:55) The Complexity of Crying
(36:00) Crying as a Connection Tool
(44:59) Crying and Queerness
(51:00) Grief, Rage, and Emotional Balance
Resources:
- Learn more about Rev. Benjamin Perry at https://www.benjaminjperry.com/
- Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter by Rev. Benjamin Perry
- Join our online community at Sanctuary Collective Community
If you want to support the Patreon and help keep the podcast up and running, you can learn more and pledge your support at patreon.com/queertheology
This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.
(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 declare 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. Hey there. Before we get into this week’s episode, just a reminder that Shannon’s new book, no one taught me How to Be a Man, what a Trans man’s experience reveals about masculinity is coming out very soon, on April 15th. Pre-orders are so important, and we would love for you to grab yourself a copy now, Shannon, in like a sentence or two, what is this book about and who is it for?(53s):
This book is about my journey of figuring out what masculinity means to me and what that journey might open up for other people who consider themselves men or on the masculine spectrum as ways to embody and inhabit their gender in ways that feel good to them and are also healthy for people of other genders around them. So, really excited about this book. You can get that book wherever books are Sold. So if you’re an online shopper, you go to Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon, we have links to all those three at Queer Theology dot com slash books, so you can get easy access to those. You can also go to your local bookstore, and if they don’t have it in stock, you can request it. Ask them to either like ship it directly to you or have it shipped to the store.(1m 33s):
Putting in requests at your local bookstore will help booksellers know that this is a book that people are interested in, which really helps get the word out about this important book. Again, the title is No One Taught Me How to Be a Man. What a Trans Man’s Experience Review about Masculinity. It officially comes out on April 15th. If you pre-order, you might get it a few days early. So go ahead and do that now. All right, onto the episode. Welcome back to the Cariology Podcast. This week we have a special guest, Reverend Benjamin Perry, and you are really gonna enjoy this conversation. So here’s a little bit about Reverend Perry. Reverend is the Minister of Outreach and Media Strategy at Middle Church and author of Cry Baby, Why Our Tears Matter published by broadleaf books in May of 2023.(2m 18s):
Benjamin is an award-winning writer. His work focuses on the intersection of religion and politics. The writing can be found in outlets like The Atlantic, the Washington Post slate, the Huffington Post, sojourners Bustle and motherboard. And he has appeared on SNBC Al Jazeera and New York one. They hold a degree in psychology and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary. He’s married to Aaron Mayer. They live in Maine with his brother and best friend. They are the editor of the Queer Faith Photojournalism series, curator of an art exhibit by the same name, and a passionate advocate for building church that lives into God’s blessed queerness. His two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show.(2m 57s):
Welcome, Reverend Benjamin Perry. Welcome to the podcast. We are so excited for this conversation. Thank you so much for being here. It’s a delight to be here. Thanks so much for having me. So we love to start by asking, you know, we’ve heard your official bio, but if you were at a fancy queer cocktail party or a not fancy queer cocktail party, you know, how do you generally introduce yourself and your work? And in that, what are some identities that are important to you that you would like our listeners to know? What a loaded question. I feel like I, I, I always joke that I have to come out as queer and Christian spaces, And I come out as Christian and queer spaces like, like many a person.(3m 39s):
And so I would say that usually I, I don’t lead with, I’m a minister because especially at a cocktail party that immediately launches into a whole bunch of, lots of throat clearing and other conversations that, like, especially at a cocktail party, I don’t necessarily wanna get into. Yeah. So I often, now that I’ve written a, a book I lead with, I’m an author, I write about crying and emotional intelligence, and then as we sort of get to know me a little bit better, then I will sort of peel the layers of the onion back and say, I’m actually, I’m also a minister. I do a lot of Queer Theology. I work a lot with how we can build religious communities that welcome and embrace all people, how we can use religion as a force for liberation and a collective flourishing as opposed to lot of the ways it is, it is currently being used by other shorthand way of saying that, particularly in, in a cocktail party setting is, I will joke that I I professionally fight with evangelicals, which sometimes is how my work fuels on the internet, even if it’s not the, the work of my spirit.(4m 40s):
If you’ll Yeah. Yeah. O yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned that you, that you have written this book Cry Baby, Why Our Tears Matter, and we’re gonna get into that in a bit. But before we do, we would love to ask you just to share, you know, a little bit of your spiritual journey, what that’s been like for you and how queerness has intersected with that. Yeah, thanks so much for that question. I came out pretty late publicly. I was out to a lot of my friends by the time I was 18, 19, but I was still grappling with a lot of internalized homophobia and shame and moving through all that, all that good stuff. And then by the time I was in my early twenties and starting seminary, I had largely started to unravel a lot of that for me.(5m 29s):
But then I started dating a woman and all of a sudden had all sorts of other feelings and, and fears and concerns like, oh, well maybe I don’t belong in the queer community and, you know, I, am I taking up space if I’m, you know, publicly identifying as queer, even if I’m in a hetero passing relationship. You know, went through a, a whole cycle of these new worries and doubts and fears. And so it wasn’t until I was, you know, 27 or so that I actually came out publicly and started doing Queer Theology from a more authentic and explicitly personal place. Prior to that, a lot of my work was around the Intersection of Religion and Politics.(6m 9s):
Part of that actually ended up just being a, a function of a rather bizarre and unexpected series of, of life events. My third year of seminary I went to to school at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and my third year there was the year of the Eric Garner non-decision. And so a lot of folks in my community and myself were involved in organizing and protest efforts. And one night, myself and another seminarian were out protesting, and we were on the FDR and the Riot Police showed up and, you know, charged with their shields and do what riot police do. And my friend And I were, you know, locked arm in arm.(6m 53s):
And then we sort of got tackled and broken up and thrown into the pavement. And the officer who initially apprehended me whispered in my ear, like, get outta here. And I stood up And I turned, And I saw my friend who’s black in handcuffs, And I was like, well, like, see you later, Sean. Like, catch you in the morning. Have fun in jail. So I literally just stood around the FDR for another, you know, five, 10 minutes until another officer was like, what are you doing? And I was like, waiting, waiting for you to arrest me, I guess. And because this was so emblematic of exactly the same circumstances that we were in the street protesting in the first place, the story really caught on in a way that I was not expecting.(7m 35s):
And so the New York Times ended up writing up a big story about it, and we were on Melissa Harris Perry’s show, And I was NBC in New York one and Al Jazeera and did the whole, you know, media circus, if you will. And this was right as I was applying for pastoral jobs. And all of a sudden all of these nice Presbyterian churches who I had been interviewing with mysteriously moved onto other candidates. And so I found myself graduating seminary without any, you know, fucking Yeah, that’s Presbyterians. That’s it. Maybe. So I was, you know, I literally, I graduated and was like, oh, I guess this past spring thing might not work out.(8m 16s):
And because I had written some pieces around the same time that this was happening and that had gone fairly viral and it seemed like, you know, there was a place for me to write about this Intersection of Religion and Politics, I said, well, I guess I’ll do that. And so I worked as an editor at Time Inc for a couple years doing more editorial things. And I eventually, when Trump was elected, realized I couldn’t, you know, edit my Ford magazine and Caesar’s Total Rewards and these other, you know, magazines for time anymore. And so I, I approached Union and said, well, listen, you know, this ascendant Christian nationalism needs to have robust voices and engagement, people calling this out and saying, this is not Christian.(8m 57s):
This is not faithful to the gospel. This is a perversion of everything about who Jesus was and what Jesus lived and died for. And I think that union could be the place, or a place that, you know, robustly amplifies this message in this presidency. And they were, I was fortunate enough that they, they took me on with that crazy idea, And I went and did public theology with them for a number of years where I, I was laughed when Trump would yell about paid protestors because that was, you know, largely a, a lie and a silly thing to say, but actually kind of accurately characterized a lot of my work for like the first three years of the Trump presidency as I would go around the country, you know, profiling the Poor People’s campaign and other popular, you know, religiously motivated uprisings against the, the violence of the Trump administration.(9m 49s):
So that actually was a lot of the work that I, I did for a long time And I kept my own queerness. That was something I was sort of moving through personally, but it wasn’t explicitly a part of my public work. And then the United Methodist Church made their decision in 2019 to, you know, re entrench the homophobia that then was, you know, guiding their book of disciplines saying that queer folks couldn’t serve as ministers or be ordained. And we had a number of queer Methodist students in the ordination track at Union who were obviously very hurt and fearful and, you know, at, at a loss for exactly what to do with, you know, what this meant for their futures.(10m 35s):
And I realized I, I needed to do something. I was, you know, in the communications office and we collectively needed to do something to respond to this. And I got, I’m so tired now and then of the same conversations about, you know, unpacking the glob or passages. And I just, It’s very funny when you invited me to this podcast, I was like, oh, I’m so grateful to both of you because oftentimes when I don’t wanna have that conversation, I point people to episodes that you have done. So I’m like, they do it so well, and then I don’t have to have this conversation with you. I can have a different conversation that is more life giving. But it took Us like five years before we, we were, ’cause we also were so over that. Yeah. We started this work to not have to do it and then like, so we just like ignored them for the first many, many years.(11m 19s):
And then like, just everyone is obsessed with ’em. So I was like, we’re gonna record a handful of Things. Fuck, we might as well do it, Never do, never do them again, because like, that’s not where the life is. Yeah, exactly. And so, so I wanted some sort of response that would be, you know, affirmative of the place that I knew in my heart that queer people had in the church. And so I put together this photojournalism package called Queer Faith, where I had a, an incredible photographer, Mohamed Mia, who was an intern in, in our department at the time. And he took these gorgeous headshot of faculty, staff and students, all queer faculty, staff and students at Union coupled with testimonies about how we understood our own faith journeys and our queerness and how we saw those not as somehow contesting forces, but very much wrapped up in the same mission to live authentically and to nurture, thriving.(12m 15s):
And I was reading all of these beautiful profiles and testimonies from students who had so much to lose by coming out. And I had so very little to lose that I, it it made my ongoing silence feel really intolerable. And so I, I came out publicly as part of that project and I’m so grateful that I did. In some ways I’m a little curious as why it took me that long because it then opened up this whole, you know, trajectory of my career since then that has become such a, a core part of the work that I do. That to that point I was sort of keeping locked up in inside of myself. And so I, I became a minister at Middle Church in New York, which is a very queer congregation.(12m 57s):
I gotta do all kinds of incredible Queer Theology there. And, and now I’ve written this book about crying, but crying becomes this refraction point where I can actually talk about all of these other things that I’m so interested in discussing, like masculinity and queerness and power and race and, you know, whose tears are, are privileged and whose tears are cast aside. And how do we create a world where that kind of tenderness and softness that all people should enjoy is in fact the, you know, the water in which children grow up, the, the circumstances in which all of us experience life. Hmm. Love that. Yeah. I, oh man, I wanna just like jump right into that.(13m 37s):
But I also, like a, a few minutes ago you touched upon the, like, intersections of religion and politics and it, it feels like perennially important, like when you were first coming up right? With Eric Gardner, I remember I like came out as queer right around the time of like the George Bush’s reelection campaign and all of the anti gay state constitutional amendments. Yep. And now we’re recording this before the election, but like Christian nationalism is alive and well it sure is. Like, it’s all just sort of like mixed up together. And so like, can you, And I know it’s complicated for, for progressive folks because on, we’ve seen the ways in which religion gets weaponized in public spaces by the, by the right.(14m 27s):
And so I think there’s this like reluctance for some progressive folks to like, we, we don’t wanna like voice our religion on other people Right. But like religion and politics are mixed up together. And so can you talk about like why religious literacy is important for politics and maybe why political literacy is important for like religious folks and how those two are, are, are intertwined historically, but I also like what’s like, what’s the word in this moment? Yeah. And doing some time traveling. We we’re recording this before the election, but it will be coming out After election right. Days before Yes. Much trembling and trepidation. Yeah. You can like feel it in the air on the call. Yeah.(15m 8s):
Yeah. I’ll say as a, as a Christian and a pastor, when we allow Christian nationalists to be the only people who are talking explicitly in public about religion and politics, we seed the moral center to people who are defining Christianity in a egregiously harmful and bigoted way. And as someone whose faith means an awful lot to me, I, I can’t personally sit and listen and not say something. So there’s just a personal part of myself that, that feels like I, I have, you know, Martin Luther here I stand, I can do no other, like, when I hear people talk in explicitly religious terms about how we need to deport millions of, you know, immigrant neighbors like that, that is a violation of some of the religious principles I hold most dear.(16m 7s):
And so when I hear that, I feel the need to talk in explicitly religious language because otherwise people who do not have a lot of religious literacy will hear who might, you know, identify as Christians loosely and feel that that identity has some importance for who they are in the world. That they then may experience cognitive dissonance where they say, well, you know, on the one hand I don’t really want us to round up families and, you know, use military police to, to go after my neighbors. But if, if that’s the Christian thing, like, oh, I, well what, what am I to do?(16m 50s):
And so I think creating a moral clarity where we actually accurately talk about like what is in the Bible, you know, pointing to passages where, you know, the Bible is very explicit about the command to welcome the stranger about that there shall be one set of laws to, to rule both the, the citizen and the, the non-citizen resident. You know, that these kinds of explicit commands are not somehow anti-biblical. They are the very substance that, you know, grounds our, our faith. Those kinds of things are really important also, when you have a, a movement of Christian nationalism that is using explicitly, you know, salvific terms to talk about Donald Trump again and again.(17m 42s):
Yeah. And again, that kind of heresy, And I don’t use that word like freely or loosely, but like that is, that is what it is when you’re talking about any political leader, but particularly this political leader in these hagiographic terms as if, you know, he is in fact, Jesus, come again, if I as a minister do not say, I should probably just turn in my collar and and go do something else. Yeah, yeah. I I think that, you know, in this time we’re just, we’re in a space where We need more prophetic voices.(18m 23s):
And, and when I, when I was, I was working at a, an an ELCA congregation in Minneapolis, and one of the things that I was finding is that my congregation was like super, super justice oriented, right? They cared deeply about their neighbors and the political sphere and they were working in all sorts of ways, but when it came to articulating that they were doing that work because of their faith. Yeah. Like that step was just missing for so many of them. And I think it was because of this reticence of like, we don’t wanna be like those other people that are in the public sphere that are talking about their faith so ridiculously, right?(19m 9s):
Like, we don’t wanna be lumped in with evangelicals, we don’t wanna be lumped in with the Christian nationalists. And I think that there are a lot of people that are listening that are feeling that tension. Yeah. It’s like, yeah, of course I care about justice. Like of course I’m doing these things, but like, how do I make explicit that faith connection? And I’m wondering if you have advice for folks who are wondering like, how, how best can I have the conversation that is grounded in my faith? Yeah, Yeah. But to avoid being those other things. Yeah. Well I think it’s, it’s exactly what you were just, what you were just laying out that, you know, the answer to that hypocrisy can’t be silence and it can’t be a feeling of shame that somehow these justice commitments are made at odds with our faith that they are in fact expressions of our deepest values and beliefs.(20m 3s):
I’ll share a little story from here in the woods of Maine where I live. There was a school district nearby that had really wonderful policies protecting trans kids. And I mean, basic common sense stuff. These are not radical policies that you, you know, teachers should use Children’s Pro the correct pronouns. Kids should be able to use the, the bathroom that is appropriate for their gender. I mean, you know, really, you know, don’t bully kids for being trans, like these kinds of policies. And a number of fundamentalist Christians ran for the school board and won school board seats and won a very narrow majority and decided to make it their first act as school board members to go after this policy and rescind it to replace it with nothing.(20m 60s):
And so there was a, a big outcry from the queer community in the, in the area and a series of like seven hour hearings where we, I mean literally like, you know, a Parks and rec episode. We were there from 7:00 PM to like 2:00 AM and people, you know, open comment, everybody’s talking for three minutes and saying all kinds of things. And there were a lot of pastors who got up and spoke very explicitly about how Jesus condemns these children. And so, like in a context like that, it’s really important to talk about your own faith and not to do someone who say that, listen, everybody needs to believe what I believe or even that, like, my beliefs as a Christian should be, you know, addressing school board policy because they should not, you know, public schools are public schools.(21m 47s):
Religion has no place in them. And when you have a open hearing where pastor after pastor is saying, oh, you know, God hates trans people and there are trans kids in that audience, it is really important to talk about your own faith. And I, I didn’t do it in a, when I testified at those hearings, I didn’t do it in the kind of way where I was at actually at all talking about what they were saying. ’cause I didn’t really care. I mean, I, I do care, but I, that’s not what I wanted the kids to hear. Didn didn’t want them to hear me talking about these toxic odious things that these other speakers had said.(22m 28s):
I wanted them to hear that this is a community that cares about you, that God loves you, that this community is here for you. And hundreds and hundreds of people showed up to testify. And to say that this is, these are the values of our community by a, a measure of, I think it was like 80 or 90 people spoke against rescinding the policy to like 10 to 15 people who spoke for it. And those people were for all other parts of Maine. They had been Boston, they were not local to the community. And the, the school board heard all of this and they voted to get rid of the policy. Anyways, literally, children were coming up to the microphone begging them, please don’t take away this policy.(23m 12s):
It’s what helps me feel safe in school. And these adults who listen to this after they heard teachers and social workers and pastors and all sorts of folks say, please, please keep this policy. They got rid of it. And what the kids in my community got to see next really speaks to what happens when we live into our values. Because there was an election the next Tuesday and there weren’t enough progressive candidates running. And there was very quickly a writing campaign organized, again, we’re talking small town Maine, it’s like 5,000 person towns A a writing campaign was organized.(23m 55s):
And the, the can, the progressive candidate who everyone was encouraging folks to write in won by like 60 something votes. And kids got to watch adults in their community. So, you know what, we’re actually not going to sit and let these values that we cherish be trampled. Like that is the kind of pro proclamation of values that means something. And I don’t have to talk about Jesus to do it. I often do talk about Jesus, but it’s not essential. What is important is living into my own Christian values and explicitly articulating how my commitment to people, to kids is something that I’m willing to fight for and something that we collectively are not going to ignore.(24m 43s):
What I think is so important about what you just said is, is that I, I think often people think that they have to combat or argue against the things that are being said by the other side, right? And that, and that part of the concern is why don’t, I don’t know how, like I don’t have the right argument. And I think what’s so vital about what you just said is like, it’s not about the argument, right? It’s in fact, we don’t even need to dignify their argument. Instead we speak from our own convictions and our own values. And I think that that, that also like gives people a sense of like, you don’t have to have all of the right answers, right?(25m 25s):
Like, you can just share your story, you can share what, what matters and it’s important to you. And I think that’s really, that’s Important. Well, the other thing that happens when we feel like we need to have the right argument is we let the worst actors in our society dictate what all of the rest of us are talking about. And I’m really tired of that. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Amen. And, and not only do you like not have to have the like with the right argument or the right response that actually that, that is like a poor tactic. I remember before I did a lot of direct action activism. I like got Glad media training and they’re like, absolutely do not ever repeat back the opposition’s talking points. It like, just reinforces it in a public consciousness.(26m 6s):
And I just like, I learned that in, I don’t know, 2007 And I feel like I’m still trying to teach people that ’cause it just like, you then say it. And now Twitter didn’t exist back then, but like every time you quote tweet something or you stitch a Instagram or a TikTok, you’re just amplifying the like, the garbage. And I like, I, I so appreciate it. You were talking about this school board meeting, you’re like, I don’t need to address these passwords. Like, that’s not what I want these kids to take away. I don’t want them, you, we need to like speak from the positive and like it’s more effective strategically. I also think that there’s like a, a faith-based and a pastoral reason to like not subject yourself to that, to not subject other people to that that, and, and also like, to your point, like lets the wor it lets the worst actors like define define the terms and define the parameters and define the assumptions of it.(27m 1s):
And it’s just like I, I’m not willing or interested in like, seeding the moral framework to the assholes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for, thank you for bringing, bringing that up. We’d love to talk a little bit about your book Cry Be, And I’m wondering for folks who are hearing about it for the very first time, can you just give us a brief snippet of like, what is Cry Baby about and what inspired you to write this book? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for asking. So Cry Baby begins with my own journey being someone who didn’t cry for more than a decade, learning how to cry again, learning how to feel again. Then it goes into the physiology of crying, crying in literature, all to say, if crying is this deeply human experience, if it’s good for us, if it’s linked to transformation, why do so many people feel so much shame about crying?(27m 57s):
And then the middle chunk of the book gets into all of these social forces that affect when and if we feel comfortable crying. And then the last third asks, if we could get rid of all of that, What would a world shaped by more open, weeping look like, inspired by the communities where that is already vibrantly present. And so the, the book came about in part because of an essay I wrote in the, the very beginning of the pandemic. I was living in Washington Heights at the time, and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital was two blocks away. And in the early days of the pandemic, they were parking more trucks in the street right in front of my window.(28m 42s):
At the same moment that I was hearing all of these governors talking about, we need to get back to business, business as usual. And it was this perverse juxtaposition that sparked this recognition in my own spirit. I was like, oh, I, I know what that is. Like, that’s an inability to deal with Grief, an inability to, to really feel anything at all other than, you know, intellectually this desire for, for the thing that you are grappling with to no longer exist. And it reminded me viscerally of the time in my life that I didn’t cry. So between when I was, you know, 12 years old or so until I was beginning seminary, I didn’t cry at all.(29m 28s):
A lot of that was, you know, my own internalized homophobia. The ways that I, I feared, you know, crying would expose parts of myself to other people that frankly I was not ready to deal with my own internalized transphobia and discomfort in my own gender. My, you know, all of this stuff had calcified into a point where feelings felt really threatening and dangerous. And so I, I didn’t do them for quite some time. And I then I learned, you know, I told this story in the, in the book that I had this experience at the beginning of seminary when I was in a Hebrew Bible class. And a professor asked us to share moments in our lives that we had wept in small groups.(30m 11s):
And I listened as folks went around the circle and shared these beautiful experiences of crying. And as the, you know, proverbial baton was coming around to me, I realized that I had nothing. I I had vague memories of crying as a child, but nothing more recent. And it was this moment that crystallized for me that something inside of me was, was broken. And that if I was gonna provide effective and compassionate care to other people, I needed to figure out why I was so emotionally numb in the first place. And so I, I went back And I abused myself emotionally into crying that first day.(30m 51s):
I had this euphoric experience of feeling something for the first time in a very long time in a, in a deep and real way. And it felt so good that I decided to engage in this odd spiritual experiment where I made myself cry every day for months. And this really interesting thing happened where over the course of, you know, days into weeks, my entire emotional baseline shifted And I just became a person who cried more easily. So whereas I, you know, went years and tears and years without crying, all of a sudden I would hear a beautiful piece of music and start to tear up. Or a friend would share a, a moving story And I would find myself in tears.(31m 33s):
And so many days I didn’t have to go back and make myself cry at the end of the day. ’cause I had already cried at some other point. And so I, I wrote this article sharing this story of learning how to cry again as a microcosm for what I thought we needed to do culturally. And an editor approached me and asked, you know, would you be interested writing a whole book on crying? And I hadn’t thought about it at, you know, up until that moment. But the more I thought about crying, I realized how wrapped up tears are in all of these other social forces that I, I care a lot about writing about. You know, crying is rarely just about crying. And so it, it became this really beautiful opportunity to explore so much of what makes us human through this uniquely human act.(32m 17s):
Hmm. Love that. I, I’m curious if you can, obviously people should just go read the book, but please do, if, if there is a, a a nugget of like, what, what is one thing that crying can or does do for us? I don’t, I don’t know if there’s like one thing that you could point to that would be A Yeah, it, it’s really interesting. In my, my chapter on physiology and crying, I talk about this sort of two camps in the psychological world. There’s, there, there’s folks who believe really strongly that crying is a physiological process that helps to release pent up neurotransmitters associated with stress.(33m 2s):
There’s this scientist, William Fray, who in the, the eighties did this very famous experiment where he compared emotional tears to tears that you cry if you’re, you know, chopping an onion or you get dust in your eye. And he found that emotional tears have much higher concentrations of these various proteins. And so hypothesized that tears were actually detoxifying the body in, in literal ways. And then there’s folks on the social side of things exemplified by this Dutch psychologist Aho, who talk about crying as an interpersonal process. They’re evolutionary psychologists who talk about things like the fact that emotional, those that same elevated protein content makes emotional tears have a higher viscosity.(33m 51s):
So it slows the rate at which they fall down our cheeks and makes it more likely that somebody else is gonna see that, that signal for a need of assistance. And research has repeatedly shown that when people see other folks who are crying, they feel more tender towards them, they’re more likely to offer help. That crying can be this invitation to connection even where it didn’t exist before. And in the book, I tell some stories about times in my own life where I cried with a stranger and all of a sudden felt tethered to that person who I did not know in ways that simply would not have happened from a, from a normal conversation that there seems to be something about the act of crying and particularly the act of crying with another person that builds these tender yet durable social interweaving.(34m 44s):
That is something that I think is such a gift that we don’t talk about enough. I think so many of us have this shame and fear that if we cry openly in public, we are gonna be judged for it. That we’re gonna take up too much space in the room and not have a whole chapter devoted to times when that certainly is the case. I’m not saying that that’s never true, but more often than not, I think that when people cry in public, that’s actually not the reaction that other people have. That people are generally empathic. That we long for connection, particularly in this time of isolation and alienation and polarization that we yearn for interpersonal connections.(35m 24s):
And so when we cry, it’s this invitation to a different kind of world that isn’t shaped by that kind of divisiveness, but is instead grounded in our common humanity. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I, I I think that you’re onto something there and that, that when people cry, that it, it triggers a, I dunno, like a natural sort of empathetic thing. And other people, and also like, I I think that we’re not people who are worried about being, I don’t know, a judged, for instance, or like, not entirely wrong, like, I don’t know if judge is the right word, but like, I’m thinking especially around like, tears around like Grief. Like one of my best friends died a few years ago.(36m 5s):
My a family member’s family member died recently. And I’m just thinking in a way of like, people are like really, really, really uncomfortable with Grief. And so like, if you’re, like, once you’re crying, people can comfort you. But if you’re like, not crying, I, I found that people really want to like jump into like problem solving mode. Like make it, make it like kinda how you were saying like, I’m just gonna like not do the feelings, like make the feelings go away and fix it. And like, whether it’s like they’re in a better place, or at least they didn’t suffer, like whatever, like bullshit they used to try and shut it down. And so like, I do wonder if there’s like a communal response that it’s not just like you by yourself have to like, figure out how to cry more often, but like, how can we make space for like sadness without, and to sort of like really feel into that in a way that doesn’t try to solve it Well.(37m 0s):
Yeah. ’cause Because if we can sit with that, like we, like you were saying, all of these really beautiful important things like come out of, come out of that space Yeah. And we learn so much about ourselves and one another. Yeah. And I think part of it, you’re, you’re not at all wrong. There is this collective aversion to, you know, going there, quote unquote. Yeah, yeah. In part because we don’t do it. And so people Like, it’s a muscle like anything else. And if you’re not, you know, well versed in accessing your emotions and being able to hold them, they can feel wildly unmanageable. And not to say that we should all have Yeah. You know, nicely controlled emotional lives, that’s not the point.(37m 42s):
But the more that we are open with our own emotions, the more we become mindful of them, the more that we can, you know, have interactions that affirm what people are feeling without that reflexive need to fix. Yeah. In the book, i, I share one of my favorite little bits of, you know, things, practical things that you can do for the people in your life. This is a piece of advice that my clinical pastoral education supervisor shared with me. For folks who don’t know about CPE, this is something that pastors do as part of your training, oftentimes you’ll serve as a chaplain in a hospital. And I was working in the, the pediatric ICU and had lots of experie like moments where I was crying with other people.(38m 28s):
And my supervisor pointed to this thing that so many of us do when someone else is crying, which is that we put, put our hand on their back and we rub in a circle. And this is not, you know, an evil act in and of itself. It’s not like I’m, I’m saying, oh, how, how dare you do that? You, you villain like this comes from a very emotional and empathic place of, oh, I see you hurting And I I want to take that away from you. I don’t want you to feel so much pain that you are clearly currently experiencing. But what that does is it communicates through this circular motion that like, I would like you to stop crying when in fact what we can really do to be there for someone is to instead sit with them in that feeling and say, you know what?(39m 16s):
This is, this is okay. Like this is natural, this is normal. Of course you’re feeling this and I’m going to be here with you beside it. So what she encouraged to do instead is in, you know, still put your head on their back. But instead of rubbing in a circle, just hold it there. And what that communicates is, I am here for you as long as this takes and it changes the tenor of that interaction. And so I think there are little things like that and big things, but like, there’s so many little things that are just baked into the fabric of our own collective discomfort with, with Grief, with big emotions that we need to be really intentional about how do we create different kinds of interpersonal paradigms that don’t continue replicating these forces that I think all of us on some level know are damaging.(40m 3s):
It’s really interesting. I have a whole chapter on masculinity and crying And I was talking with all these men who were sort of reporting these, these double shame that they had all of this shame about crying when they were growing up because it wasn’t manly, because it wasn’t, you know, associated with femininity. ’cause it was, you know, called gay what, what have you, they had all this this shame about the act of crying and now they are adults and they have all of this shame about not being able to access their emotions and not being able to cry. You know, see, you get it coming and you get it going. And, and part of what I’m trying to get across in this book is like all of that shame is not yours. Like this is something that has been handed to you by generations of patriarchy and white supremacy and all these other toxic forces that have taken something that is beautiful and human and loaded it with so many ambivalent at best feelings.(41m 0s):
And just because it isn’t ours doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to do something about it. And so the question becomes how can we sift through all of that wreckage and excavate a more authentic relationship with our tears and with one another? I’m wondering if, for you, is there something inherently queer about crying? Yeah, it’s a really great question. I I would say queer in the sense of destabilizing supposedly fixed boundaries, boundaries and borders like that, that sort of academic queer theory definition of queerness.(41m 43s):
Absolutely. One of the things that I love about crying is that it unearths things is quite literally, you know, moving through our bodies and dredging up all of the stuff that, that feels stuck. You can feel that experiential thing when you have that, that really good cry and all of a sudden you feel, you know, both drained but also in some ways almost like purified afterwards like that. I think there are, there are experiential ways in which that’s true, but it’s also true on a, you know, a, a more metaphysical level. I mean, that’s sort of going back to what I was talking about earlier. That’s what I was so scared of when I was a kid.(42m 23s):
I had this sense that if I cried, other people would know this thing about me, that it would reveal parts of myself that I was not ready to tell them or tell me. And while that can be scary, it’s also this beautiful opportunity. And it’s interesting, I, I just finished, I got, I had the, the great fortune of getting to, to read Shea’s book before it, it is out in the world, but you should absolutely pre-order it this beautiful, beautiful book about masculinity. And it was so interesting reading the way that you talk about masculinity. ’cause it was bringing up so many of these forces.(43m 3s):
For me it’s, you know, you frame the book as this journey of, you know, always knowing that you are a man and sort of finding your way into understanding masculinity for yourself and understanding what that means culturally. And I found myself reading it from this sort of opposite perspective of someone who has never felt at home in masculinity, who is, you know, a assigned male and is, you know, relatively masked in my presentation. And so it gets read by the world as, as male in a lot of ways, but it’s always been deeply uncomfortable in groups of men has never felt comfortable with, you know, I always joke with, you know, queer friends that I identify as a tomboy. And I think that’s about, as about as close as I can sort of, you know, put a label to it.(43m 47s):
But it was this, it was this really interesting, like, there’s so many of these social forces that sort of like get stuck inside of ourselves that we don’t have great language for that, you know, oftentimes, you know, I’ve been wrestling with these feelings for 35 years And I still don’t have good words to put around them, but there’s something about crying and these emotional, these kinds of emotional authenticity that in some ways can help affirm who we are before we even have the language to, you know, put a name on it. Or even if we never have words that feel exactly right, we can still feel right in our bodies in ways that transcend language. Yeah. It’s so, it’s so fascinating as you were talking about, you know, crying and, and masculinity.(44m 30s):
Like my experience was I wasn’t able to cry until I started a transition and then as soon as I started to get more comfortable in my body and be in touch with my masculinity, I became a crier. Right. Like Hallmark commercials, whatever films like I am just, I’m like, I cry all the time. Yeah. And so it’s so interesting that that piece for me, right, it’s so tied into my masculinity, like the, the ease of which I cry Yeah. For me is very much centered in my identity, but I think it’s more about like being comfortable in myself, right. And being able to be vulnerable because that is a, it is a sharing of vulnerability.(45m 10s):
Well it’s so interesting you say that because one of the comments I’ve I’ve gotten from a lot of particularly trans men is that when I’m fit on tour and, and things is that they used to be big criers until they went on tee and then all of a sudden they found, they found themselves unable to, to cry. And so there does actually seem to be some sort of hormonal link between, you know, estrogen, testosterone and tears. Like it’s, it’s not very clear in the research. There isn’t really good studies because nobody funds crying research ’cause crying is effeminate and not linked to things we can use for the military. And like why, why would we fund research about it then? So there’s not a whole lot, you know, really crystal clear picture of what exactly is happening. But there seems to be some sort of link between, you know, elevated le levels of testosterone and you know, a reduction in, you know, the number of tears that people cry.(45m 59s):
But I think that what you were talking about is so interesting because I also think at the same time that that is true. There is a, an a simultaneous truth that if we do not feel comfortable in our bodies, it does not matter what the hormonal balances are like. We are not going to feel comfortable enough to weep that in some ways crying is this experience of oneness with, with who we are physically. And so I think the more that we can sort of cultivate this authentic and tender relationship with our own bodies, we learn so much of our, about ourselves and who we are and we can create different ways of, of feeling and being embodied. Even if we go through periods where for any number of reasons, we end up not crying.(46m 39s):
’cause I also never want to, you know, hear people when I’m talking about crying, have people who have a hard time crying hear me saying like, oh, like shame on you. Like that’s terrible. Like I, I people get enough of that from the world. I, I don’t need to add on to it. And that’s actually not what I’m trying to say. You know, people will often ask like, oh, should everybody be crying more? And I’m like, I dunno, maybe. But like, that’s not actually not what I, what I really want, what I encourage people to do is sort of be curious about their relationship to tears. You know, when do you feel comfortable crying? Why, you know, think about times in your life where you cried, but more frequently or less frequently, how did that situate you within the world? How did the world respond to that?(47m 19s):
What were the lessons you learned from those kinds of relationships? Like these kinds of things. I think crying dredges up. And so, so to go back to your earlier question, you know, is crying queer. Yeah. I think there is something radically unstable about crying in a way that, that is deeply queer. And I think that’s partly why, you know, I have a whole chapter in the, in the book on Crying and Queerness And I, I talk a lot about, you know, the ways that, for example, movements like Act Up used Public Grief as a way to galvanize political action, you know, to tie together a lot of the threats we’ve been talking about today. But, you know, there’s, you know, the, for folks who are, who are too young to, to, I mean, I, I was not alive so, or or barely alive, so I’m, I am counting myself in the, in folks too young to, to physically remember, you know, act Up was a, an organization in the eighties and that was founded in the eighties and nineties that was really marshaling around the Reagan administration and subsequent Bush administration’s lack of response to the AIDS crisis.(48m 22s):
And one of the really public demonstrations that activists engaged in repeatedly were these public funerals where they would carry the bodies of their friends who had died through the streets. There was a very public action where folks from all over the country brought ashes of people who had died and scattered them on the White House lawn and wept. And I interview people who were there at that and they talk about that, that link between tears and action, but between crying over the way that the world is as a proclamation of the way that the world might be. And so there’s something deeply queer about that too.(49m 4s):
Yeah. I, for folks who haven’t seen that, we actually have a clip of this on our website at Queer Theology dot com slash ashes. I think it’s so, it’s so powerful And I, I go off a whole tangent about how that was like, that was part of my Queer Theology journey in terms of like seeing faith and queerness And I was like, oh, like this is, this is a conversation another day, but I was like, this is like Palm Sunday, right? Like yeah, this is what it means to like put your, like your faith in action and oh God, it’s so powerful. Deeply liturgical. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. And I, this is, you’re leading me right into my next question, which is like, you know, we’re in, we’re in a world where there’s a lot happening where, you know, we’ve mentioned we’re recording this before the election, so there’s lots of anxiety around that.(49m 47s):
Too Much happening, happening all over the Place. Yeah. Yeah. We’re in the midst of climate collapse. Right. And, And I think that often people’s response is to head right towards Rage and often like a very righteous Rage. Yeah. Right. But I think one of your points is that, that we need to also make room and space for Grief too. And I’m wondering if you can just share a little bit about why that is and, and how maybe Rage and Grief go together if there’s a way to balance them. And I guess like along with that, not to add too many things into one question, but like, is there, there, is there a risk of like getting stuck in a place of Grief, right?(50m 31s):
Like, can there be too many tears? Yeah. These are, these are great questions. I dunno what you do with all of this. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, you know, to, to stick in that, that chapter where I’m interviewing folks from Act Up, one of the things I heard over and over again and Act Up was a place where there was all a, a whole lot of righteous anger on display. Yeah. Regularly. And it was interesting talking to some of the folks who I was interviewing saying like, yes. And that, like, that is in some ways a lot of the public recollection of Act Up. And that was absolutely there and an essential part of, of how folks were fighting for change, for dignity, for recognition, and also folks who share these beautiful stories of tenderness and Grief and the way that folks held each other in the midst of, yes, you just went to a protest, but you also just heard that another friend of yours had, you know, tested positive like that.(51m 30s):
It couldn’t be one or the other. I think that, you know, as someone who’s been involved in, you know, organizing work in, in various capacities for, I I guess a while now, years, years creep up on you, staying in the anger place exclusively is unsustainable. That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel angry. Like who, boy do I feel angry? Who, boy do I feel angry right now? But I think part of what it means to be human is to access a full spectrum of emotional life.(52m 11s):
And so Grief becomes also this way of, of, of naming loss. You know, it’s, it’s become a, a little cliche at this point, but I I don’t think it can ever be mentioned enough that Grief, the act of Grief is in some ways a proclamation of love that we grieve because we love something deeply. And so giving ourselves that space to grieve is a way of naming the magnitude of what is on the line and what we are losing. You know, think talking about the climate crisis, I’ve, I’ve done a few lectures now explicitly on climate Grief that folks have invited me to give.(52m 55s):
And it’s a question I hear a lot because I, it’s something that I think is inside of a lot of people’s bodies that like, even if we do all of the things that we should be doing right now, which we are not doing, even even in the, the imaginary world where politicians actually start to do something now, we are still going to be moving through all kinds of unpreventable Grief and loss. And so if, if we ignore that or we refuse to sit with it, we’re actually not being honest about what we’re moving through collectively. And we don’t give ourselves the space to build those kinds of interconnected ties.(53m 40s):
’cause one of the other things that is, you know, anger is, is great and righteous and has its place, it’s also phrase social fabric in ways that sometime are really important. Sometimes things are ossified that need to be frayed or, or shattered or broken. And if we just are in this place of constantly breaking things down, we don’t actually get to a place where we can start to build new things. And I think the Grief becomes this really fertile place where we can talk about what we love, what we want to invest in, the kinds of things that, that nurture life. You know, that that literal metaphor of tears falling and watering something new feels really important and salient in this moment of how can we grieve in ways that move us closer to the kind of world that we deserve.(54m 38s):
And what’s, you know, to sort of answer your last question there about, you know, is there ever a time where we get stuck in, in Grief or we get Yeah, yeah. Like we should not sit and just like cry every day, all day on, on the ground. Like that’s, you’re not particularly conducive to getting things done, you know? And that’s true of crying. I I think sometimes we don’t cry in part, especially for those of us who cry more frequently. ’cause you’re like, not today I have, have things I need to do. Like today is not, it’s not a crying day. Like, I need to stop weeping. I need to do, I have like a whole list of stuff that needs to happen and like, I can’t just this weekend. Yeah. Like I can’t just be crying for two hours right now. I got like stuff, but it needs to get done.(55m 19s):
And so yeah, there’s a degree to which if we are always just perennially in this sort of solipsistic place of just weeping in a circular pattern that just, you know, ends up sort of being weeping about weeping. Yeah. That’s not great. And I think also sometimes people need to go through that season to get to a place where they can find balance between like their various emotions because the opposite isn’t great either. The sort of anger that feeds on itself and becomes more deeply entrenched. You know, I I think that there, you know, are, are lots of folks who very righteous anger over the, over the course of decades turns into a place where all of a sudden it sort of twists upon itself.(56m 1s):
And then you end up with, you know, all kinds of unintended ramifications where people become kind of toxic as a product of having just stewed in that anger place for so long. And again, I don’t wanna, you know, I’m not trying to like demonize anybody. I think there’s so many different ways that, you know, folks can get stuck in that in ways beyond, you know, their own agency or volition. So many times that’s not a thing that somebody chooses, is just the way that, you know, their life exists in friction with the world. But, you know, as much as we are able to consciously and intentionally shape our own emotional lives, I think trying to find balance between these various forces and knowing that like there is, there is holiness and all of it.(56m 41s):
And unless we are able to access the fullness of our humanity, you know, what we’d say in like the, you know, the Abrahamic traditions of, you know, that, that the mago de that, that being made in the image of God, you know, that image of God is wr large across all of these things. It’s not just one of them. And so, you know, that righteous anger is part of the image of God, but so too is that Grief. And if we want to be, be faithful, and if we wanna live sustainably, we need some sort of balance that allows us to hold all of these things in tension.(57m 23s):
Amen and amen. Or we could, I, I could talk about this topic all day, every day. If people want to find you and your work, where is the best way for them to connect with you? Yeah, you can find me online@benjaminjperry.com. My book is Cry comma Baby. Why? Our Tears Matter. You can get it wherever books are sold. I narrated the audio book, if you’re an audio book person, it’s on Audible. And then you can find me at Faithfully BP on Twitter and Instagram, although I’m using social media less these days. So you, you go give me a follow, but know that I’m not always, I’m not always on there.(58m 5s):
Awesome. And we love to close by asking what’s one thing that’s been bringing you joy lately? Last Sunday, I went to a folk song circle here in May, And I showed up at the, the Steam and Sail Power Museum of all places. And there were, I love it, you know, 15, 20 folks, mostly like in their sixties, seventies and eighties, some younger folks, but like all playing different instruments, banjo, guitar, fiddle, and singing old folk songs. And it was healing in ways that I did not even know I needed.(58m 46s):
Just hearing these songs that were being passed, you know, a lot of the songs that these folks had heard as children that they are now singing and, and sharing with me that kind of enduring liturgy, that, that intergenerational thread that gets passed through music is a place where I find deep joy and tenderness. There’s, there’s something beautiful about music that helps us invite different ways of, again, being in our bodies, being in relationship with one another and proclaims the possibility of, of hope in a fractured world. Thank you so much for being here. I, I think folks are really gonna resonate with and appreciate this conversation, so thanks for having it.(59m 30s):
My pleasure. The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do at Queer Theology dot com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration, Fort Q Christians and straight cisgender supporters. To dive into more of the action, visit us at Queer Theology dot com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. We’ll see you next week.
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