TRANSCRIPT:
Susan Veronica:
Well, when I was asked to be on this panel, I wasn’t quite sure how my story applied. And then I started to talk and say, “Well, I came out late in life and it was a long journey and there were detours along the way. And by the time I got into ministry and was preparing to go into search, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. How was I to navigate these waters?” There was a lot of support along the way coming out in the congregation during my internship, while I was leading the welcoming congregation program. It was lots of support and encouragement. But in the wider Unitarian Universalist context and in the world of ministry, not much happening.
Susan Veronica:
I want to tell one other little thing that was a piece of the coming out process. When I was still in seminary and coming out to friends and colleagues very slowly but not to the congregation, not much to my family either. I was struggling with that and I met with one of my professors who was the professor of African-American theology history. And just a person I really responded to. And he was also… he did pastoral counseling for some of the seminarians. I went to talk to him, Reverend Lee Butler. And he asked me, “What’s holding you back from this?” And I said, “I really don’t know, but I think one of the things is a fear. Why would I put myself out there and identify with a group that is discriminated against?” And Lee looked at me and said, “Why would you indeed?”
Susan Veronica:
I looked at Lee, who could not hide who he was, and realized to my chagrin I was hiding behind… I didn’t have the language for it then, but my white privilege, I could pass as straight. I was a nice white lady and I could move about the world pretty safely and securely and to come out would mean to take a step into a world I didn’t know about and that could potentially put me at some risk. I had fear inside.
Susan Veronica:
Then encouraged by the congregation, my colleagues, whatever, I’m boldly stepping into this. But at the same time as a woman in ministry, not really sure what I was doing. There was no guidance, there was no guidebook on how you do it, as an LGBT-identified minister to make it, to enter into the search process, to be in relationship with congregations. What was this going to mean? I was in a bubble and so it was all trial and error.
Susan Veronica:
Well, a lot of people have told these stories, of very horrible search stories. Mine was not horrible, but it wasn’t successful either. And I don’t know why that was. Was it because of being female? Was because of being lesbian? Was it because I was a former religious educator, which is another identity that didn’t always get a lot of respect?
Susan Veronica:
I feel kind of done on that chapter. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Okay. That’s good. Anybody else has something to say?
Carlton E. Smith:
I can go. So when I did my internship, I was an extension minister working in two congregations. One was the Unitarian church in Summit, New Jersey. David Bumbaugh was the minister there at the time. There was also interim minister at the UU Society of the Palisades and Englewood, New Jersey at the time. So it’s up and down the Garden State Parkway all that year. David, who was in his, I guess next to last parish ministry because I think he went to Meadville from Summit. I guess it was the last one.
Carlton E. Smith:
David said to me at some point, he said, “Well, given your identities…” I’m paraphrasing what he said, but this is literally what he said. “You’re always going to be preaching to the savages.” Is what he said to me.
Carlton E. Smith:
I understood what he meant, because he was saying that there were ways in which, given that I was a black gay-identified man, that I was constantly going to be walking into these settings where people weren’t going to have a context to understand what it was I had to offer, what it was that I was bringing. That would be a great name for a book by the way.
Carlton E. Smith:
Though these many years later, I can see what he was communicating. I actually understood it at that time as well. That given the way our congregations function, there was a way in which I would… even though I was inside and in a position of leadership, there was a way in which I would always be outside and not fully embraced, appreciated on one level. I’d say appreciated it to the extent that my presence affirmed what the congregation wants to believe about itself, and what the individuals in the congregation want to believe about themselves. Because I think good, white people, and every white person wants to be a good… everyone person wants to be white person. Is that fair to say? No good white person wants to go to an all white church. I think that’s true. And automatically feels better when there is more diversity inside of that congregation.
Carlton E. Smith:
So there’s a way in which I know that just the fact of my walking into the room is currency. It’s got currency. And I acknowledge that. And then at the same time, there is a bit of, not terror, is not the right word, although some people have been terrified when I showed up in the room. One time I did this wedding and the bride had not let her mom know that there was a black minister with dreadlocks. I had long locks at the time. And so I show up and I poke my head into the dressing room and the mother turns around and gasped. She is just shocked. That was like a moment of terror for her.
Carlton E. Smith:
But in most congregates, it’s not terror, but it is a fear of white people, when I’m in a room of not saying the right thing or not doing the right thing. I’ve had plenty of cases where I’ve had to figure out how I was going to address that. Am I going to dance around this awkward moment? Am I going to walk away from this very bizarre thing that this person has said in the middle of coffee hours? Like it’s all this trying to figure out how to navigate that.
Carlton E. Smith:
And as I was saying earlier today, there are ways in which opportunities have opened up because of who I am. And I think that especially at the point that extension ministry was going full blast and Chuck Gaines had such a dedication to make things… because the light bulb went off for him.
Carlton E. Smith:
As director of the extension department, he was very much aware and committed to the placement of ministers of color and other marginalized groups in congregations. And I would say from that standpoint, I really benefited from it because when it came time for me to do my internship, David Bumbaugh only had $4,000 to put towards nine-month internship. That was in Metro New York. So that’s not going to go very far at all. So thankfully Chuck checked out $10,000 from the extension department.
Carlton E. Smith:
I stayed in the home of one of the members of the Summit congregation. And that’s how my internship worked because I was able to do a back and forth. But all that to say is that my first three ministries were somehow affiliated with the extension ministry program. And it was an on ramp for me.
Carlton E. Smith:
I’m trying to think, would I’d be at Unitarian Universalist ministry now if I hadn’t had that on ramp with the extensive ministry program? I don’t think so because I think it’s hard enough to be minister of color, an LGBTQ person as a leader inside of the association as it is. And then by the time you had the additional level of there not being any financial support, I could have easily said, “I think I’m going to stay in religious journalism,” or enter other aspects of the nonprofit sector.
Carlton E. Smith:
I’d say it’s been a mixed blessing and there are ways in which that I’m for sure that all that intersection work translates into a superpower for me, because we don’t have so much to hide behind.
Carlton E. Smith:
I feel like life requires me and those who are performing to be bold and to be assertive and to speak their minds in a way that others have not and to have less risk as a result of all of that. What about you, Darrick?
Darrick Jackson:
For me, part of the reason why I’m in Unitarian Universalism is I grew up in the AME church. And there was no space for me to be in the black church and be gay. I came to Unitarian Universalism as a place that allowed me to be both.
Darrick Jackson:
I found that as I’ve gone Unitarian Universalism, gone into ministry that often times I might’ve thought of as black or I’m thought of as gay, but there’s never thought of as both. And so conversations will… people will come and approach me and say, “Oh, you’re gay,” and have that conversation. Or people might come and have the conversation, “Oh, you’re black. We want to talk about, in particularly, why are we don’t have any black people in our congregation.” And that sort of thing. I don’t know if you’ve experienced as well, but there’s never been a sense of what it means to be black and gay and a minister. And there’s no one that’s engaged that conversation.
Darrick Jackson:
I feel I often have to wonder, which of my identity is the one that people are looking at or engaging with? Instead of feeling like I’m always looked at as a whole, all of my identities. Sometimes if I’m feeling one, I might push the other a little bit more just to say, “Hey, there’s other sides of me.”
Darrick Jackson:
More often it is the black identity that gets noticed more or it gets addressed more. And part of it is the work that we are doing around on racism and which gives people an opening to share with me their struggles, their concerns, their hopes. But also in the places that I’ve served, I won’t say not all the places of the… I served in church congregation, both of my internship and one of the congregations I serve, there was a hope is, “Oh, we have a black minister. That means that we’ll have more people come into the congregation.” By my presence or, “You’ll do something to make that happen.”
Darrick Jackson:
Now when the congregations is like… I haven’t seen any black people in the town, so where are you going to bring the people to come here? And so how are we going to actually… how is that going to happen?
Darrick Jackson:
I think we don’t often talk about the intersectionalities and recognize that part of our understanding of how would I bring the ministry is kind of the gifts of being a gay man and also being a black man. You bring both together and people often only see one or if they bring, again, the gay piece, there’s a white gay understanding of what that is. Is not often to have a very different cultural understanding of what it means to be gay. And the other layer is that comment.
Darrick Jackson:
I try to bring all of that into who I am and how I minister and how I engage. But it’s often hard when I get hit up to the place of like, “Well, we can only see part of you.” The other piece doesn’t really matter. “Oh, you’re married to a man?” Or, “Is it all right, you’re black?” I’ve had people actually say it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t notice that. “When do I want you to notice that actually. I don’t want you to judge me differently because of that, but I want you to notice it. And that’s a really important piece for me and so I try to engage that in my ministry.
Carlton E. Smith:
Can we ask each other follow up? Oh, you had something?
Susan Veronica:
Well, I actually had a thought that occurred to me as I was listening to both of you about being in the search process, being a Unitarian Universalist minister, carrying those identities and the naive assumptions I had that our faith affirming women in ministry and GLBTQ acceptance in our congregations and all of that, that it was not going to be a cakewalk, but that I could do it. I could go into search and I could be interviewed by congregations. It was either through extension that I was getting pointed in directions and practically offered a congregation or I got sideways into an interim associate ministry, they gave me something to do.
Susan Veronica:
And then when I was in search for a settled position the following year, we had a very different search process where just went through one person in Boston. And I told that person I wanted my name to go to this congregation and somehow the director of settlement forgot to send my name and packet to that congregation.
Susan Veronica:
I just wrote it off as bad. My papers got lost or something. And then I found out that that congregation did call another lesbian minister and I wondered, “Hmm, is that a quota?” You wouldn’t send two lesbian names to this one congregation because that would be not serving the purposes of having our diversity. And then, years later, then I went to work for the district and it was not an issue. I was just one of the consultants in the district.
Susan Veronica:
But then I did get called to two different congregations who had pretty recently, before they’re calling me as their minister, gone through the welcoming congregation program and got their certificate and wiped their hands and then call this nice lesbian minister. And they were done. When I brought up things… Oh, and both congregations working on marriage equality and pushing that marriage issue, there was just a lot of resistance because I was in that other little box over there and it was the check mark that they had done what they needed to do as a welcoming congregation and we weren’t going to go any further down that path. I don’t know exactly what all this is about, but I used it.
Susan Veronica:
For years, I just put those things aside and then you start to unpack it and figure out what was going on there. And why was that? Was I too nice? As I said earlier, there was very little guidance in the late 1990s and early aughts about how we go into search. Because I don’t know, how do you do it? How do you come out in your packet? How do you negotiate and navigate those choppy waters when you may not be exactly what they think you’re going to be. Ask your questions.
Carlton E. Smith:
Thank you for that. There’s a whole raft of things that came out of what you just said. I was going to check in with both of you actually. There was a point during the program yesterday where one of the presenters said something to the effect of, well, all black gay men refuse to tell people in their lives that they’re HIV positive. And in that moment I felt invisible. And again, I know that a lot of people in the room and at this conference are used to speaking to rooms where there is no black people. Like ever, or very rarely. But it just took me back a little bit. It’s like we’re not monolithic. I don’t know. Did you have that experience? Did you pick up on that at all?
Darrick Jackson:
I did actually. I had a moment of, “Did I really hear what I just heard and do I want to engage it?”.
Carlton E. Smith:
Right, right. That’s the question, am I going to break… that’s not what the conversation was about, but there’s this thing I found and is like I can step over it.
Darrick Jackson:
I may’ve decided not to engage, it wasn’t worth it, but then it did feel like this broad statement. I was like, “Well, no. That’s not my experience of people at all.” [crosstalk 00:20:00]
Carlton E. Smith:
And why do you feel empowered to speak this in my presence? Or you’re not seeing me?
Darrick Jackson:
When there was pre-selecting, I didn’t have that feeling of like, “Well I’m not sure if… I’m being seen in this room right now?” And that happens often in UU communities where things are said and it’s like, “Hello? By the way, I’m here.”
Carlton E. Smith:
Something just hit me, we’re talking about intersectionality, you’re lighter than I am. And so there’s ways in which you just disappear like on the next level [crosstalk 00:20:43]
Darrick Jackson:
That is true. That is very true. I think in some ways my path has been as easy as it has been. I think I do attribute some of it is to being as light as I am. There is some an unintentional passing that happens. I don’t not share. I’m actually pretty upfront about it. Yet people can look at me and for a moment just not think about the fact that I’m black. I think it’s easier. And so I think that that does, I do sense that sometimes. I’ll be in the room and things are said and as if there are no, “There’s no people of color in the room.” And it’s like, “Oh.” And then when I say something, then they’re like, “Oh wait, sorry.” Multiple times I’ve had that experience of not being noticed in the room.
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah. One of my best friends from high school is lighter than you actually, she’s a black woman, but some people don’t understand that, like black is not a color. And even in representation with the president Obama, he’s always portrayed like in cartoons and stuff like my color, but he’s not [crosstalk 00:22:03]. No, it’s really profound. I think there’s a lot of training people need to do around that, and not to presume.
Carlton E. Smith:
We have ministers serving congregations now that will look like us, you would assume they might be Italian or something like that. They’re black or biracial or mix. Oh, settlement. Can we talk about settlement?
Susan Veronica:
We sure can.
Carlton E. Smith:
And intersect because you were touching on that I think. I think when I started out in ministry 25 years ago I was doing my internship. I had aspirations of being a large church pastor, a senior pastor more specifically. And I looked around Unitarian Universalism and I kept looking and I kept wondering, “What would it be like to be a black, gay-identified minister serving a typical Unitarian Universalist congregation as the senior minister where there’s relatively little allowance for all that I bring to the table.” That’s not to say that it would never happen. The association has changed a lot over the 25 years. And still there is what I refer to as the binding aspect of whiteness inside of Unitarian Universalism.
Carlton E. Smith:
So that’s to say that you can have a lot of diversity around belief and ethnicity. But if whiteness is the frame and it’s actually an ethnic church where the Unitarian Universalism is as ethnic as the AME church actually. And that’s what actually holds it together, but it doesn’t get acknowledged.
Carlton E. Smith:
I think that’s why the conversation around intersectionality and white supremacy is just so threatening because it’s like, what’s going to hold Unitarian Universalism? When this very strong binder has been analyzed and it’s being challenged and pushed back against.
Carlton E. Smith:
But I’m saying that to say that I question now, what would be the congregation that I could serve as a senior minister and bring all of myself to that, as you were saying before, Derrick.
Darrick Jackson:
I think that might’ve been part of why I’ve always felt community ministry was going to build and not parish ministry. I was just thinking, I realized that you were the first black gay minister, UU minister I ever met. You were the one that I was like,” Okay, he’s doing it, so at least I know I can make it through ministry however it comes.” I always follow what you are doing. Like okay, “Carl is doing it.” Because you were the first one that I met and I was like,” Okay, now I see myself in ministry.” And I had never seen an image before but I never seen a black gay UU minister. So that was like, “Okay, all right.” And you were actually a big piece of whatever I do, we are successful in ministry and making it through.
Darrick Jackson:
But I think I have found myself in community ministry and really institutional ministry because that actually held me more and allowed me to be myself than the parish, even though my parish ministries were fine. But I also felt limited by the structure. And as I think about particularly now with the UUMA was, “Bring yourself, and we’re just going to… if we need to rethink things that we do.” And it’s a whole different experience and more freeing just like you said, “Okay, so how am I bringing myself?” And actually recognizing that, “Oh I’m not always bringing my full self.” Because I’m so used to not bringing my full self that I’m actually learning how to bring my full self and it’s been a lesson learning for me. Because I haven’t had that space to do that.
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah. I’ve got a question for you. I’m thinking like when we were coming out, we sort of like coming out more or less the same time.
Susan Veronica:
Yeah, the same time.
Carlton E. Smith:
The thing that I remember is that I remember going to the Northern New Jersey cluster meetings and I looked around the room and it was like pretty much 50, 50 male to female. We were still fairly even at that point. And then it’s continued to shift since then, and I’m wondering and it’s now is just overwhelmingly female because there are more women. So I’m wondering how are you experiencing that? Do you feel like more empowered? What is it like seeing more of your reflection in the room than what it was back then?
Susan Veronica:
It’s interesting because I still feel invisible. Because women are diverse too and most of the women who I’ve been interacting with in ministerial groups have been straight. And there is a difference in our life experience and a difference in how we approach life. That doesn’t get acknowledged, that we just… there’s an assumption made that if this minister’s cluster is 80% female, woman-identified, whatever, that we all have something in common. And I’ve not found that to be true. I’ve found it to be… I bring a different perspective. If I talk about my family life, if I talk about my now wife, but then I always had to call her my partner, it was something other. And maybe that’s just me. Maybe I was just being defensive. I don’t know. It just felt… I guess what I want to say is it’s not an automatic inclusion just because we share that biology or whatever. I don’t know how to put it.
Carlton E. Smith:
No, I completely get that.
Darrick Jackson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Susan Veronica:
I don’t know if the function of the group is much changed. Well, it always struggled to be a cooperative thing. But I don’t know. There’s something rolling around in my brain and I can’t quite pin it down.
Carlton E. Smith:
When you say the group you’re talking about cluster?
Susan Veronica:
Yeah, the cluster. Yeah. Because the chapter is a whole bigger structure where there’s more anonymity. I feel not in the ministry chapter. I guess there’s less of the male dominated conversation in the minister cluster about the size of your congregation and the success of your ministry, which it used to be like bragging sessions back in the day. And there’s less of that. Now, I’m thinking even more of my experience in a previous chapter in the Priestly Kingsbury Chapter when I was a student minister, it was very much a male-dominated bull session, I’m sorry, get out the rulers kind of experience that everything was measured by how successful you are, whatever.
Susan Veronica:
There was one point when we were trying to bring in, that was a couple of seminarians as student ministers in the group and a couple of ministers of religious education in the group, and we were trying to bring in a more collaborative co-ministerial conversation to this ministerial grouping that met every month. And it was met with so much resistance and shut down immediately.
Susan Veronica:
We had to reorganize. We brought in… I think Tracy Robinson Harris came in to talk to us about what a co-ministry looks like, what a shared ministry looks like with other colleagues. Those guys didn’t want to have anything to do with it. A host of things, I think, come into play when we’re colleagues among a group. There’s the dynamics in the congregation, but there’s also dynamics amongst colleagues and how we are perceived.
Susan Veronica:
I actually had a… another senior minister in a fair to mid-size urban congregation, had a position open for an assistant minister or associate minister, something like that, call me up to recruit me for it because I bring a certain demographic.
Carlton E. Smith:
Oh, it happens to me all the time.
Darrick Jackson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). All the time.
Susan Veronica:
I’m like yeah, exactly. But just the person, they said it out loud to me and I’m like, “Wow.”
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah. The thing is that in our still hierarchical system, it’s like, if you’re LGBTQ, if you’re a woman, if you’re a person of color, it’s like, that’s automatic, associate assessment bill.
Susan Veronica:
[crosstalk 00:31:57], yeah. True.
Carlton E. Smith:
It’s unethical. It’s really difficult for people to conceive of just as someone who would be in a senior minister role, even though in many cases I got an abundance of additional experience and others don’t, but it’s still threatening.
Carlton E. Smith:
But I think one of the things that I’ve come to appreciate over time is regardless of whether I apply for, whether I get it or not, just because I didn’t get it doesn’t mean I’m not qualified. So I take solace in that and just because other people don’t see what I know within myself to be true doesn’t make my perspective any less valid.
Susan Veronica:
Absolutely. And there is something to be gained for putting myself out there, for taking that risk, for stepping into it, even if I’m afraid or even if I don’t know what’s coming, or… even without any guidance or anything, I think we could probably all say that we’ve made our way. We’ve stumbled, but somehow we get there.
Carlton E. Smith:
Thanks for saying that. I want to circle back around something you said. Because I’ve heard people, I have heard other ministers of color say the same thing, “Yeah, you made it. And it’s true. I’ve been around for quite some time.” And it’s funny to me because what looks like making it to other people looks like hanging on by the bare-est of fingernails to me. You just don’t know what it takes.
Darrick Jackson:
[crosstalk 00:33:40] know it hasn’t been easy.
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah.
Darrick Jackson:
I’m also worried, I was just thinking that there were other… I’m just thinking of those who, just to recall, who’s not actively ministry right now, and they were like the other gay men, black men of color. But somehow you persevered and kept going. And just the thinking about how-
Carlton E. Smith:
I have to give myself a little pat on the shoulder. Okay. Can we go a little deeper?
Darrick Jackson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Susan Veronica:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Carlton E. Smith:
I want to turn. Are we okay? Are you going with that?
Speaker 3:
Is fine.
Carlton E. Smith:
Okay. Okay. So can we talk a bit about sexual harassment and being hit upon by colleagues? Because I definitely have had that experience. And even in one occasion from an ostensibly heterosexual colleague. I feel like that’s more like intersection because I feel like to the extent that our Unitarian Universalist ministry is becoming “feminized”. There is a devaluing of the persons, of our bodies, of our emotional wellbeing that can happen and a downgrading of the status that happens as the ministry becomes more, people of color becomes more gender queer, all of this becomes more female-associated.
Carlton E. Smith:
I guess I’m just wondering, is that something that has presented itself for you in your ministries? I know that it has in mine. Even sometimes things that people say to me, it’s like… I feel like even in relationship to congregants, it’s like I feel uncomfortable when any congregant regardless of gender says to me, like, “Oh, you look so hot in the pulpit today.” It’s like, if I can’t say it to you, you can’t say that to me either. That’s me, what do you guys think?
Darrick Jackson:
I’ve had it from a congregant. I had a congregant make a pass at me. And I had to shut that down rather quickly. I haven’t had that from colleagues in that way. I think colleagues, which I don’t know if they were paying attention… I don’t know how intentional they were of jokes or something that they said particularly about black men that were just like… well, I wasn’t in the room and they’re just not paying attention… and I wasn’t sure where that was.
Darrick Jackson:
So I consider that sexual harassment terms of just actually saying that and I am physically there, but I also don’t know how, even if they were knowing I was there and saying it or they were just saying something and they’re not even be conscious of those in room, just the thing that they said.
Darrick Jackson:
But luckily I haven’t… because I know a lot of people have. I actually feel lucky that I haven’t had the same kind of colleague interactions that other people have, sexual harassment. So I’m grateful for that. But I have heard some people say things that were just very uncomfortable and I had the look and say, “Do you know what you’re saying?”
Darrick Jackson:
Oftentimes people will say something before I say it because they can all look at my face and see, “Oh right. You probably shouldn’t have said that.” And then they call them. But yeah, I’ve had some uncomfortable moments.
Susan Veronica:
I have not had that experience from colleagues. But I have some congregants who think that because of who I am, the boundaries might be a little more porous, both male and female. I was brought up as a girl to appreciate compliments. And so it’s taken me many years to not always take the compliment as a compliment. That there’s something else going on there. Well I guess I did get that, but experienced that more from colleagues when I was a student. Well I’m beyond it now. Now, see you making me think of all kinds of stuff.
Carlton E. Smith:
That question should’ve come with a trigger warning
Susan Veronica:
It’s not even triggering. Because actually I feel more stupid than anything because you get sucked into a situation that all of a sudden you have to go, “Well, wait a minute.” It was interesting that the experiences with congregants was after I’d come out and it was almost assumed like it was okay. Because I was lesbian and going to be with women and so this was another woman and that was going to be okay. And it wasn’t the same rules as if she had been a man. “Wait a minute. No audience.”
Susan Veronica:
I guess you’re saying that, bringing that up reminds me of, in addition to this intersectionality, the multiple awarenesses we have to have. Extra super spidery sense about our presence in a room, in a community amongst people and the role of minister, of leader, of pastor. And then the whole of our person that we bring to that and you can’t shut that off.
Susan Veronica:
You can’t box that and say, “I’m only, minister, pastor, administrator, whatever.” And you don’t get to either experience, see or interact with the female, the woman, the lesbian. You keep that back. That doesn’t make for good ministry.
Carlton E. Smith:
You mean not having those boundaries in place?
Susan Veronica:
No. Having to keep on one self-boxed in, what you were saying. Not being able to bring your full self. So boundaries, the others are two different, I guess they’re crossed metaphors.
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah, so you’re saying still bring their whole self but-
Susan Veronica:
Self but not see that as an invitation. Others perceive that as an invitation to not respect boundaries.
Carlton E. Smith:
But we can’t control other people’s perceptions. That’s the thing. Some people just because you’re a buoyant and friendly, and laugh and joke with them, it’s like that automatically gets perceived as some sort of invitation. And I would think even more so for women because there’s ways in which women are socialized to be receptive. For lack of a better term, to… as you were just saying.
Susan Veronica:
Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it. [crosstalk 00:41:28] Receptive to that kind of stuff.
Carlton E. Smith:
Yeah. And I guess I would say that. I’m trying to think of, was this my experience? I think there’s ways in which… so I have a lot of men who from very early in their lives are identified as being sissy, punk, queer, as I was, as a very young child are groomed to be feminized in that same way. And to be open to predators, to have their feelings, their emotions minimized in a way that allows people to cross boundaries. So no, that’s more kind of intersection, right?
Susan Veronica:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Darrick Jackson:
And I wonder too if… one of the reasons why I’ve haven’t had as much is that I met my husband during my second year of seminary. So we’ve been together throughout my whole journey in ministry. And so in some ways I wasn’t available. There was more of a sense because I also was and I was very upfront that I was. We were together and we were married and all that. So I think that may have put at least… it gave a little space.
Darrick Jackson:
I think I may have been a little bit more sensitive because I had… in my theater background, I had several of those experiences of sexual harassment that I was really sensitive to because I was like, “Oh now I realize that this thing, it’s actually… if I don’t cut it off early enough that could… This is not being friendly. This is actually leading to other expectations.” And that was the…I had been spending some time learning. It’s like, “okay, no, this is not appropriate behavior.”
Darrick Jackson:
So I think I was much more sensitive that by the time I got into ministry, it was just like, “Okay.” I can sense it before it even happens, often. I’m just more aware of like, “Oh, okay, I can see how their behaviors is.” I can sit there and remove myself behavioral or shift the dynamic before they actually say the thing, even though they may have actually made body language so that they already shared the thing. [crosstalk 00:43:35]
Carlton E. Smith:
And you’re like, “Okay, turn the page.”
Susan Veronica:
Moving along.
Darrick Jackson:
Just clear boundaries and it has always been part of my ministry, is being very clear about my boundaries and what they are. And I’m articulating them and that’s why I ended up teaching boundaries when I was at Meadville, it’s because I developed strong boundaries. Mostly because of my previous experience before seminary.
Darrick Jackson:
And this is like, “Oh, I need to create boundaries because otherwise people won’t respect that if you don’t.” And I think there was a sense of the being… there’s the fetishizing of being black in the gay community that would be causing me to be… I think, was being more attractive prospect that I had to… I spent a lot of time pushing back against, so I was like, “No, I’m not available just because…. you are interested in me because I’m black.” And I’m available.
Susan Veronica:
Absolutely.
Carlton E. Smith:
No, I completely get that.
Speaker 3:
I think I’ve heard a lot, this is so wonderful. All this, just the level of authenticity that I’ve heard this afternoon.
Carlton E. Smith:
All right, bye bye, it’s fun. That was interesting.
Susan Veronica:
I had fun. It’s been real.
Speaker 4:
[crosstalk 00:45:00] The only comment that I want to make, I was wondering, as we’re talking about harassment, do you think … because people assume that if you’re gay or lesbian, that you’re promiscuous and they [crosstalk 00:45:14]
Carlton E. Smith:
Absolutely. And that’ll never be the chief reason why perhaps another gay minister or our congregants will make that approach because that’s what our experiences is like. Especially you can’t be a single. I mean, that’s like a whole [crosstalk 00:45:34] Okay. Bye. Bye.