DIY: Getting Started

Although the show Queer Spirit was rooted in Maine, queer spirits are found everywhere. Queer Spirit illustrated the power of making the stories of people's lived experiences with sexuality and spirituality visible. It is good news that such power can be replicated and shared.

If you would like to explore and expound the queer spirit in your local area you don't have to start from scratch. This page contains helpful resources for how to build your own show so that queer spirits may continue to fill the air.

Choosing Interviewees: We suggest that you begin by inviting folks you know who care about queer life and spirituality. The guests interviewed on Queer Spirit are all folks that hosts Marvin or Tamara have known as friends and professional colleagues. Community is essential to a vibrant queer life because coming out is most often a coming into community, an ongoing process of exploring and laying claim to chosen family and learning how to offer safe, respectful, and caring community for one another. As Marvin and Tamara sat together and dreamed up a list of prospective guests to interview, they thought first and foremost of those queer souls who had inspired them over the years and who continue to embody spiritual wisdom with courage, insight, and good humor.

Even though you might be inviting people from your own network, it is good practice to have a standard invite that will be sent to all potential guests. Here is invitation that Marvin and Tamara sent to the guests of Queer Spirit.

QUESTIONS for Queer Spirit quests 2.2.21.pdf

Forming questions: In planning your interview, it’s smart to have a standard list of questions and also remain open to moving off script during an interview. In order that some consistency across multiple interviews, Marvin and Tamara developed a set script that started with a welcome, offered a short bio of the guest, and then proceeded with a standard list of questions for each interview.

You may rightly wonder what types of questions would invite authenticity, make room for a wide variety of experiences, and allow folks to "go deep" in less than 30 minutes? Taking inspiration from Krista Tippet (“On Being”), Queer Spirit began each interview by asking the interviewee to "Tell us something about the spiritual tradition or traditions that formed you, and how would you now describe your faith, your spirituality, and your sense of place in the world?" The hope was that this question would allow each guest to speak as much or as little about the traditions that formed them, but also about any journeying that allowed them to arrive at their current spiritual understanding.

The remaining questions can be seen in the "Questions for Queer Spirit Guests" document. Each guest was sent a script a week or two ahead of time and encouraged to think about the questions they most wanted to delve into more deeply, knowing that time was limited. Sometimes the speaker wove concepts together in a way that eliminated the need for another prompt. Other times, after the interview, the guest would ask Tamara and Marvin to eliminate an answer to make space for others.

Being open to change: As hosts, Marvin and Tamara both responded to and were changed by the conversations they had with guests. As just one example, early on, Marvin and Tamara would set up one of their questions by saying "In the past few years, we’ve seen a remarkable campaign aimed at queer youth, 'It Gets Better,' which has helped young people find hope by remembering past hardships and how people often – not always, but often – find a way to get through." However, one interviewee, Nicole Manganelli, pointed out that while it had perhaps gotten better for some members of the queer community, for others it had decidedly not gotten better. In addition, Nicole pointed out that many do not have the ability, for a host of reasons, to leave family and community contexts which continue to inflict damage or require them to remain silent about aspects of their identity.

In response to this interaction, Marvin and Tamara revised the question to read, "I would like to believe that we are a culture in the midst of transformation, but change does not happen without truth-telling and an honesty assessment of what’s broken. In terms of your work and as a participant in this culture needing repair, what feeds your spirit, and similarly, what troubles your spirit these days?"

New questions emerged as the conversations unfolded. It is fair to say that the co-hosts found that their own spiritualities and queer identities were reshaped in the process of asking different, perhaps better questions and in the process of listening deeply to the queer spiritual wisdom that others so generously shared. Now it’s your turn.

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