- Welcome to "Ear To the Common Ground."

Here, we celebrate the power of music and food to bring Americans together.

Filmed from a historic barn on Cash Lane and Music City, each episode of "Ear to the Common Ground" features one musical artist and a diverse gathering of eight of their fans.

Everyone brings a dish to the table and they talk about one of the issues of the day, face to face with compassion, replacing contempt as they keep their hearts, ears, and minds attuned to the common ground.

I'm She Returns From War, and these are eight of my fans, Morgan, Steven, Robert, Kristen, Maria, Tiffany, Susannah, and Cameron.

Tonight we are focusing on issues surrounding the LGBTQ Plus community.

Let's celebrate America's greatest diversity, diversity of thought and shine a light on some common ground.

♪ Is I'm talking in my sleep deep again ♪ - My name is Pastor Robert P. Harris Jr.

I am of course a pastor, I am a writer, researcher.

I am a lover of humanity.

God has poured that into my heart.

Now, I will say this, I used to despise, hate white people, even gay people, and I tell you the reason why is because I was taught to do that.

In my day doing black power, it was you hate white people because they're white.

Until one day, oh, I'm a ex heroin addict, cocaine addict, crack addict.

Been clean about 40 years.

And one day I was dying, I was literally dying.

I had a syringe.

I had cocaine in a spoon and my heart was going, I don't know how many miles a minute.

And I was sweating without moving and I was about to die.

And I said to my creator, "If you don't do nothing, I will die, I do anything you ask me to do."

And in that room was an experience that I've never had before.

And when I came out of that experience, I went outdoors and everything I saw was brand new.

Everything I saw was brand spanking new.

And I've been loving all of humanities.

And I need some help from you guys because I say, now, what am I gonna do about this as a pastor?

What am I gonna do about this?

So I look at scripture and I look that all of us are part of one big human race.

And we all have our bends and our biases.

I don't agree with same sex marriage and that kind of thing, but I love humanity.

And so I came up with this vision and I started off with the YAS vision.

And the YAS vision is Y stands for you, A stands for are and S stands for somebody.

And you are somebody because God is somebody.

It doesn't matter what color you are, it doesn't matter your sexuality.

And this is to bring all of us to the table where we can have discussions like this where we engage.

It doesn't matter what church you go to, whether you go to the church or not, because we all have this trauma going on.

And so we are brothers and sisters by creation, okay?

And we have a common heritage that is our father.

That's our commonality.

That is our common ground.

And he's listening to this conversation.

He's giving us an ear.

I wanna know if you could help me with this movement that is made up of all of us to talk to our kids.

Help me with another thing, is it possible for someone to say they are gay and turn around and say that they're not gay?

- There are people who are investigating their sexuality and sometimes those people they have a liking for a person.

And so they may be gay for that person, but they don't really like the same gender.

- They could be straight for that person too.

- That's the thing.

- Yeah.

- Say that again.

- They can have a thing for a person and they can engage in a homosexual or a heterosexual relationship for a person.

- It's called demisexual.

- Or pansexual.

- Or pansexual, right?

- And here, let me educate you a little bit, right?

Let me educate you.

It's all right.

- If I could speak to this for a moment.

- Speak.

- I see the wheels turning which is when you said, help me with this, I think what some of us are describing here is what being a person who is like myself and what being a part of a community for LGBTQ liberation, I think it's about liberating all people, right?

It's about helping us all understand that the ways of being sexual, the ways of being gendered.

So the way you see yourself as a man and a woman.

- Which are mutually exclusive.

- Or all in between myself, I think of myself as being sort of both.

And it's kind of unclear how much of either man or woman I am, but there's also people who are born intersex.

So for all of the ways of being human, there's so many different ways to think about it and define it just like there's so many ways to think and define about not just what your anatomy looks like, but how you might love other people romantically or a romantically as you would consider platonic.

There's a lot of ways of being all of those things.

And so I think what is most interesting to me when thinking about this issue of LGBTQ rights is thinking about how do we liberate all of us from the thinking that there's only this way and that way.

- Yes.

- That there's only man, there's only woman, there's only straight, there's only gay, okay?

So now there's only bi and maybe you're trans, but like why are you liking a person who looks like your gender on the outside?

There's a complicated.

- It gets real complicated.

- Realm of that how to be a person.

- Complicated and confused.

- But let me help you.

- But rich in texture?

- Yeah.

- It's complicated.

- Let me help you get around the confusion.

Let's let people self determine.

Let's let the person we just meet tell us who they are, right?

- Yes.

- And let's meet that person where they are and let's show them respect and let's show them dignity by saying, okay, what you're telling me is new and I'm not getting this, but I'm down for it 'cause I'm trying to understand.

But like you're saying, you love all of humanity because we're part of a human race, right?

- Right.

- So there is this place that we all come together which is spiritually and in this we all human sack of water and skin and organs or whatever is making us up, right?

We all are pretty much the same, but how we live our lives and how we express ourselves and how we find our joy, really only looks like difference because we're sort of hung up on it as being different.

But what I think is best to think about difference is like let's not get hung up on the concept of our negative attachments to what difference can be and how it can be scary and let's think of it like, wow, there's this amazing spectrum of being human and isn't that wild?

Because we see it in nature all around us, right?

Nature is fluid, nature isn't man and woman.

Nature isn't black and white.

Nature is a beautiful spectrum of possibilities.

So I think we need to start thinking about ourselves as human beings and our sexuality and our gender and our sex category, we need to start seeing it for what it really is which is that it's a lot of things.

And it's a lot of things that are possible.

And maybe what's possible is what we need to be thinking more about rather than what we assume is real in a narrow sense.

And even thinking about God and how God is within each of us, right?

And I was taught when I grew up that God was a man in the sky somewhere, the spirit realm that kind of was thinking and judging about my life.

I was raised Christian, I was raised Southern Baptist, kind of Episcopalian, all of those things.

But nonetheless we're talking think about God and all of our images of God, right, was a white man.

- And he was up there and far.

- Because that's Jesus, right?

Jesus is the visual human representation of God, right?

But when I got older, I started to think about, well, what could God actually be outside of what I've been told?

And what I realized was it's probably none of that.

It's probably not a man in the sky looking down at me and thinking and judging about my life.

It's probably not a white guy with long blonde hair.

It's probably something beyond all of that.

And I think that that is more reflective of how human beings are embodying the sense of the divine and what queerness can teach us about the divine which is it's sort of beyond our full realm of understanding.

But why don't we just start with that as the concept first, and then from there we can get more expansive.

And so when you're meeting a person, they might appear to you as a certain way, but why don't we just ask more questions about what people are like, oh, hey, what's your name?

Like how we started when we first got here, what's your name?

And hey, like what kind of pronouns do you go by?

And some people might be like, I don't know, I'm a guy, but you'll be surprised.

What you're saying then is you're giving people permission to tell you how they want to be seen.

And I think that is the spiritual premise.

- Playful and intentional with identity, right?

- Yeah.

I mean, I guess I wanted to interject and say like for me, part of what the education has been is I was raised, we're talking about being raised on Sesame Street not to see color.

That's how my mama raised me.

Now, that sounded really progressive in South Carolina, in the country when everyone else was protesting Martin Luther King Day, right?

But as I grew away from, the perspective came to me, right, that when you say that, when that is your belief, I don't see color.

You're really erasing the richness of people, right?

You're erasing history.

- Right.

- And the same is true for queer identities, right?

The same thing.

Like if I just say, well, why do we have to talk about our sexuality all the time?

And I know people, my oldest child is bisexual, never came out, never said a word, just brought different people home.

Has no interest in being political, doesn't talk about it, doesn't wanna go to pride, none of that.

I want a world that is free for people to disengage too.

'Cause as you all know, it's hard to constantly be fighting for your basic dignity all the time.

It's exhausting.

And for me it's just about like getting curious about how textured, how marvelous, how incomprehensible gender is, right?

Just like race, just like all the other things.

Like it's not simple.

I will likely never understand it all, but isn't that fantastic?

We thought we figured this out and we were all wrong.

- Right.

So it's like the meaning you're attaching.

- So like I mentioned earlier, there's new discussion on legislation in the Tennessee House to redefine marriages of one man and one woman.

And it has committee, it's already been in the press about it, but the United States Supreme Court, the United States government recognizes same-sex marriage.

All sex marriage is legal and it's binding and it's the law of the land yet we have state after state trying to redefine the redefinition of marriage.

And I would like to ask you, sir, what your reasoning is to not support the law of the land in regards to marriage between any two consenting adults i.e.

a man, a woman, trans people, pansexuals, whatever it might be.

Why you say you love everybody, but you don't love the fact that they love somebody else and want to legally lawfully be married to them, whether it's in a church or in a justice of the peace?

- So my loving everybody doesn't mean I love everything about everybody, see?

You see what I'm saying?

- No, I don't.

- Listen, I love you, but I may not like or love all of what you do as a person.

- How do you justify what about me you like or don't like?

- I love you, here's the reason why.

- So what about my marriage do you not like?

- What I don't like, let me put it like this.

The marriage between a man and a man, right, or a woman and a woman, right, to me according to my beliefs is not right.

Now, let me say this, I'm gonna say this 'cause we talked about freedom.

Here's my belief that when we go to the Bible, when we talk about Genesis and God says, now here's your range of freedom, okay?

All of these trees you can eat from, but that one you can't eat from because the day you eat the fruit from that tree, you just surely die.

It's a judgment tree, which means when you eat it, you now become the judge of what is right in your own eyes.

- Can I say something?

- Yes.

- And I just wanna gently gently challenge you since I'm sitting right next to you, because I come from very conservative, I'm a preacher's daughter, grandfather's a preacher.

So I grew up hearing in exactly everything you're saying.

I guess what I wanted to say is that it doesn't feel like love.

- Let me finish.

- No.

- Can I just finish what I wanted to say?

- No.

- I would love to hear what you have to say.

- I just wanna finish my thought and then I'll let you go on.

- Okay.

- If you are not in support of me showing up as my full self, it's hard for me to feel loved in that space.

- Okay.

- That's what I wanted to say.

- I agree with you, lemme tell you the reason why.

Love doesn't always feel good.

It doesn't always feel good.

- But love doesn't hold people down.

Love is liberation, right?

- I am not holding you down.

- No, I didn't say you were.

I'm just saying that when I hear that from religious people, I love you, I just don't like what you do.

- Okay, we all have our biases.

- Sure, I'm just gently pushing back.

- We all have our prejudices.

- But you're touting, I love every, there's not a somebody I don't love like in your introduction.

So what I'm saying is who we choose to marry and share our being with, share our family with, and make a family for others with is a big part of who we are.

- Okay, here's what I know.

Everybody at this table doesn't agree with everything.

- It's true, absolutely true.

- You're picking on me.

- No, I'm just challenging this one thing that you said.

- I gotcha.

- Right.

You made a big statement and I just wanted to push back a little and say sometimes that doesn't feel loving.

- Yeah, I gotcha.

- So this is something that's actually close to me because I am married.

- Yeah.

- And one thing that my wife and I both wanted, we wanted to be married by a minister.

So when we eloped, we found a minister to marry us in Las Vegas.

When the bill passed for same-sex marriage, that was a huge thing for me because I want to be able at the end of the day to take care of my wife in the event something happens to me.

If that law wasn't passed, pastor, I wouldn't be able to do that.

There's no way that I could take care of my wife if something were to happen to me if I couldn't have married her like that.

- Facts.

- And I agree with why the challenge is there because it's beyond what the Bible says.

This is a law that has passed.

This is a law that allows future Gen Z, future kids to love and marry somebody that they choose to.

When I chose to marry my wife that day, that was gonna be something that we said forever in the eyes of God.

So I pray for my wife.

My wife prays for me.

- Yeah.

- And we continue to love each other every day.

And I hold with honor, with pride calling her my wife, because I wouldn't have been able to do that.

So it goes beyond the conversation of love is between a man and a woman in the bible.

It's beyond that aspect.

So for me, when I got married, it was not only to call her my wife, it was also to take care of my wife in the event that something happens to me.

So I get scared about that.

I'm not necessarily scared about being hit or violence against me for being gay.

- Yeah.

- People get shot unexpectedly, people get hit by cars unexpectedly.

- Yeah, as a black man, I know.

- As a black man you know, as a black woman I also know.

- Absolutely.

- I could have been Sandra boy.

- Yeah, so let me say also about the Bible, right?

I believe in the Bible alone, but not the Bible only.

So I think outside the Bible.

I've always have been becoming evolving because there's a lot to learn, okay?

So I'm expressing how I feel, my belief and my thinking all of that shaped by the love of God.

- Right.

And I respect you for the fact that you have this belief.

I respect that.

And you also said that you can love everybody at this table, but you're not gonna like everything about them.

I don't disagree with that statement.

I believe that's very clear.

But at the end of the day, is the only reason why you don't believe with same sex marriage is because of what you've read in the Bible?

Is that the only reason?

- Hi?

- [ALL] Hi.

- This is fun and the cupcakes match my dress.

So I thought that after all this healing conversation we've been having, that we all deserve a little treat.

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

- So you're your most beautiful self when you are listening, I think.

And when you're tapping into hearing other people's opinions and when you're tapping into understanding why people are, and maybe that might be different, it's like how can we facilitate that in the most amazing way possible?

And I think it starts by maybe buying y'all cup cakes because God knows I can't bake.

♪ Tell me what you thinking of me now ♪ ♪ You're spilling hair from your teeth ♪ ♪ Like you figure my intentions out ♪ ♪ Black white nimble in the back of your head ♪ ♪ I'll watch your ego taste my flesh ♪ ♪ To put the faces back together but you don't know how ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I was spitting fire of the place you bend ♪ ♪ in Backwood now ♪ ♪ I've sung my songs from north to south ♪ ♪ You are still afraid the year that someone loves ♪ ♪ You spill in the next room over ♪ ♪ the perfect patterns ♪ ♪ We were standing in.

♪ ♪ I'm not a cool kid ♪ ♪ but I'm a swamp witch ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ The dream of a ceiling caving in ♪ ♪ It's like a mirror of the moon when ♪ ♪ You ask to keep my secret ♪ ♪ Why don't you tell me about the day that ♪ ♪ You die black lightning put in through the sky ♪ ♪ Swear if you shut your eyes ♪ ♪ I know that you could see it ♪ ♪ I'll be three feet off the ground while ♪ ♪ You are on fire now I've sung my songs ♪ ♪ all over town ♪ ♪ Dancing with my demons in the space between our ceramic ♪ ♪ If I choose to be in the now ♪ ♪ Look who's getting loud ♪ ♪ ♪ Tell me what you think you mean now ♪ ♪ Tell me what you think you mean now ♪ ♪ Tell me what you think you mean now ♪ ♪ Tell me what you think you mean now ♪ ♪ I'm not a cool kid ♪ ♪ but I'm a swamp witch ♪ ♪ I'm not a cool kid ♪ ♪ but I'm a swamp witch ♪ Thank you guys.

(audience clapping) (upbeat music) ♪ White wire drag through fight ♪ ♪ Tell me when I'm going to make my money back ♪ ♪ I got a street walker with the real long stare ♪ ♪ Tell them you ain't ever going nowhere ♪ ♪ Honey you ain't ever going no ♪ ♪ You ain't ever going nowhere ♪ ♪ (ambient chime music)