Glen Retief & Peterson Toscano

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Peterson Toscano (born February 17, 1965 in Stamford, Connecticut) is a playwright, actor, Bible scholar, blogger, and gay activist. Toscano spent nearly two decades undergoing ex-gay treatment and conversion therapy before accepting his homosexuality and coming out as a gay man. He has since shared his experiences internationally through various media outlets, especially plays. Peterson Toscano lives in Sunbury, Pennsylvania with his husband, South African writer Glen Retief. (P: Tina Encarnacion. Peterson Toscano (born 1965), 3 November 2007)

Toscano was featured in the second season of the Be Real program on Logo TV, and has appeared on several TV and radio programs including the Tyra Banks Show, the Montel Williams Show, Faith Under Fire, PBS In the Life, PRI To the Point, Connecticut Public Radio Where We Live (PRNDI Award winning episode), BBC Radio Ulster Sunday Sequence and BBC World Service Reporting Religion.

In addition to print, television and radio, Toscano appears in various documentaries including the 2005 film Fish Can't Fly, which explores the conflict that many lesbians and gays have had with their Christian faith, and the 2008 Canadian documentary Cure for Love. He appears in and is associate producer for the 2011 film This is What Love in Action Looks Like.

Toscano is also the co-host of the podcast Queer and Queerer.

Glen Retief is a South African writer who won a Lambda Literary Award in 2012 for his memoir The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood. The Jack Bank was also an Africa Book Club Book of 2011.


Peterson Toscano is a playwright, actor, Bible scholar, blogger, and gay activist. Toscano spent nearly 2 decades undergoing ex-gay treatment and conversion therapy before accepting his homosexuality and coming out as a gay man. Toscano lives in Sunbury, PA with his husband, South African writer Glen Retief. Retief is a South African writer who won a Lambda Literary Award for his memoir The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood. The Jack Bank was also an Africa Book Club Book.

Retief grew up in South Africa's Kruger National Park, where his father was a park warden. He later attended a boarding school before studying English at the University of Cape Town. As an anti-apartheid and LGBT rights activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was part of the group that successfully lobbied for sexual orientation to be included in the Constitution of South Africa as a prohibited grounds of discrimination. His essay "Keeping Sodom Out of the Laager" appeared in Defiant Desire, an influential anthology of South African LGBT writing published in 1996.

He currently lives in Sunbury, Pennsylvania and teaches English literature and creative writing at Susquehanna University.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson_Toscano

Further Readings:

The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood by Glen Retief
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (April 24, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250002745
ISBN-13: 978-1250002747
Amazon: The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood
Amazon Kindle: The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood

An extraordinary, literary memoir from a gay white South African, coming of age at the end of apartheid in the late 1970s. Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary--and brutally unusual.

Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend whose uncle led a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare at barbecues and abused Glen's sister in an antique-filled, tobacco-scented living room.

But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school, that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings, earn interest on their deposits, and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. Retief writes movingly of the complicated emotions and politics in this punitive all-male world, and of how he navigated them, even as he began to realize that his sexuality was different than his peers'.

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