Touched by a Mormon, attacked by a Douchebag

TW: sexual assault, bi-phobia

A few years ago a married religious comic grabbed my genitals without invitation or permission at the comedy club. I went up later that evening and told everyone on stage, in the harsh accusatory way tinted with self depreciating sarcasm all the comics of my generation think is so clever. I wasn't as articulate as I could have been about it, but I do remember that nobody cared. I haven't brought it up again, until now.


It is easy for others to forget I am a sexual assault victim. I don't talk about it much, but it did help form many of my attitudes and feelings now seventeen years later. I am as vocal as I can be about the things I feel are important as often as I have the energy to do so. I also seem to have near infinite capacity for conflict during certain moods and take advantage of them to throw myself at the big issues whenever I can. All of this has made the explosion of the #meetoo movement interesting to watch. I haven't posted this yet since I believe my role in this has mostly been to stay as supportive as possible to the women in my life while lambasting the shitbags in the comment sections who feel the need to become a problem.

Then a few weeks ago I closed out a show at the comedy club downtown, where I essentially did a fifteen minute intersectionalist rant with incorporated recent social events. When I mentioned two local sexual predators by name, I got the reaction in the club you'd expect, including noises of recognition from the other experienced comic in the room.

And this is where I get frustrated. Several years ago I worked with a man named Jade Jesser. Jade was a bartender and a brewpub I worked at, did a lot of coke, and spent a lot of time trying to have sex with the other employees and the more attractive customers. There are a thousand dudes exactly like him in every city, most of them with the same workout routines and haircuts, and just charming and attractive enough to get away with it. The biggest difference is Jade was also doing comedy in the valley, and we worked together. I didn't notice his worse habits right away and we became workplace friends, I even gave him an old Conan comic book I found.

Then he finally talked me into joining him for a drink. As we sat the bar he talked about how close he was to some gay people in his life, how open-minded it had made him, and how offended he was I wasn't more open to him about it since we were friends. Despite the ridiculousness of expecting any person you're not in a relationship with to be open with you about their sexuality, I tend to enjoy talking about myself and we had a few conversations. A lot of straight dudes over the years have been curious about what it means to also be attracted to men and I typically don't mind sharing my experiences. The rest of the night passed without memory, other than his comments on the bodies of the women around us, which were frequent and annoying.

Unfortunately, we were out with a few coworkers together not long after, where the conversation turned to women and the pursuit of them (men are boring). During which he conspiratorially leaned in and accused me of lying about my sexuality in order to trick women into sleeping with me. As if we were sharing our cons and how effective they were. I was stunned and played it off as a joke, not trusting the drinks in my heads to have heard him correctly.

Our close work proximity kept me civil and I started paying more attention, eventually noticing his toxic patterns and communicating those things to many of the new women who started working with us. Eventually this got back to him and he challenged me on it, changing our relationship. I worked for a small, slowly failing company. Jade was head bartender and old friends/coke buddy with the manager. I could probably have done more, but I didn't feel at the time like I had many options that would work out for me. I frequently get labeled as a problem for talking about problems caused by other people and I've learned I can only do so much.

Fast forward a few months and Jade and I are both booked to do a local Chive fundraiser. The booker was our store manager and decided having Jade close out the show was a better choice, which is fine by me, your show can suck if you want it to and I wasn't getting paid anyway. My set went decently well (humblebrag: a local media person originally from out of state came up afterwards and heaped drunken praise on me, which made me feel pretty good), then Jade went up next. He almost immediately went into several bi-phobic jokes about me, attacking both me and my sexuality in general. I left during most of his set.

At least one of them made a meme about me, so it wasn't a total loss

This resulted in me breaking off my relationship with the Chive group immediately, benefit shows or no, and outing the entire thing onto Facebook. I am nothing if not a petty bitch. In the comments of that post, buried somewhere in Facebook memories, several woman came out directly relating their own bad experiences with Jade. The manager, currently the store manager of Even Stevens in downtown Boise, handled this by responding to every story and allegation with a all caps “FUCK YOU!”. There are times when I realize why that brewpub closed so quickly. He later defended those comments by saying Facebook isn't the “real world”.

And I guess this is why I'm writing this. Despite the fact all of this was public, despite us publicly telling stories about how Jade would have sex with his employees and then abuse them at work to try to get then to quit, many of the people in my life stayed friends with him, including people I thought were close to me.

I am struggling to find the right way to feel about this, like when after a longtime partner cheated on me and all of our friends decided the middle ground was to stay friends with both of us. The people who are most likely to support my actions in these arenas are the people who barely know me, women comics from other states who might not even recognize me in person, or random Facebook friends/fans who I definitely would not recognize in person.

I can't say I have been without success. After our first ever Boise's Funniest Person event, I took my observations about how some of the men coaches were taking advantage of some of the women contestants to the producer and the rule was changed the next season so coaches and their contestants couldn't be alone anymore. I still believe that only worked because the producer was a woman.

Yesterday I saw a post on social media where that married religious comic who always preaches clean only comedy and also grabbed my dick that one time was preaching against porn. Her and I are friends, life is comedy, and I am not mad at her. I don't honestly know all of her story and maybe being sexually aggressive was a survival tactic for a woman in comedy or just a way she allowed herself to be when she was without the confines of her Mormon lifestyle. And maybe porn is toxic, maybe that's why everyone is single these days, but I do know that her actions did not hurt me and I do not need an apology or anything from her. Maybe an apology all the comics who thought it was funny when I mentioned being groped on stage all those years ago, maybe from all those people who stayed friends with Jade after his bi-phobia and sexually predatory behavior became public, definitely from the manager who thought it was okay to attack women for allegations against his friend.

The guy who made the meme about me is okay though, I can take a joke.  

Boise Police Dept. to finally receive the rocket launchers they’ve been aiming for.

*I originally wrote this for a now defunct left leaning satirical website in 2014. I am re-posting it here after Donald Trump decided to start arming police departments with military hardware again.*

Boise – After months of waiting, the Boise Police dept. is finally at the top of the waiting list for this year’s distribution of military surplus to city and state law enforcement agencies. In past years, Boise has received over 150 fully automatic weapons, two armored vehicles, sixteen jetpacks, and a flame thrower, not to mention numerous landmines and assorted buckets of ammo. In 2009, Boise also received a M1A2 Abrams tank, but an inexperienced rookie left the keys in it and it was last seen being used in a gang fight in southern Caldwell.  

“Our department used to be armed with only our wits, training, and the practical tools necessary to protect citizens and keep our community safe.” wrote Lieutenant Dancer in a recent media release packet. The Lt. has been the liaison between the government and BPD leadership since 2002 when a shocking amount of military grade equipment started being manufactured across the country in response to imminent aggression from Iraq. “But now, with access to more efficient resources and equipment, every man, woman, and white baby living in the city of Boise has nothing to fear.” Lt. Dancer has never been seen in public and is most likely a Halliburton robot suppressing human behavior in service to an alien, cybernetic hivemind.

This week, Lt. Dancer is expecting a shipment of MK153 shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons, more commonly known as ‘rocket launchers’. “These tools are designed for target suppression,” explained the Lt. “and for unpaid parking tickets or any cyclist within six feet of a roadway, on or off their bicycle.” The Lt. continues on at length, explaining in detail the list of criminal offenses most likely to warrant the use of extreme explosive justice. “Burglary, petty larceny, jaywalking, speeding, rooting for the Vandals, saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry  Christmas’, leaving less than a 10% tip, comparing any other politician to Hitler, moving here from California, balding, or listening to Sean Hannity.”  If the program continues to be successful, crime rates in Boise will have fallen every year since the program’s implementation in August of 2001.

Boise has also been given the opportunity to be a future location for a family friendly, reeducation camp, edging out other Northwestern cities like Seattle and Portland by being more ‘compliant’. “It is our hope that the beacon of safety and peace that Boise, Idaho has become, will one day be used an example of adequate behavior for your kind all across this insignificant speck you call a planet.” Lt. Dancer’s release finishes. “It is the will of Ann Coulter that the cleansing begins soon, and the Reavers shall be fed on the screams of anyone with overdraft charges.”

And, while alien robots infiltrating all levels of our government is clearly the fault of President Obama, he refused to surrender hope in the face of the eminent doom of our species, reminding a crowd of 250 at a fundraiser last week of the time during Nixon’s administration when a portal to Hell was opened and thousands of our best and brightest students were sacrificed in order to bring Beelzebub into our plane of existence, only for humanity to be saved at the last minute by a plot device. The President then called upon Michael Bay, Jenny MacCarthy, Sarah Palin, and other American geniuses to step up to the plate and offer some solutions to us in this dark time. So far, only scientists have responded, but the American public never listens to them.

A military officer in uniform gave me religious hate speech.

Hi, and welcome back to the Bearded Atheist blog. It's been four years or so and this made me mad enough to start the entire thing up again. It's good to see you.

This is an evolving story and I will edit this to reflect any changing information or knowledge. This happened to myself earlier today at work; my place of employment is left vague intentionally to keep my Corporate Overlords from getting awks about it. I have witnesses to these events, but would prefer to keep their identities secret for the same reason.

To set the scenario up, it is important to know I carry myself with a much more queer bearing than I used to when I was younger. I was wearing pink earrings, blue nail polish, and I'm lucky enough to work at a place that allows me to wear a button that showcases my sexuality.

This one, because I also like DIIIICKS.

As the years have marched on, I have become something more of an activist, identifying with Intersectionalists and actively supporting BLM and Antifa (if you aren't antifascist, you are the most wrong). My atheist activism is folded into all of that. I still run my atheist show twice a year (two weeks from today, actually) but, considering the recent political climate, there is so much to focus on and it can be hard to keep up with everything. All that being said, I am much more aggressive about things and have become nearly immune to negative feedback. Also, my extreme, nearly militant opinions about everything have kept a lot of the worse people away from me. It is not out of character for me to out a man publicly for sending unsolicited dick pictures, or to question the Minister talking about the "gay lifestyle" exactly what the fuck that means to her face. I am not an awkward person about this and, if anything, leverage other people's awkward tendencies to my advantage. I am not always nice about it, but today's events bothered me because it was so wrong.

I currently work as a cashier at a popular grocery outlet near a busy intersection. During lunchtime it is not out of place for me to wait on a wide variety of customers, from actual farmers, WoC in hijabs, skateboarding teenagers, and soccer moms, all the way to Mormon missionaries, travelling businessmen, members of the state government, on duty police officers and the military. I have a dry sense of humor with strangers, but am mostly open and friendly to everyone. As always, I am passionately curious about people and what motivates them, frequently engaging in micro-conversations with the random aspects of humanity I meet. Within this mess an older, white male in full military camo, with an Army Ranger patch on his arm and a Lt. Col. insignia on the front of his uniform came into my line in express. His name was Peterson.

Lt. Colonel or Tree Star, I can never tell

Peterson and I talked about him going camping this weekend and then him heading further south to catch the upcoming Solar eclipse moving through our state in a few days. It was friendly and cordial, but then, right as he was about to leave, he reached into his back pocket and gave me this:

Watch a review about this here.

This, my friends is a Chick Tract. For those of you who aren't aware of these wonderful little booklets, they are handed out by a lot of Christians in an attempt to scare people into/back into their religion. They are full on garbage, and this one is horrible for a lot of reasons. If you've got 45 minutes. listen to my friends Hugo and Jake over at The Bible Reloaded do an entire episode on this one right HERE.

I have several problems with this. First off, an officer in uniform threatening civilians with violence by sending them to hell is highly unethical. These things are hate speech. Filled with lies and hypocrisy from the early 90's, this issue not only makes up what the bible says and what was happening within the LGBT community at the time, it insinuates that all gay men are also pedophiles through illustration, and it uses the story of Lot to make judgment on us. INCLUDING THE PART WHERE LOT GIVES UP HIS DAUGHTERS TO BE RAPED. That is not a typo or misrepresentation at all; in this story, the "godly" man offers his virginal daughters up to be raped and yet he is somehow considered a good person. According to this tract, Rape > being Queer.

So, to my full understanding. Lt. Col. Peterson finds it be completely acceptable to hand out religious paraphernalia threatening violence to people while in uniform, and does so from the cowardly position of them being forced to be nice to him since they are at work and doubly cowardly because he did it at the end of the conversation. Like a cowardly coward. Let me repeat that, Lt. Col. Peterson is a coward.

Now, I'm personally pro-soldier because they get me drunk a lot when I'm on the road doing comedy and many of my friends and family have served, also they do not create the horrible policies I am actually against. I also know it is most likely against the rules and this behavior does not represent the Army Rangers or the service they have done for this country. But our taxes pay this man and he is representing our country in a leadership position and we should expect more from him, and I'm certain most of you can at least agree we don't want our military officers using their uniform to push whatever religion they happen to be into. This is unacceptable and I am not going to drop it.

Feel free to leave comments or questions here and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I will be talking about this on a podcast in less than two hours and will post a link to that with our opinions as soon as it's posted. Thanks for reading.