Peter's Place

Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and LGBT/Q Youth My friend David Balog wrote an important book that describes the physical damage homophobia inflicts on our youth. While his book focuses on youth, it's not difficult to see how the same physical damages inflicted on youth can also be inflicted on adults who experience homophobia. David's book,  Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and LGBT/Q Youth , has been described as An invaluable resource for those working in the trenches with LGBTQ youth in foster/adoptive care but equally important serves as a primer for those in the community at large who are largely unaware of this subset in our population who are in such desperate need!  A review, in layman's terms, of the effects caused by both physical and emotional trauma to youth, in particular lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. To mitigate the social, emotional, and physical damage suffered by these youth, we must understand the effects of stress and tra...

It's not often that I write movie or book reviews, and for good reason: I struggle to come up with meaningful insight that portrays the essence of the medium, and my thoughts and feelings about it, without giving away any spoilers. I was asked to review a new, independent film made by friends of a friend, and I reluctantly agreed. It has taken me over two weeks to put my thoughts together because I honestly didn't know where to start. The film completely blew me away, in pretty much every aspect. There is just so much I want to say about it ... but I found it difficult to start because I didn't know which of the myriad thoughts floating around in my mind should be brought up first. I also worried about how I could do justice to such an important work of art that does what all great artistic masterpieces do best: provoke and trigger public discourse. To review the film, I was given a private link where it is hosted on a password-protected server—and no, I'm not giv...

I don't care what your religion is, or what your view of Pope Francis is. I implore you to watch this -- it's less than 10 minutes long. The wisdom in his words is simply amazing. This is someone who is speaking #truth about our world, our communities, and he needs -- and deserves -- to be heard. Listen to the #truth this man is speaking about, and bring some #HOPE into your lives./ Pope Francis with T-Shirt, "Water worth more than gold" This isn't about other things this man has said or what he's done elsewhere. Tell me that, after spending 10 minutes watching this, you don't feel better, or believe everything he's said. We must restore faith in our youth by building communities, by implanting in them the wisdom from our elders, and give them purpose so that they go out into the world and work to make it a better place. And we have the power to do this, right here, right now, however we wish to go about doing so. But we need to start doing thi...