Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Ben, why don't you share who the guest is and why he's here?

Okay. We're here with my friend Barry Donachie. Hello. Barry, can you tell us a little bit

about yourself? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm from Orm, Utah. grew up right here in the Valley, went to BYU, studied English and Spanish, have worked with the Gather Conference for a few years now. And then also we do the LGBTQ workshops over at the Utah Valley Institute that are now in their fourth year. Yeah. Could you give a little more information about that, actually?

Because I think there's probably listeners who might not know and could be interested.

Absolutely.

This is actually, this is a fun topic right now because the workshops, four years ago, my friend

Christopher worked with one of the instructors, went to the church and said, hey, we want to

have a class that is for LGBTQ individuals and their friends. And he did a whole petition, requested it.

They came back and they said no to a class, but you can do a workshop. And we're like, what does

that even mean? It just means a class, but like three weeks out of the semester originally.

So we had like Ben come in the original

one, Tom Christofferson, sister Raina Berto. Like we've had some awesome people come speak.

Jen Blossel. Jen Blossel, um, who was delightful, as always. Um, and then it switched to more

of a classroom format. So it was kind of that lecture series at first at the Institute.

And then it switched to like classroom format where we just did come follow me.

And it was like weekly for five months out of the year.

And just barely after like so many times requesting, requesting, requesting, requesting,

they finally came back and said, you can have an official class.

Cool.

And it's a pretty great group.

It's 80 to 100 LGBTQ individuals.

Some of them go to church.

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