Public Universal Friend

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

America in the run-up to the Revolutionary War wasn't just a period of dramatic political change, it was also a time of great religious and social instability, anxiety and experimentation. And in the midst of it all there arose a self-proclaimed genderless prophet — the Public Universal Friend. This week, how the Public Universal Friend rocked society's norms and paved the way for others to reject religious and gender expectations for centuries to come.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jammama Wilkinson was the young single woman at this time.
0:08.7	She has a deep knowledge of the Bible.
0:10.8	In fact, it seems like she's memorized large passages of the Bible.
0:14.4	So we know that.
0:16.6	Everything else is less certain.
0:23.1	The next thing we know about her is she gets really ill.
0:28.1	She gets a raging fever and it gets worse and worse and worse to the point that her
0:33.4	family fears that she's going to die.
0:42.0	But instead of dying, as the story goes, she sort of miraculously emerges from her sick
0:48.4	bed.
0:52.1	It's because of the fact that Jammama Wilkinson is dead and that Jammama Wilkinson's body
0:58.8	has been reanimated by God as this holy messenger, the public universal friend.
1:13.1	Jammama Wilkinson was no longer Jammama Wilkinson and the friend was no longer female.
1:23.1	It was this sort of genderless or gender intermediate spirit of God.
1:33.2	This prophet is not a woman, probably not a man either, something in between some sort
1:39.4	of mystical blending of the two.
1:42.5	The illness is gone.
1:43.8	The friend or Jammama or whoever you want to see her, here she is well again.
1:52.9	The awareness about gender identification has grown among people outside of the LGBTQ community
2:00.6	and a number of popular programs is increasingly moving to the mainstream public consciousness.
2:06.4	And it's got history, even Shakespeare used it.
2:08.7	You don't need to do anything fancy.
	...

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