Part One: The Public Universal Friend: A Non-binary Icon in Revolutionary-Era America

Margaret talks with podcast host and journalist Garrison Davis about an 18th-century genderless preacher and their gender-bending followers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, Welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, a
show about cool people in history, especially rebels and nonconformists
and activists and people who threw bombs and dictators and
ship like that. This week we're more on the nonconformist
side of things, but more about that in a second.
I'm your host, Margaret Keildroy, and my guest this week
is my friend Garrison Davis, who is also a cool person.

(00:20):
Oh wow, I'm a certified cool person. I believe I
have declared myself the arbiter of cool, which was never
my intention, but you are among them. I have you
down as an investigative journalist, the co host of It
Could Happen Here, and generally just an appreciator of really
weird ship. That's fair. That's fair, Yes, most most of

(00:43):
the bases. I'm doing great. And we also have our
producer Sophie licht Erman on the show, best known for
her work raising a dog named Anderson. Little known fact,
she's also a podcast producer. How are you, Sophie, I'm
I'm I'm yeah. Excellent for you, thank you, credible lack
of adjectives. I'm getting better at this against the tyranny

(01:07):
of the adjective new essay forthcoming, not the tyrannous adjectives. Um,
the main reason people have been asking me if the
main reason that Sophie is on the show is to
cover for me when I don't get pop culture references.
And that is true. Well, yeah, that does happen all

(01:28):
the time. Yeah. So, Garrison, today we're going to talk
about it's a very famous year in American history, and
we're gonna talk about the most important thing that happened
in this very famous year. One of guess what the
most important thing that happened in the year seventeen seventy
six was, oh, man, seventeen seventy six. So I'm Canadian,

(01:49):
I by birth, so let me let me think. Um,
I didn't people like make make a piece of paper
and sign it and it was like a big deal. Oh,
I don't know. I was going to talk though, about
the most important thing that happened, which was that it
was the birth of Public Universal Friend. In seventy Public

(02:13):
Universal Friend was born. Harrison, have you ever heard of
Public Universal Friend? I think so. I'm it's that it
sounds it sounds familiar. Yes, Well, it's not every year
that a genderless servant of the Lord comes down from
heaven and occupies the body of a dying woman who
is reborn as basically the nicest peace and love transgender

(02:34):
cult leader you could ever hope to meet. Yeah, and
that cult definitely gender fucking It's probably not a gay
sex cult. I couldn't promise you it's not a gay
sex cult. I'll let you decide, since the history books
sure don't want to tell you. So to start off,

(02:55):
we're gonna have to talk about pronouns in gender, right,
because that's one of the central points of today's topic,
and that means we need to start where all conversations
about pronouns and genders start with furry porn. I mean,
I mean, you're you're not as rung as you should be. Um,
but continue, Yes, okay, So have you ever seen the

(03:16):
geek hierarchy. It's this chart from two thousand two. Yeah, yeah, okay.
So at the top of it, At the top of
this chart, it says published science fiction authors and artists,
and then it descends down through all of various people
in the geek hierarchy, with like gamers and various fandoms.
At the very bottom, there's fan fiction writers, but below

(03:37):
that there's furries, that below that there's erotic furries. And
at the very very bottom of the geek hierarchy, well,
let me just quote it. The very bottom of the
geek hierarchy is people who write erotic versions of Star
Trek where all the characters are furries, like Kirk as
an acelte or something, and they put a furry version
of themselves as the star of the story. Yes, very

(04:00):
very relatable experience. Yes, So what would you say if
I were to tell you that the gig hierarchy is
entirely wrong? I mean, I'm as someone who is generally
not fond of hierarchies, I wouldn't be the most shocked. Yeah, okay,
I appreciate that. Okay, So the singular vey as a
pronoun is cool, right, yes? Okay. So the first recorded

(04:23):
use of the singular day is from a book from
by a poet named William. The book is called William
the Werewolf. It's a romance. It's about a guy named
William who likes this lady. The two of them turn
into bears and deer. So it's self insert furry and romance.

(04:44):
And I know you're thinking, but how is this going
to be fan fiction, Margaret, Well, it's a retelling of
a twelfth century French poem. That's very funny. So the
first use of the singular day is self insert erotic
fury fan fiction. Yeah wow, I mean it's it's funny
how little our culture has changed. Yeah. Yeah, our type

(05:12):
of our own is just like the descendant of this
great tradition. I was very excited when I discovered this,
when I was like William the Werewolf. Wait, the author's
name is William, And then I kept looking yeah, I
mean more and more excited. Yeah. So, so that's how
old the singular they is as a pronoun in English.

(05:32):
And of course, historically the pronoun they wasn't used to
describe individual people as non binary generally, but instead people
whose gender is not known or is not being revealed
by the speaker. Right, like in the sentence, I saw
someone floating outside my third floor window in the middle
of the night, and I couldn't tell why they were there, Right,
I'm not describing the specific gender of the person or

(05:55):
the sentence. If anyone has a problem with the way
I'm talking about this, they can yell at me on
Twitter at I write Okay, yes, yea. So, but the
singular days, I suspect you might be aware, is used
for more things in contemporary society. Specifically, it gets and
and all these uses get conflated, so I want to

(06:15):
separate them out. So there's, first of all, there's people
who prefer to be described with they as a sort
of specific gender or lack of gender, right. And then
there's also a movement interwoven within all of that where
people use they as a default pronoun for all people
if their preference isn't known. So there's sort of a
a definite singular day to describe a person as neither

(06:37):
a man or a woman, and there's an indefinite day,
which is just not referring to someone by their gender.
And I'm personally fine with both of these users. I generally, Yeah,
I enjoy both both of those as concepts. Yeah, I'm
really jealous of the languages that just don't have gender pronouns.
I have to admit that would Yeah, language is the

(06:58):
rootiful freshion. So okay, So the reason I'm bringing all
of this up is that I'm going to be referring
to this person, the public universal friend, using the pronoun day,
which is not what they did right interesting because that
concept wasn't really available to them at the time. Got

(07:19):
it because they're not a non binary person in the
modern context. They don't live in the modern context. But
they're also neither a man nor a woman, and so
the current way to describe such a person in general,
the safest way to me, feels like using a day cool.
And if anyone out there is struggling to accept the
singular day, then they should recognize that it predates the
singular you. Back in the day you as the plural.

(07:42):
I know you're really excited about your grammar lesson, and
that's why you came on the podcast is to learn
all of this. I swear it's all going to tie in.
So you was the plural, and thou and thee were
the singular, which is why in most English dialects you
say you are and not you is so you versus
thou and the is also relevant today's story because the

(08:04):
singular you didn't happen all at once. First, around the
seventeenth century, the singular you became formal, and the and
thou were informal, sort of like two and no stead
in Spanish. And so this formal or royal use of
of plural pronouns is actually where the royal we comes from,
Like when the queen says okay, yeah, no this This

(08:24):
came as a surprise to me too. I always assumed
it was like the queen was like, we are in
charge of the entire country, so we are the country
or whatever, right, um, But it's actually just this, like, no,
we think we're better than everyone else, so we use
the formal and you know, they say things like we
are not dead, we are definitely alive, we are definitely

(08:45):
not a vaguely animatronic robot. We are not being paraded
around as a hologram. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So slowly,
eventually everyone becomes you, except not the Quakers. The Quakers
a radically egalitarian, and they wanted to show it, so
they kept on being and vowing. To quote The New
York Times, the Quakers founder George Fox explained that when

(09:09):
God sent him forth, he forbade me to put off
my hat to any higher or low. And I was
required to thee and thou all men and women, without
any respect to rich or poor, great or small. I
love that. Think this is like the cultural war issue
of the time. Yeah, totally. What fucking pronouns are you using?

(09:32):
Nothing changes, No that they changes at all. It just
gets slightly worse and we're complicated, Yeah, totally, because we're
able to do it faster because instead of the opinion
section of newspapers, we have Twitter. Yeah. So of course
this means that the rest of society is calling everyone royalty,

(09:54):
whereas the Quakers are running around calling everyone peasants, which
actually pisces off a lot of people. That makes that
is yeah, that tracks. Yeah, and it's it's called plain speech,
as I understand it, and it's mostly died out today,
but you can still be heard sometimes in some Quaker environments.
And this, this radical galitarianism, weaves into the story in

(10:14):
a similar way as genderlessness. So back to our friend,
our universal friend, our public universal friend. The person who
later became the public universal friend was born on November
fifty two in Rhode Island. And to be clear, in
the modern context, if you're talking about trans person, usually
go back in time with the name and pronounced like

(10:34):
I'm a trans woman and when I was little, I
didn't know I was a trans girl yet. But like
in general, if you talk us, tell a story about
me when I'm little. The more polite thing to do
is to refer to me as Margaret and to use
you know, share they pronounced right. But that ties into
the modern conception of transnis, which does not map to
public universal friends. Yeah. Um, because uh, Puff, who I'm

(11:00):
going to call Puff like the magic Dragon, did not
consider themselves to be non binary of genderless as a kid.
They see their story very differently. They had a gender
and then that changed. Right, So I'm going to tell
you that the person who later became the public universal
friend was born in November seventeen fifty two as a

(11:21):
girl named Jemima Wilkinson. Her and her family didn't keep
journals that anyone has been able to find, so there
weren't and they weren't like big important people. So and also,
since she was never married, she doesn't exist on like
tax list. She wasn't like a real person. Yeah, exactly.
If you want to be invisible to the state, be

(11:42):
an unmarried woman in the eighteenth century. It's as simple
as that. I wish I could be an unfeared moment
in the seventeenth century, yeah or eighteenth century either one.
Just don't get sick and you'll be fine. We don't
know a ton about Jemima Wilkinson before she died and
Puff took control of her body. She grew u in Cumberland,
Rhode Island, which is where she was born. And it's

(12:03):
not a coincidence actually to the story that she was
born in Rhode Island. Most people know Rhode Island for
two things. One it's really small, and too it's not
to be trusted because it is neither a road nor
an island that's there. Yeah, making a joke that I
made in high school. That wasn't funny then. But in

(12:26):
colonial times it was like the Freethinkers State. Um. It
was founded by a Puritan, but it was founded by
a Pureitan who got run out of Massachusetts for preaching
democracy and some level of religious freedom, and it became
like the place of a religious freedom in colonial America.
Not to be clear, not for indigenous people. They Narrow

(12:46):
Gassett people who lived there had tried to stay neutral
and friendly with the colonists and then wound up massacred
by the hundreds in a preemptive attacks, sold into slavery
and all that ship for their trouble, and barely kept
their identity intact. So it's not actually went a peace
and love. But you could be a different type of
Christian than the ones in Massachusetts. Yeah, well you can

(13:07):
actually be Jewish. They're Quakers, and Jews lived more freely
in Rhode Island than anywhere else in the colonial period.
But yeah, as long as you believed in God, and
you know, we're accepted as white within the context of
colonial America. So, but it's not a coincidence that a
person who becomes like Puff becomes is born in Rhode Island,

(13:30):
her mom dies giving birth to one of her sisters.
When Jemima is like twelve or something. She's the eighth
kid out of twelve or thirteen kids, Which imagine how
fund up that would be. Like you finally think you
have a handle on this like birthing thing, right, you're
on twelve, twelve or thirteen, and then I mean if
you if you die on thirteen, that makes sense. Yeah,

(13:51):
that's true, Like you are you are really really gambling
with your thirteenth kids. Yeah, just skip to fourteen. Say no,
this is not that, this is not that their deeth kid, Yeah, totally. Yeah,
there's probably some elaborate ritual that you can get you
burned it anyway, oh, colonial America. So, and she's in

(14:13):
a reasonably prominent family as far as like random not
rich family goes or her dad as a productive farm
and holds local office sometimes. And they're Quakers. And it's
worth knowing that the Quakers are actually called the Society
of Friends. The name Quaker is what people called them
to make fun of them, because they would shake when
they're overcome with religious fervor. And they took their name

(14:34):
for themselves in classic reappropriation of a Stler basically. And
the Quakers come up in every fucking episode I do
about the US. Really, Yeah, that's not super surprising, honestly, Yeah,
because there their abolitionists, and they're reasonably into egalitarianism and
like general quality and stuff. You mean, they're cool people

(14:56):
who do cool stuff. Well, many among them are cool people. Times. Yeah,
they've got some problems, which we'll get into in this episode.
More than last, they do come up. They are like
almost every episode, it's like, what Quaker, Yeah, if it's
if it's Europe, it's Tolstoy. Yeah, but Europe, it's exactly,
it's Europe. It's told what what about the ranters? Everyone's

(15:23):
everyone's favorite The Ranters, Will the Ranters and the Levelers
are coming up and you all got to wait for
that one. Okay, alright, I'm just saying we're really creating
like a really cool like cool people do cool stuff
Bingo card situation, like already yeah, yeah, completely unintentionally, I like, okay,
so such your my mom. This this Quaker kid is

(15:45):
gets described as smart, stubborn, and lazy, which I think
rules it's a really good combination of to be I think.
But it's also possible that she wasn't stubborn and lazy.
She apprenticed as a seamstress and then got fired for
being lazy, but like, maybe she just didn't like working
for other people. I don't know. Whatever, she reads a lot.
She memorizes the Bible in a bunch of Quaker texts,
or memorizes chunks of the Bible, I don't know. And

(16:08):
one place I read said that she worked as a healer,
but I haven't found any other background proof of that.
And then her family started having trouble in the society
of friends because the Quakers are Pacifists and there's a
revolutionary war happening, and three of her brothers are thrown
out of the church for joining the Continental Army to
fight against the British, and there's a trial and everything,

(16:31):
their charges attending trainings for military exercise. And then Jemima's
older sister patients got thrown out for having a child
out of wedlock. So the Quakers not perfect. But that
brings us to the Revolutionary War, which frames the whole thing. Okay,
what's the story you get in Canada about the American Revolution?
The U. S Revolution? Probably one you get annoyed that's

(16:52):
called the American Revolution, That's my guess. We don't get
to know. The Canadians usually just call it America. Um.
There is not much like a debate around North America.
I don't know. I mean, how American culture is viewed
in Canada is always really interesting and it depends on
what region you're in. UM. But in terms of the

(17:13):
Revolutionary War, they were just like they went a bit
harder than Canada did. I guess is how it's frinmed
fair enough. I don't know anything about Canada because Canada,
because Canada still has the Queen. We still we still
have the hologram, right, so like we we just did
not go as hard as America did. Yeah, well, I'm

(17:36):
gonna present to you the story that I got told
about the Revolutionary War, and then the story that I
think is more accurate, and then the weird ship that
I'm gonna overlay on top. Great. So the Revolutionary War
runs from seventeen seventy five until see and what I
heard in school, that is a story about a gang
of plucky, adventurous men who decided enough is enough, and

(17:58):
they fought and they won their freedom against the greatest
military power in the world. T tax T taxes were
a problem, that's right. And it all started by throwing
tea out of a boat into the river in the
ocean or the something, the something, Yeah, yeah, I don't know,
a bay or something Boston, And I know there was
a cherry tree that got cut down. There was Paul

(18:21):
Revere going around on his horse yea, um, and that's
kind of it. And then then Ben Franklin invented to
the kite. Yeah. And electricity and electricity, yeah, there was
no electricity before Benjamin Franklin, that's right. Nor was there
a quality and freedom. Um, but they brought that around. Yeah,

(18:41):
that's the story we get told. They were all good
boring Protestant Christians, somewhere on the spectrum from a bit
Puritan to a bit Enlightenment science minded. I was definitely
taught in Canada that there was a lot of freemason
fuckery going on, though, Oh I don't know, I don't
know about that. Yeah, No, I mean in terms of
like how money of the founding fathers were also Masons

(19:01):
and all that kind of stuff that was that was
definitely definitely emphasized a little bit. Yeah. So yeah, that's
the that's the normal story of America. And you know
who else is the story of America. Capitalism is it selling?
Selling your soul for money. Selling your soul for money
is what you do in America. That's what makes us free,

(19:24):
land of the Free, because of the brave and the
selling ourselves for money. If you have money, you can
use it to purchase things like the things that you're
about to hear about. Because these are some ads and

(19:44):
we are back and we're talking about the story of America.
And I want to tell a second story about America,
which was that the Revolutionary War was a bunch of
slave owning white men who wanted to have more autonomy,
and how they conquered the country to kill indigenous people
and take all their ship. So they let England and
France fight at proxy war on their soil, and eventually
they beat the British. Enslaved black people were promised freedom

(20:06):
if they fought for the English, so they did, and
some fought for the colonies, but far fewer Indigenous people
were split on the war, but most supported England because
the king was slightly better at respecting treaties and had
less vested interest in their subjugation in genocide. It didn't
help that George Washington had been so actively interested in
genocide that the Hoode and a Shawnee called him the

(20:27):
town destroyer. Thirteen thousand Indigenous people fought on the British
side the divided loyalties within the hood and shown he
actually splintered the Confederacy, which was a democratic agreement between
six indigenous nations that was older at the time than
the US is now. And when the USA won the war,
it didn't end colonization, it cemented it, and one of

(20:48):
the world's most powerful slave states rose from the ashes
of war. That sounds a little bit more accurate, Yeah,
And I'm glad more and more people are aware of that.
That's what happened. There's third story. It doesn't really run
counter to the other stories, but it informs it. When
we talk about men in powdered wigs with shitty muskets
and rifles, we we talked about them, right, but we

(21:10):
don't talk about that. The colonies during the Revolutionary War
were really fucking weird. I don't want to use the
word cool here, but they were definitely not boring. To
quote author Paul B. Moyer, the Revolutionary era was a
time when profits walked the land, people exercised miraculous spiritual gifts,
and sectarian groups espousing fantastic creeds grew in eager converts.

(21:33):
America sundered its ties with the British Empire, which not
only upset long standing structures of political authority, but ultimately
called into question all sorts of traditional power relationships, including
those that had ranked people according to categories of class, sex,
and race. Basically, the Revolutionary War reshaped American religion, and
it through open doors of possibility. Not they didn't throw

(21:55):
the doors open, like really wide. He still had to
be Protestant, fucking Christians. Throughout the history of white people
doing weird stuff. Most of it needed to happen under
the guise of Christianity in the first place to be allowed, right,
Like yeah, and all of like the super like weird,
weird traditions throughout through areas where white people were, a

(22:19):
whole bunch of stuff just got repackaged in like a
Christian box and be like, no, we're not doing all
of this weird stuff. We're doing Christian mysticism. And you're like, sure, sure,
sure you are, buddy, where Yeah you will, you won't
get burn at the stake today, but watch your step. Yeah,

(22:41):
that is a that is a huge thing that informs
I think what happens in today's story. So pessimism and
hierarchy are getting questioned and rejected. In a lot of
those religions, free will is encouraged, although basically free will
means that like you can, it's up to you to
get into heaven. So it actually in some ways becomes
like anti free will. It's like you have to follow

(23:01):
these rules or whatever, but you have the free will
to choose if you're gonna go to hell or heaven. Yeah, exactly.
The Methodists and the Baptists are coming into their own
plus dozens of smaller sects like the Shakers, the Free Will, Baptists,
and the Universalists. So in this context public universal friend
not actually all that weird. Gender was reshaping also at

(23:24):
the same time in a completely bad way, not in
a good way. American men wanted to stop being such
English sissies types of flat circle. Yeah, they all wanted
to be fucking Daniel Boone. They didn't want to be
British soy boys, is what you're trying to say. Yes,
none of that soy boys, which is funny because it's

(23:46):
like the British, We're still a bunch of like evil
fox right. Yes, they weren't good, they weren't like Pacifists.
They were just rolling over anyway. Um, So they get
rid of their powdered wig, they grab that raccoon skin
hat and go off to go conquer some people, but
not in a wimpy British way of conquering people, in
a good manly American way. And the role of women

(24:10):
shifts too, and it starts shifting in a kind of
similar direction of women becoming more independent, and they're running
the farms for men off at war, they run activist organizations,
all of that women were even involved in the war
at all levels, including sometimes as impromptu soldiers. These soldiers
were called the molly Pitchers, generally a sort of half

(24:31):
mythical figure of women threw down in the war against England.
They will never get their own episode, because both sides
of the Revolutionary War can go funk themselves. I am
almost annoyed that I'm doing an episode that takes place
during the Revolutionary War, making me care about it. But
the women who foughfer the revolution they managed to, you know,
they're like, okay, we're we're shifting our gender roles around
all of that, and they absolutely end up structurally worse

(24:54):
off at the end of the war. The promises of
liberty like voting, improperty rights do not apply to them.
Women are supposed to go home and make babies to
raise up the next generation of good American manly man soldiers,
and even religiously, this doesn't work out. Women start off
at the forefront of starting a lot of these new
sects and new religious ideas and the Great Awakening, which

(25:15):
is a period of religious turmoil before the Revolution, and
then those sex formalized and women were cut out of
the picture, and then even men get sucked over by
patriarchy and being forced into gender roles. Right during the
Great Awakening, before the Revolution, there were like men and
women both moving towards this concept of being brides of Christ,
which included yeah, yeah, yeah, Um, I'm actually curious. I

(25:38):
hadn't run across this much before. I think you have
more of a religious background than I do, and so
I'm yeah, I mean, my my like experience is with
the religious background is more evangelical. We don't have as
much of like the bright of Christ type thing because
that that's generally more like traditional uh, like congregations are sex,
Evangelicals are generally not. But even you definitely within the

(26:01):
Christian milieu, you hear stuff about that concept a decent amount. Yeah,
that this might tie into this whole thing. So it's
basically like so religious men were moving away from these
like masculine traits like pursuit of wealth, physical violence, and
drinking alcohol. These were seen as like masculine traits, but

(26:22):
they were moving away from those things to become brides
of Christ. After the Revolution, Nope, no more bride of Christ.
Enter the Christian soldier. Times of flat circle yep, and
a good manly Christian soldier knows that his wife knows
her place subordinate to him, no more equal in the

(26:44):
eyes of God. Ship. Yeah, I don't know if my
cynicism of the US is coming across well enough in
this script, might have made it too subtle. So Jemimah
Wilkinson's come back to her. She's not around much longer
in this story. She dies soon. Jemima Wilkinson is still
Jemima Wilkinson. In seventeen seventy six, she was a twenty

(27:05):
four year old, unmarried woman. Some historians are like, Wow,
she must have been so worried that she hadn't gotten
married and had kids yet. But I have a feeling
that was not a burdensome arrangement for her. Uh. Not
getting married was also a fairly common thing among Quaker
women anyway, something like ten percent of them never bothered,
And Jemima was cheating on Quakerism. Half of her family

(27:29):
had been kicked out, so I don't really blame her.
She was hanging out with the New Light Baptists as well,
which was a reform movement within the Baptist Church, and
they were into this idea that divine insight came from
divine revelation. The Quakers didn't like that she was cheating
on them, and she joined four of her siblings and
being kicked out of her local society of friends. Then

(27:49):
less than a month later, she got sick. There's a
Continental Navy ship called the Columbus that decided to live
up to its namesake while docked in Providence, Rhode Island,
and it brought disease to the people living there. This
disease was probably typhus and it was called Columbus fever.
Typhus is a bacterial disease that used to kill the
ship out of people all over the world, but it's
pretty much under control with antibiotics. Jemima Wilkinson was living

(28:12):
at home when she got sick on October five. By
the sixth, she was sick as fuck. The doctor came
and was probably like, I don't know, sorry, kids, you're
living in the wrong century. There's nothing we can do. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure that's that's exactly what doctors said back then. Yeah, totally,
Like once we figure out biotics, we're going to figure
out antibiotics and we're gonna be in such better shapes
or just hold on for a couple hundred, like two hundred,

(28:34):
three hundred years, and it'll be slightly better unless it's
a virus than you're still fucked. So yeah, whatever, Yeah,
here's some leeches. I actually don't know enough about exactly
where they were at with their medicine at the time. No,
I think, I mean, yeah, Graham would be later on,
and oh boy. In terms of fun Christians, I think
I think everyone's everyone's pretty pretty familiar with with. No,

(28:57):
I don't know who Graham is. Oh, the guy who
invented the Graham cracker and people the bloodletting baths and
all of all the stuff. Oh yeah, yeah yeah. In
terms of like fun like Christian doctors, Yeah, what do
you think is going to be the stuff the stuff
from right now that people two years late from now
we're going to be like, oh my god, I can't

(29:18):
believe they did that. That's something I wonder a lot
of the time, actually, and I don't. It's always it's
always hard to say, right because whenever you start getting
sure of yourself, that's just like hubris and foolish um.
But it's something I definitely contemplate a lot, like what
types of things we do now? Will people eventually be like, whoa,
look at those lunatics. I I hope that we look

(29:41):
back at cancer the way that we currently look back
at like things that antibiotics fixed. God, I hope. So yeah,
I mean that would that would be great. As someone
who was supposed to many cancers chemicals the past two years,
I would that would be nice. Yeah, well those are
good for you. That's that's what the doctors and the

(30:03):
bodies to say. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with tear gas.
It's it's actually used to treat um a lot of
unruling nous. Nothing wrong with the harsh, the harsh metals
and the tear guess canisters that were older than I was.
That doesn't take much. Sorry, but I know definitely there

(30:23):
were there were a few of them that were like
banned from the military because they kept killing people in
the military dirty during like basic training. Yeah, you're like, oh,
they were just using those on kids. Yeah, that makes sense.
It's exciting. It is exciting. Everyone gets to be part
of a grand experiment. So the grand experiment of Typhus

(30:46):
is um it's kill and Jemima on the tent, you know,
five days into into her illness. The family is basically
like figuring out what the fun her funeral is going
to be, like, she's she's not coming back. And then
on the eleventh she died at least to hear the
Public Universal Friend tell it. The doctor claims otherwise. The
doctor claims that this person recovered. But on October eleven,

(31:10):
the person in bed wasn't sick anymore. They got up,
told everyone that Jemima had died, her soul had gone
up to heaven, and God put a genderlest divine spirit
into the body to reanimate it. The spirit was named,
of course, the Public Universal Friend, a holy prophet who
we're gonna, yeah call puff. I mean I have, I
have had similar experiences when I've had intense, intense fever

(31:30):
dreams before. So I can, I can, I can kind
of see how you could get there. Oh yeah, no, totally.
I mean, like honestly, the wildest part about this is
picking a name that isn't a name. As far as
I'm concerted, like I thought my friends were, you know,
interesting that they call themselves like raccoon or squid or something.
But um, Public Universal Friend, that's a you know there,

(31:55):
I've never heard such a non binary name before. I know,
I mean, it's it is much more aspirational than just
naming yourself after whatever the closest in inanimate object is. Well,
today I'm Cup because that's the cup that I'm looking at.
And to be clear, my name is Magpie also, And
I am not attempting to speak badly of people who

(32:20):
name themselves after I just think it's funny. I think
it's a nice trend. Yeah, exactly. At this moment, realizing
that like, you know, we're people who don't know us
might might think. Okay. So, while they died, two angels appeared, with,
in Puff's own words, golden crowns upon their heads. Clothed

(32:42):
in long white robes down to the feet. The angels
announced that there was room, room room in the many
mansions of eternal glory for the and for everyone. They
said that everyone will come, may come and partake of
the waters of life freely, which is offered to sit nurse,
without money and without price. Oh, and that the world's

(33:03):
gonna end, okay, I mean, yeah, sure, yeah, in less
than four years, the world's gonna okay. Well yeah, um,
so it's the it's the last chance for sinners to
get absolved and live forever, and puff is like, hey,
and all you gotta do to get saved is follow me.
And new sects and even people experiencing a new birth

(33:24):
before heading off to preach, or those claiming direct messages
from God were the style of the time. So this
wasn't as weird as it sounds. And I mean, well, okay,
it was as weird as it sounds. It's just it
wasn't as a regular Yeah, yeah, totally. And so friend
is a word for Quaker, right, but public friend was

(33:44):
a word that Quakers were using for their itinerant preachers.
So a public friend with someone who goes around and
spreads the good word or whatever. And I'm reasonably sure
that universal is a nod to the universalism concept that
was in spite of the time. That's that was. That
was the next thing I was going to ask, because
that would that was also where my brain was heading,
which I you know, it's like I I I grew

(34:06):
up lapsed Catholic and I'm still there and so I
don't know everything about all this stuff, but as far
as I can tell, universalism is basically like everyone eventually
gets into heaven? Is that more usually? Um, I mean
there's definitely a lot of different sects. I mean, there's
like a philosophy of universalism, but for Christian ones. Yeah,

(34:28):
it's like we kind of all have our path that
we're going to end up inside, inside, inside someplace that
we're like meant to be. It's not, it's not it's
it's not like Calvinism and like it's not like determinism,
but it's it's it's definitely more of a softer look
at it. I believe I could be wrong, but I

(34:50):
thought Jefferson was a big universalist. I I will take
your word for it. I definitely remember that when I
was more into the pology. Okay, yeah, yeah, I learned
about this ship as it relates to people like this.
So it's like a little bit interesting to me that
Puff is going for universalism basically since they're they're saying

(35:12):
you have to get to heaven through my teachings, and
I personally just hate the heaven health things so much
that it kind of rubs me the wrong way everywhere.
But yeah, yeah, whatever, So Puff isn't the first Quaker
to rise up from their deathbed and head off to preach.
I'm mostly including this other person because their name is Margaret,

(35:33):
and I like including Margaret's in the story whenever possible.
Margaret Brewster was a Quaker who a hundred years earlier,
in six seventy seven, rose up from her deathbed from
illness and decided to head off to Boston to preach.
And Boston at the time was violently anti Quaker, like
in a it's illegal to be a Quaker or be
friends with Quakers kind of way, like a break down
the doors of every Quaker gathering and arrest everyone way

(35:57):
because sucking Puritans. I just looked up something on Thomas
Jefferson and he was He was, in fact not a Universalist.
He was instead a Unitarian, which is a much worse,
much worse theology than universalism. Um and universalism does have
disagreements on whether hell exists or what it is. Between

(36:17):
different sex generally they don't believe in like an eternal hell.
They generally if there is. If if there is a hell,
it's like more of a like a it's like a
purgatory that you like spend being punished for any kind
of bad deeds on on your way to like your
place of happiness and fulfillment. But it's not something that
you like stay forever. Okay, No, that that makes sense.

(36:40):
So our girl, Margaret, she's risen up from the dead, right,
and she throws on a burlap sack, and she paints
her face black with ashes. But this is hundreds of
years before black face is a concept in US society
appeared and Quakers would basically sometimes dress in sacks and
paint themselves with ashes to show how humble they were whatever,

(37:00):
which is it's not a practice that age as well, right, No,
But but she she dresses up like this, and she
and four others storm into a Puritan church in Boston,
and people shrieked and shouted and fainted, which rules she
was arrested, strip naked and drawn through town tied behind
a cart while being whipped. People really didn't like the

(37:21):
Quakers in Boston at that point. But anyway, that's that's
the Margaret who was the other Quaker comes back from illness.
But let's talk about puff. But before we talk about puff,
we need to talk about wholesome products. Do you have
a wholesome product that you would like to plug here?
For example, we have previously plugged potatoes as a concept,

(37:46):
half water as a concept, a good comb as a concept.
I don't know in terms of a concept that is truly,
truly pluggable to be upon this platform. Um, I don't know.
There's there's there's there could be a lot of a
lot of things that are plug worthy, you know. Oh, no,

(38:07):
these are plugs. These are advertisers. We're we're sponsored. We're
sponsored by the concept of potatoes. So yeah, so they're
paying us. Oh that's totally different then, Um, in that case,
we are sponsored by the the rough concept of cr gas,
which I keep. I keep. I keep a canist I have.

(38:30):
I have a little dome that I keep a saint
canister of next to where I do work. And I've
been told by quote unquote scientists that I shouldn't do
that because me being exposed just to the canister where
the metals were could have quote unquote health consequences. Now
I don't really trust quote unquote scientists. Like where do
they get their authority from? I don't know. So there's
no system by which to find out where they come

(38:52):
up with their information. There's no record of how they
how they No, so come on, Yeah, it's a little
bit iffy, but yeah, see our gas. I think eventually
I might just use it as like a pipe. I
think it would be a good a good way. So
if you want to have a good time, invest in
some ce our gas or any of the other products

(39:13):
and services that support this show. And we are back
now that we've all heard about both good things and
then the things that Garrison mistakenly believes are good and
the things that advertisers are trying to sell you, which
may be anywhere on the spectrum between those things. So

(39:37):
so Puff, for her part, waste no time to start
preaching their new religious sect. First they try at their
local Society of Friends, of course, but the Quakers are
not having it. Within Yeah, like, well wasn't wasn't Were
they like just excommunicating Yeah yeah yeah pretty recently. Yeah,
I think that they showed the feeling I get is

(39:57):
that they showed back up, being like I'm back from
the day and now I'm the public universal friend and
like they're like nah yeah, like one by one everyone
stands up and it's like get out. Um. So so
instead they go to a Baptist church and they go
to the service, and then after the service they give
a sermon of their own under the tree outside, and

(40:19):
the sermon was the thing that's cool about Puff is
less they're like groundbreaking theology. One I only half care
about theology. Into what they were saying was not wildly original.
The public universal friend was like, virtue is good, sin
is bad, repentance is good. Also, the world's ending. So
all the same ship that you hear everywhere at the time,

(40:43):
but they are not the usual preacher is the big difference.
So they start preaching at home on their father's farm.
Their father, their family was their first converts, and soon
their dad was thrown out of the Quakers for believing
his kid. This whole family gets kicked to the Quakers.
It's three more of their siblings are soon to follow.

(41:06):
And I gotta say, I think the single most utopian thing,
like the part that's the hardest to believe about this
entire thing is that Puff was like, I'm not your
daughter anymore. I'm neither a man nor a woman. And
their family was like, all right, like I know what happens,
but it doesn't even happen to most people, now, you know. No,

(41:30):
it was yeah, I mean, they must have been very
convincing about how God sent them a new, a new
spirit to inhabit their body. It was like, really sold
that because it seems hardy. They they were really good
at this thing that they did. Um, the abolitionist Moses
Brown came to see them speak, and incidentally so so.

(41:54):
John Brown's death kicked off the Civil War. But apparently
his guy, Moses Brown, had a brother also named John Brown,
and his arrest for torching a British customship in seventeen
seventy two was a big part of kicking off the
Revolutionary War. So I think the lesson is, don't arrest
people named John Brown unless you're ready for war, or
the lesson is that fucking everybody used to be named

(42:16):
John Brown. Yeah, I'm not sure Whigy Puff starts getting popular.
People liked the strange, generalist preacher who said things they
kind of already agreed with. Puff also advocated celibacy. Celibacy
wasn't mandatory. Even married couples were encouraged to not funk
if they could help it, And I get the feeling
that this was actually a fairly big part of their

(42:36):
draw not necessarily from a self denial point of view,
but like, let's say you just don't want to fuck,
or especially you don't want to suck your spouse in
a time when marriage is not something that you always
have a ton of control over or you don't want
like thirteen kids. Yeah, if you don't want thirteen kids,
you hang out with Puff. Maybe you're gay, maybe your ace,
Maybe you don't like your husband, maybe don't wan any

(42:57):
more kids, maybe you don't like babies. It's everyone's welcome, yeah, exactly,
everyone's welcome. And then the way that gay ship gets
written out of history. It's hard to read between the lines,
right because like history books are like, and there were
no gay people until you know, nine until stone Wall
in nineteen sixty nine, and like, you know, the statistically
a ton of these people are gay, So it's it's

(43:20):
always just a weird trying to read between the lines.
Later on, Puff is going to live in a big
house full of unmarried women and occasionally get caught with
them in in their bed, but they just sound like
good friends to me. Yeah. Um, history books are just
gonna put that in as like throw away one liners
without any context or analysis. They'll be like and then
one person accused them of having a girl in their

(43:41):
bed or whatever, but al pals Yeah either way. Puff
preaches against lustful sex and if you're going to have sex,
and let's face it, people are going to have sex,
it better be with your spouse. Okay, sure, So that's
that's there. That's their party line, right. Puff is also
really into lane dress on paper, but they definitely had style,

(44:02):
and they were always wearing new clothes and nice clothes,
not like fancy clothes, but they had good style, and
they wore clothes specifically designed for androgyny. They wore a while.
All right, so this is what the kids would call.
They would say that public universal friend has dripped is
what is what? Yes, I believe you. I've heard this before.

(44:26):
I am old enough that if I said this it
would sound like fake, so I won't. Uh. Their drip
was that's all just making fun of market really quick.
But then all right, so they wore a wide brimmed
hat like male Quakers, like the dude from the Quaker

(44:48):
Oats logo, and then they paired it with clothes of
various clergy like robes and cloaks and ship plus a cravat,
which is like what later develops into a necktie. I mean,
that's basically how I treat Yeah, yeah, no. Garrison started
off this call with a huge, wide brimmed hat and
I'm currently wearing one of my biggest cloaks. Yeah, trans

(45:12):
non binary fashion has not aged a day. Well. They
also and this is literally what I wore before. I
actually would still wear this, but my um. They wore
skirts paired with waistcoats. Oh I was doing that, Yeah
now I was one of my favorite looks. Um and Uh.
Basically they wore a mix of men's clothes, women's clothing,

(45:34):
and priests clothes. But then priests closed from all different denominations.
Oh they just like me. Yeah, maybe you are the
reincarnation of Puff. I couldn't prove it, so yeah, you
who knows most scandalous lee. They never wore a cap
like women were supposed to wear inside and outside, and

(45:55):
most people actually mistook them for a man. They were tall,
and they spoke with a deep voice and signal mask
ualinity in their dress more than femininity. So and when
they were asked if they were a man or a woman,
Puff generally replied, I am what I am. That's great.
Oh yeah, it gets better. When people gave them ship
for how they dressed, they apparently replied, I am not

(46:15):
accountable to mortals. Jesus Christ treads cultures do age today,
it's exactly the same, and so so a lot of
the women in her congregation picked up on the style,
and at least one place claims that in private, a
bunch of the women took on the names of male
profits say this whole culture that's cross dressing and taking

(46:39):
names of other genders. A lot of Puff's outfits, especially
the clerical elements, seemed designed to hide their body, which
I absolutely wholeheartedly respect. Yeah, it's the it's the trans
person wearing a baky hoodie trumph. Yeah. Yeah, but just
was clerical, which I'm literally wearing right now. Before I
was fully out as trans, and I was just a

(47:00):
frostressing man named Margaret. One of my friends asked me
kind of politely, is your gender identity, Wraith, and and honestly, yeah,
I could see. I could see it. Yet, Yeah, that's
not not my gender identity. That's yeah, that's it's not wrong,
it's just incomplete. Yeah. And then I started a band
called Feminale School. I mean, like, um, I don't mind

(47:20):
the race thing. Uh So even the men among them
moved slightly towards drogyny, although less in clothing and more
in mannerism, and sure, yeah, and these definitions of a
feministy were really revolutionary wartime ship. They they showed emotion.
That's what people complained about the most. Oh that's fun

(47:43):
sissy men. They're being impacted emotionally by the world. Fucked them.
Even worse, they would ask Huff for help on how
to do things. Men should not ask a quote woman
for help. What's wrong with them? Some of the men
even let women be their equals or run their households.
So scandal. Yeah. Soon Puff is preaching throughout Rhode Island

(48:08):
in Massachusetts, fitting with their role as a doomsayer. They
particularly like speaking at funerals and executions. Trans culture is
not ageedis tingle today? There was a there's a war
on so death preaching is kind of a boom industry, right,
And they would they would pray for the souls of
the condemned and the executioners, and they end up getting

(48:28):
called the friend of sinners, which is yeah, I mean,
this is this is just like trans person goes on
a first date of this a cemetery trip. Yeah, okay.
And so their mannerisms were just odd enough and their
voice was eerie and otherworldly and masculine enough, which I
have a feeling was an affectation. Everyone kept being like
their voices so eerie and I'm like the rules they're

(48:49):
just putting on a voice. But who knows, and it
it leans, it lends credits to their claims of divinity,
I mean, or there whatever like or their voice changed
completely when you know they died in a spirit of
the Lord entered their body. Who knows. In seventeen seventy eight,
they converted the entire family of a Justice of the
Rhode Island Supreme Court, William Potter, Penelope Potter, and their

(49:11):
thirteen kids, Puff moved out of their dad's farm and
into Judge Potter's mansion in a town called Little Rest Potter.
Potter started building onto the mansion too to make room
for everyone, and since Puff's doctrine was abolitionist, Potter freed
all of the people he'd have been enslaving. And Okay,
in the yeah, like in the grand scheme of things,

(49:34):
like cults are sketchy, slavery is worse. So in the
paper Rocks scissors, that is, cult beats slavery than cult.
Find by me, it's not actually paper rocks as or
slavery doesn't beat anything, it's just bad. And and also
people are allowed to come and go freely, so it's
actually more of a sect than a cult. And I'm

(49:56):
just going to use the terms interchangeably because I'm not
a proper story and i don't really care. Quakers started
pouring into Puffs group, and Quaker authorities were like, you're
not even allowed to go to a meeting because of
how many Quakers were jumping ship on Quakerism and joining Puff. Well,
it has a name later later is the Society of
Universal Friends. And most of their converts are people who

(50:20):
got hawked out of the Quakers. Because the Quakers are
throwing everyone out left in right, thousands of people start
coming to their events, all led by this genderalist preacher.
In seventeen seventy nine, Puff published the first pamphlet with
the evocative title of some Considerations propounded to the several
sorts and sex of this age. Transperson makes a zine

(50:41):
drove and and it's complete plagiarism. Ok. Yeah, trans culture
has an age today. To quote from the book The
Public Universal Friend by Paul by Moyer and to avoid
plagiarism of my own by admitting I'm quoting here. The
publication is a bald faced act of lagerism, having been
taken almost word for word from two classic Quaker texts,

(51:04):
the works of Isaac Pennington and William Sewell's SEO History
of the Society of Friends That's That's Wonderful by Seen
eighty three. The sect has a name, the Society of
Universal Friends, and they start building churches. Women and men
are both joining, and about equal number, most young, like
in their twenties and thirties, but some old folks are
joining too, and a statistically significant portion of them are unmarried.

(51:28):
Like it's something like five of adults weren't married in
the greater population, and it was like ten to within
within the society. Nice, and so all these people are
joining the sect that is not theologically different from anything else,
And so it has to be about the sense of
community that they fostered. I just wish I knew what

(51:48):
the community was actually like. They probably weren't like gay
within any kind of modern sense of that word, but
I at least on like a sect wide level. But
members tracked their dreams, and a lot of them had
anxiety dreams about marriage. I read one history sting. Yeah,
that like one of the things that they all kept

(52:09):
dream journals, which fucking rules. And I read one historian
say that this is because they were anxious about their
marriage to God. But I don't think that's why they
had anxiety about dream before they like they joined a
like celibacy cult like this doesn't. Most of the followers
were white, but there were numerous black followers as well,
including folks born free and folks escape slavery, and some

(52:31):
who had been freed by other followers. And I couldn't
tell you how common it was for these new sects
to be to have significant black membership other sects I
don't know. A bunch of the followers of preaching in
their own right, including women, and Puff had a right
hand woman, Sarah Richards, who after joining, was with them

(52:53):
for the rest of her entire life. Gal pals yeah,
not binary gal pals, yeah, sure. And so the whole
history of the society is buried under rumors and accusations
that may or may not mean anything. So like, so
many people hate them that it really muddies up the
record about them. But Puff did work as a mediator

(53:15):
of conflict and oracle of prophecy and a stage. People
would come and be like, how do I run a farm?
How do I cook? How do I make clothes? So
both worldly and other worldly affairs. You could go to
the public Universal Friend to find out one thing that
I think people are getting wrong, and at least in
some of the stuff I read about it, like some
of the kind of quicker stuff, especially the stuff that
wants to talk about how great Puff is. People like,

(53:38):
I've read some stuff that claims that it was like
fairly free form and anti authoritarian, but I don't think
that that was true. Um In Puff published an eight
page list of rules and it was called and I
swear they are not good at names. The Universal Friends
advice to those of the same religious society. They really

(54:00):
like alogate all of their titles, which I mean, to
be fair, was the style at the time. It's like,
why all those books are so cool? Like the book
title is just like here's what the book is about,
you know. And in this book of rules it says
things like ye cannot be my friends except ye do
whatsoever I command you. Yeah, not not the best. No,

(54:21):
this is this is where Puff starts to losing me
a little bit. Some of the rules were all right,
like don't lie to people, don't lie about people, don't
spread rumors. Others were like, don't talk nonsense, only talk
when there's a reason too. Or children and servants, Oh
obedience to their superiors and superiors, Oh justice to their subordinates.
Or church service starts at ten, got to be on time. Um,

(54:47):
you're allowed to drink a little bit, but not to excess.
Puff would drink wine sometimes. And you're allowed to funk
every now and then if you like really need to,
but better if you don't. And you gotta be married
to Buck, of course, and I'm the only one who
can give you permission to get married, so I control
gets the fuck uh. And you should avoid all nonbelievers

(55:10):
and make interactions with them short and Kurt, And of course,
believing me is the only way to go to heaven.
So this is this is like all of my least
favorite stuff about that Puff all of one paragraph. Yeah,
that's the kids would say, that's a lot of elves. YEA.
At some point that you're just going to start lying
to me and tell me about things that the kids

(55:31):
would say that are not true. So I'm decided I'm
not gonna believe you about any of these anymore. But hey,
and and then the other thing is that that but
all of these rules it actually, I mean this is
completely like they still are less suboletarian than most of
the other religions around. Like, yeah, but I think that's

(55:52):
where we're gonna leave it today. You've got this new
sect is just starting to come into power. Uh, Garrison,
how are you feeling about the Society Universal Friends so far?
I mean, I do like that it carries on the
great tradition of people who are like what we would
in modern day call quote unquote trans having really interesting

(56:13):
ontological spirituality because of how they refer to their own
ontology and their own sense of being in self and
how that relates to how they see external reality. I
think that I like that it carries on that tradition.
So it's it's definitely one of my This type of
thing is like my entire alley. So yeah, I thought
you might be the right person for this episode, Gared.

(56:37):
Do you have any things you'd like to plug here
at the end? Um, let's see you can. You can
look at me post pictures of my new cat on
on Twitter dot com at hungry bow tie. Uh, let's
see if if you're in Portland, there's gonna be a
rad Pride on June. I will be tabling some pretty

(56:58):
ridiculous zines as is our great as is our great tradition.
It will probably have already happened by the time people
hear this. Unfortunately. Well, I kind of thought we would
throw it in near this time so that we could
get it in for Pride. Okay, well, I take it back.
You all are maybe even hearing this in June. Oh wow. Well, anyway,

(57:19):
if if you want some ridiculous zines about gender and occultism,
then is find find me there and and Margaret anything
you want to plug at the end here, I have
a new book that may or may not be available
for pre order by the time you hear this. It's
called We Won't be Here Tomorrow and it is short
stories about trans girl who feeds men to a mermaid

(57:42):
lover and hackers who troll CEOs into quitting with drones
and stuff like that. It's available from a k Press.
And I also would like to plug the fact that
I'm buying time because I forgot my Instagram handle. My
Instagram handles, what's so funny is your Instagram handle. It's

(58:07):
literally yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But so you can
follow me on Instagram at Margaret Killjoy, say almost at
Magpie killed Joy. But that's how you can follow me
at Twitter is Magpie kill Joy because I made that
one a long time ago and I haven't changed it
for no good reason. And that's how you can follow
me on the Internet. And you can hear more about

(58:27):
public Universal Friend on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. Or more
podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
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