He describes himself as a childless, middle-aged, white, queer Quaker man. With at least three major career changes under his belt, Francis Elling has packed in a whole lot of living thus far — and he’s just getting started.
PGN: Where do you hail from? FE: I’m a Midwesterner, born in a little town named Breeze in Southern Illinois.
PGN: Is Breeze where they had all the tornados lately? FE: Illinois did have a number of tornados but I called my sister and she said they were clear.
PGN: So you have at least one sibling? FE: I have seven siblings: three sisters, four brothers. I’m the youngest and I admit to being a little bit spoiled. My parents were working-class — my father was a factory worker and my mother was a housekeeper — but by the time I came along, my father had started to do plumbing work and my mother became a seamstress. She made wedding dresses and formal gowns and he made hats, and then she started doing secretarial work. We were a little more upwardly mobile so I got much more, materially, than my siblings.
PGN: What did you kids do for fun? FE: We played lots of outside games together, we roller-skated and flew kites and hunted for frogs and snakes by a little branch of water nearby. It was the kind of small town where no one locked their doors and you ran in and out of everyone’s house: only 2,700 people and almost all German-Catholic. Until my sexual orientation came up, it was really fun and safe.
PGN: What was your first exposure to other people? FE: Diversity-wise? The first time we went into St. Louis was the first time I saw people of color. I particularly remember an African-American boy in a stroller and I was really curious about him: It was hard to understand because no one had given me a frame of reference for it.
PGN: What was a favorite class outside of art? FE: I was the only guy who took home-ec and I loved it. We made lunch and I got to invite my favorite teacher, our gym teacher.
PGN: Really? FE: Yes. [Laughs.] My favorite and least favorite teachers were both gym teachers. My least-favorite class, though, was definitely gym. I hated dodge ball and the awkwardness of waiting to get picked for a team. PGN: Did you go to college? FE: Well, my parents learned a lot with seven kids before me, so my choices were a trade school or junior college. I needed to get out of town quick so I graduated high school in three years and went to beauty school. I then went to barber school and became a barber. I realized after six years I didn’t want to stand on my feet for the rest of my life, so I went to a career counselor and decided to study community health education at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and I got a degree in social work at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
PGN: How did you end up in Philadelphia? FE: I did social work for 14 years in a wonderful little town, Lawrence, Kansas. Then my career kind of went down in flames. It ended horribly and I decided that God was kicking me out of social work. So I studied ceramics and became an artist. My fiancé and I had a five-bedroom house in Topeka, Kansas, and when I told him that I wanted to be a potter, he said, “Well, then we might as well put our house on the market,” and that was the end of that relationship. We were supposed to go to a queer Quaker gathering in New Mexico at Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe did her paintings, but he decided not to go. His excuse was that he couldn’t afford it but everything was already paid for, so that was BS. I went by myself and several of the people I met told me I should go to Pendel Hill, which is a Quaker study center in Pennsylvania for cultivation of inner spiritual life. I decided to apply for the artist’s scholarship and to be a resident student. At the gathering I’d also met a man from D.C. and he invited me to stay with him and his boyfriend. I love all the free museums in Washington and, to make it even sweeter, there was a big ceramics conference in Baltimore at the same time, so I signed up for that too. He lent me a car and I drove up to Pendel Hill to interview and got the scholarship. Everything fell into place and by the time I flew back to Kansas, I was ready to move to PA. It was amazing. After two semesters, I got offered the job of arts and spirituality teacher. I also got an offer to go to Santa Fe, but I’d met somebody here and he really didn’t want me to go to Santa Fe. When I was on the fence he even offered to go to Santa Fe with me and I thought, Woah, you don’t know me that well. I guess he did because we’re married now.
PGN: But you took a little time out first … FE: Yes, I always wanted to learn Spanish so I took a semester off and traveled to Guatemala. I lived with different families throughout Central America. When I came back, Lee invited me to move to Philly with him.
PGN: Backing up, you mentioned that the social work ended abruptly. Could you elaborate? FE: I’m pretty comfortable talking about it now, but it was very painful. I was a social worker but I was working in a mental-health center, so it was like a school setting. Lawrence had equal protection in the workforce for sexual minorities so I felt safe being out. When Massachusetts passed gay marriage, my fiancé at the time and I were thinking about getting married and I was so excited about it, I shared it with the class. I brought it up when we covered things in the news. Apparently some of the students were really uncomfortable with it. Later we had a song-writing therapy class and I wrote a song from a really painful place and it included a line, “dreaming about you in the sack.” I was fired for sexual harassment: I was told to leave that day. It was terrible. As a gay-identified man, to accuse me of sexually harassing children was the most painful thing you could accuse me of. I had to get a lawyer and fight for my unemployment so I had to recount the story over and over. Thankfully, the judge decided what they did was not right. I got them to change the official reason to “Poor Judgment,” which was important because sexual harassment on my record would have been the end of my license. Not that I practiced social work again. PGN: Also, you mentioned that you had fun as a kid until your sexual orientation came up? FE: Well, a small town is great as a kid, especially for me being the youngest of eight. With so many brothers and sisters, everyone knew us: Teachers knew my family before I even had them. Being an all-Catholic town, once I noticed my attraction to boys, there was a huge sense of guilt and shame and feeling I had to keep it secret. So on a certain level, being there was very toxic for me. I’ve gone back for every class reunion and, at one reunion, I asked the principal if there was a support group for LGBT kids and he looked at me straight-faced and said, “We don’t have any.” I looked at one of my classmates and said, “Wow, you know that means it’s still not safe for kids to be out here.” That was sad.
PGN: When did you come out? FE: I fell in love with a man at 24. It only lasted about six months but I came out to my mother, my coworkers and my sister in that time. My sister tried to convince me that I was straight but all it did was made me look at my emotional and sensual relationships with women and acknowledge that some of them were really significant and that I was bisexual. Not her goal at all. My mother wanted me to see a priest, but I told her there probably wouldn’t be a lot of objectivity there. So they went into denial for a few years and then I had another painful incident where my sister wanted me to go back into the closet. I refused so she made me say goodbye to my nephews. It was horrible, they were in tears and I was in tears and it was awful. Only recently have we begun to mend the situation. She came to our wedding, which was very healing. Another sister and my brother came also. What’s weird is that my siblings with daughters didn’t seem to mind so much, it’s the ones who had boys who somehow seemed to think the boys would catch it. I was like — then where did I catch it? I don’t remember any gay people around me as a kid.
PGN: Tell me about your activism. FE: I’d say it started around bisexuality in the late ’80s. It seemed to be a closeted part of the community back then and we were starting support groups and just trying to get the B in LGB. We weren’t even thinking about trans yet. That’s how it started, but I kind of think just being openly queer is an act of activism itself. Waking up my family and educating people just by being yourself. More recently, I’ve been doing a lot of spiritual development building within the Quaker community. I joined a spiritual formations group and we’ve committed to daily spiritual practice and started an accountability group. We read a book by Marcus Borg called “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time” that changed my attitude about The Bible. He really put it in context so Jesus seems much more human. Ideas like, Jesus would probably never have used language like “Our Father,” he would have said, “Popa,” changed the whole feel for me. I’d always been a little afraid of The Bible, because of how often it’s been used against me. I decided that I should probably get more familiar with it so that it couldn’t be used in ways that I thought were inappropriate. I started doing visualizations where you place yourself in the stories of The Bible. Visualize the sights and the sounds and the smells and that’s how I ended up becoming involved with Occupy Philadelphia. In one of the visualizations, I asked Jesus, “What do you think about it, what would you do?” And he said, “I would be there!” So I went. I lived in the interfaith tent during the occupation.
PGN: Interesting. FE: Before that, I was led to the conference on fracking at the synagogue on Broad Street and that changed me as well. I realized that the carbon footprint from my ceramic work is pretty high and it made me feel really uncomfortable as a potter. Thinking that my art was adding to the poisoning of our water made me stop doing what I thought was my calling. It’s been freeing laying down that part of my life.
PGN: I was reading about your ceramic “face jugs,” which have a history from when slaves were unable to have tombstones and used face jugs instead. Did it bother you being a white guy doing African-American art? FE: Well, I didn’t even know there was a history behind them at first. I just was trying to challenge myself and instead of making pottery with faces by sticking clay on the outside, I altered the clay by pushing out from the inside. The only awkwardness was in that the first pieces were ugly! Not what I had in my mind for them to look like. PGN: Who would you call to bail you out of jail? FE: I’ve done a lot of work with the Earth Quaker Action Team and they have lawyers on speed dial. You have the numbers written right on you so if something happens you know whom to call. Outside of that, I’d call my husband, though he’d probably appreciate it if I told him ahead of time that I was putting myself at risk.
PGN: Favorite piece? FE: There’s a big pot called “Flow” that I did, that looks like a big sea creature. It’s a significant-sized piece and so many things can go wrong along the way, but that came out perfectly. To me it looks like it’s really moving.
PGN: Best scar? FE: When I was in third grade, I played on a Little League team and this other kid called me a girl. We got into a fight and he bit me on the back shoulder: I still have the scar! I haven’t been a fan of baseball since.
PGN: If you could fly or breathe underwater, which would you prefer? FE: Oh fly. I love to travel and to be able to do it without leaving a carbon footprint would be lovely! [Laughs.] I’m getting ready to leave for Africa and that would be great if I could fly on my own!
PGN: A great travel experience? FE: The Great Wall of China. It’s like the Grand Canyon everywhere you look.
PGN: When did you and Lee get married? FE: We married in September 2009 in the Quaker meetinghouse. He’s the director of OperaDelaware. He’s getting ready to retire in May and then we’re finally going on our honeymoon.
PGN: Where are you headed? FE: We’re backpacking around the world. We got one-way tickets and expect to be gone for six months to a year, traveling to Australia, Singapore, Korea, Egypt, Denmark and China.
PGN: Words to live by? FE: If you fear something, look it in the eye and deal with it. There have been times in my life where I feared things and avoided them and it causes so much more pain in the long run. See fear as a challenge and opportunity for growth instead of as an obstacle. Unless it’s going to kill you … then run!
To suggest a community member for “Family Portrait,” write to [email protected].