In his recent essay for the Advocate, Peterson Toscano returns to familiar yet urgent terrain: the performance of identity under pressure. Titled simply Camouflage, the piece is equal parts memoir, cultural critique, and call to conscience. Toscano, a longtime chronicler of queer survival, unpacks how the impulse to “blend in” is often a capitulation to fear—and how it quietly shapes the lives of queer and trans people, especially in conservative spaces.
It begins with a green camo hat. “Once I put it on,” Toscano writes, “the cap seemed to summon brown and tan work pants, heavy boots, and a jacket meant for moving unseen in the woods.” As a fem gay man in rural Pennsylvania, Toscano uses camouflage quite literally—to avoid confrontation, to pass, to disappear. But the metaphor doesn’t stop at his wardrobe.
He traces this reflex to earlier shapeshifting: his Italian-American family assimilating into suburban whiteness, his own stint in the evangelical anti-gay world, and the performative masculinity he once learned through conversion therapy. “Like so many trying to blend into America’s melting pot,” he writes, “I learned how to hide who I was to survive.”
That line—to survive—is key. The essay isn’t just about a gay man wearing camo. It’s about what happens when self-preservation requires self-erasure. Toscano’s ability to name this tension—how survival sometimes asks us to mimic our oppressors—is what gives Camouflage its depth and sting.
But what makes this piece especially timely is how Toscano connects personal camouflage to collective betrayal. “Today, we are slipping backward,” he writes, pointing to the mounting attacks on trans people, immigrants, and activists. He doesn’t just lay blame on the far right. He calls out cisgender gay men, especially those who, after gaining rights and visibility, now attempt to distance themselves from the “T” in LGBTQ+. He reminds us of Barney Frank’s 2009 move to exclude trans protections from ENDA. He sees history repeating itself—again.
It’s a brave, unflinching critique from someone who knows firsthand what it’s like to be both closeted and complicit. And he doesn’t let himself off the hook: “Some, like me,” he admits, “must rebel against the temptation to camouflage ourselves and flaunt our differences, perhaps fully clad head to toe in designer rainbow camo.”
That mix of self-awareness and challenge is what makes Toscano’s voice so necessary. He isn’t just documenting injustice—he’s interrogating the subtle ways we absorb it, reenact it, and sometimes, reward it.
In a time when queer visibility feels both more normalized and more dangerous than ever, Camouflage reminds us that authenticity has always had a cost. And that some of us, if we’re not careful, will pay it with someone else’s dignity.
About Peterson Toscano
Peterson Toscano is a performance artist, Bible scholar, and queer climate advocate known for using storytelling and satire to explore issues of identity, faith, and justice. He survived 17 years of conversion therapy before coming out as gay and later co-founding BeyondExGay.com. His groundbreaking solo performance Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House offers a hilarious yet harrowing look at ex-gay programs (watch here). In Transfigurations–Transgressing Gender in the Bible, he uncovers gender-nonconforming characters hidden in plain sight within sacred texts (watch here). Learn more about his work at petersontoscano.com.