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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
What is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
Next
Step in Evolution
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
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Harry Hay, Founder of the Mattachine Society and
the Radical Faeries is truly the "Father and Founder of the modern gay
movement."
Will Roscoe, another important founder of the gay movement as scholar
author, historian and philosopher of gay awareness, collected and wrote
about Hay's ideas in his seminal book Radically Gay. Harry Hay did not
write a book of his own, so Radically Gay (and Stuart Timmons biography
"Trouble With Harry") form the corpus of Harry Hay's
literary/philosophical output.
His thought is important. These are ideas that, I believe, arise from the very experience of being gay.
Roscoe provides a succinct summary. This piece from his book has been
reprinted and distributed multiple times through White Crane precisely
because it is so seminal to our collective thought.
From Harry Hay's Radically Gay, edited by Will Roscoe:
Harry Hay's Gay politics represent an alternative to
postmodernist, queer theory and dogmatic constructionism. Indeed, Hay
is the only contemporary Gay thinker who could be said to offer a
unified theory of Gayness — one that begins by defining its subject in
multidimensional terms and then accounts for its individual and
historical origins, its diverse forms and their history, the
psychosocial development of Gay individuals, and the nature and sources
of Gay oppression. Postmodernism offers at best a politics of
resignation, one that rejects the possibility of an "outside" to power,
of a subject-SUBJECT alternative to subject-OBJECT social relations,
and the means of getting there is through a politics that affirms Queer
identities and cultures.
Hay is not bothered if his ideas are called essentialist or if his
activism is deemed identity politics — he is happy to emphasize his
differences with social constructionism and Queer theory — provided
that the word radical precede these labels. The original meaning of
this word, "to the root," serves well to convey the underlying theme of
his philosophy and politics. The key principles of Harry's radical
essentialism can be summed up as follows:
It is, first and foremost, Gay-centered — a "situated knowledge" (to
borrow Donna Haraway's terminology) reflecting the social standpoint of
contemporary sexual minorities. It is not neutral on the question of
Queer well-being; it seeks to create knowledge that contributes to that
end.
It posits Gay presence rather than absence in the usual state of human society.
It conceives of its subject in multidimensional terms — not merely as
sexual preference but as a difference manifest in gender roles, social
identity, economic roles and sometimes religious roles, as well.
It seeks to tell history from the bottom up, using those documents,
records and artifacts that reveal the common experience of the largest
number of Queer folk and not only the discourse of elite heterosexuals
and social institutions.
It recognizes various levels of meaning — individual, social,
transcultural, and spiritual. It does not assume that the way an
individual describes herself will be identical to the institutional
definition of labels that have been applied to her.
It is multicultural and comparative. Rather than a unitary instance--
"the modern homosexual"-- it employs the notion of a family tree (like
Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance") to conceptualize the
relationship between the Queer identities and roles of different
cultures and historical periods.
It views history as a process of continuity-within-change rather than
as a series of sharply defined periods of ruptures. Concept/labels like
"Sodomite" and "Urning," "homosexual," and "Gay," have overlapped in
their usage. Neither can be defined without reference to the other.
It focuses on praxis. It seeks to analyze the interaction between
individuals and their societies and cultures. It looks for instances of
symbols and ideas in action as well as in discourse.
The mass coming-out that transformed the quiescent homophile movement
of the 1960s into the dynamic Lesbian/Gay liberation and civil rights
movements of the 1970s and 1980s was in large measure a function of
joining a community where a negative label could be replaced with an
affirmative identity. Hay's writings show that this was no accident.
The cultural minority model was a carefully thought out political
analysis and strategy on the part of the Mattachine founders.
Beacon Press (June 30, 1997) ISBN-10: 0807070815 / ISBN-13: 978-0807070819 Used with permission.
Will Roscoe is author/editor of numerous books,
including The Zuni Man-Woman, Changing Ones, Queer Spirits and Jesus
and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love.
see all his titles at amazon.com
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