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Toby Johnson's books: 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 PLAGUE: A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
Articles and Excerpts: The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate What Jesus said about Gay
Rights Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium "It's Always About You" The Joseph Campbell Connection, "The Evolution of Gay Identity" "St. John of the Cross & Religious Articulations of the
Secret Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil Allah
Hu: "God is present here" 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 How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
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Alien Abduction
Whitley Strieber, author of one of the first and most important books on alien abduction was a close high school buddy of Toby Johnson's. Whitley has a wonderful website at UnknownCountry.com As high school students, Whitley and Toby were both fascinated by themes in science fiction novels. (See Toby's piece In Honor of Sir Arthur C. Clarke ). Whitley has offered a much more subtle and intelligent interpretation of this phenomenon in his various books, including Communion. Toby Johnson has thought a lot about this phenomenon, in great part because of his long friendship with Strieber. These surprisingly widespread abduction experiences are very much like religious experience. What is particularly noteworthy is that people do not so much experience being abducted as they remember having been abducted. The memory appears without the event itself having happened consciously. It is like an intuition of something from the collective mind. What if a kind of telepathic/empathetic connection between conscious beings is a real, scientifically explainable medium of communication that intelligent species all over the universe naturally evolve, like sight and hearing? What if the reason the S.E.T.I. and Ozma and such projects with their radio telescopes have not found signals from extraterrestrial races is because using TV and radio for communication is fairly primitive and is quickly evolved beyond in an intelligent planet’s maturation? What if, in fact, we are picking up signals from extraterrestrials, not with radiotelescopes, but with our brains. The signals come telepathically, psychically, seeming like ghostly apparitions of strange, frightening aliens wanting to perform medical experiments on us. Perhaps the alien abduction phenomenon represents planet Earth’s beginning to “hear” the psychic background noise of the universe (which is sentient beings’ wanting to know about each other). Or perhaps, even, there is a specific signal being beamed to us by a particular intelligent race, a message of interest and curiosity about us. And it is being received by some people and interpreted as memories of terrifying abduction experiences. Strange and nutty as the whole alien craze sometimes appears, it too has to be understood as a sign that something important is happening in human consciousness. There is a curious link to homosexuality, or at least to homosexual panic, in the fact that so many abduction experiences include a kind of high-tech sodomy with the dreaded anal probe. There is a whole subcategory within gay and lesbian literature of gay science fiction and a national organization of gay sci-fi fans. Many writers, including Perry Brass, Constantine Storm, Mercedes Lackey, David Gerrold (and the present author, you know), have crafted sci-fi myths that give spiritual significance to gay experience. Also among the science fiction mythopoets are San Francisco activist Sally Gearhart, sci-fi superstar Samuel Delany, and even Rock Hudson’s movie star pal (and gay scapegoat) George Nader. Read about Toby Johnson's award winning
soft sci fi romance Secret Matter
Toby Johnson, PhD is author of eight books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality. In addition to the novels featured elsewhere in this web site, Johnson is author of IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD and THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET (Revised edition): AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL. Johnson's Lammy Award winning book GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness was published in 2000. His Lammy-nominated book GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was published by Alyson in 2003.
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