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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
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
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 Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
"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
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
"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
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
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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The best gay sci-fi novel, in
my
opinion, is David
Gerrold's time travel classic The Man Who Folded
Himself.
The novel sets up a mind-bending and marvelous
hypothesis: with a time travel device it would be possible to go
ahead
to tomorrow and meet yourself.
That is what "folding" means.
And when you've folded yourself, of course, it is possible to have sex
with yourself and to become your own best friend and lover.
Gerrold's novel explores the implications of such a reality. Underlying
the psychological issue of fear of homosexuality (and the whimsical
question whether such sex would technically be masturbation and not
homosexual intercourse), there's a spiritual and mystical subtext. If
everybody in your life is a version of you at a different time in life
and/or with different circumstances, maybe YOU are God and the source
of it all, the One Being.
A wonderful book, a wonderful exploration of the fantasy of self-love
and narcissicism!
The gay angle flows right out of the sci-fi gimmick.
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The second best
gay sci-fi novel, if you'll pardon my audacity, is my Secret
Matter.
What the reader wants is for the sci-fi gimmick
and the gay theme of the story to intersect.
As entertaining as, say, a "generation ship" storiy is that includes
homosexual activity onboard (The Dark
Beyond the Stars by Frank Robinson, for example*), the gay angle
of the story doesn't necessarily intersect with the space journey that
is the sc-fi gimmick.
"Gay science fiction" sometimes just means a science fiction story with
a gay character.
Secret Matter
tells the story of a young gay man of the near future who's gotten a
job in an architectural firm helping with the rebuilding of San
Francisco after the "Big One" earthquake. Coincidentally (?),
"Visitors" in space ships show up soon after. And accidentally the
young architect intern meets and becomes enamored with one of the
Visitors--who curiously have turned out to look just like human beings,
though in general more attractive and alluring. Are they really from
outer space? Why have they come?
I can't give away the secrets, but the gay connection between the sweet
young lovers turns out to be
the source of the Visitors' secrecy AND their reason for coming to
Earth in the first place.
Secret Matter
is a delightful story with a very positive spin on what it means to be
gay. And it's a gay-sensitive religion interwoven into the plot.
Gay consciousness, you might say, comes from not taking a bite out of
Adam and Eve's apple!
What an enlightenment!
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Secret
Matter is
now
available for Kindle.
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Toby
Johnson's meditation on gay sci-fi, titled What Are You Looking For in A Gay Science Fiction
Novel?
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*While I criticized The
Dark Beyond the Stars for not having the sci-fi gimmick tie
directly
into the gay content of the plot, The
Dark Beyond the Stars is a WONDERFUL book. And it does draw
certain gay implications about living in all-encompassing gay community
as that parallels the enclosed "community" of a spaceship on a
generations long journey across galatic distances.
A notion Frank Robinson put out to describe that situation offers a
sexual ethic that, I think, would really improve the world and improve
individuals' self-image and sense of sexual fulfillment--remembering,
of course, to practice safe sex and NOT exchange disease.
The rule on the spaceship was that the first time anybody asks you to
have sex with them, you are morally bound to say "yes." The second time
they ask, they are morally
bound to accept "no" without rancor or judgment.
Such an ethic would cut through looksism and ageism and alter the
experience of sex from being one of conquest and importuning to one of
shared experience and satisfaction of longing and curiosity. This seems
like such a gay/queer/homosexual ideal!
Frank M. Robison's The Dark Beyond
the Stars indeed derives a gay-affirming, life-affirming message
from its sci-fi gimmick.
The Dark Beyond the
Stars won the Gay Sci-Fi Lambda
Literary Award in 1992, the year after Secret Matter won (in a tie with
Mercedes Lackey's Magic's Price.
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Also nominated with
Robinson's book in 1992 was Mirage
by Perry Brass.
Brass is author of 14 some titles, many of which count as "Gay Sci-fi."
Most have spiritual and ethical messages woven into stories often
gritty with gay male erotic sexuality.
The intertwining of sexuality and "post-religious/trans-religious"
spirituality is a hallmark both of gay thought and of modern
science-fiction.
Perry Brass's multitude of books are of interest to anybody who is
reading this page.
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And, of course, any
discussion of great sci-fi has to include Arthur C. Clarke.
(There is a page on this site devoted
to Clarke.)
Childhood's End
served as a model for me in crafting Secret
Matter.
Indeed, I've sometimes thought Childhood's
End formed the basis for my own understanding of enlightened
spirituality.
I've noted in my non-fiction title The
Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell that
Clarke's novel seems to perfectly parallel the
evolutionary
spiritual vision of the scientist/mystic Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin.
And apparently without Clark's knowing of Teilhard's ideas.
And Clarke's The City and the Stars (and
its original version called Against
the Fall of Night) presents a wonderful high-tech,
computer-based version of the Hindu notion of reincarnation. Clarke's
sci-fi vision of the future city of Diaspar wonderfully explicates
prescientific mystical visions of how consciousness operates.
To Clarke's great acclaim, these novels, though written half a
century ago, are still current and read like they were just written.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
truly is a visionary.
See my article on Childhood's End titled "Karellen was a Homosexual"
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