Johnson, PhD, Edwin Clark (Toby), Catholic monk turned activist, psychotherapist and spiritual writer, was born in 1945 in San Antonio TX. He attended Catholic parochial school at St. Peter's, Prince of the Apostles in Alamo Heights, and then high school at Central Catholic High School (CCHS), the college prep school associated with St. Mary's University, both run by the Brothers of Mary (Marianist). A writing teacher at Central Catholic, Bro. Martin McMurtrey, S.M., changed the lives of many students, including novelist Whitley Strieber, spiritual writer Toby Johnson, college president Larry Goodwin, and Henry Cisneros, beloved former mayor of San Antonio, by teaching them to think and write clearly and coherently.
The most prominent and successful writer among Bro. McMurtrey's first--star--class of expository writing students was Whitley Strieber, the prolific novelist and autobiographer who has helped bring attention to the mysterious experience of alien abduction and other inexplicable phenomena in human consciousness. Toby Johnson and Whitley Strieber were boyhood buddies, carpool mates, and fellow fans of the esoteric, the mystical, and the fantastic. Bro. McMurtrey's lessons about the nature of metaphor and allusion, and Strieber's fascination with the mysterious prepared Johnson for his understanding the nature of religion according to Joseph Campbell a few years later.
Johnson entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite. With the ’Vites, he was in the first class of students at the then newly-formed Catholic Theological Union, (a consortium connecte with the
University of Chicago Divinity School, made up of the Theologates of three religious orders, the Passionists, the Franciscans, and the Servites). Johnson was fortunate to study under the influential Scripture scholars Barnabas Ahern, C.P. and John Dominic Crossan, both of whom--in very different ways--changed how the modern world understands the nature of sacred writings.
Here he is (on right) with his friend Tom Sheerin
dressed as seminarians with Roman collars,
for an anti-war demonstration.
Notice the "halo" over Tom's head!
After a year in Chicago, Johnson worked in a Hospital Chaplaincy summer training at Metropolitan State Psychiatric Hospital in southern Los Angeles; that summer, in the "hothouse" of the mental hospital, he experienced the psychological breakthrough known in gay lingo as "coming out." Coincidentally (?!?) that was the summer of 1969; Johnson's personal "coming out" was within weeks of the national "coming out" of the gay world at Stonewall.
After that life-changing summer, he did not return to C.T.U., but remained in Southern California at the Servite novitiate in Riverside. Another life-changing psycho-spiritual event happened to him at the Servite Priory there (also known as Benedict Castle); the story of that enlightening "mystical experience" is told elsewhere in this website. (Johnson was honored to have befriended Roy Neuner, Allan Pinka (Oct 6, 1947 - Jan 4, 1989), Charlie Ruffner and Tom Sheerin during those years--all now deceased.)
After leaving seminary in 1970, Toby Johnson moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Asian Studies ( later renamed the California Insttitute of Integral Studies, C.I.I.S.) from which he received a master's in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."
Johnson is pleased to identify his roots as Northern Californian, San Franciscan gay hippie. He actually lived on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in the early 70s (admittedly a few years after the "Summer of Love" by which time the neighborhod had gone into decline). The photos of the familiar Haight-Ashbury sign at that intersection frequently show a Queen Anne Victorian turret on the apartment building in the background. That was Toby Johnson's apartment.
First as a peer-counselor and then licensed professional, Johnson worked as a gay-oriented psychotherapist in San Francisco in the mid-70s. As a member of the D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance ("Dykes And Faggots Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism") and spokesperson for the Gay Mental Health Task Force of San Francisco's Health Department, he was instrumental in the adoption of a Gay Client's Bill of Rights, guaranteeing access to gay or gay-sensitive health care providers--a notion that, subsequently, had major effects in AIDS-related services.
Toby's boyfriend Bill organized a surprise birthday party
in August 1979. This photo was taken at that party
In the late-70s, he teamed with Harvard-trained sociologist Toby Marotta in producing Marotta's books, The Politics of Homosexuality and Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67, and in working in a federally-funded ethnographic study of gay teenage prostutition.
In 1981, Johnson returned to his hometown where he practiced as an openly gay therapist and served as co-chair of the San Antonio Gay Alliance. Toby and partner Kip Dollar organized Gay Pride celebrations, worked with fledgling AIDS Foundations, and helped found gay business societies in both San Antonio and Austin. From 1988 to 1994, Johnson and Dollar ran Liberty Books, the lesbian and gay community bookstore in Austin. Partners since 1984, they were the first male couple registered as domestic partners in Travis County, TX.
Johnson is author of three autobiographical accounts of spiritual development: The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness about his discovering a modern understanding of religion; In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld about his experiences--and interpretation of events as a religion scholar--in the study of teenage prostitution; and The Myth of the Great Secret (revised edition): An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell which added substantial anecdotal material about his mentor.
Toby looks like actor Ben Kingsley and so, by extension, Mahatma Gandhi. In 1996, Toby participated in an Earthwatch expedition to a small town in India. In this picture, he's wearing an Indian dhoti, the garment Gandhi often wore as an expression of solidarity with the traditional native peoples of India.
Toby Johnson is author of three gay novels: Plague: A Novel About Healing, Secret Matter, and Getting Life in Perspective. Secret Matter, a sci-fi, romantic comedy about truth-telling and gay identity featuring a retelling of the Genesis myth with a gay-positive outcome, won a Lambda Literary Award in 1990 and in 1999 was a nominee to the Gay Lesbian Science-Fiction Hall of Fame, the first year of the award. He collaborated with historian, anthropologist Walter L. Williams on the novel Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo. And co-edited, with Steve Berman, publisher of Lethe Press, an anthology of gay-positive stories, Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.
He is also author of Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe. From 1996 to 2003, he was Editor and Publisher of White Crane: A Quarterly Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality.
Johnson's central idea is that as outsiders with non-gender-polarized perspective homosexuals play an integral role in the evolution of consciousness--especially regarding the understanding of religion as myth and metaphor--and that for many homosexuals gay identity is a transformative ecological, spiritual, and even mystical vocation.
Bibliography:
The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness (Morrow, 1982)
In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld (Morrow, 1983)
The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell (second edition, Celestial Arts, 1992)
Plague: A Novel About Healing (Alyson, 1987)
Secret Matter (Lavender Press, 1990), reissued by Lethe Press in a revised and expanded version, 2004
Getting Life in Perspective (Lavender Press, 1991), reissued by Lethe Press, 2008
Gay Spirituality (Alyson, 2001), reissued by Lethe Press/White Crane Books, 2004
Gay Perspective (Alyson 2003)
Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo, with Walter L. Williams (Lethe Press, 2006)
Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling, with Steve Berman (White Crane Books, 2006)
With Toby Marotta:
The Politics of Homosexuality (Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67 (Morrow, 1982)
