Contact Us
Table of Contents
Search Site
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
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
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
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
"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
|
Being Gay at the
California Institute of Asian Studies (C.I.A.S.)/California Institute
of Integral Studies (C.I.I.S.)
I read about the Queer@CIIS listserv in the Fall 2008 "CIIS today"
Newsletter.
My name is Toby Johnson; I'm listed in the CIIS files under my full
name Edwin Clark Johnson, Class of 1978.
I go back quite a long way in Institute history. I graduated with the
first PhD in what was called the Dept of Integral Counseling at the
time; the school was still C.I.A.S.. I was in the "accreditation class"
that was interviewed and monitored by the WASC committee for Institute
accreditation.
I actually started at CIAS in 1970. I certainly wasn't the first gay
student at the Institute, but I was very consciously part of the
Stonewall generation and was very openly gay at school--and at a time
when there weren't other gay students around.
I did classwork for my MA in comparative religions that first year.
Then spent the next year working as a "hippie carpenter and general
factotum" for one of the popular
professors at CIAS at the time, and volunteering with the San
Francisco Gay Counseling
Service/Gay Rap, a fledgling gay social service agency.
I went off to Napa State Hospital the next year and got a license as a
Psychiatric Technician, then came back to the City and worked at Mt
Zion Hospital Psych Emergency Unit. Then went back to CIAS and
completed my thesis (under Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri & Bishop
Nippo Syaku) and
started in on a doctoral program in the Dept of Counseling. (By that
time, Paul Herman and Vern Haddick were openly gay faculty members.)
---
Both my Masters Thesis and my Doctoral Dissertation and my first book
and my fifth book were titled The Myth of the Great Secret;
that is a
central concept in my understanding of the world: there's a secret we
are always looking to uncover, and it's the driving force of our lives
as individual human beings and, collectively, as incarnations of
consciousness. The wise and wonderful, ever-cheerful and laughing
Nichiren Buddhist teacher Nippo Syaku taught a course on the wisdom of
sunyata,"emptiness," in a class on Nagarjuna, author of the text,
MulaMadhymaka Karikas, and one of the founders of the Mahayana
tradition.
 Influenced
by Bishop Syaku and the textbook for the course (Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning
by Frederick Streng), The Myth of
the Great Secret, in all its incarnations, has
been about Nagarjuna's notion of the emptiness of meaning in religious
doctrine and medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart's idea that
ultimate truth--the "Godhead" as God-in-itself, not as thought about in
human's minds--is absolutely unknowable. All we can possibly know about
"ultimate truth" is metaphors that hint at it, but never communicate
it. It's a secret, a great secret.
---
From the phone counseling service onward, I was part of
the
"gay-oriented psychotherapy" movement in the Bay Area (under the
influence of Don Clark, Ph.D.) I was in the first class to offer
services through the Institute's own counseling service; and was
effectively the male "gay-identified counselor" in the program that
first year; there were also a couple of lesbians on the staff at the
beginning. I then did an internship at The Tenderloin Clinic, a
gay-identified mental health clinic downtown (that had indirectly
evolved out of the activism of the Gay Counseling Service/Gay Rap
volunteers). I graduated with a PhD in 1978. In those days, graduation
(which was held at the Ashram out in the Richmond District) was always
on the same day as the Gay Pride Parade. I remember running from one
event to the other. So I got a pretty gay degree out of the Institute.
I left San Francisco in 1981--first spending the summer at Southern
Dharma Foundation, a meditation center outside Asheville, NC that was
established by a lesbian couple who were in my Institute class, then
returning to my hometown of San Antonio TX. I was THE "Gay Therapist"
in San Antonio for a few years, using my MFCC license gained at CIIS.
In the late 80s, my partner, Kip Dollar, and I moved to Austin and ran
the gay community bookstore there for seven years. Then moved to the
Rocky Mountains and ran a small B&B for a few years, then brought
that operation back to Texas to a little town outside Austin. By the
way, we're celebrating our 25th anniversary next spring. When we had
the bookstore in Austin we were fairly high-profile characters in the
local community and so got called on to advocate for gay relationships;
we were the first male couple to register as Domestic Partners in Texas
in 1993.
I am also a writer and have written several books on Gay Spirituality.
And from 96-2003 was editor/publisher of White Crane: A Quarterly
Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. Some of my books, I know, are in the
Institute Library.
While I was at the Institute that first year, I came across a notice on
the bulletin board (in the original bldg on 21st and Delores) that
Joseph Campbell was giving a program at the Mann Ranch Seminars in
Ukiah. I signed up for the
seminar and applied for a work-scholarship (I was a poor hippie
flower-child in those days). As a result of that, I was invited to come
early to help clean up the building; Campbell also arrived early. And I
had the opportunity to meet and befriend him. I corresponded with
Campbell for nearly a decade and was part of the crew that regularly
worked his public programs when he was in the Bay Area.
Toby Johnson at the
Mann Ranch 1973
I only slightly tongue-in-cheek fancy myself "Joe Campbell's apostle to
the gay community." My books are generally about how Campbell's
comparative religions model makes sense of myth and religion in ways
that queer, gay and lesbian people can embrace because it transcends
the old time understandings of religion and allows us to drop the
nonsense.
I'm living back in Texas again these days; we came back to San Antonio
to
watch over Kip's elderly mother. I'm working as assistant to the
Publisher of Lethe Press and White Crane Books, doing freelance editing
and book layout/design for this small gay press that specializes in gay
spiritualities. Kip and I have recently moved to Austin.
I was at CIAS/CIIS at a pivotal time in the school's history. (I
actually have two doctoral diplomas: one showing CIAS as the name of
the school; the other CIIS.) I think my experience demonstrates a
gay-positive attitude at the school stretching way back to the
beginnings.
Coincidentally, as an undergraduate I was a fellow student in the
Honors Program at St Louis University with Institute professor Charlene
Spretnak; I suspect we both ended up with interests in comparative
religions and new paradigm thinking as a result of an honors class in
Jungian interpretation of literature.
And Randy Conner and I are old friends from Austin days.
I'm impressed to see Queer@CIIS.
|
