Harry Hay would be 100 years old



Contact Us


Table of Contents


Search Site


home  Home


Google listing of all pages on this website


Site Map


Toby Johnson's Facebook page


Toby Johnson's YouTube channel


Toby Johnson on Wikipedia


Toby Johnson Amazon Author Page

Secure Site Comodo Seal

Secure site at

https://tobyjohnson.com



rainbow line

Also on this website:

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.



Toby Johnson's books:

Toby's books are available as ebooks from smashwords.com, the Apple iBookstore, etc.


Finding Your Own True Myth - The Myth of the Great Secret III

FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III


Gay Spirituality

GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness


Gay Perspective


GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe


Secret Matter


SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan


Getting Life

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods


The Fourth Quill

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil




Two Spirits
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams



charmed lives
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers


Myth of the Great Secret


THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell



In Search of God


IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey



Unpublished manuscripts


About ordering


Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series


rainbow line

  Toby has done five podcasts with Harry Faddis for The Quest of Life

rainbow line

  Articles and Excerpts:

Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness


Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"


About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996


The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate


A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality


Why gay people should NOT Marry


The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage


Toby and Kip Get Married


Wedding Cake Liberation


Gay Marriage in Texas


What's ironic



Shame on the American People


The "highest form of love"


rainbow line


Gay Consciousness


Why homosexuality is a sin


The cause of homosexuality


The origins of homophobia


Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness


What is homosexuality?


What is Gay Spirituality?


My three messages


What Jesus said about Gay Rights


Queering religion


Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men


Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"?


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


The Gay Succession


Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?


The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter


Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium


Easton Mountain Retreat Center


Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism


The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey


The upsidedown book on MSNBC


rainbow line


Enlightenment


"It's Always About You"



The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara


Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara


You're Not A Wave



Joseph Campbell Talks about Aging



What is Enlightenment?



What is reincarnation?



How many lifetimes in an ego?



Emptiness & Religious Ideas



Experiencing experiencing experiencing



Going into the Light



Meditations for a Funeral



Meditation Practice



The way to get to heaven



Buddha's father was right



What Anatman means



Advice to Travelers to India & Nepal



The Danda Nata & goddess Kalika



Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva



John Boswell was Immanuel Kant



Cutting edge realization



The Myth of the Wanderer



Change: Source of Suffering & of Bliss



World Navel



What the Vows Really Mean



Manifesting from the Subtle Realms



The Three-layer Cake & the Multiverse


The est Training and Personal Intention



Effective Dreaming in Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven


rainbow line

Gay Spirituality


Curious Bodies


What Toby Johnson Believes


The Joseph Campbell Connection


The Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)


Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy


The Two Loves


The Nature of Religion


What's true about Religion


Being Gay is a Blessing


Drawing Long Straws


Freedom of Religion


rainbow line


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


Priestly Sexuality


Having a Church to Leave


Harold Cole on Beauty


rainbow line


Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption


Not lashed to the prayer-post


Monastic or Chaste Homosexuality


Is It Time to Grow Up? Confronting the Aging Process


Notes on Licking  (July, 1984)


Redeem Orlando


Gay Consciousness changing the world by Shokti LoveStar


Alexander Renault interviews Toby Johnson



rainbow line


Mystical Vision


"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


No Stealing


Next Step in Evolution


The New Myth


The Moulting of the Holy Ghost


Gaia is a Bodhisattva


rainbow line


The Hero's Journey


The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016


The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)


You're On Your Own


Superheroes


rainbow line


Seeing Differently


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


Facing the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom


What are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?


rainbow line


The Vision


The mystical experience at the Servites'  Castle in Riverside


A  Most Remarkable Synchronicity in Riverside


The Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis


rainbow line

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


rainbow line


The Secret of the Clear Light


Understanding the Clear Light


Mobius Strip


Finding Your Tiger Face


How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated


rainbow line


Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey, and the modern Gay Hero-- a five part presentation on YouTube


rainbow line


About Alien Abduction


In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke


Karellen was a homosexual


The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance


Intersections with the movie When We Rise


More about Gay Mental Health


Psych Tech Training


Toby at the California Institute


The Rainbow Flag


Ideas for gay mythic stories


rainbow line


People


Kip and Toby, Activists


Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.


Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement


About Hay and The New Myth


About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"


About Michael Talbot, gay mystic


About Fr. Bernard Lynch


About Richard Baltzell


About Guy Mannheimer


About David Weyrauch


About Dennis Paddie


About Ask the Fire


About Arthur Evans


About Christopher Larkin


About Mark Thompson


About Sterling Houston


About Michael Stevens


The Alamo Business Council


Our friend Tom Nash


Second March on Washington


The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement of Spirituality"


rainbow line

Book Reviews



Be Done on Earth by Howard E. Cook


Pay Me What I'm Worth by Souldancer


The Way Out by Christopher L  Nutter


The Gay Disciple by John Henson


Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry


Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth A. Burr


Extinguishing the Light by B. Alan Bourgeois


Over Coffee: A conversation For Gay Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson


Dark Knowledge by Kenneth Low


Janet Planet by Eleanor Lerman


The Kairos by Paul E. Hartman


Wrestling with Jesus by D.K.Maylor


Kali Rising by Rudolph Ballentine


The Missing Myth by Gilles Herrada


The Secret of the Second Coming by Howard E. Cook


The Scar Letters: A Novel by Richard Alther


The Future is Queer by Labonte & Schimel


Missing Mary by Charlene Spretnak


Gay Spirituality 101 by Joe Perez


Cut Hand: A Nineteeth Century Love Story on the American Frontier by Mark Wildyr


Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman


Nights at Rizzoli by Felice Picano


The Key to Unlocking the Closet Door by Chelsea Griffo


The Door of the Heart by Diana Finfrock Farrar


Occam’s Razor by David Duncan


Grace and Demion by Mel White


Gay Men and The New Way Forward by Raymond L. Rigoglioso


The Dimensional Stucture of Consciousness by Samuel Avery


The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love by Perry Brass


Love Together: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication by Tim Clausen


War Between Materialism and Spiritual by Jean-Michel Bitar


The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal


Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal


The Invitation to Love by Darren Pierre


Brain, Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration by Daniel A Helminiak


A Walk with Four Spiritual Guides by Andrew Harvey


Can Christians Be Saved? by Stephenson & Rhodes


The Lost Secrets of the Ancient Mystery Schools by Stephenson & Rhodes


Keys to Spiritual Being: Energy Meditation and Synchronization Exercises by Adrian Ravarour


In Walt We Trust by John Marsh


Solomon's Tantric Song by Rollan McCleary


A Special Illumination by Rollan McCleary


Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott


Fruit Basket by Payam Ghassemlou


Internal Landscapes by John Ollom


Princes & Pumpkins by David Hatfield Sparks


Yes by Brad Boney


Blood of the Goddess by William Schindler


Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom by Jeffrey Kripal


Evolving Dharma by Jay Michaelson


Jesus in Salome's Lot by Brett W. Gillette


The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson


The Vatican Murders by Lucien Gregoire


"Sex Camp" by Brian McNaught


Out & About with Brewer & Berg
Episode One: Searching for a New Mythology



The Soul Beneath the Skin by David Nimmons


Out on Holy Ground by Donald Boisvert


The Revotutionary Psychology of Gay-Centeredness by Mitch Walker


Out There by Perry Brass


The Crucifixion of Hyacinth by Geoff Puterbaugh


The Silence of Sodom by Mark D Jordan


It's Never About What It's About by Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja


ReCreations, edited by Catherine Lake


Gospel: A Novel by WIlton Barnhard


Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey by Fenton Johnson


Dating the Greek Gods
by Brad Gooch


Telling Truths in Church by Mark D. Jordan


The Substance of God by Perry Brass


The Tomcat Chronicles by Jack Nichols


10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives by Joe Kort


Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love by Will Roscoe


The Third Appearance by Walter Starcke


The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann


Surviving and Thriving After a Life-Threatening Diagnosis by Bev Hall


Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald Long

An Interview with Ron Long


Queering Creole Spiritual Traditons by Randy Conner & David Sparks

An Interview with Randy Conner


Pain, Sex and Time by Gerald Heard


Sex and the Sacred by Daniel Helminiak


Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan


Rising Up by Joe Perez


Soulfully Gay by Joe Perez


That Undeniable Longing by Mark Tedesco


Vintage: A Ghost Story by Steve Berman


Wisdom for the Soul by Larry Chang


MM4M a DVD by Bruce Grether


Double Cross by David Ranan


The Transcended Christian by Daniel Helminiak


Jesus in Love by Kittredge Cherry


In the Eye of the Storm by Gene Robinson


The Starry Dynamo by Sven Davisson


Life in Paradox by Fr Paul Murray


Spirituality for Our Global Community by Daniel Helminiak


Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society by Robert A. Minor


Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences by Glen O'Brien


Queering Christ by Robert Goss


Skipping Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage


The Flesh of the Word by Richard A Rosato


Catland by David Garrett Izzo


Tantra for Gay Men by Bruce Anderson


Yoga & the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main


Simple Grace by Malcolm Boyd


Seventy Times Seven by Salvatore Sapienza


What Does "Queer" Mean Anyway? by Chris Bartlett


Critique of Patriarchal Reasoning by Arthur Evans


Gift of the Soul by Dale Colclasure & David Jensen


Legend of the Raibow Warriors by Steven McFadden


The Liar's Prayer by Gregory Flood


Lovely are the Messengers by Daniel Plasman


The Human Core of Spirituality by Daniel Helminiak


3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke


Religion and the Human Sciences by Daniel Helminiak


Only the Good Parts by Daniel Curzon


Four Short Reviews of Books with a Message


Life Interrupted by Michael Parise


Confessions of a Murdered Pope by Lucien Gregoire


The Stargazer's Embassy by Eleanor Lerman


Conscious Living, Conscious Aging by Ron Pevny


Footprints Through the Desert by Joshua Kauffman


True Religion by J.L. Weinberg


The Mediterranean Universe by John Newmeyer


Everything is God by Jay Michaelson


Reflection by Dennis Merritt


Everywhere Home by Fenton Johnson


Hard Lesson by James Gaston


God vs Gay? by Jay Michaelson


The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path by Jay Michaelson


Roxie & Fred by Richard Alther


Not the Son He Expected by Tim Clausen


The 9 Realities of Stardust by Bruce P. Grether


The Afterlife Revolution by Anne & Whitley Strieber


AIDS Shaman: Queer Spirit Awakening by Shokti Lovestar


Facing the Truth of Your Life by Merle Yost


The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J Kripal


Secret Body by Jeffrey J Kripal


In Hitler's House by Jonathan Lane


Walking on Glory by Edward Swift


The Paradox of Porn by Don Shewey


Is Heaven for Real? by Lucien Gregoire


Enigma by Lloyd Meeker


Scissors, Paper, Rock by Fenton Johnson




Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:




Gay
Perspective cover
Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe


Gay Perspective audiobook
Gay Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated by Matthew Whitfield. Click here







Gay
Spirituality cover
Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness



gay-spirituality-audiobook
Gay Spirituality   is now available as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by John Sipple. Click here








charmed lives
Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman







secret matter
Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated







Getting Life
Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance





Getting
Life in Perspective audiobook
Getting Life in Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated by Alex Beckham. Click here 






The Fourth Quill

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE




johnson-the-fourth-quill-audiobook
The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here






Two
Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams




Two Spirits
audiobookTwo Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here






Finding Your Own True Myth - The Myth of the Great Secret III
Finding Your Own True Myth:
What I Learned from Joseph Campbell

The Myth of the Great Secret III








In
Search of God in the Sexual Underworld
In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld










The Myth of the Great Secret II

The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.




rainbow line



Toby Johnson's titles are available in other ebook formats from Smashwords.

Radically Gay: The Life & Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay

The New Myth of “Spiritual, not Religious” Through the Gay Window



Toby Johnson


Harry-Hay-Trouble_cover        The hundred years since Harry Hay’s birth have seen a revolution in human society. The Universe has been discovered, both the incredibly tiny: particles within particles, and the unimaginably huge: galaxies beyond galaxies. The human race has looked back on the Earth from the moon; we have achieved a perspective no human being has ever been able to before. For gay people the changes have been enormous. Charles Dickens’ opening sentence from A Tale of Two Cities truly applies: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

        

        It is considered an important step in psychological development to be able to hold two seemingly opposing propositions in mind at the same time. It forces you to rise to a higher perspective in which best and worst are not in conflict, but somehow coexist as aspects of one another. You see two worlds: the ordinary world and the one from the higher perspective.

        

        This bifurcation of the world is at the heart of gay consciousness and it underlies—I would argue—“the New Myth,” the stance of “Spiritual, not religious,” and “the Gay Window.”


        — — —


        Heterosexual people experience the world as radically divided between male and female. You are only one or the oFloating manther and can’t be both. They celebrate the conflict: vive la difference. But they also call it the “battle of the sexes.”


Floating man
        Floating Man by Bill Biggers


        Gay people grow up learning to see the heterosexual world because it’s all around us, but, I think, we don’t experience the difference. Our attraction is not across the male female divide. In fact, we don’t seem to take the divide very seriously. We can be both male and female at the same time—or neither! In Harry Hay’s Radical Faerie Proposals for the March on Washington Organizing Meeting, Harry talks about what he calls our “spiritual neitherness.”

        

        Our attraction is to another self, another Subject, to use Hay’s famous expression. Our attraction is not to opposites but to sames; our beloved is not an object to our subject, but another subject like us.

        

        We grow up discovering that there are two worlds—like the two cities in Dickens’ title—the world everybody else lives in and then the one that has homosexuality in it. As we grow up, we might discover the real gay subculture that is a homosexual world. But always there’s that distinction between the world “normal people” live in and the world we live in because we understand about sex and homosexuality.

        

        One of the traits of the “gay wise man archetype” is understanding homosexual and sexual dynamics that other people don’t—and won’t—see, and therefore being a teller of truth. A funny and poignant version of that gay wise man is the mad drag queen with a heart of gold—a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford character who is able to speak the truth that no one else dares to say.

        — — —


         This bifurcation of worlds, I think, appears also in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who seems to have been a homosexual, as the phenomenon and the noumenon, the consensual world people generally experience and the real world. It also appears in the notion of the bifurcation of nature by homosexual astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, the idea that the writing desk is this thing made of wood that is solid and the scientific reality that it’s actually mostly empty space with tiny atoms great distances apart on the atomic scale.

        
Gay Perspective
        That gay people are raised, inadvertently, by straight society to be able to rise to a perspective—the outsider’s perspective—and see a straight world AND a gay world and to understand the straight world as but one way of viewing this is what I have called “Gay Perspective” and which Harry Hay called “the gay window.”

        

        Through that gay window we are likely to see religion in a different way. Being able to understand religion from over and above, from the outsider perspective is something that, personally, I learned from reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

        

        I was a Catholic seminarian when I was assigned that book for a college course on Jungian interpretation of literature. I was dealing with understanding my sexual feelings and identity at that same time. The comparative religions approach demonstrated by Campbell helped immensely as I struggled to reconcile my religiousness and my sexual deviance. I saw that by rising to a perspective the two seemingly conflicting elements could actually coexist and in a way that made them both better and richer.

        

        Donald Boisvert wonderfully captured how the effort to deal with one’s homosexuality inspires s kind of sanctity.

        

Sanctity and Male DesireHow could I possibly ever reconcile [my attraction to other boys] with some grand, altruistic life purpose? This question, I believe, lies at the heart of the gay vocation in the world, and of gay spirituality and sanctity more specifically. It summons us to consider how and why we do what we do, and the reason that our vocation so often lies in areas of beauty, creativity, and service. Much has been written about the fertile manifestations of our marginality. I will put forth a radical proposition, though it is historically impervious to proof.

        

    I venture to say that a significant, if not a predominant, number of male saints have been homosexual, that they have struggled with the meaning of same-sex desire in their lives, most often for the person of Christ, that some succumbed to their sexual urges, while others chose quite consciously to sublimate their needs in works of heroic Christian virtue and fortitude. And, furthermore, that such needs and desires, as evil, sinful, or condemnable as they were thought to be by the saints themselves or by any number of  “godly” others, have been the core, fundamental forces for good, motivating, sustaining, nourishing, and inspiring these great works. (pp. Sanctity and Male Desire 149-150)

        

        In his Preface to Queer Spirits, Will Roscoe says:


         Queer Spirits -- Will Roscoe


Don’t we lead mythical lives? Even the most unassuming of us can tell amazing stories of victory against overwhelming odds, self-respect forged out of mind-boggling hate, invention and wit mothered by inescapable necessity. When Joseph Campbell spoke of the hero’s journey he should have used us as his example—although he never did. We’re the ones who arrive at wholeness after an oblique journey to the margins of the social order and back again, who suffer inordinate wounds and are healed, who win the gift of “insider-outsider” vision and can therefore speak with authority to men and women alike.

        




        Some of you may know that I only partly tongue in cheek fancy myself Joseph Campbell“Joseph Campbell’s apostle to the gay community.” It isn’t so much Joe Campbell in particular that I want to champion, though he was, in fact, a wonderful fellow, but the stance of understanding religion and ultimate truth from a perspective over and above. I associate all this way of thinking with Campbell because he was my personal entry into it.

        



The Hero with a Thousand FacesBecause I had a read his book, I signed up as a work volunteer for a seminar he was giving the first year I moved to San Francisco; I ended up on the crew that worked his appearances in the Bay Area for the rest of the decade, and so was one of his “official followers” (something he wouldn’t have liked—he didn’t want to seem to be a guru—but he did like having people gush over how wonderful his ideas were, especially young men, like the son he did not have. His wife was a dancer and they chose not to have children for professional reasons. Remember, he taught at a girls’ school, Sarah Lawrence College so didn’t have male students. I was one of those bright-eyed young men who gushed.

        

        Campbell was interested in what he called “the new myth.” That is, now that humankind has developed a global culture with historical and cultural perspective, and can see that there are different religions around the world that are all terribly different, but are also just different manifestations of the same thing, how do we believe them?

        

        Could a “new myth” develop that includes and explains them all? Could there The Hero with a Thousand Facesbe a new world savior, like a Jesus or Buddha, who reconciles them all? Probably not. There are lots of messiahs these days and nobody takes them very seriously.

        

        But maybe the concept itself of how all the religions can be true at the same time even though they conflict mightily might itself be a higher meta-myth that makes overarching sense of religion even though the actual stories, myths and doctrines don’t make sense anymore in any literal way. We need a model which can explain all the behavior we observe, a theory that includes all the points on the curve.

        

      

Earthrise



        The image of the earth seen from the Moon, for Campbell, captured this new perspective as nothing else could.

        

        — — —


        I think gay people are naturals for this higher perspective on religion, as we are for a higher perspective on everything. Indeed, that’s a major characteristic of so-called gay consciousness—seeing through the gay window.

        

        This higher perspective that Campbell alluded to—and that I think is what satisfies his question about the new myth—has shown up in modern culture in the expression “Spiritual, not religious.” This expression, of course, can just mean that one doesn’t have any interest in religion and is sort of lazy about such issues, but doesn’t think of oneself as a bad person therefore. But it also tends to suggest that one feels a deeper moral sense and higher spiritual sense than the religion of “believers.”

        

       The Human Core of SpiritualityI want to acknowledge Daniel Helminiak with the insight that “spirituality” doesn’t require meditation without mythGod or any of the other elements of religion to exist. meditation without mythSpirituality is about human consciousness. Daniel is, of course, author of What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. He has many other books, let me mention Meditation without Myth; What I Wish They'd Taught Me in Church About Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for Peace.       

        


       





At the end of Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell wrote:

        

        The descent of the Occidental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their concentration today, at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. (Hero, p. 391)

        

        Since Campbell wrote those words in 1948 or so, the use of the word “man” has, of course, changed—in great part because of the women’s movement and sexual liberation, and the new sciences he wrote of have come to include ecology, brain science, and consciousness studies—even more about the nature of humankind.

        

        We’re only just coming to understand what all this stuff means, but certainly one way of reconciling all contradictory religions is by understanding them all as about human consciousness. God and the gods are metaphors for our own deepest identities. And we have to relate to “God” in a different way.

        

        I think Harry Hay’s idea that gay men relate Subject-subject, rather than subject-object, resonates with exactly this concept of God. “God” is not an other, but a reflection of deepest/highest Self. And so the way to relate to God is as self to self, subject to Subject. The way to relate to the world is to see it as a reflection and outflowering of one’s own consciousness.

        — — —

        

        I don’t know that Campbell had any direct influence on Harry Hay, but the comparative religions approach most definitely did. For, according to the story in Stuart Timmon’s book, one of Harry’s first encounters with the word homosexual and the idea of love of a like comrade, not an oppositely sexed wife, was with Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex.

        

        Edward Carpenter


Carpenter, like Campbell would a century later, viewed religion from over and above and observed that “Uranians” had played a pivotal role in the development of religion and continued to possess a kind of special insight.

   





     Carpenter and George Merrill

        The very idea of “Uranians” manifests this. In the way that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, so homosexuals —the 19th C sexologists proposed— are from Uranus. Ignoring the blatant pun, we can understand that Uranus was the most recently discovered planet; its discovery paralleled the discovery of homosexuality as a category of human being.

        

        — — —

        The story goes that as an 11 year old boy, Harry hung around the public library and had befriended the librarian. He’d discovered that there was a shelf of books in a locked bookcase—one with the word Sex emboldened on the spine. He convinced the librarian she should get one of these, then new, permanent waves in her hair and since the only time to do that was during library hours, he volunteered to spell her while she went down the street to the beauty shop. While she was gone, he got The Intermediate Sexthe key and opened the bookcase and there found Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex. So one of his earliest encounters with homosexuality was as a phenomenon of anthropology and religious history.

        

        Harry got caught, by the way, by the librarian when she arrived back with her new hairdo.

        

        I’d say, following Carpenter, that people we’d call homosexual or gay or queer—we have so many distinctions now because we’ve had time to think about the richness and variety of this form of non-heterosexual, non-breeding consciousness—are always on the cutting edge of the evolution of consciousness. We’re part of the prodigious transfer of the focal point of human wonder that Campbell correlated with the New Myth.

        
Buddha by Bill Biggers
        Buddha by Bill Biggers




Campbell’s wonderful retort to the accusation he must be an atheist was: “Anyone who believes in as many gods as I do can hardly be called an atheist.” But that’s an entirely different kind of not being an atheist. Indeed, such an overview includes being atheist too—or nontheist to use the Buddhistic term for transcending literal belief in the myths.


        — — —

        

      

 Kenneth Burr Kenneth Burr Coming out Coming HomeComing out Coming Home

I want to observe that there is another kind of bifurcation within the world of gay religion and gay spirituality. For some people, gay spirituality means getting gay people to go back to Church and become active within the religions of their upbringing. (e.g., Coming Out, Coming Home: Making Room for Gay Spirituality in Therapy by Kenneth A. Burr)

        

        MCC and the various gay affinity groups within the established churches represent this trend. The Radical Faeries, gay Wiccans, The Body Electric represent the other side of the bifurcation, rejecting traditional religious myths altogether and conjuring up our own gods and traditions.

        

        The comparative religions, “spiritual” approach does not have to reject conventional religion, though it does change how you understand the truth value. But on either side, the truth value has to be reevaluated. Gay people within MCC, for instance, for all they might seem to be “evangelical,” and scripture-based, still have to take the Bible with a grain of salt. They necessarily transcend traditional belief. You don’t have to abandon your religion, but you do have to understand it differently, more as an art form, like the opera or the ballet, that conveys beauty and meaningfulness, but not literal truth. As 21st century human beings, we’re simply beyond that.

         The One in All -- Stevee Postman
The One in All -- Stevee Postman
      

        This is the direction the whole human race must be moving in; we’re, as usual, up toward the front of the line. Remember the old joke that “when they’re running you out of town on a rail, get to the front and wave a baton and make it your parade.”

        

        I would say that in the long run the most important contribution of the gay rights movement is going to turn out to be the transformation of religion.

        

        I think Harry Hay would be very happy with that.

rainbow line

Toby Johnson, PhD is author of nine 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, four 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 and editor of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness. 

Johnson's book GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His  GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They remain in print.

FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual qualities of gay male consciousness.

 back to top


BACK to Toby's home page


valid html

Visitors
Essential SSL