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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
is Gay Spirituality?
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
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"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
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
"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
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Toby Johnson
was asked to assist a student in writing a paper about homosexuality.
Here's the interview:
1. Just to establish a baseline, how did
you decide to write about homosexuality and psychological and spiritual
functioning? Were there any specific events leading to it, or people
you know, or is it just a view you feel strongly about?
I was raised deeply
religious and entered Catholic religious life after high school in the
early 1960s. In those days, children were kept very unaware of
sexuality. I had no idea that such a thing as "sex" even existed, I
think. It was in the context of religious life, as I grew older, that I
came to experience attractions and feelings that I'd later come to
think of as "gay." Because I was raised to be thoughtful and
conscientious and of pure motive, I always understood my feelings of
love and affection as part of my spiritual life.
During college, I studied
comparative religions; I was greatly influenced by the ideas of Joseph
Campbell, the religions scholar/mythologist who became famous in the
late 80s when Public Television featured him in a series of talks with
Bill Moyers called "The Power of Myth." I came to see religious myths
are lessons and techniques for teaching psychological maturity and
enlightened consciousness. The 1970s were a very psychotherapy-oriented
time; people routinely joined "encounter groups" and underwent
psychotherapy and counseling, the way they now join health clubs and
run marathons.
As a graduate student in
Theology, in 1969, I worked as a chaplain intern at a mental hospital
in southern Los Angeles county. I was exposed to psychiatry. In that
process, I came to understand the names for my sexual feelings and was
able to think of myself as gay in a very positive and psychologically
mature fashion. Because I had such a good experience of "coming
out" and understanding what gayness is AND a good experience of mental
health as a way of giving good service to needy people, I turned my
social service drive from religion to psychology. Over the 70s, I
worked in a state mental hospital, then a psychiatric emergency clinic
and studied for a PhD in Counseling Psychology. At the same time, while
I was in grad school, I actually met and befriended Joseph Campbell and
was part of the crew that worked his appearances in Northern California.
From high school on, I've
thought of myself as a writer and so naturally sought to get my
dissertation published. from that experience in the late 70s, I've gone
on to write some other more books, to work as a bookseller, running a
gay lesbian community bookstore, and now to co-manage a small gay press
with a specialization in a thoughtful books about spirituality and
psychological well-being mainly for gay men.
2) Briefly, what are your views about
homosexuality?
I think homosexuality is a
naturally occurring variation in "human nature" that must have evolved
because it is useful to the species. The fact that so many important
characters in history have been people we would now think of as
homosexual--from Socrates to Michelangelo to Isaac Newton to Alan
Turing to Dag Hammarskjold, to mention by a tiny number of the
multitude--is evidence of its serviceable function to humanity.
I think there are quite a
few different ways that gay people contribute--both personally and
collectively. I think simply by living good and useful lives, we
demonstrate that human beings don't have to reproduce and have children
to live successfully; in an overcrowded world this is a VERY important
message.
Traditionally people we'd
now call gay have been religious and spiritual leaders. Among Native
Americans, for instance, people called Two-spirits were the
medicinemen, healers, and guides among certain tribes--especially the
Plains Indians (like the Navajo). Two-spirits were people who were
believed to possess both a male and a female soul, so they could
understand both sides of humanity. This was seen as a divine gift.
Gay people have talents that
come from blending gender traits--we make good nurses, caregivers,
psychologists, counselors as well as artists and designers.
3) Many people view homosexuality as a
"disease" or a "disorder". How would you counter that?
I think a very difficult
step in psychological growth for a lot of heterosexual males is
learning how to cope with their developing sexual feelings for females.
It requires shift in friendship patterns as teenage boys cease being
buddies with other boys and become young men courting young women. For
many teenage boys, an important part of that maturation process
involves a rejection of sexual feelings for their buddies; that is, in
order to understand mature sexuality they need to break from their
boyish feelings for one another. One way to do that is to reject the
homosexual implication of their boyhood feelings.
I think that means that
"homophobia"--the fear and hatred of things gay--is part of growing up
for many men. (It is not so crucial an issue for girls becoming women
because women are not as focused sexually.)
I think the reason many
people view homosexuality as a "disease" or "disorder" is to justify
and make sense of those feelings of homophobia.
I also think, in general,
"other people's" sexual feelings are just baffling to us anyway. Sex is
something kept, perhaps appropriately, private. We don't talk about
these things with others. So anything different from our own feelings
may seem "a disorder" because we wouldn't do that.
Historically, the great
objection to homosexuality that we find in modern Christianity
developed after the time of the Black Death in Europe. So many people
died of the several waves of plague that the populace was expecting the
end of the world and many were giving up on the propagation of life.
Why have children if the end is near? So the Church and society had a
need to encourage people to rebuild the population--if only so there
would be workers for the fields and grow food. One way of doing that
was to blame the plagues on non-reproductive sex. Then the solution
would be reproductive sex. If God caused the plagues because people
were not procreating enough, then the answer to stopping the plagues
was to procreate more. It was at this time in history that, for
instance, the story in the bible of Sodom and Gomorrah came to be
interpreted as anti-homosexual. (There isn't actually anything about
homosexuality in the story in the Bible; it's about not recognizing
angels when they appear even disguised as foreigners.)
We've inherited that
population-encouraging strategy from the Middle Ages as though it were
central to the teachings of Jesus.
4) What do you think about how society has
treated homosexuals? To you, has the way homosexuals are treated by
society affect the way that they are given their rights? Are their
rights hindered by disagreement in the government or by society?
In the recent past,
homosexuals were still sometimes put in prison simply for being
homosexual. That is clearly wrong. In the more distant past,
homosexuals were burned alive. This still goes on in Islamic
Fundamentalist countries today.
So much evil has been done
against gay people--and so often in the name of religion.
Things have changed
dramatically in recent times. The evolution of rights of homosexuals
and women is one of the great signs of democracy at work. In our modern
American free society, we are able to understand the concerns and
feelings of other people and to make allowances for people to be
different.
In some ways, the laws
against homosexuality helped gay people feel more "special" and to have
to struggle to explain their feelings to themselves. So while the laws
were morally wrong, they did have a function in gay identity
development.
Many gay people have
struggled against the odds to be successful and it has made them better
people. On the other hand, some who would have been successful have
accidentally fallen victim to the negativity -- either by being
persecuted from outside or by being emotionally devastated on the
inside.
The real damage that
anti-gay messages have in the world is not to legal rights, but to
people's emotional well-being.
5) Many people say that homosexuality is
unnatural and has no purpose. Could you reiterate what you think
homosexuality brings to the world? Such as ideas or issues it
highlights?
I wrote of this above: gay
people witness to living a full rich life without having children, to
serving just for goodness sake and not for one's own offspring. We also
witness to the importance of viewing life from outside and over and
above. Gay people learn to be outsiders and to keep a deep secret. That
helps us understand the arbitrariness of what so many take for granted.
One of the functions gay
people have always played in society is as extra surrogate parents.
That is, bachelor uncles and maiden aunts were additional adults in the
family or tribe to help raise the children. The more adults involved in
children's development, the more likely the children are to be healthy,
intelligent, and wise. The presence of gay people in extended families
probably helped the whole family function better and people to get
along with one another better.
There is a theory called
"biological exuberance" that says nature is so abundant that it
produces lots of variations in living beings just for the sake of
variation. Diversity is a good in itself. In this way of thinking,
homosexuality is natural simply because it is a possible variation and
all variations are good for the development of the species.
6) How do you think homosexuality came
about and why? Is it spiritual or physical?
The origins of homosexuality
are really not understood. The best parallel to homosexuality is
lefthandedness. We don't really understand why some people are left
handed; their brains just work that way. Maybe it is just chance
because it is possible. About the same number of people are left handed
as are homosexual -- though handedness and sexual orientation aren't
particularly related to each other.
My own guess is that
homosexuality originates in the growth of brain cells in a developing
fetus as those cells are influenced by neurotransmitters in the
mother's blood. It is all pretty random, but may have some genetic
influences.
I also think it is "karmic,"
that is, spiritual in origin. The same way some people are said to be
called to the priesthood or have special talents that cause them to
become artists, so I think people are "called" to be gay. For some it
is a burden they carry, for others an ordeal, for others a gift. From
the spiritual perspective, the issue is what you manage to do with the
traits you are given to make your life and the life of those around you
better.
7) Last question. For
credibility, can you tell me how many books you've written and how long
you've worked or researched this topic.
I've written a total of ten
books; they all deal with the nature of religion, mythology, and
spirituality--and how to live a good life. Four are novels, featuring
gay characters working to understand their feelings and to interpret
the "spiritual message" in their feelings. Two are about my experience
of studying Joseph Campbell's ideas. Two are specifically about the gay
spirituality movement and what gay people can understand about the
nature of religion from their specific experience. One is a book I
edited of essays and short stories demonstrating "gay spirit in
storytelling."
I'm 64 years old, so I guess
I have been "researching" this topic since I entered religious life at
age 17, so 47 years.
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