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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
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. L.P.T.
San Francisco Days 1970-1981
In 1974-75, Toby Johnson took a course at Napa
Community College in Napa, California for licensure as a Psychiatric
Technician. The Psych Tech license is a license in California in
nursing with a specialization in psychiatry. In the 1960s, the Psych
Tech training was the same as that for Licensed Vocational
Nurses--L.V.N.--for the first three academic quarters, that is, the
first school year. The second half year, LVNs study obsterics and
pediatrics, while LPTs focus specifically and exclusively on psychiatry
and mental health hospitalization.
The Pysch Tech training at Napa Community College coordinated with the
Napa State Hospital across the highway from the community college.
Students did their practicum training at the State Hospital.
Johnson had learned about psych techs from Terry Carlson. In 1971,
while he was studying at the California Institute of Asian Studies
(C.I.A.S.)--now the California Institute of Integral Studies
(C.I.I.S.)--which was then located at 21st and Dolores on the edge of
San Francisco's Mission District and of the Castro, through Ken Dyer,
whom he met thru mutual friend Peter Roy, Toby befriended a sort of
"hippie household" who lived up 21st St from the Institute in a
wonderful five bedroom, three-storey house with a view looking out
over Dolores Park. The head of the household was Tom Rhodes. Toby had
met Dyer a few months before; he was invited for Christmas Dinner with
that household in 1970. At that dinner or another soon after, he met
Carlson who, recently out of the Navy where he'd worked in psychiatric
services, was now working at Mount Zion Hospital's Crisis Clinic.
Having been interested in mental health services to the psychiatrically disabled--as a current day
manifestation of what in Jesus's day were the lepers--since he'd worked
as a "Hospital Chaplin Intern" while still a Servite seminarian,
Johnson was fascinated by Terry's stories about the Crisis Clinic.
Also during those days Toby was friends with Rhonda Zobel, a young
woman with wonderful flaming red hair, who worked as assistant to the
Institute Librarian.
After completing his course work for a Master's Degree in Comparative
Religions from CIAS, and realizing that degree offered no particular
job opportunities--and, in fact, working as a hippie carpenter and
general factotum for his Tantra teacher at the Institute, Kim McKell,
PhD--Johnson decided to pursue the psych tech training with the aim of
getting a job at Mt. Zion in the same unit where Terry Carlson, L.P.T.
worked.
Toby was dating Guy Mannheimer at that time. Guy had some interest in
mental health (though mainly, so far, as a client) and both of them
were looking for jobs. They'd spent the summer of ’72 together working
at the Mann Ranch Seminars. At the end of the summer, Guy moved back to
his home at Werder House in Menlo Park next to Stanford University
(previously the house had been home to members of the Grateful Dead);
Toby got an apartment with his college friend Paul 
DePalma and a medical student named John Shapiro ON THE CORNER OF
HAIGHT & ASHBURY. When Toby and Paul found an apartment at that
location for rent they decided they had to live there, no
matter what the state of the apartment! In fact it wasn't bad--though
Toby's mother burst into tears when she walked into it at the very
thought of her son living in such poverty. But the neighborhood had
gone down hill from the days of the Summer of Love. And Toby, Paul and
John only stayed there six months. (The turret behind the familiar
street sign was in our apartment.) Major gay philosopher, political
activist Arthur Evans ended up living in the apartment next door. It
wasn't till Toby and Guy returned to S.F. in 1975 and got involved with
Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) that Toby met Arthur.
(Paul moved in with his girlfriend and Toby and John moved to a
houseboat in Sausalito on Pier 11 1/2 to housesit for Dee Cameron; John
got sick that summer and moved back to Boston and never
really lived in the houseboat. Toby ended up sharing the boat with
Dee's friend's sister, a wonderful woman, Freddie Cobey, the first
"computer programmer" Toby'd ever met.)
Toby and Guy made the decision to join the psych tech training when it
was discovered a friend of Toby's from Gay Rap and the San Francisco
Gay Counseling Service, Peter Goldblum, had just gotten a job teaching
psychology in the program at Napa College.
In fact, a whole household formed in Napa around Toby and Guy that
included Leslie Peterson, Spider O'Toole, Peter Goldblum, Doug
Fairchild, Peter Hall -- and Susie Dosen who had a wonderful big white
cat named Buffalo (who'd jump into your lap, climb up and put one paw
on each of your shoulders and nuzzle your neck), along with several
others in a neat old house on Coombs Street on the southern edge of
downtown Napa.
The Psych Tech training was a wonderful--though sometimes emotionally
wrenching--experience. The class consisted of about 35 students, most
of us full-grown adults, though a few junior-college-aged young
people--since the program was admininistered through Napa Community
College and the classroom buildings were in an annex off the backside
of Napa College. Among the teachers were Geneva Link, Patty Vale (a
very stylish lady with a marvelous personality) and, of course, Peter
Goldblum.
In 1975, Guy and Toby completed the training, got their licenses and
moved back to San Francisco; they took an apartment on 18th St between
Noe and Sanchez just down the street from the 18th and Castro gay
nexus. Toby went by Mt Zion and, lo and behold, there was a job
opening. He applied and got the job immediately. It was like a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
For three years, Toby worked at Mt. Zion in The Westside Crisis Clinic
of Westside Mental Health. Among the other psych techs and crisis
clinic staff were: Terry Carlson (who by that time was going by the
single initial "T"), Oscar Peterson (who went by "O.P." --nurses, maybe
especially male nurses, take on their initials as first name because it
is how they sign medication orders they've administered), Richard
Gibson, David Navarro, Christine Porter, Rudy Smith, MSW, Hilda Wedel,
RN, Don Tusel, MD.
Toby stayed at that job while he went back to C.I.A.S. to complete the
Master's and then go on to a PhD. in "Counseling Psychology." His
class, which included Art Rosengarten, Howard Rossman, Barry
Shea, Ann Sibary, was the "test class" for acceditation for the
Institute. Toby Johnson, in fact, was the first Ph.D. graduate in the
Counseling Dept. The school changed its name the year they graduated.
(They actually have two diplomas--one with the name as CIAS, the other
CIIS.)
Johnson worked as an intern at The Tenderloin Clinic, a community
mental health unit in downtown S.F. which had an official mandate to
provide services to the City's gay and lesbian population. The
Tenderloin Clinic's gay services actually evolved out of the peer
couseling program Toby had helped Cliff Kraus establish a few years
prior out of the Gay Rap program that met at a hippie community center
called Alternative Futures on West Pine. (For a year or so, the
counseling service operated out of the house Toby lived in on Arguello
St at Clement in the Richmond District with a household that included
Michael Ackerman and Dennis Conkin.) Cliff was very good at public
relations and took the idea of gays-for-gays in counseling to the
city's mental health providers. The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance developed from disgruntled lesbian social
workers at the Clinic who felt we couldn't fulfill our gay/lesbian
mandate because we were burdened with so many responsibilities for
general psychatric patients in the downtown Tenderloin neighborhood
(Ricki Boden, Phern Hunt, Carol Hastie, Mavis DeWees, JoAnn Lovejoy,
David Greenberg,
Karin Wandrei, etc.). DAFODIL
inadvertently, I think, changed gay history, by getting the
gays-for-gays model adopted as policy for the San Francisco Dept of
Health. This came to the fore a few years later when AIDS appeared and
San Francisco was able to mount a response because there were gay
clinicians and because there was no stigma for them to work with gay
patients with a "gay disease," the way there was in other parts of the
country.
While Toby was working there, first as an intern and then as paid
staff, the Clinic moved from the Golden Gate YMCA Bldg to Hyde Street
and Jerry Polon became Director of the Clinic.
Also at the California Institute in those days were Elizabeth Kent and
Melinda Guyol--who went on to create Southern Dharma Foundation in Hot
Springs, NC out of conversations a group of (mostly non-gay) students
at the Institute conducted in monthly dinner parties about how we could
take our comparative religions training into our professions as mental
health workers.
Toby Johnson left San Francisco in 1981 and spent that summer with
Elizabeth and Melinda in North Carolina helping to clear the land for
the meditation hall at Southern Dharma. (Among their North Carolina
friends with Alan Troxler and Carl Whitman.) Johnson wrote his second
book IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD that summer, reporting
on the very eventual experience he'd had the previous couple of years
working with Toby Marotta and URSA on
the Hustler Study.
Follow-up:
This webpage was patentlyintended to attract the attention of Toby
Johnson's old friends from 1970s California. That is why so many people
are mentioned by name; when they go googling themselves (as we all
should do regularly--for all sorts of reasons), they'll find this page.
In summer of 2008, the net tossed out by the mention of the Psych Tech
training at Napa introduced Toby to Renee Romanoff who'd been in a
class a couple of years ahead of his; she'd later worked at the
hospital and became friends with Susie Dosen when they worked on the
same ward. Renee's email is renee22754@gmail.com
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