Spirituality and Gay
Identity
by Toby Johnson
This article appeared as "The
Evolution of Gay Identity" in
the April 2000 issue of GENRE.
The term "spirituality" has come
to be
used these days to refer to the concerns and sentiments that
previously have been called "religious." People who used to think of
themselves as deeply religious now often call themselves spiritual
instead. This is certainly true among gay people. Many of us were
deeply religious as youth. A disproportionately large number entered
the seminary or studied for the ministry. Often it was our budding
homosexuality itself which inspired such religiousness. We knew
vaguely that we weren't normal, that we were special, that we wanted
something different from life from our parents, that we weren't drawn
to the usual life of marriage and family. We knew we were
"called."
For most of us, that youthful religiousness failed us.
This
happened in two ways, one personal, one social. Personally, as we
grew up and became more aware of our interior motivations, we
discovered sex. We learned to name our feelings as sexual and to see
that what made us special was that those sexual feelings weren't what
the other boys and girls were experiencing. Socially, we discovered
that the history of religion was filled with cruelty and oppression
and persecution of difference. As we studied history and science, we
saw that the stories we'd learned in Sunday school or catechism class
didn't fit the modern world view. We may have begun to realize that
if religion was wrong about such things as structure of the solar
system and the development of life on Earth, it was probably wrong
about a lot of other things--especially the nature of sexuality.
But even as we were seeing through the content of
religion, we
likely still felt those deep feelings of love of life and sensitivity
to other people. We still wanted to find meaning in life and to feel
the presence of God in our experience. Especially as we realized our
homosexual orientation and saw how the Churches had only bad things
to say about those feelings--crazy things that we could tell in
ourselves were just as false as the stories about the origin of the
Earth--we likely abandoned religion. We may have started to call
ourselves spiritual, instead of religious. And we meant that we
looked to our own experience to find meaning and the presence of God,
not to the teachings of Church authorities.
In the past hundred years or so, religion has
been
challenged. The old world view has been swept away by scientific
discovery and technological advance. The modern mind no longer finds
the argument from authority very convincing. We no longer look to the
past for truth. Indeed, we logically expect the ideas of old to be
overturned by modern discoveries. When we go to a doctor we want him
our her to treat us with the most advanced modalities, not the most
ancient. We don't want a dentist or an architect to look up what to
do for us in a book handed down from antiquity. Why would we think
that the authorities of old who didn't understand human biology or
have effective pain-relievers or know sound engineering techniques
would understand the nature of God and the cosmos?
The images and symbols for these big questions have
evolved
over time. Primitive peoples worshipped animal deities and plant
gods. These were the source of sustenance. As they observed the
patterns in nature, they saw correlations between the seasons and the
movement of the heavenly bodies. The gods shifted to the skies, and
they worshipped the sun and moon. As consciousness became more
complex and people began to live in ordered societies, the gods
shifted their concerns to morality and personal behavior; God became
the bestower of Law and guide of conscience. As science shifted its
purview from the heavens to the earth, from astronomy to biology, and
in the 20th Century to anthropology and psychology, human
consciousness itself became the focus on wonder.
Religion is necessarily undergoing a tremendous
transformation.
It is having to cope with modernization. One very important aspect of
that modernization is the recognition of psychology. Just as
astronomy and paleontology have changed how we understand the
structure of the solar system and the evolution of life, psychology
changes how we understand human nature.
The rise of gay consciousness in the last fifty years
is one of
the great challenges to religion. While, of course, people have been
behaving homosexually all through history, it is a new thing to claim
this as a source of personal identity and to understand it as a
source of admirable personality traits. It challenges the old notion
that the purpose of human life is to go forth and multiply and subdue
the earth. Gay consciousness demands a paradigm shift just as
significant--and maybe more so--as the heliocentric universe and the
evolution of species. Religion is just managing the heliocentric
universe (the Pope has finally forgiven Galileo for being right). The
war over evolution is still being fought, though it is inevitable
which side will win.
The paradigm shift signified in
part by gay consciousness
is even more challenging because it affects the meaning of sexuality
and the experience of embodiment. Acknowledging that a significant
portion of the human race is not driven to reproduce changes the
meaning of sex. That there are people who are constitutionally
homosexual challenges the notion of a universal natural law. It even
changes the way embodiment in flesh and the experience of physical
pleasure is experienced.
The religious Fundamentalists deny the reality of
homosexuality
just like they deny the truth of evolution. And for somewhat the same
reasons. They are more concerned with maintaining their authority
than with recognizing and responding to the real human situation.
Ironically, the message of religious reformers, like
Jesus, was
that love and compassion supersede Law and authority. "Love your
neighbor" was the commandment Jesus gave. He never mentioned a thing
about homosexuality, or about sex in general for that matter. The
Golden Rule would certainly not support the Churches' champaign
against gay rights. Indeed, to the extent that the Churches rail
against gay people, preaching fear and hatred for fund-raising
purposes, they reveal themselves out of sync with the One Commandment
of Love.
As the old myths make less and less sense, the meaning
of
religion has to shift away from the archaic symbols and old-fashioned
laws and begin to respond to the reality of human life. Homosexuality
is a central issue in this transformation.
In recent years, a new paradigm has arisen. A new
scientific
discovery has been achieved. This is the awareness of planetary
ecology. We now understand that there are forces that guide the
development of life on the planet. At the same time, a whole new
issue has developed for the planet: overpopulation. There are now
just too many people for the earth to sustain. Even if food
production can keep up with population growth, how is the planet
going to cope with the waste all these people produce. We are
exhausting natural resources and polluting the environment because
there are just too many of us.
The development of conscious homosexuality may well be
an
ecological mechanism to call the human race to reduce population. We
are the models of contributing, satisfying lives lived without
reproducing. We demonstrate that having children is not the primary
purpose of sexuality or of life.
Gay culture may not have entirely caught up with its
role as
ecological guide. We are still struggling to find our place. But even
as we struggle we are helping the human race in the important step of
maturing from religion to spirituality. We are helping force the
issue.
Today, everybody is having to make the shift away from
the old,
out-dated myths. In the conflict between religion and science,
science necessarily will win. The purpose of religion then cannot be
to cling to the old symbols. It can't be about maintaining certain
myths. These are, after all, just metaphors. As the metaphors lose
meaning, the deep sensitivity to other people and to the larger goals
of planetary ecology have to supersede them This is the meaning of
spirituality. Gay people's struggle models everybody's maturation
from religion to spirit.
