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Toby Johnson's books:

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

FINDING GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: The Journey Expanded
2020 edition

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

Unpublished manuscripts

About ordering

Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

  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"

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

Enlightenment

"It's Always About You"

The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara

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

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

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

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

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016

The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)

You're On Your Own

Superheroes

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?

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

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

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

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"

Book Reviews

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

Gay Perspective

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

Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman








Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated








Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE

The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams

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

Finding Your Own True Myth:

The Myth of the Great Secret III









In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld












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

This was the second edition of this book.

Toby Johnson, gay spiritual writer

a short version appears at the bottom of the page

Johnson, PhD, Edwin Clark (Toby), Catholic monk turned activist, psychotherapist and spiritual writer, was born in 1945 in San Antonio TX. He attended Catholic parochial school at St. Peter's, Prince of the Apostles in Alamo Heights, and then high school at Central Catholic High School (CCHS), the college prep school associated with St. Mary's University, both run by the Brothers of Mary (Marianist). A writing teacher at Central Catholic, Bro. Martin McMurtrey, S.M., changed the lives of many students, including novelist Whitley Strieber, spiritual writer Toby Johnson, college president Larry Goodwin, and Henry Cisneros, beloved former mayor of San Antonio, by teaching them to think and write clearly and coherently.

The most prominent and successful writer among Bro. McMurtrey's first--star--class of expository writing students was Whitley Strieber, the prolific novelist and autobiographer who has helped bring attention to the mysterious experience of alien abduction and other inexplicable phenomena in human consciousness. Toby Johnson and Whitley Strieber were boyhood buddies, carpool mates, and fellow fans of the esoteric, the mystical, and the fantastic. Bro. McMurtrey's lessons about the nature of metaphor and allusion, and Strieber's fascination with the mysterious prepared Johnson for his understanding the nature of religion according to Joseph Campbell a few years later.

Johnson entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite. With the ’Vites, he was in the first class of students at the then newly-formed Catholic Theological Union, (a consortium connected with the University of Chicago Divinity School, made up of the Theologates of three religious orders, the Passionists, the Franciscans, and the Servites). Johnson was fortunate to study under the influential Scripture scholars Barnabas Ahern, C.P. and John Dominic Crossan, both of whom--in very different ways--changed how the modern world understands the nature of sacred writings.

Here he is (on right) with his friend Tom Sheerin
dressed as seminarians with Roman collars,
for an anti-war demonstration.
Notice the "halo" over Tom's head!

After a year in Chicago, Johnson worked in a Hospital Chaplaincy summer training at Metropolitan State Psychiatric Hospital in southern Los Angeles; that summer, in the "hothouse" of the mental hospital, he experienced the psychological breakthrough known in gay lingo as "coming out." Coincidentally (?!?) that was the summer of 1969; Johnson's personal "coming out" was within weeks of the national "coming out" of the gay world at Stonewall.

After that life-changing summer, he did not return to C.T.U., but remained in Southern California at the Servite novitiate in Riverside. Another life-changing psycho-spiritual event happened to him at the Servite Priory there (also known as Benedict Castle); the story of that enlightening "mystical experience" is told elsewhere in this website. (Johnson was honored to have befriended Roy Neuner, Allan Pinka (Oct 6, 1947 - Jan 4, 1989), Charlie Ruffner and Tom Sheerin during those years--all now deceased.)

After leaving seminary in 1970, Toby Johnson moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Asian Studies (later renamed the California Institute of Integral Studies, C.I.I.S.) from which he received a master's in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."

Johnson is pleased to identify his roots as Northern Californian, San Franciscan gay hippie. He actually lived on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in the early 70s (admittedly a few years after the "Summer of Love" by which time the neighborhood had gone into decline). The photos of the familiar Haight-Ashbury sign at that intersection frequently show a Queen Anne Victorian turret on the apartment building in the background. That was Toby Johnson's apartment.

First as a peer-counselor and then licensed professional, Johnson worked as a gay-oriented psychotherapist in San Francisco in the mid-70s. As a member of the D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance ("Dykes And Faggots Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism") and spokesperson for the Gay Mental Health Task Force of San Francisco's Health Department, he was instrumental in the adoption of a Gay Client's Bill of Rights, guaranteeing access to gay or gay-sensitive health care providers--a notion that, subsequently, had major effects in AIDS-related services.

In the late-70s, he teamed with Harvard-trained sociologist Toby Marotta in producing Marotta's books, The Politics of Homosexuality and Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67, and in working in a federally-funded ethnographic study of gay teenage prostitution.

In 1981, Johnson returned to his hometown where he practiced as an openly gay therapist and served as co-chair of the San Antonio Gay Alliance. He met his lifetime partner, Kip Dollar, while Kip was working at Bexar County National Bank. They count the start of their thirty-plus year relationship as March 16, 1984. Toby and Kip organized Gay Pride celebrations, worked with fledgling AIDS Foundations, and helped found gay business societies in both San Antonio and Austin. From 1988 to 1994, Johnson and Dollar ran Liberty Books, the lesbian and gay community bookstore in Austin. They were the first male couple registered as Domestic Partners in Travis County, TX in 1993.

In 1997, Johnson and Dollar moved to the Rocky Mountains to start a gay Bed & Breakfast called The House at Peregrine's Perspective. They lived in a wonderful three story log cabin lodge in the Denver Foothills town of Conifer, CO on the highway to Fairplay and South Park. The current highway is built along the railroad right-of-way leaving Denver for California, a route that was important to the unfolding of the plot of Johnson's historical novel Getting Life in Perspective, written in 1994. The fictional "utopian colony" in the 1880s in the novel was situated almost exactly where Kip and Toby found a house for their experiment in running a country B&B. It was a marvelous adventure, but very cold and very remote. Kip needed to be closer to his ailing parents in San Antonio.

And so in 2000, the couple moved their B&B operation back to the Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio, to the town of Wimberley, where they called the B&B Casa Peregrino. After another three years, Johnson and Dollar sold this house (after doing major structural repair on the property) and moved to San Antonio in 2003. Johnson was completing a seven year term as editor of White Crane Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. He passed the editorship to Bo Young and Dan Vera and shifted his own work to assisting Steve Berman's little one-man publishing venture Lethe Press bring out White Crane Books. After that first project to preserve Gay Spirituality titles which had gone out of print (like Mark Thompson's Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning and Johnson's own Gay Spirituality), Johnson had become Production Manager for Lethe and for the now-independent White Crane Books. He jokes that his karma must be resonating with the vibes of all those monks down through time who spent their days in the Scriptorium copying manuscripts to preserve them for posterity, only now instead of quill and ink, the manuscripts are produced with Adobe Creative Suites and Photoshop.

Kip and Toby lived six years in hometown San Antonio until after Kip's father's passing. In 2009, they moved back to Austin. They both worked with Lethe Press, Toby as freelance editor and book designer and Kip as bookkeeper for some ten years.

Here they are at the Lammy's Awards in 2007.

The couple retired from Lethe Press in 2013/2014 as Toby was reaching age 70. Toby's continued doing a little literary editing and book layout and "self-publishing" for friends and previous Lethe authors. In 2018, they were legally married. There is a nice story about how they went from being denied marriage licenses in 1991 to being registered as Domestic Partners in 1993 to being issued a marriage license in 2018—and all by the same County Clerk, Dana DeBeauvior—an enthusiastic supporter of marriage equality all along. The marriage was performed by the Presiding Judge of the Travis County Commissioners Court, Judge Sarah Eckhardt, and the official witness was Jim Fouratt, one of the founders of the gay liberation movement in 1969.

Toby looks like actor Ben Kingsley and so, by extension, Mahatma Gandhi. In 1996, Toby participated in an Earthwatch expedition to a small town in India. In this picture, he's wearing an Indian dhoti, the garment Gandhi often wore as an expression of solidarity with the traditional native peoples of India.

Johnson is author of three autobiographical accounts of spiritual development: The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness about his discovering a modern understanding of religion; In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld about his experiences--and interpretation of events as a religion scholar--in the study of teenage prostitution; and The Myth of the Great Secret (revised edition): An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell which added substantial anecdotal material about his mentor. In 2017, Johnson updated his spiritual autobiography in the book Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III. In 2020, he updated and expanded his book about the hustler study—and slightly renamed it—as Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded.

Toby Johnson is author of four gay novels: The Fourth Quill (originally published as Plague: A Novel About Healing), Secret Matter, and Getting Life in Perspective. Secret Matter, a sci-fi, romantic comedy about truth-telling and gay identity featuring a retelling of the Genesis myth with a gay-positive outcome, won a Lambda Literary Award in 1990 and in 1999 was a nominee to the Gay Lesbian Science-Fiction Hall of Fame, the first year of the award. He collaborated with historian, anthropologist Walter L. Williams on the novel Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo. And co-edited, with Steve Berman, publisher of Lethe Press, an anthology of gay-positive stories, Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.

He is also author of Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe. From 1996 to 2003, he was Editor and Publisher of White Crane: A Quarterly Journal of Gay Men's Spirituality. Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell (2017) tells Johnson's personal story of learning the real nature of religion and discovering the spiritual qualities of gay consciousness.  Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded uses Johnson's adventures in the study of teenage prostitution as the occasion to tell about the spiritual dimensions of sexuality and homosexuality.

Johnson's central idea is that as outsiders with non-gender-polarized perspective homosexuals play an integral role in the evolution of consciousness--especially regarding the understanding of religion as myth and metaphor--and that for many homosexuals gay identity is a transformative ecological, spiritual, and even mystical vocation.

Bibliography:

The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness (Morrow, 1982)

In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld (Morrow, 1983)

The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell (second revised edition, Celestial Arts, 1992)

The Fourth Quill (Lethe Press, 2012) originally published as Plague: A Novel About Healing (Alyson, 1987)

Secret Matter (Lavender Press, 1990, reissued by Lethe Press in a revised and expanded version, 2004)

Getting Life in Perspective: A Fantastical Romance (Lavender Press, 1991, reissued by Lethe Press, 2008)

Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness (Alyson, 2001, reissued by Lethe Press/White Crane Books, 2004)

Gay Perspective: Things our [homo]sexuality tells us about the nature of God and the Universe (Alyson 2003, reissued by Lethe Press, 2008)

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo, with Walter L. Williams (Lethe Press, 2006)

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling, with Steve Berman (White Crane Books, 2006)

Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III (Peregrine Ventures, 2017)

Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded (Peregrine Ventures, 2020)

All of the above, except Charmed Lives, are now available in editions from Peregrine Ventures.

With Toby Marotta (as editorial assistant):

The Politics of Homosexuality (Houghton Mifflin, 1981)

Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67 (Morrow, 1982)

Short bio

Toby Johnson, PhD, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of some ten books, including Secret Matter; Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness; and Gay Perspective: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us About the Nature of God and the Universe, is past editor of White Crane Journal of gay wisdom and culture.

Former Roman Catholic monk and comparative religions scholar turned gay activist, psychotherapist, community organizer, bookseller, ’zine editor and publisher, spiritual writer and novelist, Johnson was a student and friend of Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist best known for his life-affirming aphorism “Follow Your Bliss.”

Toby Johnson and Kip Dollar, partners since 1984, ran Liberty Books, the lesbian and gay community bookstore in Austin, for seven years and have operated country Bed & Breakfasts in Colorado and the Texas Hill Country. Johnson and Dollar have been working as freelance editor/book designer and bookkeeper respectively with the up-and-coming gay small press, Lethe Press. They're in the process of slowly retiring from this role.

Even shorter, one paragraph, bio.

Toby Johnson, former Roman Catholic monk and comparative religions scholar turned gay activist, psychotherapist, community organizer, bookseller, ’zine editor and publisher, spiritual writer and novelist, was a student and friend of Joseph Campbell, the renowned mythologist known for his life-affirming aphorism “Follow Your Bliss.” Johnson is author of some ten books, including Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III.

Download a Chronology of Toby Johnson's Life