Note from Joe Perez: Inspired that a quality treatment of gay spirituality could have been published as early as 1980, I am excited to republish the following piece on Gay Spirituality & Culture. This is not only a piece of historical interest, but also a compelling vision for spirituality that is still valid today.
Background to the article:
By Kendra Crossen Burroughs, 20 September 2005
Around early 1980, someone had put an ad in the New Age Journal to the effect that he would award his entire collection of back issues of that magazine to anyone who could explain why the New Age Journal would not publish anything on gay spirituality. I was not sure what the term “gay spirituality” referred to, but I was curious to find out, so I wrote to this person. He sent me some material, and I decided to write an article and try to get it published.
Since gay spirituality was a men’s movement and I am a woman, I asked a gay male friend to do the article with me. Bruce Hoffman was an English professor and, like me, a follower of Avatar Meher Baba. In the article, I combined the material I had gathered on the gay spirituality movement with Bruce’s comments in a taped conversation that I had with him.
The New Age Journal turned the article down, but the Yoga Journal accepted it, as they had a column suitable for such op-ed pieces. The editor told me that many yoga teachers were gay men and would be interested in the article.
The article includes a circular diagram representing a cycle of incarnations, showing a series of six male incarnations on the left side of the “clock” and six female incarnations on the right side. I can’t recall where this came from; it could be that Meher Baba had imparted some such idea to someone and then Bruce thought of expressing it in this particular diagram. It suggests that just as the reincarnating individual was about to enter or leave an incarnation of the opposite sex, there would be a gay or lesbian incarnation. Several readers misunderstood this as "female souls in male bodies" or "male souls in female bodies," which was not at all what we'd intended; the soul has no gender, as far as we were concerned. It was more a matter of "impressions" (sanskaras in Sanskrit) deposited on the mental body in prior lifetimes.
After the article was published, we got many responses from men who were eager to know more about gay spirituality. I am pleased to see this little bit of “history” republished, and I dedicate it to my late dear friend and coauthor, Bruce Hoffman.
On Gay Spirituality
By Kendra Crossen and Bruce Hoffman
[originally published: Yoga Journal, July-August 1980]
This August, hundreds of men are expected to convene in the Colorado mountains for the second annual “Spiritual Gathering for Radical Fairies." The first such gathering was held last summer at a desert ashram in Arizona. Proudly affirming their identity with the magical little people of legend, the fairies proclaimed a new spiritual movement that looks to the "gay vision" for a conscious force capable of healing society as well as helping individuals realize their human potential.
The 1979 conference was the first dramatic expression of a growing impatience with the frequent failure of New Age groups, as well as traditional institutions, to address themselves meaningfully to the gay community. A participant in the conference summed up the problem this way:
"Bioenergetics says that gay people have marked blocks in the pelvic area. Macrobiotics say we are too yin. Kundalini says we are stuck in the lower chakras. Gurdjieff said we can't do the Work. Religion labels us sinners. The law calls us criminals. Psychiatrists still call us sick (despite recent changes in 'classification'). This all leaves me with one question: What New Age?" And his conclusion: "It's no New Age for us. Our support doesn't come from New Agers. They haven't liberated themselves from patriarchal, authoritarian structures--they've merely created new ones."
The Gay Vision
In response, the advocates of gay spirituality have decided that integration into a world dominated by "male heterosexism" is not an adequate measure of freedom. These men have come to see the gay community as a people who have their own distinct culture and share a "multidimensional" quality, a special "gay window" through which they view the world. Repudiating the notion that gays are "just like everyone else,” they seek a deepening of gay consciousness in the belief that gay people, as a unique manifestation of the Universal Spirit, can make a vital contribution to human unfoldment.
The idea of a prophetic mission latent in the gay experience is not new one. In the nineteenth century, for example, Edward Carpenter saw the role of what he called the intermediate sex as guiding the world toward "the life of the heart," in which the values of personal affection and friendship would replace monetary, legal, and social obligations as the dominant force in human relationships. Present-day spokesmen express a similar view, finding in the gay ideal a model of spiritual love. Don Kilfhefner, in discussing the need to reexamine "hetero-male assumptions" about spirituality, notes that in the Bhagavad Gita the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna has “a qualitative nature just like that of gay lovers." Though perhaps startling at first glance, this observation is understandable in light of Larry Fine's statement that gay people "tend to relate to each other as whole individuals, with an equality rarely found in a heterosexual relationships."
Harry Hay calls this "subject-to-subject" consciousness in contrast to "subject-to-object” relationships, which he links to opportunism, competitiveness, and the pursuit of self-advantage. Subject-subject consciousness, which fits into neither the "male" nor the "female" category, is felt to be the chief gay contribution to the New Age vision. A countercultural corrective that restores balance to society, it points the way to liberation from rigid definitions of self and to the possibility of a free interplay of love from soul to soul, regardless of sex.
As we understand it, gay spirituality proposes a merging of this spiritual vision with social/political awareness as a means of transforming human consciousness. This approach cannot be regarded merely as a petulant response to the exclusiveness of certain “straight" organizations, nor as an ad hoc philosophy thrown together to meet the needs of a few extremists; it is rather the latest culmination of a movement that has gradually evolved over a long period.
Nevertheless, while recognizing that homosexual as well as heterosexual impulses are inherent forces in the process of spiritual development, we question the validity of a spirituality that stresses sexual identity. To best appreciate the contributions and limitations of sexual identity in achieving spiritual growth, it is vital to understand the dynamics behind the spiritual journey.
The Spiritual Journey
Any approach to spiritual growth is essentially an attempt to answer the questions “Who am I?”; “What am I doing here?”; “Where am I going?”; and “How do I get there?” In the view presented here, these questions are seen to arise simultaneously with the origin of the universe itself.
<P>Sources as ancient as the Vedas and as recent as God Speaks by Meher Baba assert that the universe came into existence in order for the Divine to play hide-and-seek with Its own creation. The soul's consciousness advances slowly and painfully through the process that we know as evolution, and it is not until the human form is reached that the soul is capable of asking, "Who am I?" But human consciousness is so burdened with the multitude of impressions picked up in the course of evolution that it takes millions of human lifetimes for the soul to suspect that it is something more than the particular form in which it happens to find itself.
Through millions of incarnations, one is exposed to the entire range of human experience--as female and male, rich and poor, black and white, powerful and weak, healthy and sick, and so on, until the individual reaches the point, of involution: the conscious return to the one Self from which we all originated unconsciously. Every spiritual aspirant is on this journey of involution, which basically entails the elimination of impressions that cause the soul to identify with being limited.
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