MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Gay spirituality vs. everybody spirituality: A new closet?

Gay spirituality may be replaced by “everybody spirituality.”  That’s an important idea that emerged during a recent gay spirituality weekend in New Mexico.  Guest speakers included gay author Toby Johnson and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.

One of the organizers was gay artist Peter Grahame, who sends this report:

“The Spirituality weekend here in Albuquerque at the end of April '08 went well. We had 30 or so for the dialogue Friday evening between Toby and Richard; the audience participated and it was quite a discussion. The retreat on Saturday and half of Sunday was attended by 18 people or so, and it was very good; Toby offered much information that many found really very helpful and inspiring.

“But as it turns out, we learned from this whole thing that the trend seems to be away from 'Gay Spirituality' to 'Everybody Spirituality.' Apparently, there may be many GLBT people these days, especially among the young, who don't seem to want to be labeled anything. Of course we're all equal. And nobody is trying to say we should be 'separate' or that we're 'better' at all. But many, especially the young GLBT people, don't seem to want  to recognize their unique gifts – especially their unique spiritual gifts; a unique spiritual point of view that I believe comes with being GLBT. Again, these unique gifts don't make us 'special' or 'superior,' but they are unique, different, and these gifts are much needed.

“Maybe some Straight people have gifts like these, too, but to me, not in quite the same way. I agree with Toby that by just wanting to be, or appear to be, just like everybody else... to want to assimilate... well, it seems like a subtle way of just going back in the closet. There are GLBT folks who say, 'We're just like everybody else except for what we do in bed,' but even causal observation shows that just isn't true. And yet, oddly, at the same time, these GLBT folks can still be very much involved in highly visible Gay Pride activities. Go figure.

“In the end, the real point is, as I think Toby keeps saying, that GLBT people do have particular spiritual gifts to offer the development of religion as we head further into the 21st century. Well, anyway, that's not the end of the discussion, I've only touched on a few ideas here, and I applaud you, Kitt, for wanting to open it up for more. Thanks.”

Peter has just launched a gorgeous new website, Ironic-Horse.com, which highlights his book Contemplations of the Heart: A Book of Male Spirit.

I found it especially helpful to hear about the trend from gay spirituality to everybody spirituality.  My partner and I have experienced this attitude with younger GLBT people and been puzzled and saddened by it.  Now I see that, like it or not, it’s part of a larger social context.  Maybe it’s even a sign that the GLBT rights movement has succeeded.

Has anybody else run into this attitude of “inclusiveness” that threatens to water down or gloss over the unique characteristics of gay and lesbian spirituality?  Or if you think it’s time to move beyond the “gay” label, can you explain why?

Image credit: “After the Rainbow Ceremony” by Peter Grahame

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Cross-posted at the Jesus in Love Blog. Kittredge Cherry blogs at the Jesus in Love Blog and edits the Jesus in Love Newsletter on queer spirituality and the arts.  She offers GLBT and progressive spiritual resources at JesusInLove.org.

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."

The Nature of Gayness, As I See It

Speaking of conservative Christian theology, here's a short note to explain my most significant disagreement with Jeremy Marks' theological opinion in "A Time for Change."

Jeremy Marks says this much that is applaudable: "This is not an ‘anything goes’ approach-anyone seeking to be Christ-centred will naturally yearn to find a basic moral framework and ethos for gay and lesbian relationships." However, he also espouses the following basic theological underpinning: "When Courage began in 1988, I shared the view commonly held amongst conservative evangelical Christians that, according to the Bible, we are all made male and female and that the union of a man and a woman fulfils God’s purposes for mankind with godly marriage and family life forming the essential building blocks for a stable society. I still hold firmly to that view."

To put my own panentheistic integral spiritual perspective into Christian and theistic language, I believe that every human being is made in the image of God, and that the dignity of homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals derives from this fact. The union of male and female does reflect the fundamental structure of reality in the Kosmos, but masculine (or yang/agentic) and feminine (or yin/communion) principles are inner universal qualities of all things when viewed at the level of their deep structures. We are not simply male or female; we are embodied beings (actually, following Ken Wilber, we can use the term "holon" or "whole/part") with a spectrum and diversity of gender and sexual expressions.

All this talk about the union of masculine and feminine reflecting the Divine is only half the story. That's where Marks begins to go astray. It's not enough to say that God made human beings male and female and all men and all women are intended to interact heterosexually (that's naive biological literalism), or even that all human beings are manifestations of universal principles of masculinity and femininity (that's true enough). We must also note that the very essence of Reality is a divine Love that flows in two primal directions reflecting a universal duality of Sameness and Otherness: from God embracing and unfolding unto all of Creation, and from Creation reaching out towards transcendence unto God.

Ken Wilber made this point in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by persuasively arguing that agency, communion, self-immanence, and self-transcendence are the four primal drives of all holons. In terms of Christian theology, the directions of self-immanence and self-transcendence are Agape and Eros respectively (and their negations are Phobos and Thanatos respectively); agency and communion are recognized as masculine and feminine principles (Marks says "we are all made male and female"). I first articulated my view that homophilia and heterophilia are the universal qualities of holons identical to self-immanence and self-transcendence on The Soulful Blogger by controversially arguing that "God is Gay" and in "Homosexuality and Agape" right here on this blog. Today I wouldn't express myself in quite the same way as I did in "Homosexuality and Agape," but my basic position remains unchanged.

My view, consistent with Christian theology properly understood (that is, at an integral level of consciousness beyond mythic literalism) and the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber, is that Love flows from God to humankind as same-directed Love or Agape (which I call homophilia or gayness), and from humankind to God as other-directed Love or Eros (which I call heterophilia or other-directed love). We are created with diverse gender and sexual expressions with heterosexual men and women being by far the most common variety; furthermore, the union of our inner masculine and feminine drives does indeed reflect God's intentions for humanity. Both straight and gay relationships equally reflect those core human drives and mirror the Divine intention, because through our drive to realize Love our inner masculine and feminine may connect with another human being in complementary, healing, nurturing, and beautiful ways. When two gays in a loving relationship interact, the gay person's inner feminine (or "bottom" or "femme" or "passive") sexual essence is united with the inner masculine (or "top" or "butch" or "insertive") sexual essence of his/her partner; and the person's inner masculine is united to his/her partner's inner feminine; and vice versa.

But most importantly, and this is where Marks misses the mark, God's purpose for humankind is revealed not only in our masculine and feminine qualities, but also in our same-directed (homophilic) drive as well. Homophilia is as much a Divine way of Loving as heterophilia. Yin is not only drawn to yang and vice versa, but yin to yin and yang to yang. That drive for union is the drive of self-immanence rather than self-transcendence; it is the impulse of integration, empathy, and compassion. As Wilber's argument regarding the primal drives of all holons convincingly demonstrates, self-immanence is built into the very structure of the universe as involution, an essential part of the Spirit of evolution.

Every person, straight or gay, manifests homophilic and heterophilic drives the expression of which may truly be a locus for connecting to Spirit. When any two persons in a loving relationship interact, the person's drive of homophilia (or "same-directed Love") draws his/her inner masculine sexual essences to unite with the masculine sexual essences of his/her partner as an embrace of Sameness, and the feminine essences are united with the feminine essences of his/her partner; the person's drive of heterophilia (or "other-directed Love") draws his/her inner masculine to unite with the inner feminine of his/her partner as an embrace of Otherness, and the inner feminine is drawn to unite with the inner masculine. Christian theology goes astray when it focuses exclusively on Eros and neglects Agape; gay ways of Loving are the Divine ways of loving. The Divine plan for humankind is radically misunderstood when the true nature of homophilia is not taken into account.

Gay with God

An article by freelance writer Dara Colwell discusses the spirituality movement within the gay community:

The gay community is coming out of the closet again – spiritually. "The movement is in its infancy, but it's just starting to gel," says Steve Kammon, editor of Circuitnoize.com, a website devoted to circuit parties. Kammon attended the first ever gay spiritual summit, held in upstate New York in May – an event that serves as testament to the community's burgeoning shift from cruising to consecration. "New connections are being forged. We're trying to make way for a kind of communal energy that supports and uplifts," he says.

The summit, held at the Garrison Institute, a retreat center overlooking the Hudson River, drew 130 gay leaders from disparate spiritual and religious paths. What attracted them was what they see as a broader spiritual movement and the queer community's emerging part within it. "Gay people have a significant role to play," says Christian de la Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually, which addresses the gay community's spiritual heritage. "We're trying to reconnect to One-ness and all the superficial externals, like what's between your legs, are meaningless."

Read full article here.

Modern Queer Mythology

I recently came across an article on The Witches' Voice by Rainbird about Modern Queer Mythology: The Divine Twins.

In it, the author talks abut recasting or inventing myths that speak to us as gay men.

Hospitality and queer folk

Interesting interview with liberal Lutheran theologian Martin Marty in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. He mentions that hospitality is a way to bridge the chasm between factions and groups that are at odds with one another. It’s different from tolerance, which often is a sort of “lowest common denominator” civility.

Unfortunately, Marty is typical of theologians who are generally progressive, but have had little to say about the situation of gay people in the church. Specifically, he failed to connect the dots and explore organized Christendom’s rampant lack of hospitality towards queer folk. (For the most recent example, check out this article. There is plenty of irony in the church’s lack of welcome; unlike the church, Christ identified inhospitality, not same-sex desire, as the sin of Sodom (Matthew 11:20-24).

What's at the Core?

Recently, I did a search on Google for “male mysteries” and came up with a page of links to various websites. Most of them were for books by Wiccan or NeoPagan authors about getting in touch with the Male aspect of the Divine and the Divine Masculine inside us.

This made me think about my nature as a gay man. Is this any different than just being a man. I typed in “gay mysteries” and hit the search button, curious as to what I would find.

Change from the inside

Peter Gomes is an American Baptist minister serving at The Memorial Church at Harvard University. He is a Republican, and among a long list of accomplishments is his participation in the inaugurations of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. He also happens to be African-American and gay.

When I first heard his name and the description of who he is, many of the words did not seem to compute. Peter is the author of The Good Book, in which he makes Biblical arguments against prejudice of all kinds, including a chapter on why the Bible, in fact, does not condemn homosexuality. To find out that he is a gay man is no shocker. I was more surprised by the fact that he is a Republican. My initial reaction is to ask how this man can be a part of a political organization that opposes many issues important to the GLBT community.