MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

New novel shows Passion of a queer Christ

A queer Christ lives out the Easter story of death and resurrection in my new novel Jesus in Love: At the Cross.

I'm excited that the book is being released in time for Ash Wednesday (Feb. 6), which begins the season of Lent when Christians remembering the sufferings of Jesus to prepare for Easter.

Jesus commits the ultimate act of love in At the Cross, a fictional autobiography of a bisexual Christ.  The dramatic events of Christ’s Passion happen in the context of a gay love story between Jesus and his disciple John.  The novel covers Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, ending on Pentecost.  Jesus has today’s queer sensibilities and psychological sophistication as he reveals the erotic, mystical experiences that may have led to the first Easter. 

At the Cross is a sequel to the popular Jesus in Love: A Novel, but there’s no need to read the other book first.  At the Cross stands alone in its own right.

Christ’s story is for everyone, but queer people often feel left out because conservatives use Christian rhetoric to justify hate and discrimination.  I wrote At the Cross so more people could understand the powerful story of Jesus’ human struggles and how he rose above them.  Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people can relate to a queer Christ -- and so can many others.

The prequel, Jesus in Love, became a surprise hit with more mainstream readers after achieving success in the GLBT community.  I receive fan mail from a diverse range of readers -- male and female, queer and straight, ranging from Roman Catholic priests to atheists and Jews.  And I get hate mail from conservative Christians, too.

Books in the Jesus in Love series follow the Biblical text and standard Christian doctrine while speculating on Christ’s erotic inner life.  The gay love story between Jesus and John has sparked controversy.  Some conservatives labeled me “a hyper-homosexual revisionist.”

Meanwhile, secular literary critics and progressive Christians affirm the Jesus in Love series as “profound,” “spiritually mature” and “beautifully written.”  Gay spirituality author Toby Johnson praises it as “a real tour de force in transforming traditional myth to modern consciousness.” 

The Bay Area Reporter called it “revolutionary religious fiction” and syndicated book critic Richard Labonte hailed it as “a winsome affirmation of erotic love’s sacred potential.” 

Mel White, founder of Soulforce, says, “Kitt Cherry has broken through the stained-glass barrier.  This is not a prurient look at the sex life of Jesus, but a classic re-telling of the greatest story ever told.” 

At the Cross grows out of my own spiritual journey and my experiences as a minister in the LGBT community.  One of my duties was promoting dialogue on homosexuality at the National Council of Churches (U.S.A.) and the World Council of Churches as National Ecumenical Officer for Metropolitan Community Churches.  I wrote At the Cross after Chronic Fatigue Syndrome forced me into a more contemplative life

My previous books include Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More, Equal Rites and Hide and Speak.  The New York Times Book Review praised my “very graceful, erudite” writing style. 

My website, JesusInLove.org, features the growing number of books and art based on the queer Christ.  I blog at the Jesus in Love Blog and edit the Jesus in Love Newsletter on queer spirituality and the arts. 

At the Cross (ISBN 1933993421) is published by AndroGyne Press, a new queer studies press in Berkeley, CA.  Ingram Book Group distributes it.

For more info on At the Cross, visit jesusinlove.org or androgynepress.com

Top 5 queer-spirit arts stories for 2007 named

JesusInLove.org has announced its picks for 2007’s top five news stories on GLBT spirituality and the arts.

Leading the list is the National Festival of Progressive Spiritual Art.  JesusInLove.org, an online resource center for GLBT people with spiritual interests and their allies, chose the stories based on Web traffic and attendance in real life.

Here’s a round-up of the year’s top five queer spiritual art stories, based on Web traffic and attendance in real life.

1.  Gay Jesus art delights crowds at National Festival of Progressive Spiritual Art.  More than 350 people attend the opening in Taos in May.  It includes the image at left, "Jesus Returns to God" by F. Douglas Blanchard. Click here for more

2.  A mini-riot erupts in an evangelical Swedish city over gay Jesus photos by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin in August.  Click here for more

3.  “Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More” by Kittredge Cherry is published to enthusiastic reviews. Click here for more

 4. A leather version of the Last Supper sparks controversy as the poster for the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco in September. Click here for more

5.  National Coming Out Day inspires dozens of videos in October, including the year’s most popular video at JesusInLove.org. Click here for more

2007 was a fantastic year for GLBT spirituality and the arts.  Thousands of people to visited galleries, read books and watched videos last year to see new images of God based on gay, lesbian, bi and trans experience.  The images inspired hope -- and sometimes fear and violence.

JesusInLove.org promotes queer spirituality and the arts, with an emphasis on books and images.  We believe that God loves all people, including sexual minorities, and that the creative process is sacred.  We hope that the new visions, especially the gay Jesus, will free people to experience the divine in new ways and lead to a more just world.

Show your support by signing up for our free e-newsletter on queer spirituality and the arts.

Lesbian Madonna embodies Christmas spirit

Christmas has inspired many contemporary GLBT artists to create queer spiritual art.

For example, Annunciation (at left) by Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin shows the Madonna and her female lover are portrayed by a lesbian couple, pregnant through artificial insemination.

The photo is included in my new book Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More. In our interview for the book, Ohlson Wallin told me how she created the striking, mysterious image. Here are some excerpts from Art That Dares:

She combined the dual influences of Christianity and queer consciousness to create a groundbreaking series of twelve photos showing Jesus in a contemporary LGBT context. It became one of Europe’s most noticed and notorious art exhibits, even arousing the disapproval of Pope John Paul II—who reacted by canceling his planned audience with the Swedish archbishop.

Ohlson Wallin called the series Ecce Homo, a pun meaning “See the human being” and “See the homosexual.” …

She enlisted local LGBT folk to serve as models, and they spent three years meticulously recreating scenes from the life of Christ based on the artistic masterpieces of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, and others….

“It’s very important for me in my work that the picture have a documentary truth mixed with the way I arrange the story in the picture,” Ohlson Wallin said. She and her models played with the contradictions….

“I wanted Jesus for me and my own sexual sense. I wanted to be able to identify with Jesus. There are millions and billions of Jesus pictures for heterosexuals to identify with. In Africa they have black Jesus. In China they have Chinese Jesus. Lots of different countries each have a different Jesus.” …

The exhibit went on to tour Scandinavia and continental Europe from 1998 to 2000, winning awards and breaking several attendance records. More than 250,000 people viewed it. Not everyone liked what they saw. A man with an ax destroyed two of the photos. People threw stones at Ohlson Wallin and she needed police protection after receiving death threats….

Ohlson Wallin recorded the whole and and  span of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, beginning with the announcement of his coming birth. In her version, the Madonna and her female lover are portrayed by a lesbian couple, seven months’ pregnant through artificial insemination. The angel Gabriel comes in the form of their gay male friend, who floats in with a message from God—and a test tube for insemination.

That's the end of the excerpts.  May everyone who visits this Gay Spirituality blog experience God born anew in their hearts during the Christmas season.

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Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian art historian and author who offers gay-friendly spiritual resources at JesusInLove.org and blogs at the Jesus in Love Blog.  She recently launched a monthly e-newsletter on queer spirituality and the arts.

 

Sex and spirit mix on new Jesus book cover

A homoerotic Christ on the cover of a new German book is sparking international debate as Christmas approaches.

The provocative cover appears on the German translation of Jesus in Love, my novel about a queer Christ.

The cover art by Berlin painter Alexander von Agoston shows a near-naked Jesus and John the Baptist rising from the water together after Christ’s baptism. The men’s genitals shine through their wet clothes. A shared halo affirms the union of body and spirit.

My book says that gay sexuality is holy to Christ and I’m a passionate promoter of queer spiritual art. However, even I thought the German image was too frankly erotic for a cover at first. Discussions with my German publisher, Edition EuQor changed my mind.

“German readers are used to seeing nudity on covers, much more than Americans,” my publisher told me. “Sure, the cover attracts attention. That’s what a cover is for.”

Gay-positive Christian images are needed now because conservatives are using religious rhetoric to justify discrimination against queer people. The cover goes all the way in showing that God loves gays. Jesus is completely comfortable in his skin. Now I’m sure that it’s the right cover for the German edition.

The German translation of Jesus in Love was released in time for Christmas by Edition EuQor, a start-up German press specializing in provocative books.

“When Jesus in Love was published in English, websites in Germany buzzed with excitement,” the publisher told me. “The idea of a bisexual Jesus seemed to fascinate Germans more than anyone else outside the English-speaking world.  Soon Edition EuQor offered to do a German translation.” 

Reactions to the Jesus in Love cover vary widely from delight to shock and disdain, even within the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community.

The original English version of Jesus in Love was published in 2006 by AndroGyne Press with a more romantic cover drawing of Jesus and John wreathed in roses. Conservative Christians attacked the novel as blasphemy because it portrays a Jesus who felt sexual attraction to men. However, it received praise from literary critics and GLBT Christian leaders.

Toby Johnson, author of Gay Spirituality, described it as “a wonderful, gay-sensitive, and delightfully ‘shocking’ reassessment of the stories of the old-time religion.”

What do YOU think of the new book cover? Please post your comments here or email them to kitt@JesusInLove.org.
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Kittredge Cherry is an author who promotes queer spiritual art at the Jesus in Love Blog and JesusInLove.org. Her most recent book is Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More.

Exploring Jesus the Bisexual

Saying Goodbye to John and Mary by Peter Grahame

Jesus Christ was human, so he must have had sexual feelings, but maybe he was so enlightened that his attractions were not limited to a single gender.

The bisexuality of Jesus is a new subject being explored by a variety of artists and authors. For example, I wrote about it in my novel, Jesus in Love, and photographer Peter Grahame explores it in his photo montage Saying Goodbye to John and Mary. Jesus, John and Mary embrace in a naked trio with bread and chalice in the foreground of Grahame’s richly symbolic image. A future scene appears in the background, where Jesus rises while Mary carries a child of light and flowers multiply around John. In the text accompanying the image, Grahame writes:

“The night before he was to die, after his last supper with the twelve and before going to the garden's hilltop to pray, Jesus expressed his deepest most profound Love to Mary and to John, the two he loved more than his own soul. And Mary brought forth his daughter. And John brought forth his word.”

Grahame contacted me from his studio in New Mexico after he discovered Jesus in Love, my fictional autobiography of a bisexual Jesus. “You make Jesus seem like some sweet guy I just met!” Grahame wrote to me while he was reading the novel.

I felt an immediate kinship with Grahame’s art. His specialty is “transformational, iconographic” male nude photos. He has compiled many of them into a beautiful book called Contemplations of the Heart: A Book of Male Spirit. It’s a gem with poetic text, glossy pages and a wide variety of male nudes all set in a spiritual context.

Although it was created as a gay men’s meditation book, Contemplations of the Heart also moved and inspired me, a lesbian. I was caught off-guard by the appealing, authentic and spiritual qualities of the photos. I've often thought that women’s bodies are objectified in western culture, but this book made me see that men have been subjected to equally strange misrepresentations in pornography and popular culture. Grahame’s nudes are a relief and a blessing.

“The book is about self image, and its intention is to help alleviate self hatred and internalized homophobia,” Grahame says. “The images are sensuous but not overly erotic and present guys of all shapes, sizes, colors and ages (all over 18.)”

Contemplations of the Heart began as a couple of hand-bound volumes that Grahame passed around to men on gay retreats, straight retreats and even at a Native people’s ceremony where it was blessed by a two-spirit elder. Their encouragement led to publication in its current hardcover form. Now Grahame is working on his next book, which will focus on queer spirit archetypes and further explore the sacred feminine.

Grahame lets viewers figure out his symbolism for themselves, but he did offer this reflection on his bisexual Jesus image: “In the back Jesus ascends to ever-new adventures in the cosmos, leaving his legacy behind... as each and every one of us will also do... what will our spiritual legacy be? It’s up to each of us.”

(cross-posted at Jesus in Love)

Transcending sex with Jesus

by Paul Purcell

Greetings all,

I'd like to share a commentary I did and placed on my website some years ago about a peculiar teaching attributed to Jesus not commonly taught among more traditional, orthodox Christians ... being found in non-canonical apocryphal writings. I'll post the major portion of it with some editing and a short addendum of how I currently view things.

Transcending Sex

There is a secret teaching of Jesus of the kingdom of heaven being realized in its fullness when the feminine and masculine principles (polarities, energies) are brought into unity ... as we see in the miracle of procreation. This higher realm of understanding in such unity ... is when 'male is no longer male; and female is no longer female' - in such union there is a dissolving of distinction in the inner-mergence of Unity. Both gender qualities are entirely baptized(immersed) into the transcendence of holy spirit. The duality of division (all multiplicity) is brought into the unity of One.

Gay frot added to Wikipedia

Hey, this author gets his first mention in a Wikipedia article here. Very cool. It's a well-written article on frot . . . it would be well worth reading even if it didn't mention this op-ed piece on Gay Spirituality & Culture.

Cross-posted at http://gayspirituality.zaadz.com/blog.

Discussion topic: Are queergay spirit and queergay sex still married?

By Tom Gossard

I intend the head of this blog entry to be a springboard to discussion of an evolving integration of social, psycho-spiritual and carnal aspects of queergay individuality and "culture."

My chosen path to spiritual awakening has recently taken an odd and unexpected turn. I am now contemplating what qualities queergay sex may yet contribute to an evolving gay spiritual being.

Spiritual cross-training

A few years ago, through the gifts of desperation and drug addiction, I had the luxury of unplugging from the rat race and immersing myself into a recovery community in South Florida. Not only did I devote myself to the principles and practice recovery, but I was also drawn, intuitively, to a variety of complimentary practices and exercises that I felt would help in my recovery.

Thoughts on Love Won Out

Today's vigil (or protest, depending upon what you'd like to call it) was surprisingly well organized and, thankfully, positive in tone.

At this point, I don't have a final count of attendees.  The plan was to have a presence in the morning during registration and the afternoon, when the conference concluded.  I would estimate around 400 people (though the local news put the figure at "dozens", since they covered the evening presence).  The picture doesn't show it, but the building is very large, and the line of people wrapped around the perimeter.  As promised, some thoughts.