Why You Were Born This Way (MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog)

{by Shokti Lovestar}

The experience of being born gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or simply queer, on planet earth is a challenge, a threat and a gift.

We are challenged to be true to ourselves, to listen to our deepest inner drives and dare to act on them, despite the threat of condemnation from family, society and religion, and so uncover the gifts of love, friendship, creativity and gaiety that our nature bestows on us.

Of course things have changed enormously in many parts of the world. It is easier and safer to be gay than it was a few decades ago. We have developed scenes and communities where we can find each other, support each other, fall in love and create our own queer families.

In other places queer people live in fear, under threat of prosecution, imprisonment – even death. Intolerance is still a mighty demon on this planet.

Far from being the spawn of evil that some see us as, we are mostly a section of humanity that demonstrate and manifest tolerance. We are wayshowers for the rest of the human race – bringing radical acceptance of diversity, putting love and celebration at the centre of human life – helping the race to overcome centuries of sexual repression, fear of difference and brutal patriarchal control. Our out and proud existence challenges the religious to live up to their holy ideals of love and compassion – and often they fail, revealing instead a sick underbelly of fear and hatred that pollutes their purpose.

Brought up in a world still hounded by religiously justified homophobia, many of us grow up carrying a burden of shame and guilt that we must heal in order to live and love healthily. We need to overcome our own doubts and see clearly that we are beings of love, joy and freedom, then demonstrate this to the world.

Rejected by most mainstream religions, and often rejecting them back, our lack of spiritual grounding as individuals and as a community leads to the problems of addiction and disease that spoil our queertopia. Most queers who dive into the cauldron of parties, sexuality and drug use have little sense that the drive that pushes them into that is the passion of their spirit to expand, to fill with energy, to love without limit, to know itself. Our voyages into bliss are journeys of the soul, we come back from them changed, hopefully for the better, though this is a territory not without risks.

The rational, secular, atheistic tendency of our age has served us well, dismantling faith-based persecution, but it has led so many of us to believe we are nothing more than bits of meat in a random existence with no purpose. Our ecstasies are seen as chemical reactions rather than moments of divine communion with spirit. But perhaps the truth is very different. My experience suggests we are the very people who can bring enchantment and light to life – we carry the potential to move beyond the old stories of religious dogma and conflict, to a unified understanding of life – the meeting point of the great mystery (consciousness) with physical matter. When we open our hearts, minds and bodies, magic happens, a greater story emerges.

Coming out opens a life of self-discovery, it opens the doors to love and points the way to transcendence. Our longing for love and ecstasy comes from the spirit part of us - just as our physical being needs food and water to survive, our spirits need love and bliss to thrive.

We also need an intellectual grasp of what is going on – to move into a twenty-first century vision of what it means to be alive, and what it means to be queer. Writers Toby Johnson, Mark Thompson, Andrew Ramer, Christian de la Huerta, David Nimmons, Daniel Helminiak, and Andrew Harvey are amongst the gay male pioneers who are opening up this path of understanding for us. Queer Spirit workshops and retreats are spreading, more websites appearing. Gradually our spiritual nature is moving to the centre of our story, replacing sexuality there. Our history as shamans and priests is talked about as never before. The urge to love in us is being honoured as never before as support for equal marriage spreads.

Prejudice, hatred and fear of us has not gone away. But we are at a tipping point, where our love of beauty, pleasure and joy could be revealed as sources of light, enchantment and tolerance that the world so badly needs. If there is a gay agenda for this world, it is surely that all beings should be free to live out their own dreams, without fear of attack or persecution, that love is what drives all our urges in life, and that transcendent ecstasies are a crucial part of a balanced, healthy life.

PHOTO: Benoit Paillé