Jesse Monteagudo: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII Issue 162). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is a writer and an activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner and his many friends. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online.
It is obvious that LesBiGay and Trans-people have a take on life that is vastly different from those held by the straight majority. In Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us About the Nature of God and the Universe (Alyson Books; 206 pages; $14.95) author Toby Johnson (Gay Spirituality) shows us how our status as sexual and gender outsiders allow us to think outside the box. “Being gay gives us a perspective on human experience that is different from that of the great majority of people. There must be something special and useful to humanity about this perspective, since a disproportionate number of important artists, poets, religious leaders, and spiritual guides in the past were what today we'd call gay.”
Gay perspective, Johnson tells us, “is based on three specific aspects of modern homosexual experience: First, we are outsiders and strangers. This status bequeaths - and sometimes forces on us - an ability to view life from a critical perspective.” “Second, most of us tend to embody both masculine and feminine viewpoints and characteristics . Hence we're able to see both sides of issues and to be both strong and sensitive, both creative and receptive.”
Finally, “by transgressing normal sexual and gender roles and by transcending the polarities of male and female, we see beyond the entire array of polarities humanity projects onto nature.” Our existence or experience as queers “demonstrates certain facts about nature”; “causes us to discover certain truth about life and human psychology”; and “teaches us practical lessons about contemporary problems and issues”. In Gay Perspective, Johnson shows us what our gay perspective tells us about life, sex, religion, the Church, God and the world.
Traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam condemn all who are different, including GLBT people, as threats to all that's “normal”. Nowadays, some would argue that we are just like everyone else, with one minor difference. In Gay Perspective, Toby Johnson admits our differences, glories in them, and shows how our differences allow us to make unique contributions to our society and to the planet. While most people are trapped in a “cycle of birth, reproduction, parenting, and death” we who are gay are “opting out of time” and are “witnesses to life lived in the present moment.” Thus there is a lot that others can learn from us, in times like these.
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