International Gay & Lesbian Review

Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness

• Nonfiction
• Publisher: Alyson Books
• Publication Date: 2000
• 276 pages

Some years ago, I was walking in New York City just after sunset in a relatively quiet residential block. The ambient light, pouring down from windows a story or two above the hot pavement, was soft and grainy. A few doorways or stoops held sweltering New Yorkers cooling off from an intense summer day. In the shadows of the secluded steps to one of the buildings lay two boys, beautiful in the extreme, their lair protected from the eyes of neighbors by heavy brownstone balustrades. They reclined in one another's arms like figures from a Doric frieze, totally absorbed, in the immortality of youth, by their mutual muscles, eyes, skin, lips and tips of hairs. I stood transfixed for a moment watching, then moved on, my own body now suddenly electric with their secret beauty. I saw but did not intrude. There is a similar scene in Pasolini's “Arabian Nights.” An old blackqueen adorned with golden bells, baubles and priceless trade beads inveigles a session with two beautiful young lovers. But once the scene is set up, the older man humbly, unworthily withdraws out of respect for its erotic beauty. In those boys, watched by their elders, on the street of my New York City walk and in Pasolini's movie, lies the irreducible spiritual center of all philosophico-religio-mythico mentalization upon the subject of homosexuality; something perfect, something tragic, something poignant. In the flesh of men in the height of their sexual vitality is such an affirmation of life, such a via positiva of the spirit, that it fills your own body with electricity and life. “I sing the body electric” rhapsodized proto-gay poet Walt Whitman. Yet in the need for their hiding “behind heavy balustrades or downcast eyes" lies such suffering that the via negativa imposed by traditional religion, "patriarchal, homophobic, and flesh-denying” comes to life. The via positiva, the positive way to God, is the spiritual practice of affirmative attitude, interpretation and action in life. Such a way of life in the modern world often requires a fair amount of economic and therefore, social and political security, and is therefore denied to many people. Though this is exactly what has been championed by modern American countercultures, like gay liberation. The via negativa, the way to God through suffering, champions the privation, declaring suffering the basis of all of existence and poverty the common lot. Such a negative way has great spiritual content, a content often served by poetry and art. It has become an assumption of Western society: the way to achieve happiness in afterlife is to accept unhappiness and self-denial in this life. That would be especially so, the religions would say, for homosexuals who are expected to forego sexuality completely in fulfillment of the religionists' notion of cleanliness and purity. It is wise, then, to consider phenomena such as the notion of the “evil eye,” “the bitch queen,” the self-loathing pervert like “the Aesthetic Realist,” the jock in denial, the businessman, the lawyer and the politician, the habitue homosexuelle, and again, as the basis of all of existence, suffering itself as the whole of gay reality. The clear, cruisy eye of the gay person in some cultures is considered an evil to be burned out of the human family. The bitch queen suffers his femininity and inflicts his persecution on others through bad temper and aesthetic tyranny. The Aesthetic Realist tortures his true feelings out of his life in the name of an abstraction handed down to him by straight society. The man, who passes for straight, pretends. And the boys in the New York street scene and those represented in Pasolini's movie inevitably will suffer for their love and desire. They each will inevitably become the older man who withdraws because their beauty has faded. The via negativa homosexualis reflects the fact of all human suffering. But gay people must have their gay experience in order to know anything of themselves and of the world. Even if in having such, we struggle, suffer and die, without ever having read or heard of a via positiva. But will we survive, as the evil in the eyes of others, as persecuted queens, as self-deniers or as innocents? And if we survive, how will we survive? There is great human pathos in the question. “We will survive in the spirit” is the answer, I believe, to that grave question. One of the meanings of the word, “spirit,” to me is “trans-mission:”that which is communicated in an event, its content, as well as its communicating medium, the pneuma, the breath of life which emanates from Being into All. The two boys in New York and in Pasolini's movie survive in my memory and in my heart. Yet there is another survival in the transmission to the world of the knowledge of their having been and having been seen. This survival, this transmission of their essences to us, adds to the world's store of good and beautiful things. And this transmission, as hermetic and revolutionary as it is, changes the world, just as Spirit, itself, in its transmissions to us changes the world in us, around us and for us.

But can the essence of the boys, the lovers be cultivated? Or is it a wildflower always?

Toby Johnson obviously believes that their flower is a rose to be cultivated and fostered and that it should be. In his book, Gay Spirituality, Johnson outlines a way that cultivation is to be done in order to reveal gay spirit to the world-at-large. And in his revelation, Johnson proposes nothing less than a renovation of the way all human beings experience religion and reality in the method that descends to us from Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. The Lord Buddha said, “We are what we think, having become what we thought.” Gay Spirituality offers us the knowledge and the understanding that we homosexuals are not quite what we think, and that we are not at all what the world thinks us to be. Everybody, gay and straight, can avail themselves of the experience of an instant transformation of an attitude, just by changing how they think about sexuality, and homosexuality in particular. Indeed, reading Toby Johnson's “Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness,” you are struck by the thought that everyone, not just gay people, should be reading this book. For just reading it transforms your own vision. Johnson examines the various myths of the world, the religions, the metaphysical philosophies and doctrines, their sects and effects. And he has found, in the method of the etymological and cultural archaeology practiced by his teacher, Joseph Campbell, evidence of a mystery figure of enigmatic but positive form in the literate traditions of the world. The existence of this figure, a metahistorical presence at the heart of our culture that exemplifies harmony, gentleness, cooperation and transcendence of the clashing polarities of male and female, goes a long way toward explaining the multi-dimensional myths he examines. With careful scholarship that is neither tedious nor bland, Johnson uncovers this mystery personality and names him many times as a major actor in the world's stories. (This is the character Andrew Ramer mythologizes in the figure of Tayarti. And which Johnson finds in the Buddhist image of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.) Johnson believes that this personality is structurally ‘gay,' as we understand the term today, that is, outside the conventions of mainstream culture, aware with critical perspective, unfettered by the imperatives of childrearing, transcending the polarities of male and female, and free from the pretense of having to be a real man, “following bliss,” in the words of Campbell. And in the myths that surround the figure Johnson finds a history full of lessons upon the greatest of human motives: to be good and to do good. He goes further and interpolates the gay personality into the larger existence of the world. He valorizes various ‘gay' characteristics, such as unvaunted sweetness, high-minded sensibility and attainment and noble service, qualities which characterize what Johnson cites E.M. Forster as calling “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky, [who] represent the true human tradition, the one queer victory of our race over cruelty and chaos.” Gay Spirituality tidily lays out the metaphysical and historical preoccupations of the Gay Movement in a convenient and genial discussion. It seemed to me at times that I was reading a variation upon my personal quest for spiritual experience over the past thirty years. In the Introduction, Johnson anticipates such a reaction, saying “I hope all this will strike you as what you have always known, though may not have thought about in quite this way” especially as coming directly from the experience of your homosexuality.” Johnson is Jesuit educated, therefore, there is at the heart of his comments a scientific devotion to meaning. Gay Spirituality is like a breviary or a manual of spiritual exercises, albeit without a hint of self-righteousness or of arbitrary authority and method, not even of piety. The text is only mildly, but at the same time, thoroughly, didactic. His disquisition upon the asshole is an instant classic! Johnson asserts throughout the book, in a calm rational voice, that homosexuality, rightly understood and practiced, is a way of devotion which Western culture badly needs in its present violent and sexual jungles. His concerns with the proper understanding and interpretation and practice, the ethos, of same-sex love, extend into the culture at large. And in the intersection between homosexuality and the world he finds a Christic configuration amongst gay people and in the institutions of high gay culture, a Christ-like presence congruent with the history of the gay personality and that of the salvific hero, Love. Even the Gospels belong to this tradition. Johnson considers the active participation in these congruencies to be the modern gay experience, par excellence. And from that experience, he launches this very positive take upon the lore and light of the gay tradition. By such lore and light alone, he says, we steer our lives, if we are honest with ourselves But a whole take upon the gay circumstance surely involves considerations discussed above, those seemingly opposed to this via positiva homosexualis: the commonplace of the evil eye around the globe, the bitch queen's bitch, the aesthetic realist's apostasy, the denials of the trapped jock, the furtive stockbroker, the fascist attorney. The list is endless in the via negativa homosexualis. But these oppositions form a counterweight to Johnson's thesis, and do not negate Gay Spirituality's truly great claim on behalf of the homosexual phenomenon. Indeed, they demonstrate the need Johnson calls for for transformation of the negative “and too often self-fulfilling” prophecies of the via negativa. And, even in the golden glow of Johnson's achievement, it is not improvident to point out that there are those who insist that the oppression represented in these negative considerations, require sterner, more traditionally masculine means, in the American style, means other than those Johnson presents to remedy the world-view of Gays and to change the world's view of gay people. This is a political struggle, after all, they argue, not some mystical reverie. I agree with these voices but far from completely. For ultimately the message of a truly gay life is “Everything for Love.” And this is a truly spiritual, even mystical, message. Johnson, I think, would say, that it is the revolutionary duty of gay people to renovate their self-concept. For in the negativist model, without such renovation, it is sometimes necessary to die for one's being and one's right as a being. For the via negativa homosexualis is not the way of devotion but of mortal struggle. The methods and ideas, the programmatic attitudes and action with regard to homosexuality that Johnson proposes in Gay Spirituality are refreshing and personally satisfying to me. He describes a gay life that is, well, downright heavenly. But perhaps, also, tangential. For it may be that by externalizing secret, erotic doctrines and histories of same-sex-love experience and meaning, which lurk throughout all human history, we will not transform human society at all, but rather bring about our own destruction. As Randy Conner makes clear in “Blossom Of Bone,” the common fate of many such externalizations in the past was extirpation. But even if we are only exposing ourselves to annhilation by the forces in our culture hostile to our truth, it is still necessary to try to change ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. And in that context, one thing looms as a certainty: full citizenship for gay people is a political imperative for us and for this country. And it will change the culture enormously because it supplants the now-outmoded notions of what human life is about in the polarity of male and female. If we are to present a public face other than the one, largely a caricature, of the moment, a book like Gay Spirituality might help lead us out. It is great P. R. However, any progress made by this direct assault upon the anti-homosexual forces will likely provoke a violent response in American society. If the book gains the attention it deserves, the Gay Movement, always required to anticipate the heart of the mortal enemy, may be be forced to mediate the extremely gay-positive stance Johnson promotes. But Gay Spirituality goes so far toward explicating the mystery of the homosexual nexus hat we can be confident as citizens, politically, that even the mediated space provided in the arguments for and against the book's assertions will be an advancement for Gay Rights. On another level entirely, it seems time for the gay gentleman of a certain age, style and learning to come into his own. He is a literate and cultured man, valuable, not only to us in the underworld, but to everyone. Of a certain age, style and learning, he has lived, in the main, a life modeled upon the putative figures discussed here, and he deserves to speak his piece in the full light of, say, the TODAY SHOW. Toby Johnson seems to be such a gentleman. The scholarship alone in Gay Spirituality should garner Johnson the interview with Katy and Matt. But lets not hold our breaths. Besides, the basic lesson of the book that Johnson is only revealing to gay people what we already know and have always known about ourselves, makes the necessity for such celebrity moot. The point is not celebrity, but celebration. This book is, by the way, like Randy Conner's, “Blossom Of Bone,” a product of central Texas. And there is a message in this. For Austin represents the coming to be of a new cultural pivot in the American Empire. “Gay Spirituality” and “Blossom Of Bone's” cosmopolitanism grows out of the possibilty of practicing, in an imperial city, gay positive lifestyles here in the fast disappearing provinces of a recent backwater. The world is changing. And in great part, and because of our spiritual efforts, it's changing in our favor.

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