Merry Christmas! My gift to the readers of Integrally Gay: a free 10-page excerpt, “The Importance of Being Gay,” from my 2007 book, Soulfully Gay. With these pages, I first announced the arrival of a new way of looking at human sexuality and its connection to spirituality.
If you read nothing else I have ever written, read these pages. They are part of the reason why the (heterosexual) philosopher Ken Wilber declared Soulfully Gay “perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our times.”
These pages are a good part of the reason this book is now being taught in divinity schools and religious studies programs across the United States in classes on theological method, ethics, and theological anthropology. There’s something original here, if you have the eyes to see it.
The philosophical significance of Soulfully Gay is summed in “The Importance of Being Gay,” and it is this section of the book I consider its most notable. It is a vision incredibly simple and yet potentially earthshattering: the announcement that human nature itself has evolved.
For thousands of years, human beings understood their gender and sexuality as a unified whole: yang or yin, man or woman. Virtually every major philosophy and theology of the East or West, from Taoism to Christianity, inherited the assumption that being human meant being basically one or the other, and every religious path designed a way to unite that essence with some concept of Spirit.
The past few centuries have changed and complicated this intellectual inheritance in many ways. Beginning at least since the invention of the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in the 19th century, humankind has woken up to the notion that gender and sexual orientation are differentiated aspects of human nature (and the homophile/gay/queer/LGBTQ movements have solidified this understanding).
Today, it is taken for granted (by all but a few in our modern societies) that a human being has both a gender and sexual orientation. All the while, our culture has consciously or unconsciously retained much of the prejudice of the ages: the notion that true spiritual paths are defined only by yang and yin, masculine and feminine. This prejudice is at the root of every notion that homosexuality is unnatural or against God’s will, no matter what major world religion you look at.
In “The Importance of Being Gay,” I first articulated my understanding of how our age is on the cusp of a revolution in its grasp of human nature. Yang and yin were suited for the age inhabited by the ancient Chinese, a world in eternal harmony with heaven, not a world continually evolving towards Spirit. Adam and Eve knew nothing of evolution. But in an evolving world, it is impossible to look at yang and yin, Adam and Eve, animus and anima, or masculine and feminine, in the same way.
Today, yang manifests as both a gender and a sexual orientation; so does yin. As genders, these eternal principles describe how human beings translate the meaning and purpose of our lives—and as sexual orientations, these eternal principles describe how human beings transform all values. Gender tells us the way that we are; sexuality tells us how we become.
In the first phase of evolution, there were two combinations of gender/sexuality: yin and yang. In the second phase, the age we now inhabit, there are four: yang-yang, yang-yin, yin-yang, and yin-yin. It is impossible to deeply understand the evolutionary dynamics of our age—what is changing in the world today with regard to gender and sexuality—without appreciating this astonishing difference.
And it is impossible to deeply understand these four combinations of gender and sexuality without looking at the major sexual emergences and movements in the past century. With the arrival of fundamentally reshaped identities, we have gained a vision of a more subtle and complex face of Spirit.
To put it simply: Straight men teach us about yang-yang and straight women teach us about yin-yang. Gay men teach us about yang-yin and lesbians teach us about yin-yin. Bisexual, intersexual, and transgender persons also have much to teach about the combinations and permutations. Human gender and sexual variations are important because they show us our core subtle identities in relationship to an Ultimate Reality.
There’s a reason why today’s culture is obsessed with homosexuality, old great religions and splintering and their theologians going into battle, and why Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, recently declared that gay rights is the “new frontier” of human rights. Sex and spirituality are the crux of this time of historical transition, as Spirit wakes up from an millennia-old slumber and sees a new reflection in the mirror.
I once said, ”It is impossible to properly understand God without properly understanding the nature of gayness.” And I stand by that claim (and want to add that no one can properly understand the nature of Christian revelation without understanding homophilia).
The ancient Chinese vase has fallen. It has split in four pieces—not two—and the shards are rearranging in our midst. My book, Soulfully Gay, is one of many in recent decades to understand that this revolution is taking place everywhere one looks; and it may have been the first book to proclaim that the intertwining of homophilia and heterophilia is the connecting pattern that holds yin and yang together, that glue which alone can reassemble the broken vase.
Once a person has truly grasped and internalized the fundamental vision that Spirit manifests in both same-directed and other-directed ways, one’s very concept of God is transformed. To recognize the duality of heterophilia and homophilia, Eros and Agape, at the heart of all things forever alters the discussion about God’s Love and love of every kind. That is what I believe.
Andrew Sullivan spoke beautifully in the final words of Virtually Normal:
[T]he seeds of homosexual wisdom are the seeds of human wisdom. They contain the truth that order is in fact a euphemism for disorder; that problems are often more sanely enjoyed than solved; that there is reason in mystery; that there is beauty in the wild flowers that grow randomly among our wheat.
There is, indeed, reason in mystery. My own conclusion is this: Heterophilia is humanity awakening to its own divinity. Homophilia is the divine awakening to its own humanity.
About Joe Perez
