“You mess with us, and you wake up with a condom on your house.”

Technorati Tags: activism, Gay, Helms, HIV/AIDS

It’s hard to find starker signs of the fundamentally different meaning-worlds that we human beings inhabit than the divide between those who make their opposition to homosexuality central to their worldviews … and those who don’t. I love the title of Stephen Miller’s post: “Homophobia’s Ongoing Decent into Farce”:

The anti-gay American Family Association has announced what will be a completely ineffectual boycott of McDonald’s because of the fast-food giant’s involvement with the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. The move follows ineffectual AFA boycotts of Disney (for “its embrace of the homosexual lifestyle”), Ford (for running ads in some gay publications) and Target stores.

What’s striking about the AFA’s hit list is that the group’s wrath is directed at the most iconic of American companies. Outside the fever swamps of the religious right or, for different reasons (e.g., “globalization”) the anti-capitalist left, these are the companies beloved most by hard-working, family-centric Americans. It’s a sure sign of the increasingly farcical marginalization of the AFA and its ilk.

Not that homophobes are inherently, actually farcical. Or supporters of gay equality always sane and reasonable. But it’s a sign of the times that the borderline loony gay activists have gone nearly invisible (when’s the last time a man-hating lesbian separatist or a Queer Nation separatist made the news? 1975? 1991?) but the borderline or over-the-top loony homophobes are loud as ever.

For those of us loony spiritual evolutionists, the changing times are welcome. Not every historical change is progress, nor every trend a sign of the unwavering march of Hegel’s World Spirit towards some glorious final end-point. But there are clear footprints in the world of advancing freedoms for individuals and for classes of human beings previously marginalized and excluded, and the voices of resistance are growing shriller and more unhinged the closer they come to defeat.

Technorati Tags: AFA, Gay, homophobia, Miller

Michael Petrelis is outraged (but not shocked) at the latest evidence that the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights lobby, seems to have put all its eggs in the Hillary Clinton basket. He writes:

FEC records show which 2008 Democratic contenders were lucky enough to take in dollars from the top people at HRC:

Hillary Clinton: $4,300
Chris Dodd: $3,000
John Edwards: $ 750
Bill Richardson: $ 500
Barack Obama: $ 0

Commenters make a good case that Petrelis is letting an anti-HRC bias show. First, he neglects to search the FEC records for the HRC’s Board of Directors. Second, he neglects to mention that the FEC doesn’t track donors who give less than a few hundred dollars. It may well be true that the HRC missed its chance at securing influence with Obama at a time of political risk (during the primary season), but Petrelis’s case isn’t rock solid.

If it’s true that the HRC missed its opportunity to curry favor with the Obama campaign, then I think that decision is political negligence. It’s a foolish gamble that will cost the organization — and may cost the entire gay rights movement — leverage with the future Democratic administration. Petrelis reports (hilariously) that the HRC was so unmoved by Obama’s victory that it actually gave the task of reporting its official endorsement to a college intern. Not an encouraging sign.

Technorati Tags: Gay, HRC, Petrelis

Matthew Yglesias makes a great point that is often overlooked in the “family values” debate: protecting the institution of the family is a valuable and legitimate goal of government. He writes:

It’s genuinely the case that we have a lot of social problems that are complicated by family instability — children are expensive and time-consuming and tend to be much better off if both parents are involved in bringing them up. So the idea that marriage and family life could, in some sense, use some shoring-up isn’t a crazy one. But conservatives don’t seem to have many actual ideas about doing this apart from blaming the gays. But I think serious social conservative ideas on this front would be welcome.

This observation is an example of the Third Way approach to politics because Matthew is saying that sound policy should affirm values that other political thinkers see as antithetical: not allowing anti-gay discriminationi and not allowing cultural decline to unravel the institutions of marriage and family.

What’s missing to make this a Fourth Way approach is to identify that the seemingly conflicting values arise from concerns at at least three distinct levels of social evolution. Protecting existing social institutions is a top priority of tradition-minded thinkers (amber altitude), defending the individual liberty of gays is a top priority of liberals (orange), and affirming a more inclusive understanding of the family is a top priority of multicultural-minded thinkers (green altitude). Matthew’s analysis would be strengthened by acknowledging that the goal of politics is to balance these values and not allowing any one set of values to establish a “dominator hierarchy” over other legitimate values.

Technorati Tags: family, Fourth Way, Gay, marriage

You know that same-sex couples have begun to marry in California. At Spirit Under Transsexual Cover, Colin writes:

Remarkably, transgender people also win this week. The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) reported today that the American Medical Association passed a resolution [PDF] calling for the removal of exclusions to health insurance that unfairly target the transgender population. Such exclusions prevent people from receiving medical care related to “Gender Identity Disorder,” the beloved moniker assigned by the American Psychiatrists Association in the DSM…

These are small victories that seem to affect only a small percentage of the population; what we see here, though, is an example of the continued evolution of human consciousness.

Technorati Tags: consciousness, Gay, GLBT, transgender

I was so nervous the morning of my dialogue with Ken Wilber that it was hard to calm my nerves. We were slated to discuss my book Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007).

Nothing that a screwdriver wouldn’t help me get through. But once it was time for my telephone chat with Ken, I found it rather enjoyable. He’s a great conversation partner and really brought out a wide variety of different angles on my story that I wouldn’t have predicted. Pretty cool experience overall!

Here’s how Integral Naked introduced my talk:

The author of one of the most searing, courageous personal memoirs of our time shares how an Integral Approach helped him reconcile a life of fierce inner struggles with what it means to be a gay man in today’s culture, the difference between genuine spiritual experiences and psychotic episodes, and the thorny intersection of homosexuality and Christianity.

In the foreword to Soulfully Gay, Ken Wilber writes: “Joe Perez’s book is perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our time. By a homosexual, or a heterosexual, or any other sexual I am aware of.” Ken wrote this foreword without even having met Joe—probably one of the strongest complements one writer can give to another—and Soulfully Gay is the second offering from our Integral Books imprint at Shambhala Publications.

Joe Perez - Soulfully Gay. Part 1. Out of the Closet, Into an Integral Embrace.
(click here for free sample)

Joe Perez - Soulfully Gay. Part 2. The Power of Integral Reconciliation.

Technorati Tags: Gay, integral, Ken Wilber, Soulfully Gay

In BeliefNet’s “Integral Spirituality in Real Life”, Ken Wilber praises my first book, Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007)?

“I am in the awkward situation of writing a foreword to a book by a gay person. This is an awkward situation not because Joe Perez is gay, but because I have to point it out. I feel the same damn irritation as having to refer to, say, Edmund White as a “gay writer.” Nobody has to point out that I am heterosexual, although now I hear that I am not a heterosexual but a metrosexual, although, in fact, I have never had sex with a metro in my life. But I’m sure it is a wonderful experience.

“Nevertheless, because I have to include that information-culture today demands it, from those both for and against homosexuals-then let me say this. Joe Perez’s book is perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our times. By a homosexual, or a heterosexual, or any other sexual I am aware of.

“As it happens, this rather extraordinary chronicle unfolds around several conflict-inducing facts, one of which is that Joe is indeed gay; another of which is that Joe was raised Roman (homophobic) Catholic; another is that he often has authentic mystical states; and yet another is that Joe is, but only occasionally, clinically psychotic. It is the jolting collision of those items, held together by Joe’s courage in the face of all of them, that makes this chronicle so extraordinary in so many ways.

“The last item-the occasional trip into realms labeled madness-can mean, especially if you are a writer, that you are given to telling the unvarnished, brutal, searing truth, whether society likes it or not. And not the Sylvia Plath look-at-me kinds of truth, but the spiritual-seer and mad-shaman types of truth, the truths that really hurt, the truths that get into society’s craw and stick there, causing festering metaphysical sores indicative of social cancers or worse-but also the types of truth that speak to you deeply, authentically, radiantly, if you have the courage to listen.

“As it turns out, Joe is a writer, a rip-roaring wonder of a writer, and he had the courage to tell those truths, to endure them, to have them tear him apart, hospitalize him, brutalize him, kill and reassemble him, in one of the most astonishing tales of death and resurrection you are likely to find in today’s literature.

Of course, Soulfully Gay is “technically” a memoir. It contains a day-by-day journey of fourtheen months in my life. Fourteen months of soul searching, philosophizing, ruminating, and discovering repressed memories and hidden secrets. It reveals the high price I paid for the mystical connection with Agape and Thanatos, a journey that disrupted every aspect of my life and sent me to the psychiatric wards.

But it’s also the book where I lay out the case, step by step, analytically and pragmatically, why God is gay. Or, to say the same thing in a more nuanced way, why the principle of “gayness” or self-immanence is the underlying principle for understanding how homosexuality manifests in all realms of our evolving world.

In this reading (sorry for the poor production values, I’m a webcam newbie), I discuss the following passage from Soulfully Gay, and succintly answer the question: what does it mean to say “God is gay?”

God made some men gay, because He made them in His image. God made gay men to love in gay ways, because God loves in gay ways. The beauty of gay men reflects the beauty of God. The beauty of gay ways of loving reflects the beauty of God’s gay ways of loving. When someone fears and hates a gay man, he or she fears and hates God.

Audio (MP3): joeperez_sg1

Video (WMV):

You can purchase or learn more about Soulfully Gay at the Website of its publisher, Shambhala, or buy it today at Amazon.com…

Technorati Tags: Gay, God, homophilia, Soulfully Gay

Starting out, I’d prefer if you keep my name to yourself, but I had to write to you. A week or two ago, I was in a bookstore and spotted a single copy of your book on the shelf. I pulled it out, opened up to a page—and was somewhat shocked—because in that particular entry, you were writing about me. I used to write a blog about being gay / bi-sexual (whatever I am) and Christian at the same time, focusing on what I thought at the time was my path to becoming exgay. (I said something like turning away from homosexuality and toward god)

I’d probably still be on that path, but a little more than a year ago, I met someone. The blog entries became fewer and fewer as our relationship grew more and more. I love him; I’ve never loved anyone before. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I feel somewhat hypocritical—I’ve become what I told others I’d never become: just happy with who I am. Mostly. I’m not out to a lot of people. Mostly close friends. My church found out about my boy friend being gay (let me explain, they seem to think we’re just roommates and that he’s gay and I’m not) and one of the pastors made a huge deal out of it. My boy friend won’t go back to the church (I don’t blame him) and they told me I had to move out, or that I couldn’t do any of the leadership type things they had me doing. I haven’t been back to the church since then either, as much as I loved it there. It surprised me a lot, their reaction, being that it’s a hugely progressive group of over 2,000.

Anyway, I don’t really know why I’m writing to you. I told myself I would when I saw the entry. I don’t write the blog anymore, but have thought about starting a new one. Being that most of my friends before I met my boy friend are Christians, I can’t turn to them to talk about this stuff. Being in a relationship is hard enough, dating a guy for the first time in my life when everyone in my life tells me that’s wrong is, well, interesting, to say the least. It was nice to see what you wrote—I’d vaguely recalled reading it online, I think a while back. I’m sure I promptly dismissed it back then.

Technorati Tags: Gay, Soulfully Gay, youth

Originally posted July 10, 2007.

Nobody’s spiritual journey is charted by a straight line from perdition to salvation. There are always surprises along the way. In recent years, a new type of spiritual path has burst onto the scene, one filled with queer curves and loops. It’s the path of the “Gay Turned Straight”.

Who is the “Gay Turned Straight”? They can be easily spotted because they always tell their spiritual story with six major plot twists:

1. A confused young man (and usually the story involves a man, though not always) decides he is homosexual. He comes out of the closet as gay. The step is always perceived at the time as liberating, a positive movement of self-affirmation and self-acceptance.

2. The young man plunges headlong into an “active homosexual lifestyle,” by which he very often means an extreme version of the urban gay subculture, not unlike what is caricatured on TV with shows such as Queer as Folk. Pornography, sexual addiction, and excesses of every sort are not uncommon.

3. The young man grows tired of all the problems he believes are inherent in such a lifestyle: its shallowness, vanity, recklessness, and so forth. Thus he begins to sink into self-pity, usually around the same time his heterosexual peers are settling down into seemingly happy marriages with children.

4. In a bold leap of logic and breaking with convention, the young man blames homosexuality itself for all his life’s woes. He becomes a “Gay Turned Straight”. In his own mind, the problem isn’t that he is behaving sinfully, Nor is the problem created by a small subculture of the adults-only lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, forged as it is in a climate of hostile homophobia. In an artful act of pure psychological projection, the Gay Turned Straight concludes that the problem is with gayness as such. Homosexuality, he concludes, is an evil.

5. The young man converts to ___ (insert dogmatic, conservative religion or philosophy here) which emphasizes guilt and strict obedience to clearly defined gender and sexual roles. His new worldview provides a sense of order, meaning, and security in a time when he is up to his ears in misused freedom and existential angst. In some cases, the religion is accompanied by so-called ex-gay ministries that promise freedom in a life of celibacy or heterosexuality.

The Gay Turned Straight is often wounded from years of his own trivializing of his own precious sexuality. It’s no wonder that getting religion brings him to “salvation”. He has a lot of inner healing and sexual recovery work to do to heal from his destructive habits and obsessions.

6. The young man tells his story to the world, rewriting his own life story in such a way that only a revisionist historian could love. Whatever sort of community involvement he may have had in the LGBT world now makes the individual a “prominent gay-rights activist”. Whatever sort of beliefs he held that once helped him to make sense of the world are now his old “homosexual agenda”. His spiritual journey is one of “coming out of homosexuality”. He is hailed as a hero by the right-wing press and ignored or dismissed by the rest. He revels in his newfound role as a modern Moses, leading the queer sinners into the promised land of normalcy.

The path of the Gay Turned Straight may feature as many variations as there are individuals, but the six major plot twists are inevitably the same, from the newly practicing Orthodox Jew to the ex-gay evangelical, from the zealous Roman Catholic convert to the rigid neoconservative “true believer”.

The latest example of the Gay Turned Straight is Michael Glatze’s account of his spiritual journey in “How a ‘gay rights’ leader became straight” (July 3, 2007), an op-ed for the right-wing online publication WorldNetDaily. The Gay Turned Straight stereotype fits Glatze to a T, right down to his own attempt to sell himself as a big gay-rights activist (in truth, Glatze was neither prominent nor totally obscure; he founded and edited a little noticed and currently defunct magazine called Young Gay America).

Before I say another word about Michael’s spiritual journey down the path of the Gay Turned Straight, let me add this note in bold: I respect Michael’s right and choice to follow a more traditional life path. I respect his Christianity and share the same faith tradition. I applaud Michael’s dedication to God, even as I challenge his particular theology.

Two facts are pivotal to understanding Michael’s narrative. First, he says he spent 16 years of his adult life working for magazines that by his own admission “bordered on pornography”. For years he had moral qualms with the sexually explicit content of the photography, but he tried to rationalize those concerns away. He seems to have formed many of his impressions of gay culture based on the sort of lascivious advertising found in magazines distributed in the gay bar and bathhouse scene.

For many gays such advertising is not a major concern. It is often regarded as a mildly embarrassing fact of life in a diverse adult LGBT subculture (as it is for me). But for Michael such near pornographic advertising is absolutely definitive of homosexual identity.

Second, Michael’s rejection of homosexuality is dependent on a misunderstanding that homosexuality is lust-based in some unspecified way that heterosexuality is not. He writes: “As a [former] leader in the ‘gay rights’ movement, I was given the opportunity to address the public many times. If I could take back some of the things I said, I would. Now I know that homosexuality is lust and pornography wrapped into one. I’ll never let anybody try to convince me otherwise…” In short, Michael allows the back pages of Young Gay America magazine to define the essence of being gay, but he never stoops to define heterosexuality by the contents of the smut racks of an adult bookstore.

It’s not difficult to see the very real origins of Michael’s feelings of revulsion, nor does it take a genius to spot the leaps of illogic that sweep him away to dubious conclusions. Anyone who spends years doing something morally against his inner conscience (as Michael did working for a magazine peddling content he found offensive) is going to have to come to a point where he faces a moral quagmire.

Michael makes no argument that homosexuality is inherently connected to pornography. And he would be hard pressed to find any type of pornographic exploitation done by homosexuals that isn’t also done by heterosexuals. And Michael’s lack of logic doesn’t stop there.

For Michael, “homosexuality is lust”. He never bothers to identify in what particular way gays are challenged by lust that heterosexuals are not. He asserts that it is so, but without substantiation. He writes: “We believe, under the influence of homosexuality, that lust is not just acceptable, but a virtue. But there is no homosexual ‘desire’ that is apart from lust.”

I don’t know of any particular gay intellectual or gay-rights activist who has ever said that “lust is a virtue” as Glatze claims, at least not in the sense that he takes it. Note that Glatze is putting his own spin on the gay community’s attitudes, painting a multicolored spectrum of opinions in black and white. My own particular take, spelled out in my book Soulfully Gay (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007), is that homosexuality is essentially an expression of love (homophilia) and is one of chief ways that God makes himself present.

At its best, the gay-rights movement has affirmed three essential spiritual principles. Not every gay person will agree with all three of these principles (and others would prefer to substitute a term for God such as Emptiness, Spirit, Divinity or Higher Power), but something like these three principles are fairly universal elements to be found in the work of mainstream gay spiritual writers, philosophers, and theologians.

First, God’s presence is encountered by the whole person: body, mind, and soul. It will not do to repress or deny any part of our integral humanity in order to meet God part way. Denying the body won’t work. Evading the intellect is a mistake. Ignoring the spirit is folly.

Second, restrictive aspects of traditional religion have frequently broken the relationship between God and human being by severing the connection between body and soul. Repressing and denying the natural instincts, sensations, feelings, and desires of the body actually dishonors God’s good creation.

Third, gay liberation heals the split between body and soul, allowing a person to own (rather than psychologically repress) their inner nature and therefore connect to God more fully, honestly, and integrally. The body is not denied, hidden, and obscured by the mind or spiritual fancy.

With this understanding in mind, you can see that “lust” has nothing in particular to do with sexual orientation or liberation. Gay liberation is about freedom to feel and accept the body. However, lust is uncontrolled, overmastering sexual desire or appetite. Lust is what happens when sexuality of any sort, heterosexual or homosexual, is allowed to run wild over prudence, common sense, health, and mutual respect.

Lust is not the same thing as bodily passion. Passion is feeling our inner drives intensely and wholly. Passion fuels life and gives us our direct encounter with our own inner drives, the given of human experience. Only passion misdirected in either heterosexual or homosexual ways is appropriately called lust (for example, a harmful sexual addiction is lustful, whether the addicty is a man addicted to sex with women or to men).

Sexual attraction means admiring the beauty, sometimes passionately so, in another person. This is the thrill and delight sung by poets for millennia, including the Song of Songs in the Bible. In contrast, lust means treating our fellow human beings merely as disposable sex objects, instead of seeing the beauty in our fellow human beings as penetrating all levels of their humanity.

In my opinion, Michael Glatze’s account of his journey is best read not as an account of one man coming out of his homosexuality. The editorial provides no real evidence that Glatze has fundamentally changed his attractions, desires, or even his behavior. Glatze makes no claim to have discovered a passionate yearning for the female sex, only a claim that he cultivated a revulsion towards his homosexual inclinations.

So please don’t read Glatze’s story as a story of a gay-rights activist turning straight. Instead, consider the story an account of one young man’s journey out of lust and into (perhaps) more disciplined sexual behavior. As a man in his thirties, it seems that Michael may be belatedly discovering that sex is not all about pornography, cheap thrills, and back-of-the-magazine sex lines. He thinks he’s discovered something important about his homosexuality. In truth, he is learning a lesson about growing up that is available to all persons regardless of their sexual orientation.

As for his stock narrative as a Gay Turned Straight, including all his terrible misunderstandings and misrepresentations of homosexuality, Michael’s is now a familiar tale. His story, replete with its truly offensive and defamatory attacks on an entire class of human beings and its tone deaf reading of gay culture, is best forgotten and forgiven.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, exgay, Gay, homosexuality