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

Originally posted: 2007. The following poem is adapted from Soulfully Gay (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007).

The Two Directions of Love

Love is not merely an emotion. Love is another name for the soul’s archetypal desire to be reunited with Divinity, Alpha and Omega, and the actions that are manifested as a result of that desire. In other words, love is another name for two archetypal directions of all reality. Love describes the process by which the soul reunites with Divinity.

There are two archetypal ways of loving: self-transcending and self-dissolving. In self-dissolving ways of loving, the self seeks to be reunited with the Alpha in inner-directed ways. Self-transcending ways of loving seek to be reunited with the Omega in outer-directed ways. There are actually an infinite variety of ways of loving, but it’s helpful to start talking about just two.

Gayness and straightness are each, in their purest archetypal forms, expressions of the two archetypal ways of loving. Gayness is another name for the self-dissolving form of loving: the desire to love in inner-directed ways, and the actions that spring from that desire. The movement toward Alpha. Another name for gayness is homophilia, or love of the same or similar.

Straightness is the self-transcending form: the desire to love in outer-directed ways, and the actions that spring from that desire. The movement toward Omega. Another name for straightness is heterophilia, or love of the self for other or the seemingly different. Heterophilia is the love of Divinity in otherness, and homophilia is self-love, or receptivity to Divine love in sameness.

Technorati Tags: agape, homophilia, homosexuality, love, poetry, Soulfully Gay