Table of Contents
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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
What is homosexuality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
Bonobos,
Family Values,
and Gay Reincarnation
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
|
 The Way
Out: The Gay Man’s Guide to Freedom No Matter If You’re in Denial,
Closeted, Half In, Half Out, Just Out or Been Around the Block
By Christopher Lee
Nutter
Health
Communications, Inc, 189 pages, paperback, $14.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson
Part edgy memoir, part
social criticism, part spiritual writing, The Way Out is Christopher
Nutter’s account of his journey from closeted, nerdy Alabamian to hot
and sexy New York gay bartender and party boy, to jaded and unhappy
victim of gay club culture glitz, to spiritual seeker and exponent of
gay wisdom.
There are not a lot
of details of Nutter’s autobiography in the book; the book isn’t about
him. But his personal story provides the framework within which to
share the insights he has gained over his twelve years as an explorer
of urban gay life. There’s just enough personal anecdote, from his own
life and from that of friends he cites, to keep the wisdom grounded,
and the insights identifiable and personal.
Chris Nutter grew up
in straight middle-America, in his case in Birmingham, Alabama, in the
70s and 80s. As a child, he was depressed and withdrawn, he tells,
because he didn’t feel attractive enough or masculine and
self-confident. Once he got to college, he began to remedy his sense of
physical and personal inadequacy by going to the gym, changing his
look, and acting the role of privileged pretty boy. But he was still in
denial of his sexual feelings. So it was a monumental shift in his life
when in 1993 he decided to take control of his own destiny. He dropped
his plans for law school to do what he wanted to do, which was to be a
writer, came out gay, took a magazine internship job in Boston, and,
most significantly, initiated his new identity by writing an article
for Details magazine about life in the closet. He burst out of his own
closet on a national scale. And was met with almost universal
acceptance.
As he tentatively
explored the gay sub-cultural world of the big cities, he discovered
gay club culture: “gorgeous, glamorous gay men with hot bodies.”
He threw himself into that world. He scored a job as a bartender at a
famous gay bar, wrote for a gay magazine, posed for classy homoerotic
photography. So by the standards of that glitz gay club culture, he’d
made it. He was one of those men with the hot bodies. He could do
attitude and fuck like it was an athletic sport. But he still wasn’t
happy.
He observes that
“coming out of the closet is usually thought of as the singular answer
to the gay ‘predicament.’” But then the gay world just takes over your
mind and fills your head with yet another false reality about who you
are. It’s a solution, but only part of the whole solution, a step in
the right direction, but only a step. There remains the deeper question
of who you really are. And this is a spiritual question.
Intermixing themes in
current spiritual thought--the Dalai Lama, Joseph Campbell, Don Miguel
Ruiz, Gary Zukav, A Course in Miracles, the Twelve Steps-Nutter offers
an answer to who you really are. And in the process recounts how he
came to understand this through his experience in urban gay culture.
The answer, of course, isn’t new or surprising. It’s the age-old
answer: we are each a perspective that “God” or “Divine Consciousness”
or “the cosmos”--whatever you want to call IT--is taking on itself. We
are not separate beings, competing and fighting with one another. We
are each other and so it’s ok to tell the truth, it’s ok to let go of
fear, it’s ok to love and respect other human beings as expressions of
the divine consciousness.
Nutter identifies
five steps in changing one’s life: Decide to Heal; Recognize Your Pain
as Your Pain; Look For How You Cover Up or Avoid Your Pain; Refrain
From Reacting, Feel Your Pain and Learn What Is Causing It; and Correct
Your Vision. These describe the dynamics of psychotherapy and
consciousness-raising, but presented in identifiable terms, based in
modern day experience. They also echo the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.
Chris Nutter’s
articulation of this wisdom is fresh and current. He speaks with the
voice of his generation and in a way that makes this revolutionary
mystical wisdom seem obvious and inevitable—even though it is
life-altering. And he derives his wisdom from his gay experience not in
repudiation or rejection of it.
Nutter is a little
judgmental about that glitzy gay club culture. There certainly is
justification for this. The club culture/ gay bar culture/sexual
underworld can be alluring, then addicting, then destructive. Some
men’s lives are ruined by drugs and alcohol and compulsive sex. Some
men need “the way out” from the gay world, just as they had earlier
needed “the way out” of the closet. For most gay men, I think, this
comes about as simply the natural development of growing older and
changing priorities. But even for those who are just naturally growing
up, a book like this can be immensely helpful. We all go through those
five steps whether we know it or not. It helps to know it and to have
some guidance in understanding where the process is going.
It’s refreshing to
discover a book like this coming from the youth generation of today.
It’s one thing when these ideas about mature gay consciousness come
from psychiatrists and professional spiritual writers. It’s quite
another--much more immediately accessible and believable--when it comes
from one of those gorgeous, hot bartenders.
Interesting, by the
way, Nutter doesn’t use the word queer. There’s a welcome
naiveté about the politicized terminology of the gay movement;
this gives the book a feel of personal honesty and
straightforwardness and makes it speak its wisdom that much more
effectively.
It is exciting--and
concerning--that Chris Nutter has derived this wisdom and spiritual
worldview on his own. It confirms the intuition that gay men are
talented at designing worldviews and religions (as we are with flowers
and furniture). This is the personal yoga of every one of us today: to
create our own religion. What’s concerning is that he had to do it
without the help of the generations of other gay spiritual seekers
who’ve done it before him because their wisdom just isn’t readily
available to the mainstream--and especially the gay club--culture. Our
gay history keeps getting lost.
It’s a symptom of
collective homophobia--and how it gets expressed in mainstream gay
culture--that young homosexuals seeking to overcome personal homophobia
naturally resist instruction from older homosexuals out of the very
homophobia they’re trying to overcome. This dynamic is familiar as the
notion that homosexuals can’t be trusted to be accurate reporters on
homosexuality because we’d be biased! As though personal experience and
knowing whereof one speaks is a “bias.” Exacerbating the problem of
passing gay wisdom down from one generation to another is that the very
experience of realizing and accepting one’s own homosexuality
usually is concomitant with realizing you can only trust your own
counsel, everything you’ve been told about sexuality is wrong and you
have to discover the secret truth yourself--in Buddhist terms, you’re
on your own and nobody’s going to save you. So each generation of
homosexuals begins by rejecting the past and distrusting all
passed-down wisdom, whether it’s from their parents, their church and
government or from gay community elders. (This manifests, of course, as
the continual evolving of the “politically correct” name for the
movement; every generation rejects the previous generation.)
So in a way I have to
think I’m sorry Chris Nutter had to go without the accumulated wisdom
of the gay elders. Our community somehow needs to learn its historical
continuity and “apostolic” succession and make this consciousness
accessible to youth just joining us. But I am also quite proud of him
for having made the perilous journey. I expect him to take his place
among the new generation of gay leaders and luminaries.
The Way Out is a good
book. It’s easy to read, interesting and thought-provoking. Nutter’s
presentation of the perennial wisdom is fresh and accessible.
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