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FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III

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, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan

GETTING LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:  A Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods

THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil

TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams




CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers

THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell

IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey

Unpublished manuscripts

About ordering

Books on Gay Spirituality:

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

  Articles and Excerpts:

Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness

Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"

About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996

The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate

A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality

Why gay people should NOT Marry

The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage

Toby and Kip Get Married

Wedding Cake Liberation

Gay Marriage in Texas

What's ironic

Shame on the American People

The "highest form of love"

Gay Consciousness

Why homosexuality is a sin

The cause of homosexuality

The origins of homophobia

Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness

What is homosexuality?

What is Gay Spirituality?

My three messages

What Jesus said about Gay Rights

Queering religion

Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men

Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"?

The purpose of homosexuality

Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality

What the Bible Says about Homosexuality

Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men

Varieties of Gay Spirituality

Waves of Gay Liberation Activity

The Gay Succession

Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?

The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter

Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium

Easton Mountain Retreat Center

Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism

The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey

The upsidedown book on MSNBC

Enlightenment

"It's Always About You"

The myth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara

Gay Spirituality

Curious Bodies

What Toby Johnson Believes

The Joseph Campbell Connection

The Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)

Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy

The Two Loves

The Nature of Religion

What's true about Religion

Being Gay is a Blessing

Drawing Long Straws

Freedom of Religion

The Gay Agenda

Gay Saintliness

Gay Spiritual Functions

The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.

The Sinfulness of Homosexuality

Proposal for a study of gay nondualism

Priestly Sexuality

Having a Church to Leave

Harold Cole on Beauty

Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption

Not lashed to the prayer-post

Monastic or Chaste Homosexuality

Is It Time to Grow Up? Confronting the Aging Process

Notes on Licking  (July, 1984)

Redeem Orlando

Gay Consciousness changing the world by Shokti LoveStar

Alexander Renault interviews Toby Johnson

Mystical Vision

"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

Pilgrimage

No Stealing

Next Step in Evolution

The New Myth

The Moulting of the Holy Ghost

Gaia is a Bodhisattva

The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016

The  Gay Hero Journey (shortened)

You're On Your Own

Superheroes

Seeing Differently

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

Facing the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom

What are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?

The Vision

The mystical experience at the Servites'  Castle in Riverside

A  Most Remarkable Synchronicity 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

About Alien Abduction

In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke

Karellen was a homosexual

The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance

Intersections with the movie When We Rise

More about Gay Mental Health

Psych Tech Training

Toby at the California Institute

The Rainbow Flag

Ideas for gay mythic stories

People

Kip and Toby, Activists

Toby's friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.

Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement

About Hay and The New Myth

About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"

About Michael Talbot, gay mystic

About Fr. Bernard Lynch

About Richard Baltzell

About Guy Mannheimer

About David Weyrauch

About Dennis Paddie

About Ask the Fire

About Arthur Evans

About Christopher Larkin

About Mark Thompson

About Sterling Houston

About Michael Stevens

The Alamo Business Council

Our friend Tom Nash

Second March on Washington

The Gay Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement of Spirituality"

Book Reviews

Toby Johnson's Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:

Gay Perspective

Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us about the
Nature of God and
the Universe

Gay Spirituality

Gay Identity and 
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman








Secret Matter

Lammy Award Winner for Gay Science Fiction

updated








Getting Life in Perspective

A Fantastical Romance

The Fourth Quill

originally published as PLAGUE

The Fourth Quill is available as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie Moreland. Click here

Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo

with Walter L. Williams

Two Spirits  is available as an audiobook  narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click here

Finding Your Own True Myth:

The Myth of the Great Secret III









In Search of God  in the Sexual Underworld












The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.

This was the second edition of this book.

White Crane Gay Spirituality Series

The most valuable asset taken from an oppressed people is their history. As a result, the GLBT community is a people constantly coming out of erasure. Because of oppression and bigotry, each generation seems destined to go through the same process of self-discovery, coming out, and finding one’s place in the larger community.

                       

The White Crane Institute, dedicated to researching, exploring and documenting the variety of spiritual roles and stories among contemporary GLBT and gender variant men and women and the publisher of WHITE CRANE: the Journal of Gay Wisdom & Culture, is pleased to make classics of gay spirituality and culture available again to a new generation of readers. It is our hope that by making our rich history more widely and easily available, new generations can move beyond erasure, bigotry and hate and find their rightful role in the larger community of the world.

White Crane Gay Wisdom Series

Mark Thompson's Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning is arguably the book that started the Gay Spirituality Movement

Publishers Weekly wrote: Cultural editor of the Advocate, Thompson here collects previously published articles and book excerpts from the magazine, each an attempt to define the status of gay men. In an introduction he distinguishes between homosexual (a form of sexuality) and gay: "A social identity and consciousness actively chosen." The text discusses the gay's role in politics, religion, culture, identity. Among the contributors are Judy Grahn, author of lesbian/feminist works; Malcolm Boyd, activist Episcopal priest; Harry Hay, a founder of the Mattachine Society; and writer William S. Burroughs, . . . [including] Geoff Mains's "Urban Aboriginals and the Celebration of Leather Magic," an approving, detailed description of sadomasochism.

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Toby Johnson's Gay Spirituality describes the Gay Men's Spirituality Movement and offers a realistic, but satisfyingly mystical, explanation of religion based in the ideas of Johnson's teacher, renowned religions scholar Joseph Campbell

R. Boerner (Tempe AZ) writing in an unsolicited review on the Amazon.com site says: ". . . being gay is a spiritual asset, not a liability. Where some look down on same-sex love as defective, because it does not express the male-female duality, Johnson turns it around and proudly declares that to be the precise reason why same-sex love is spiritually superior. It transcends the duality.

Johnson's vision of a life-affirming, sex-positive spirituality of love, cooperation, mutual respect and acceptance is in sync with modern scientific knowledge, and does not ask the reader to suspend logic or critical thinking. Gay christians who are struggling with their sexual orientation will especially appreciate Johnson's convincing refutation of common "biblical" anti-gay arguments. A powerful book for personal change, a wonderful antidote to the negativity of the Religious Right, and a great gift to a gay friend who is unhappy with his life or suffering from low self-esteem.

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In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award-winning Gay Spirituality, Toby Johnson further explicates his visionary stance that gay people's nature as outsiders gives them a uniquely powerful perspective on the nature of God and religion.

In what way does this "outsider's perspective" differ from the traditional outlook on spirituality? It provides a distance from establishment viewpoints, allowing for a deeper critical analysis of commonly accepted beliefs.

By living outside what are considered gender norms, gay people are more open to seeing across boundaries of gender and gain access to a less dualistic outlook on the nature of life. Because of this, gay people are far more attuned to the needs of a rapidly evolving society in which quickness and nimble thinking are in demand, gender equality is rapidly becoming an expected norm, and traditional religions are beset with internal conflicts, exposing inherent contradictions between organized religion and the true nature of God.

Once again Johnson approaches this potentially controversial subject matter with erudition, empathy, and visionary speculation and gives meaning to gay consciousness beyond superficial issues of sexual behavior.

Buy Gay Perspective

Andrew Ramer's Two Flutes Playing is a classic of gay mythopoesis.

Michael Bails (Seattle WA) writing an unsolicited review on the Amazon.com site says: "I was recommended this book after having taken a Body Electric workshop a few weeks before. From the first page I began to re-live the entire bonding rituals that we had experienced over that weekend. How to connect, how to communicate, and how to intimately bond on a higher plane! Although some of the prose is repetitive, it helps instill a spiritual base on which the reader can pull from. A definite "must have" book for the gay tribe who would like to interact spiritually and emotionally!"

Another Amazon customer wrote: "Tonight, my partner and I read sections of Andrew Ramer's Two Flute Playing together. It was a moving experience for both of us to read a loud to ourselves, a chapter tittle A Ritual for Male Lovers. This chapters, like other chapters of this book, gives very poetic as well as practical ways of understanding, experiencing, and living a life of Gay Love."

Buy Two Flutes Playing



Andrew Ramer’s new book, Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories, grapples with traditional midrashim, plays with homoerotic love poems from medieval Spain, and envisions alternate versions of the present.

Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, working with the narrative tools of the rabbis of old, Ramer has crafted stories that anchor LGBT lives in the three-thousand-year-old history of the Jewish people. “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms,” wrote poet Muriel Ruckeyser. The stories in this book will transport you to a new universe – the one we are striving to create, right here and now.

Buy Queering the Text

Mark Thompson has a website  showing his photo exhibit
 Fellow Travelers with links to all his books

White Crane Institute is currently sponsoring Mark to take his photo exhibit on the road.

The Fire in Moonlight:
Stories from the Radical Faeries
1975-2010

Edited by Mark Thompson and
Richard Neely (Osiris) and Bo Young, Associate Editors

Foreword by Will Roscoe, Ph.D.

The most valuable possession a people have is their story…their history.
 
Many years in the making, with over fifty contributors from around the world, The Fire in Moonlight is the first anthology of its kind. Beginning with Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter in the nineteenth century and moving through the liberation movements of the late twentieth, The Fire in Moonlight speculates far into the twenty-first. It offers a timely compendium of culture wisdom, provocative wit and challenging sensuality.
 
The Fire in Moonlight gives witness to a groundbreaking movement that painstakingly emerged from the Gay Liberation era. Rooted in the history of radical visionaries, this little known, essential community informs the modern world with new meaning, offering fresh definitions of faith, identity, purpose and gender.

The Fire in Moonlight is a series of  personal reflections on who the Radical Faeries are, where they’ve been and where they are going: Radical Faeries in their own words. It is about how a movement has changed lives—and how Radical Faeries contribute to healing a fractured Earth.

Buy from Amazon.com

The Fire in Moonlight



ALL is an anthology of writings (some previously unpublished) by gay wise man James Broughton, compiled by his friend Jack Foley.


In a life that stretched from 1913 to 1999 James Broughton witnessed and commented on the twentieth century from the point of
view of an outsider. In a time aghast at its own horrors, Broughton championed laughter. He was a poet, not of the ivory tower but of the innovative street, a playful, urban voice with the notion that a poet could change the world. In a rational century, he asserted mystery. All: A James Broughton Reader collects the range of this acclaimed poet and filmmaker.



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Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling

edited Toby Johnson & Steve Berman includes stories by some 30 authors This anthology of gay-positive stories--some fiction, some autobiographical, some funny, some sexy, some touching, some profound--demonstrate the "charm" of being gay.

This book was nominated for Best Anthology 2007 by the Lambda Literary Foundation

Buy Charmed Lives









Take Off the Masks: An autobiography by Malcolm Boyd

For over sixty years, Malcolm Boyd has written truthfully about his own journey to fullness. From theologian to civil rights pioneer to coffee house troubadour to
gay rights icon, Boyd has courageously and whole-heartedly shown the way to a
deeper, more honest examination of all our lives, leading by example.

White Crane Books is proud to re-release Boyd’s classic spiritual biography and coming out story, Take Off the Masks, for a new generation of readers hungry for its insight, honesty and soulful perception. With a new introduction by Boyd’s life partner, Mark Thompson, and a newly added postscript by Rev. Canon Boyd himself.


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A Prophet In His Own Land
A Malcolm Boyd Reader
Edited by Bo Young and Dan Vera


For over sixty years, Malcolm Boyd has written truthfully about his own journey to fullness.  From theologian to civil rights pioneer to coffee house troubadour to gay rights icon, Boyd has courageously and whole-heartedly shown the way to a deeper, more honest examination of all our lives, leading by example. Bo Young and Dan Vera interview Malcolm and his partner Mark Thompson about their years together. Many of Boyd's previously unavailable articles are reprinted here.

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In Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living, Daniel M. Jaffe explores various aspects of gay-Jewish life.

Coming out to self and family; (re)defining one’s relationship to tradition and faith; surviving child abuse and teenage sexual identity angst; experiencing the adult joys and heartbreaks of dating, of forming relationships, and of losing them; coping with HIV/AIDS; considering parenting; and dealing with old age.

Mirroring the diversity within contemporary American Jewish life, the main characters in these twenty-four stories are Jewish, but in various ways—some wrestle with religion, others with their place in tradition and community. Yet for other characters here, Jewish identity is not at issue in the pursuit of happiness, love, and inner peace; rather, Jewishness is a cornerstone given, a foundational lens through which these characters see and examine the world and self.

Buy Jewish Gentle

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