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Toby Johnson's books:

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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Unpublished manuscripts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.

from Secret Matter

Afterword
Mark D. Jordan

Picking up this new edition of Secret Matter, I recall how many thanks we owe to science fiction. For keeping our imaginations queer, I mean.

As a boy, I found in sci-fi novels (SF, s-f, fantasy...) a whole gallery of queer lives. I wouldn’t have known to call them that, at least not at first, but I studied the portrayals as intently as if they held my secret. They did. During bleached Texas summers, sprawled on a thin rug in the coolest room of my grandmother’s house, I read my way onto exotic worlds where people were allowed to be... unusual. Their lives had more colors and shapes than got mentioned around her formica dinette. Under wispy red suns or moons of ice, beside murmuring ruins of alien cities, men and women got to become what they could never have been earthside. Or in south Dallas. They unriddled strange religions. They endured demonic visions that transfigured them into gods. And often they ended by preferring life out there, beyond terrestrial certainties.

Then came the allure of sci-fi authors. I still remember the strange thrill I felt, over the thrum of the window unit, when I read that "Andre Norton" was the pen name of a woman. I knew from French class that "Andre" was "Andrew." How could a woman be an Andrew? And why had some of her novels been published originally under the cross-sex name "Andrew North"? Somewhat later, I was stopped at the local branch library when I tried to check out Brian Aldiss's Starship. The librarian looked at me sourly and explained that the book, now firmly in her hands, "talks about things that aren't for boys." My amused mother returned the next day to sign a form giving me permission to check out whatever I fancied. But the embarrassing episode taught me that some sci-fi writers, like dirty words and pictures of naked bodies, were restricted to adults. So I sought them out.

. . .

Secret Matter stands in a line of speculative novels that try to picture healthy queer lives beyond heterosexist institutions. Like lesbian-feminist dreams of utopia, or the myths told around Radical Faerie campfires, this novel proposes queer consciousness as an alternative to familiar prejudices and conventions. They tell us, "Sex can only be between one man and one woman bound in a monogamous marriage ordered to child-rearing and social stability." No. "Jealousy is an important safeguard on sexual purity." Not really. "Love needs lies." Imagine it otherwise.

In Toby's novel, the function of literary imagination is presented as a play within the play: people give meaning to their encounter with the visitors by appealing to sci-fi stories like Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. The stories--Toby's too--help them to resist the bondage of familiar lies. In other places and times, the imagination of radically better and truer possibilities for human living has been a sacred task. Priests construe patterns for other lives in sacred texts. Prophets call them down. Oracles dream them in trance. Bards, seized by another sort of divine madness, sing them. I discovered Secret Matter while I was looking for queer religion, and I was not disappointed. It not only imagines queer lives, it proposes that they be religious through a combination of text, prophecy, trance, and song.

(to continue, please buy the book . . .) 

Preface to the Updated Edition

Secret Matter was first published in 1990. It was set in "the near future." Fifteen years later, the little soft sci-fi romance has become a genre classic, but the near future it was set in has come and gone. And so for this rerelease by Lethe Press a little updating was needed.

With a few changes to the plot and some tweaking of politics and high-tech devices, I think I've made the story accessible to contemporary readers. I've introduced a new explanation of the Visitors' reality (based on--and extrapolated and fictionalized from--the mind-transforming concepts in the remarkable book The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness by Samuel Avery). And I've honed the message and, I think, made the revised and updated Secret Matter a better novel.

 As a frontispiece and in memoriam for the first edition, I'd used  a calligraphy exercise done back in the late '70s by my first lover Guy Mannheimer (1943-1989). It was a quote from the novelist E.M. Forster, friend of proto gay spiritual philosopher Edward Carpenter and best known in gay culture for the novel Maurice. Guy's sampler used the provocative word "queer" in the most charming way. It seemed perfectly to capture the innocent message of Secret Matter and the meeting with the Visitors.

a text version of the quote appears below

I've used the wonderful words "queer victory" in many things I've written. I loved how the adjective "queer,"with its meaning of strange yet also slightly alluring, implied homosexuality without appealing to the word as the mean-spirited epithet. This quotation exemplifies just the right use of this contentious word of self-identification. So now for this updated edition of Secret Matter, I went searching for its source.

E.M. Forster's  words come from an essay "What I Believe" in a book called Two Cheers For Democracy. But they turn out to be slightly different from the words Guy used in his calligraphy sampler.

Forster actually wrote: "They represent the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos." Not as neat, and not as gay-specific. It now seems to be about the contrariness of human nature, not about the "aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and plucky." Too bad!

Did Guy Mannheimer change the wording? Was it to give special meaning? Or was it simply to fit space constraints? And then where did he get the quote from? Guy had been in attendance at the First Radical Faerie Gathering in Arizona in 1979 only shortly before. Did he learn the quote there? Maybe from Harry Hay, titular Father of Gay Liberation? Did Harry change the words? (Hay's first exposure to what--in great part thanks to him--would later become "gay consciousness" was a book about the spiritual nature of "homogenic love" by Forster's friend and influence Edward Carpenter which Harry discovered in a public library when he was 11.) He'd have certainly preferred the gay-specific implication.

That I've used these words in so many essays about our queer gay consciousness--and then discovered the words were different from those I knew--has made me question whether the past might change around behind us. What an audacious idea!
Time is a quirky thing.

Well, "the near future" has certainly changed from what we thought it was going to be in 1990. The queer lives of lesbians and gay men have been vilified and devalued--because of AIDS, because of the priest pedophile scandal and the fight over same-sex marriage, because of the cultural coup of Fundamentalism worldwide--even while we achieved amazing, but maybe self-defeating, visibility in TV, movies, and the news media. Could the negative spin on what it means to be gay and queer have changed the Forster quote out from behind me?

That's certainly a topic for a science fiction novel! That's not what Secret Matter is about, but this novel is about a different way to understand the nature of gay consciousness.

Maybe what determines what we experience in life is our focus and expectation and intention, more than "hard reality." If not able to change the past, how gayness gets spun and how we think about ourselves certainly changes the future. So maybe holding in mind Secret Matter's innocent and hopeful little myth of what gay consciousness is really about is one of the ways we can change how time is changing around us.

It would be a wonderful near future if we can actually achieve that queer victory over cruelty and chaos.


Here's that quote from E.M. Forster as it appeared on Guy Mannheimer's calligraphy sampler.

An aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky are to be found in all nations and classes, and through all the ages. And there is a secret undertanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one queer victory of our race over cruelty and chaos.

 E.M. Forster

return to calligraphy above

The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness:
A Physical Basis for Immaterialism

By Samuel Avery

Compari Press, pb, $10.00  108 pages

Available from amazon