Gay Perspective

Chapter One

Being gay gives us a perspective on human experience that is different from that of the great majority of people. There must be something special and useful to humanity about this perspective, since a disproportionate number of important artists, poets, religious leaders, and spiritual guides in the past were what today we’d call gay.
Being gay means living outside the mainstream culture. While for many of us this is a source of real suffering and alienation, for others it offers possibilities for liberation, enlightenment, and artistic creativity. Discovering a positive, enlightening vision of homosexuality helps to resolve that suffering and contributes to the overall well-being of the world. Happy, flourishing gay people contribute “good vibes” that improve—even transform—the world around them.
Because the social condemnation of our sexuality is almost always couched in religious terms, our gay perspective necessarily forces us to seek to understand what religion really is. Indeed, gay perspective is itself a religious phenomenon. And because the social, cultural, and political movements that have bequeathed to us a sense of gay identity are based on notions of “revolution through consciousness change,” we have an acute sense of the phenomena of transformation and selffulfilling prophecy that are at the heart of mystical spirituality.
Since the 1950s and ’60s, homosexuals have transformed themselves and their lives—and their place in society—by changing how they conceived their sexuality. Instead of thinking of it as illness or sinfulness, we chose to think of it in the way natural for us: as love and as attraction to beauty and joy. This shift in perspective has changed everything. Signified by our embrace and proclamation of the word gay as a badge of community pride, this shift in self-perception has transformed deviant sexual orientation from a terrible burden to a gift from God. No longer a passport to hell, our homosexuality is an intimation of heaven. No longer a sin, it is evidence of grace. No longer a misfortune, it is a sign we’ve drawn a long straw in this lifetime.
We are still coping with the consequences of this shift in the context of our lives. We are still learning how to practice our sexuality compassionately, still dealing with the issues that have followed sexual liberation (most especially, the daunting spread of HIV), and still discovering the implications of the transformation of our collective consciousness.

Outsiders, Gender Blenders, and Non-Dualists

Gay perspective is based on three specific aspects of modern homosexual experience: First, we are outsiders and strangers. This status bequeaths—and sometimes forces on us—an ability to view life from a critical perspective. Even as children most of us felt “different.” Sometimes, often maliciously, our peers and classmates called us “queer,” because we were queer. We understood things differently from the others, especially things like gender-role behavior in play and sports. We were often more artistic or more insightful. Many of us were teacher’s pets, not so much because we were competitive and wanted to win but because we were sensitive to feelings and wanted to be loved. We were often precocious. All of us had a secret, though many of us didn’t yet know the words for it, and we may have explained it to ourselves using religious or magical metaphors. We learned how to protect the secret and to figure out in whom we could confide and from whom we had to stay distant. We developed a vivid interior life. We learned to think of ourselves as “special,” though we were tormented by that specialness as often as we were secretly elated.
Even those of us who have grown up in relatively accepting recent times—knowing what makes us different and knowing there are others like us—still experienced being different from parents and siblings. We still had to accept that we would be different from others’ expectations and that we would have to consciously embrace gay identity, despite considerable social pressures not to.
Because we haven’t fit into the conventional explanations of what life is about, we’ve had to figure out bigger and better explanations that do include us. So our outsider’s perspective often develops into “higher perspective”—that is, into an ability to see the bigger picture and to understand life in a larger context.

Masculine and Feminine

Second, most of us tend to embody both masculine and feminine viewpoints and characteristics. Hence we’re able to see both sides of issues and to be both strong and sensitive, both creative and receptive. We blend male and female not to confuse sexual identity but to demonstrate what’s natural and best in both sides of humanity. We tend to empathize with both men and women. For this reason we are often good marriage counselors and therapists. We’re often less inhibited than straight people about gender-specific traits. And sometimes we even naturally flout gender proscriptions. A gay man, for instance, is less likely than a straight man to be embarrassed to hold a woman’s purse for her, even when the straight man in question is the woman’s husband.
In fact, we gay folks are often fascinated by transgression of gender roles. We might enjoy holding the purse just for the style and verve of it. We enjoy cooking and housekeeping and cutting the grass and fixing things around the house. We may enjoy dressing flamboyantly or wearing costumes. We can be “creative” about our dress and appearance. Our voices are more modulated, our facial expressions are more animated and demonstrative. Gay men use their hands more in conversation, make larger gestures, and are less constricted by the fear of looking feminine. For the same reason, we’re often less likely to suppress feelings and emotional reactions for the sake of a socially approved effort to look manly. Our body movements are often more fluid; unlike most straight men, we love to dance. We’re more comfortable in our bodies. We recognize straightness in a man by his stiffness, physical rigidity, lack of expressiveness, and his fear of looking unmanly.
Straight men, after all, have to be constantly vigilant not to compromise their masculinity. One false step and they may look less manly to their peers. They must constantly prove they are real men by showing they’re not the least bit womanly or “queer.” It’s a heavy burden to never let your guard down. Gay men—and enlightened heterosexual men, who are comfortable with their sexuality, as the saying goes—don’t have nearly as much to prove, especially to themselves. We’ve already lost the battle; we don’t have to care. We’re less likely to worry about looking masculine than about looking sexy. It’s less important that other men think we look manly than that they desire us.
This liberation from the duty to prove masculinity makes us less violent, more prone to empathize with others, less guarded, and more conscious of our own feelings. On the other hand, many homosexuals find themselves in just the opposite situation: They must constantly hide their homosexuality and protect their secret for fear of reprisal and prejudice. However, the difference is that gay men know they’re hiding to protect themselves. Straight men conceal their feelings automatically or because they think such restraint is mandatory and should be mandatory. Gay men can find a gay bar or take a vacation to San Francisco, breathe “gay air,” and leave the worries behind. Straight men carry the worry with them everywhere because it’s not just other people they have to convince of their masculinity: They have to convince themselves as well.
There’s also an innocence and simplicity to gay consciousness, despite all the pressures to make us feel guilty and ashamed. Our sexual feelings for our own bodies and our sexual feelings for others’ bodies are the same. Our feelings of friendship and affection for our peers and playmates just naturally develop into sexual attraction and infatuation as we discover our sexuality. During puberty we don’t have to reorient our emotional lives and attractions away from our friends, whom we understand and share so much with, and toward members of the opposite sex, whom we don’t understand and with whom we don’t share much except heterosexual compatibility. We don’t suffer the straight man’s conflict between his private, essentially homosexual, excitement with his own body and his public identity as a heterosexual. Men who find other men’s bodies repugnant must have conflicting feelings about masturbation and about the male sexuality of their own bodies.
For straight people, gender is about what they are not: the other gender. Masculinity and femininity are defined in terms of difference. Straight men express gender by avoiding the expressions of the opposite gender. Our gay perspective helps us see that the simplistic and monolithic two-gender system doesn’t adequately describe actual human experience. All sorts of varieties and variations in gender expression can be found throughout the history of human culture, and modern freedoms allow even more variations to flourish. Premodern and non-Western cultures have configured gender in very different ways. Gender is much more fluid and eclectic than the two-gender system allows.
Bisexuality, transsexuality, transgenderedness, modern queer identity, and premodern two-spirit identity are all different and separate phenomena—as are male homosexuality and female homosexuality, for that matter—with their own distinctive experiences and exigencies. All these variations are subsumed, at least practically, in the word gay. They are aspects of our gay gender-transcendent consciousness.
Because gay people can blend gender, you might say we’re liberated from gender. We’re neither masculine nor feminine; we’re just ourselves.

Nonpolarization

Third, by transgressing normal sexual and gender roles and by transcending the polarities of male and female, we see beyond the entire array of polarities humanity projects onto nature. We don’t see the world divided between warring or competing factions the way “normal” people generally do. We don’t need to prove our masculinity by imposing male domination on the universe. We’re more apt to perceive the unity underlying the duality.
There is a real epistemological difference in our view of the world. Recognizing and coming to terms with our homosexuality—which is what “being gay” means—changes the way we experience reality.
In mythic and metaphorical terms, we are more likely to see the universe the way God sees it—freed from the blinders of duality and polarization. The effort to see beyond duality is the aim of most religious and mystical traditions; it is specifically identified as the foundation of the yogic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Most of us gay people, as a side effect of our sexual abnormality, are bestowed by the universe with this gift of insight. The trick for us, of course, is to recognize and embrace the gift.
The duality we do experience is right/left, conscious/ unconscious, voluntary/autonomic, objective/subjective, I/not I. But always our insight is that the binary opposites are just different sides of the same thing, not conflicting polarities. The inside and outside of a cup are not at odds with one another. The same is true of the categories male and female. But it is very hard for heterosexual people to see male and female as different sides of the same phenomenon because in the experience of most heterosexual people, they just aren’t. By definition, heterosexuals are either male or female, never both.
When we rise to a higher perspective we discover these seeming dualities are in fact one phenomenon. This is a mystical realization. It’s the revelation of Self itself.
This third aspect of gay consciousness—non-duality—encompasses the first two aspects: outsiderness and genderlessness. Genderlessness is outsiderness is perspective. The essential nature of gay spiritual perspective is nonpolarized.

Double Vision

Another meaning of duality does apply to us. This is the “double vision” that poet William Blake wrote about: the ability to see things in more than one way, to entertain both a realistic understanding and a mythological/imaginative/artistic vision of the same event. To use a Blakean image, this means to see the rising sun both as a shiny disk about the size of a coin above the horizon and as the ascent of the Heavenly Host singing “Holy, holy, holy.” This double vision means not being trapped in literal, single-vision, black-and-white thinking. It’s seeing the shades of gray. Double vision is only possible when you don’t believe in simple duality—in either/or propositions. It’s the opposite of “I’m right and you’re wrong.” It’s the realization that things look different from different perspectives. This duality allows you to think both literally and figuratively at the same time. It frees you from the obsession with being right—one of the sources of ego, regressive self-interest, and strife.
Rather than duality, perhaps this double vision should be called “plurality” (though that word is used usually to mean a candidate in an election who has received the most votes but not a majority of votes). In religion this is called polytheism: the idea that there are many gods and that belief in one God doesn’t conflict with others’ beliefs in other gods. (Judeo-Christianity and Islam are called monotheistic because adherents believe their God is the one, true, and only god who wants belief in other gods suppressed—by violence, if necessary.) In modern society this idea is called multiculturalism or pluralism. Modern Western culture is pluralistic because we allow different cultures to coexist comfortably. That gay culture has arisen in such a culture is no surprise.
If the existence of gay culture offends some people’s religious sensibilities, we can recognize their hostility as an indicator that their religion isn’t modern enough to cope with the plurality of cultures around the world. (Here the word is just right: Nobody’s got a majority, and nobody’s got a right to enforce their worldview on others). This double vision can also be called multidimensionality.
The idea that some things can have more than one purpose conflicts with ancient Hebrew and biblical constructions of reality. Only one kind of grain was supposed to be grown in a field; only one kind of textile could be woven into a fabric; only one kind of food was to be eaten at a time (and only on one kind of plate). And only one kind of sex was permissible. Things had one function, and that function precluded all others (since the anus was for defecation, it was therefore not for sex). Primitive thinking allowed for only simple understanding. As humankind has evolved, we’ve developed a much greater sense of life’s subtlety. Multifunctionality now implies richness and complexity. Morality now is not about categorizing and sorting; it’s about interpersonal relations.
Joseph Campbell used to tell a story that sums up the multidimensional, polytheistic vision. During a lecture on mythology, he’d explained how the various religious traditions influenced one another, how certain doctrines developed, how the various gods around the world reflected one another, and how the gods and their followers differed from one another. In short, he’d summarized his books and the whole enterprise of comparative religion.
During the question-and-answer period after the lecture, a stern woman stood up and asserted that only one religion could be right and that all the others must therefore be false. “Mr. Campbell,” she concluded, “I’ve been listening to you all night and...and...well, I think you’re an atheist!”
“Madam,” Campbell replied, “anyone who believes in as many gods as I do can hardly be called an atheist.”
That kind of “not being an atheist” is precisely what the modern transformation in religion is about. The “World Religion” of the future will include all the local religions of the past without acceding to any one of them. It will offer a vision of human spirituality that makes sense of the various religions as clues to a greater truth: a deep, encompassing message about the meaning of life. (Ironically, it has been out of Islamic culture—traditionally so intensely monotheistic—that two truly global religions have already emerged: Bahá’í and the International Sufi Movement.)
This World Religion will also embrace modern Western ideals of democracy, liberty, gender equality, freedom of choice, and respect for the diversity of life. These ideals form a modern spiritual consciousness that is morally equal to all the mythologized religions that have preceded it and that have prepared humankind for it. Mature spiritual consciousness has to be big enough to include everything that went before. Being gay gives us a step up in achieving this consciousness.

Camp Humor

On a psychological level, this multidimensional double vision is apparent, for example, in the gay talent for beauty and design. Gay design is often intentionally and transparently clever precisely in its combination of unexpected elements: antiques with ’50s modern furniture, for instance, or cactus leaves and barbed wire in a wreath with Christmas balls. Multidimensional vision also informs our sense of humor. “Camp” is based on an awareness of the dual nature of everything: Things are what they are and they are also something else. The essence of irony is that what people pretend isn’t what they really intend. Camp humor misdirects and exaggerates to unveil pretense. It’s self-conscious and reflexive. Campiness turns things around: Inverting the old visual joke about drunks putting lamp shades on their heads, camp humor might use an outrageous ladies’ hat for a lamp shade. Camp exemplifies the critical perspective of the outsider who can see there’s more going on than most people realize; things aren’t what they seem. The drag queen’s bitchy remarks cut through the bullshit to get to the lovingly golden truth within.
Of course, in our gender blending, we must avoid the error of inadvertently eroticizing and glamorizing through campy caricature the very gender roles we’re flouting and ridiculing. This “error” appears in the behavior of the gay man who parodies straight society’s idea of the failed female by acting bitchy so completely that he himself becomes truly bitchy, bitter, and angry. It appears in the behavior of the butch lesbian who rejects conventional femininity and inadvertently appropriates the oppressive qualities of the straight men she imagines she’s rebelling against.
Freedom from gender roles means being natural and naturally human, learning to be aware of feelings, and responding to others with empathy and sensitivity. It also means being unconstrained by socially determined roles.

Subject to Subject

Harry Hay, titular father of the modern gay movement, hypothesized that gay people respond to one another as subject to subject, while straight people tend to treat one another as subject to object. In other words, the nature of their sexual attraction tends to cause straight people to objectify one another, since they are attracted to a person with whom they can’t identify.
We gay people are attracted to others as reflections of ourselves (but not simply in the narcissistic sense). We relate to a person we love as someone we ourselves could be. In them we see ourselves—our particular personality traits. We long for union with our beloved(s) not by producing offspring to combine our genetic patterns but by becoming one with them in spirit.
The heterosexual model holds that people are attracted to their “other half,” their complementary opposite, to complete themselves by making the two become one. In the story in Plato’s Symposium, human beings were originally perfect spheres that were cut in two by Zeus as punishment for hubris, each half always searching for its “other half.” Except in mimicry of heterosexual jargon, gay people don’t think of their partners as their other halves. (And a gay man or lesbian would never call his or her spouse “the old battle-ax.”)
Men and women are taught to think differently, see the world differently, experience being in the body differently, like different movies, enjoy different smells and colors, have different priorities in life and in love, even button their shirts differently. They respond differently to sexual stimuli and respond to different stimuli. It’s said there is a “war between the sexes.” It’s said these differences are by nature irreconcilable and should be. The differences between men and women are what draw them together to form a familial bond and to rear children who unite the couple by transforming them into parents. This duality—the ceaseless interaction of yin and yang—is what’s said to keep the cosmic process going.
Homosexuals don’t experience this kind of attraction. We are attracted to people like ourselves who think the way we do, who experience being in the body the way we do, and who experience sexual arousal in a similar way. What we experience as the power in relationship is harmony and congruency, not conflict and difference.
We tend to opt out of the gender identity issue by incorporating both sides in ourselves. We don’t seek an opposite-gendered complement; in fact, we develop complementary qualities in ourselves by transcending gender and polarization. We look for another person who also possesses both sides.
Because we live immersed in heterosexual culture, we are raised with many heterosexual expectations. Before the era of sexual liberation, homosexuals (especially lesbians) traditionally bonded in butch-femme pairs. The development of open gay consciousness generally ended the obligatory character of that pattern. Of course, some gay people really do enjoy the differences and do experience the “opposites attract” phenomenon. Anyway, the individuals who form any couple will be different from one another. One may be older than the other, one a little butcher than the other, one more artistic or more intellectual. One may be more feeling-oriented, the other more thinking-oriented. When we see these differences through the heterosexual expectations, they may look like polarities. Even so, the differences gay people experience in their relationships are insignificant compared to the differences men and women experience in heterosexual relationship.

Being Gay Is More Basic Than Sex

Being gay is more basic than simply behaving sexually with someone of the same sex. Lots of heterosexual men, in fact, enjoy a little homosexual sex on the side. That we homosexual men have sex with other men is a consequence, not the cause, of our gayness. The cause lies in our reflection of the archetypal quality of non-duality. This is a way of seeing the world: the universe as a reflection of self, not as a complementary but different other. The grounding principle of existence is identity, not duality.
Our relationships are more symmetric than straight relationships. Homosexuals understand each other’s experience of attraction. We feel the same arousal. We’re attracted to each other for the same reason. We’re generally attracted to the same people. We understand—and can resonate with—our partner’s attraction to others because we are probably attracted to them too. (We can have three-ways.)
Straight people are compulsively drawn to individuals of the opposite sex whom they can love intensely but with whom they can never really connect. This duality creates tensions that pervade all of human culture. To be sure, it gives rise to the sexual joys of heterosexuals. It also gives rise to enmity and animosity (“You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em”). In a very real way, the polarization of male and female accounts for the existence of evil.

Male-Dominant Assumptions

Seeing the world with a different set of lenses helps us to see how arbitrary—and often erroneous—are many of the assumptions that most people make about the meaning of life. Male dominance, competition, hierarchy, scarcity, polarity, and the existence of good and evil are taken for granted by most people as fundamental features of human life. The reign of these assumptions determines the shape of the world we live in—all of us, gay and straight.
With the possible exception of male dominance—which the feminist movement has brought to everybody’s attention as controvertible—these social conventions seem inexorable and built into the fabric of the universe. That’s because the powers that champion male dominance want us all to believe they are. A key feature of the male sexual experience, perhaps going all the way back to our aquatic ancestors in the primordial oceans, is competition for access to females and the opportunity to father offspring. This heterosexual male struggle to reproduce gets projected onto everything and spawns many (if not all) of the problems human beings face daily. Experience of the apparent scarcity of accessible or willing females gives rise to the belief that for any kind of success in life, a host of problems must be overcome and that misfortune, injustice—and other people—stand in the way of achieving success.
We could have a world where everything everybody needed to sustain them is available and there is no scarcity and no need for competition for resources. New technologies may create a world where energy is so abundant and labor so easily automated that everything will be free. But it’s unlikely the “alpha males” who’ve won the male dominance competition will allow this to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we continue to believe there isn’t enough happiness to go around, that we can’t be generous (“If I give one to you, I’ll have to give one to everybody”), that the world is fraught with problems, and that “those other people” are responsible for the problems we face. In mythic, metaphorical terms, life is an ordeal to be suffered; there’s a battle between good and evil, between the sinners and the saved; and heaven must be somewhere else.
Becoming aware of how these heterosexual male assumptions color all of life is the work of spirituality and consciousness-expansion. The goal of our spiritual practice (which actually requires no achievement at all) is to see that heaven exists right here, right now, on the other side of all those dualities.

Both/And Instead of Either/Or

Conventional thinking, dominated by the influence of straight males, asserts: “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Nonpolarized thinking transforms that: “We’re both right and we’re both wrong, from different perspectives.” Therefore both sides can coexist and help one another. There is no competition. This is the basis for love of neighbor and love of enemy.
This transformation demonstrates the new paradigm of “both/and instead of either/or.” You can actualize this new paradigm in your daily life by practicing using the word “and” instead of “but” every time you start to say it. It’s simple and it changes how you think.
The word but usually contains a lie. Here’s the classic example: I want to go to the beach, but I have work to do. The but in the sentence creates the impression that these alternative ways of spending the day are contradictory and mutually exclusive. That’s simply not true. The truth is that you want to go to the beach and you want to get your work done. Both facts are true. Making the shift in wording shows you that you might be able to adjust your schedule so you can do both. You begin to inhabit a universe full of possibilities instead of mutually exclusive alternatives.
Of course, some alternatives are mutually exclusive, and no amount of adjusting can change that. But if each time you start to use the word but you stop to consider whether you could use and instead, you discover there is a lot less polarization and opposition in life than we’ve all been taught to believe.
Non-duality allows you to avow conflicting ideas at the same time. For example, you can affirm that democracy, free enterprise, and private ownership of property are wonderful ideas and that Communism and collective ownership are also wonderful ideas. Both can be true. You can believe in God, and at the same time you can understand that God is a mythological image. Non-duality and multidimensionality free you from exclusivistic thinking.

Making Other People Wrong

    “Making other people wrong” is an example of how polarization creates animosity and justifies enmity and misunderstanding. Making people wrong is choosing to interpret their behavior in a negative context, projecting bad faith and bad intentions onto them, assuming the worst, and judging them accordingly. It means interpreting their behavior and their motivations from the other side of a polarity, from the other side of a but. “I go to church on Sunday, but so-and-so plays golf” implies the golfer isn’t as pious or moral as he should be and makes him wrong. “I go to church on Sunday and so-and-so plays golf” changes the sentence to a simple statement about various pastimes. Dropping the but removes the judgment by removing the opposition.
    The straight world’s tendency to object to gay marriage, for example, is full of buts. The opposition argues that recognizing gay relationships undermines and invalidates straight marriage. They look for contradiction where it doesn’t exist: “They want to get married, but they’re two men.” Allowing gay people to marry doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of straight marriages. There is no conflict between straight marriage and gay marriage—no scarcity of marriage licenses or conjugal bliss.
For the most part, the straight world unwittingly accepts the polarity and believes in the contradiction. They accept unthinkingly that the existence of homosexuals in the world somehow threatens the existence of heterosexuals. They see things in terms of opposing teams. They believe adversarial conflict is the best way to achieve justice.
In a very real way, straight people are always involved in a power struggle between men and women. That means, for them, that life is full of sexual possibilities and delights in overcoming the male/female opposition. It also means they are immersed in a process of polarization that gives rise to wrong-making and opposition.

Straight People Are Not the Problem

    The point here is not to make straight people wrong or to criticize their behavior negatively. They are the vast majority of the human race—the normal people. There are many wonderful straight people. Indeed, there are wonderful straight religious people—both among our supporters and among our opponents. Obviously, most wonderful people are straight because most people are straight. Though the polarized worldview that heterosexuality produces remains the biggest source of the suffering and acrimony in the world, straight people are not the problem. And so we want to collaborate with straight people to make a better world for everybody.