Gay Consciousness, Sex, and the Evolution of Religion

The following excerpt is from Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness by Toby Johnson.

______________________________

A gay spirituality is necessarily concerned about sex – and is necessarily sex-positive. People who choose to identify themselves openly as gay are more sexually motivated and more sexually aware than others. If their sexual and affectional urges were insignificant to them, they would never have come out in the first place. Because gay people have experienced their sexual desire as so intense and consuming that it sets them on a different course from their peers, they are more motivated to find deeper levels of meaning for sex and to discover more variety in ways of experiencing it.


Of course, there are highly sexualized straight people. But they do not have a great need to tease out new meaning for sexuality. It comes to them. This is not to deny that for everybody, straight and gay, discovering sex can be difficult or that straight people cannot find new meanings for their sexuality on their own. But the culture supports heterosexuals with a ready explanation of what sex is for, though usually relegating it to a simply biological, reproductive role. As gay people we have to create our own explanations, our own myths, our own visions of why “God” created us this way and what it means to be homosexual. We often have to do this on a person-to-person basis with little help from either mainstream or gay culture.


When we seek spiritual answers as gay people, we are necessarily looking for sex-positive and gay-positive answers. This puts us in a special place in the evolution of religion.

Gay consciousness gives insights into sex by demanding that it be viewed from the perspective of the exceptions, not the norm. What forces a theory – or a theology – to expand and rise to a higher perspective are not the findings that fit the theory, but those that do not. The accumulation of knowledge is founded on seeking explanations for what does not meet expectations and assumptions.


Sex is a state of heightened awareness of consciousness incarnated in flesh, an altered state of consciousness in which individuality is momentarily transcended and consciousness merges with the collective. It is consciousness delighting in its own evolution into human bodies that can feel pleasure and joy.

The most important function of sex in human evolution has been reproduction. You could even say the purpose of sex is to produce babies. A lot of people do say that. Unfortunately, they often go on to say, looking from their own limited perspective, that reproduction is the only purpose of sex, and if sex cannot lead to reproduction then it should not be allowed. They do not see things from a high enough perspective. That there are self-aware and self-identifying gay people tells us that there is more to sex than reproduction. The issue is not what some sort of creator/biodesigner had in mind. The issue is what is real. Homosexuality is real. Therefore, it is part of the design.

It is the homosexuals’ responsibility to create an understanding of functions for ourselves. And we have. This is a major part of our contribution to evolution. As consciousness has evolved, new layers of reality of sex have developed. Certainly, human beings have sex in a much more complex way, more rich, more prolonged than other animals. In addition to a biological process, in human beings sex has evolved into a psychological process.

Modern gay-sensitive research demonstrates broader functions of sex in refuting the notion that homosexuality does not exist among animals. Giving evidence of homosexual activity in more than 450 species, for example, biologist Bruce Bagemihl offers a new paradigm of “biological exuberance.” Nature is driven as much by abundance and excess as it is by limitation and practicality. The conventional model of evolution based in Darwin’s experience of nineteenth century British capitalism presumed scarcity and competition with a winner-take-all mentality called “survival of the fittest.” In fact, perhaps, nature simply delights in variety. Efficiency and cost effectiveness are modern economic ideas. Biological exuberance many be “God’s” idea. And gay people represent the exuberance for fun and pleasure.

– Excerpted from Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness by Toby Johnson.