Toby Johnson

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Toby Johnson is an award-winning American novelist and writer in the field of gay spirituality. From 1996 to 2003, Johnson was editor/publisher of White Crane, a periodical focusing on gay men's spirituality. Johnson's central idea is that as outsiders with non-gender-polarized perspective homosexuals play an integral role in the evolution of consciousness--especially regarding the understanding of religion as myth and metaphor--and that for many homosexuals gay identity is a transformative ecological, spiritual, and even mystical vocation.

Born Edwin Clark Johnson in 1945, San Antonio Texas, Johnson attended Catholic parochial school and then the college prep school associated with St. Mary's University, Texas. Johnson entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite, where he was in the first class of students at the Catholic Theological Union, Johnson studied under the influential Scripture scholars Barnabas Ahern, C.P. and John Dominic Crossan, both of whom changed how the modern world perceived sacred writings.

After a year in Chicago, Johnson worked in a Hospital Chaplaincy summer training at Metropolitan State Psychiatric Hospital in southern Los Angeles; that summer, he came out as gay. Johnson viewed this summer of 1969 an auspicious one because of the Stonewall Riots events. He left seminary in 1970, moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. Johnson received a graduate degree in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Asian Studies, later renamed the California Institute of Integral Studies. He was a student of Joseph Campbell and was on the crew that put on Campbell's talks in the Bay Area during the 1970s. He worked with gay political science scholar Toby Marotta on Marotta's two books and in a study of gay teenage prostitution for the San Francisco-based consulting firm Urban and Rural Systems Associates (URSA).

In 1981, Johnson returned to his hometown where he practiced as an openly gay therapist and served as co-chair of the San Antonio Gay Alliance. Toby and partner Kip Dollar organized Gay Pride celebrations, worked with fledgling AIDS Foundations, and helped found gay business societies in both San Antonio and Austin. From 1988 to 1994, Johnson and Dollar ran Liberty Books, a lesbian and gay community bookstore in Austin. They were the first male couple registered as domestic partners in Travis County, TX. They currently live in central Texas.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe
  • Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
  • Secret Matter. This science-fiction novel, set in San Francisco, which tells of the arrival of alien visitors and contains a retelling of the Genesis myth with a gay-positive outcome, won a Lambda Literary Award in 1990 and in 1999 was a nominee to the Gay Lesbian Science-Fiction Hall of Fame, the first year of the Gaylactic Spectrum award.
  • Getting Life in Perspective
  • Plague: A Novel about Healing
  • Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo (With Walter L. Williams, PhD) - a romantic gay western that deals with gender roles and ethics.
  • The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Spiritual Meaning in the Face of Emptiness (1981)
  • The Myth of the Great Secret (2nd Edition): An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell (1991) - about Johnson discovering a modern understanding of religion.
  • In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld - about Johnson's experiences--and interpretation of events as a religion scholar--in the study of teenage prostitution.
  • Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling (co-edited with Steve Berman) (2006). The inaugural title in the White Crane Wisdom Series, this anthology of inspirational essays and short fiction for gay men earned Johnson and Berman a Lambda Literary Award nomination.