Gay Liberation is Human Liberation

 

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

50 years on from the first Gay Pride March in London – that of the Gay Liberation Front on 1st July 1972, walking from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park, the resurrected GLF is celebrating and recreating the original march on 1/7/22, the day before the ‘official’ London Pride celebration.  The activist core of the original Pride protest marches is still alive – if the celebratory official Pride reflects the huge advances in acceptance and visibility of LGBTQ+ people, the GLF march highlights the fact that some of us are very conscious that the LIBERATION JOURNEY IS NOT COMPLETE, because…

Gay Liberation is intimately involved with the spiritual liberation of all of humanity.

I believe a time is coming when the true purpose behind all religious and spiritual paths – the discovery and realisation of the divine potential in human consciousness – will become apparent to ever increasing numbers. A time is coming when the the search for the true Self, free of all masks and roles that the world asks us to play, becomes the driving force in human existence.

This affects all the people of the world, and how it affects, and alters, the story of LGBT people around the planet at this time is crucial. The emergence of LGBT communities in the past century is a sign of this emerging spiritual transformation happening to the species. Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals have done a vast amount to break down social taboos around sexual activity, relationship models, gender expression…. the current global phenomenon of increasing numbers of people questioning their gender identity is a call to us all to realise there is a deeper identity within us than the gender we were born (or transition) into. The emergence of gay/lesbian identity is a call to us all to realise the same thing…..that the boxes humanity divides itself up into are illusions. The TRUE SELF is manifest as all things, underlying all our identities, the same Self exists in all of us, limitlessly. Male, Female, Trans, Non-Binary, Gay, Bi, Straight – are simply versions of the same thing which we all are.

The Great Spirit is calling humanity to know itself, know The Self, at last. The breakdown of sexuality taboos and gender norms are a call from this Self to us to destroy all illusions and come home to what we really are and have always been. As LGBT people we are primed and ready for this awakening – the questioning and soul searching we go through in order to come out of the sexual closet prepares us for the shaking off of other illusory concepts and identities too. Our queer culture is still immature however, it supports us in coming out but then encourages blind identification with the pleasures and spectacles of the queer universe. A mature queer culture will recognise that the journey of self discovery goes much further than what we do sexually, or even than whom we love. It will encourage Self discovery on every possible level of our being.

The spiritual path has two key elements – it is as much about removing the blocks that exist in our mental and emotional planes, which prevent us from knowing and being the core divine consciousness within us, as it is also about embracing and evolving the unique talents, gifts and perspective that we are each born with in order to fully experience the joy and love that is possible once we are aware of and aligned with our own divine core, our soul essence.

Eckhart Tolle on gender, sexuality, transgender, nonbinary existence..    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s0DBFnJS2I

 

Awareness is key. Awareness is SEXY. Yes we are animals, some of us go far into exploring the sexual beast within.. And we are lovers, friends, a tribe of people whose queer eye makes us bearers of a unique and important view on the world… the queer eye of the age of Aquarius, which looks at the world and brings r-evolutionary new ways of being in it. Coming out is our response to the call of the Self within us to be expressed. We need the awareness in gay life that the story does not stop there. Our queer perspective on gender, sexuality, relationships, society, spirituality is invaluable to the whole. In fact our experience as outsiders in society makes LGBT people preeminently ready for the step into spiritual consciousness. All it takes really is to step outside of all the labels that we have become associated with in our lives and step into the holy presence of our own unique soul. A person in touch with the deep truths of their soul is a much sexier shag, a much more attractive lover prospect, than one using drugs as a way to avoid the challenges of love, of connection, of life.

In his book Gay Mystics, Andrew Harvey shares this:

“Many shamans were are homosexual; many of the worshippers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world … openly avowed their homosexuality and were accepted and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that transcends both…”

We are no longer bound by the homophobic religious and secular laws that forbad the development of gay identity. We are free to be who we are and to explore our fascinations, but we are seeing many, especially gay men, lost in the fantasy worlds we create within our subculture. We need to know that we are more than these bodies, more than animals that got lucky in the evolutionary game, more than any identity label through which we experience our existence on this world.

Our queer spirit has already produced its prophets of love and pioneers of evolved queer consciousness – voices that we badly need to hear, such as Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Harry Hay, Judy Grahn, Ram Dass, Arthur Evans, Starhawk, Andrew Ramer, Andrew Harvey, Toby Johnson, Christian de la Huerta and others… these are the gay visionaries every gay person should know about, these are voices of those who recognised the journey of love and spirit that all humanity is on, and which gay people are in fact born to lead.  Every gay kid deserves to know that the shamanic medicine men of the tribal peoples of the whole planet were often the genderbenders – that these shamans are our ancestors.. They did not build churches and create religions, they explored the natural connection to the non-physical, spirit realms of creation that they were born with, and used that special power to serve the wider community. We do not have to deny spirit because we are gay, nor do we have to exist uncomfortably in archaic religious institutions – the inheritance of the shamanic peoples of planet earth is ours to receive and explore, in our own spaces, in our own ways. This is the kind of intelligent awareness that gay life needs NOW.

Since 1979 Radical Faerie gatherings and sanctuaries around the world have manifested, in these words from Faerie pioneer Mitch Walker, “the first indigenous spiritual tradition created and sustained by the gay male community in modern times. By “indigenous” I mean gay-centered and gay-engendered, in contrast to the various gay synagogues, churches, covens etc. In the latter groups, gayness is incidental or additional to the tradition espoused, while in the former it is central and causal. Radical Faeries celebrate and explore the Gay Spirit, which is itself the source of spiritual existence, wisdom and initiation. Because of its indigenous, gay-centered nature, the Radical Faerie movement pioneers a new seriousness about gayness, its depth and potential, thereby heralding a new stage in the meaning of Gay Liberation.” https://www.whitecraneinstitute.org/wcjarchives/wc01019.htm

Coming out Spiritually will be the Second Coming for the LGBTQI+ community. We thought for ourselves. fought for our rights and declared the goodness in our sexuality. Now as we get bolder and learn to think for ourselves on the spiritual level it becomes increasingly apparent that we do not have to belong to religious institutions to express our spirituality. We can be signs to the whole of humanity that a direct relationship with spirit can be ours to enjoy, that spirituality is about finding out who we are on the most fundamental level, then bringing that joy filled soul essence into life.

Queer Spirit Festival is a UK festival where we celebrate the natural earthy spirit of LGBTQ+ people. 500 attended the third festival in 2019, plans are underway for the festival to return in 2023.

http://www.queerspirit.net    sign up on the site to receive festival mailings.