Profiles: Toby Johnson

Toby Johnson, Catholic monk turned activist, psychotherapist and spiritual writer, was born in 1945 in San Antonio TX. He entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite. After leaving seminary in 1970, he moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies from which he received a master's in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."

First as a peer-counselor and then licensed professional, Johnson worked as a gay-oriented psychotherapist in San Francisco in the mid-70s. As a member of the D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance ("Dykes And Faggots Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism") and spokesperson for the Gay Mental Health Task Force of San Francisco's Health Department, he was instrumental in the adoption of a Gay Client's Bill of Rights, guaranteeing access to gay or gay-sensitive health care providers--a notion that, subsequently, had major effects in AIDS-related services.

In the late-70s, he teamed with Harvard-trained sociologist Toby Marotta in producing Marotta's books, The Politics of Homosexuality and Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67, and in working in a federally-funded ethnographic study of gay teenage prostutition.

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, the lesbian and gay community bookstore in Austin. Partners since 1984, they were the first male couple registered as domestic partners in Travis County, TX.

Johnson is author of three autobiographical accounts of spiritual development: The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness about his discovering a modern understanding of religion; In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld about his experiences--and interpretation of events as a religion scholar--in the study of teenage prostitution; and The Myth of the Great Secret (revised edition): An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell which added substantial anecdotal material about his mentor.

Toby Johnson is author of three gay novels: Plague: A Novel About Healing, Secret Matter, and Getting Life in Perspective. Secret Matter, a sci-fi, romantic comedy about truth-telling and gay identity featuring 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 award.

He is also author of Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe. From 1996 to 2003, he was Editor and Publisher of White Crane: A Quarterly Journal of 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.