Toby Johnson

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About Toby Johnson
Author of Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell, Secret Matter, and other books. Edwin Clark (Toby) Johnson, Ph.D. is a former Catholic monk and comparative religions scholar turned psychotherapist, gay activist, community organizer, bookseller, ’zine editor, B&B host and gay entrepreneur. He and Kip Dollar, partners since 1984, ran the lesbian/gay community bookstore in Austin for seven years and later two gay Bed & Breakfasts, first in the Rockies and then back in the Texas Hill Country. They were the first male couple registered as Domestic Partners in Texas in 1993. They were legally married in 2018 on the date of their 34th anniversary. Johnson is now working as a freelance editor and book designer.
Toby Johnson is author of numerous books. Six non-fiction titles present spiritual wisdom he learned from his mentor and friend, renowned religions scholar Joseph Campbell. Four gay genre novels, including Two Spirits: A Story of Life Among the Navajo (in collaboration with Walter L. Williams), are sweet adventure/romances woven through with wisdom and psychological insight.
Johnson’s Secret Matter won a Lammy Award for Gay Men’s Science Fiction. His Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in the Religion and Spirituality category. With Steve Berman, Johnson edited the Lammy-nominated anthology Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.
From 1996 to 2003, Johnson was editor/publisher of White Crane: A 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.
Finding Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth of the Great Secret III is Toby Johnson's spiritual autobiography recounting how he learned the real nature of religion and discovered the spiritual qualities of gay consciousness.
Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded brings back Johnson's 1983 book about working with Toby Marotta in a federally-funded study of teenage hustling for the bureau that ran halfway houses for runaway youth, told from his perspective as a scholar of comparative religion and a seeker on a spiritual path, now with additional material on sexuality and spirituality
Toby Johnson has a webpage at tobyjohnson.com.
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Titles By Toby Johnson
GAY SPIRITUALITY: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Consciousness offers a sensible, modern and enlightened understanding of spiritual consciousness for gay men who are so often faced with misunderstanding and conflict dealing with traditional religion. Acclaimed author Toby Johnson presents a bold perspective: being the outsider and consciousness scout allows cutting edge insight.
In this Lambda Literary award-winning title, Toby Johnson explores how the rise of gay identity has become an important part of contemporary religious development. This dramatic transformation has resulted due to the perspective of gay men with their ability to step outside the assumptions and conventions of culture and see things from a different point of view. This book will reward readers seeking new insight into faith as well as culture, myth and traditions.
Johnson's vision of a life-affirming, sex-positive spirituality of love, cooperation, mutual respect and acceptance is in sync with modern scientific knowledge, and does not ask the reader to suspend logic or critical thinking. Gay Christians who are struggling with their sexual orientation will especially appreciate Johnson's convincing refutation of common "biblical" anti-gay arguments. A powerful book for personal change and a great gift to a gay friend who is unhappy with his life or suffering from low self-esteem.
Anthropologist Walter L. Williams has teamed up with award-winning novelist and spiritual writer Toby Johnson to produce a work of historical fiction that presents the Native American philosophies, spiritualities, and gender wisdom which Williams documented in his groundbreaking The Spirit and The Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. It was that book in 1986 that helped introduce the Two-Spirit tradition to modern readers. Williams’ and Johnson’s novel Two Spirits was winner of a prize for Historical Fiction from the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation.
This is a story, based on the real history of the Bosque Redondo, of tragedy, oppression, and discrimination, but it is also an enlightening tale of love, personal discovery, and natural beauty. Full of suspense, plot twists, and endearing romance, Two Spirits will captivate readers with its positive approach to life and love and its wonderful happy and satisfying ending. The novel is, at once, educational, entertaining, sexy, romantic, mystical, enlightened.
Walter L Williams is author of the award-winning The Spirit and the Flesh and more than a dozen other books and novels. He has been professor of anthropology, history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, where he taught gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies, and also American Indian Studies. He is past president of ONE Institute International Gay and Lesbian Archives.
Toby Johnson is author of four non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of Joseph Campbell, his teacher and “wise old man,” to modern-day social and religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay consciousness, and two books on gay men’s spiritualities, gay spirit, and the mystical experience of homosexuality.
One of the clues that many cultures share is the tradition of the “wise old man,” the elder who serves as guide, teacher, and companion, helping others on the path to enlightenment. When Toby Johnson, a young Catholic seminarian, left the monastery on his own unconventional spiritual journey, he had the good fortune to find such a teacher in the person of Joseph Campbell. Johnson says in the introduction: Joe demonstrated how to gently leave behind the naïve religiousness of youth and find wonder, meaning, and bliss in a new post-mythic, but re-mythologized, spiritual consciousness.
Finding Your Own True Myth—The Myth of the Great Secret III—is both a loving memorial to Campbell and an original extension of his work. Johnson, later a psychotherapist, religions scholar, novelist, and gay spirituality writer, offers insight into the vital role that myth—and insight into myth—play in the modern world and inspiration for anyone seeking coherence and meaning. A wealth of personal anecdotes and teaching stories are woven throughout the text to provide practical applications for these lessons and concrete examples of their power to change lives.
As editor/publisher of White Crane Journal (1997-2004), Johnson featured articles and stories about gay men's mystical experiences and adventures on the path to psychological and spiritual wholeness. This book follows in that tradition.
Johnson had studied for the Catholic priesthood before leaving the monastery in 1970 and moving to San Francisco to discover gay life and gay consciousness. While enrolled in a graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, he met and befriended the renowned scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell and became part of the crew that put on Campbell's appearances in Northern California in the '70s. From studying the world's religions and mythological traditions, especially Buddhism and mystical Christianity, Johnson learned a deeper meaning of spirituality. He still thought of himself as a monk, but now with an understanding broader than his boyhood Catholicism.
While completing a degree as a psychotherapist, Johnson worked in a specifically gay/lesbian community mental health clinic in the downtown Tenderloin District. In that capacity he met social scientist—and nicknamesake—Toby Marotta who was doing a survey for the County of agencies in the Tenderloin. Marotta was just finishing his Harvard Ph.D. on the gay political and cultural movement in New York City. Together they worked to get their respective academic dissertations rewritten into readable style and published as popular books. Then pursuing Marotta's interest in ethnographic research into urban gay lifestyles, they worked in a federally-funded study of teenage prostitution to produce a Resource Manual for social service agencies struggling to address issues raised by the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and ’70s.
Originally published as In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld: A Mystical Journey, this book recounted Johnson's discoveries and adventures in the hustler study, told from his perspective as a scholar of myth and religion and a seeker on a spiritual path. Now re-released as Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded, this second edition adds more details of the author's personal life and again demonstrates how to weave a tapestry of meaning out of seemingly random and sometimes harrowing events.
In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award-winning title Gay Spirituality, Toby Johnson further explicates his visionary stance that gay people's nature as outsiders gives them a uniquely powerful perspective on the nature of God and religion. By living outside gender norms, gay people are more open to seeing across boundaries of gender and gain access to a less dualistic outlook on the nature of life. Once again, Johnson approaches this potentially controversial subject matter with erudition, empathy and visionary speculation and gives meaning to gay consciousness beyond superficial issues of sexual behavior.
This revised edition includes a new Preface and extensive updating and expansion.
A White Crane Gay Spirituality Series Selection.
Still timely and insightful.
Kevin Anderson is finishing up college, and getting ready to leave New York for an internship rebuilding San Francisco after an immense earthquake. Then the Visitors arrive; a race of human-like aliens touch down in several cities around the globe, including San Francisco, and nothing will ever be the same. When Kevin's company is given a contract to build a facility for the Visitors, he forms a friendship with 'Bel, one of their number. But is 'Bel so alien after all? They seem so human, but they possess some odd characteristics and seem to be hiding something. What secrets do they carry, and where, exactly, are they from?
This edition includes a Bonus of Toby Johnson's whimsical, but profound, story "Adam & Steve."
Originally published in 1987 when AIDS was still a mystery disease, this novel, originally titled Plague: A Novel about Healing presented wisdom from A Course in Miracles and The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment. In those days, successful treatments had not been developed and spiritual/attitudinal healing—of soul, if not of body—was the only hope.
Thirty years later, the novel's quandary about the nature of evil and its message of hopeful acceptance and love of life are perhaps even more relevant if about something so much more than disease and illness. The story of the "fourth quill" comes from an Indian tale about a previous incarnation of the Buddha who discovers the "treasure of the ages" and it's not what he'd expected; Johnson retells the tale and derives a meaningful and life-affirming attitude that transcends the specific issues of AIDS in the 1980s.
“There is a fresh naivete in [Toby Johnson’s] style that rings pleasantly in the ear, like the memory of a ‘boy’s book’ enthusiastically devoured at age 12. Against the sour punk of so much of today’s gay male fiction, Getting Life in Perspective is a treat.” —Marvin Shaw, reviewer