Gay Tantra

By William Schindler

We gay folk, who inhabit bodies of the type we naturally desire, require a sex-positive spiritual practice that celebrates and utilizes our gay being instead of opposing it. We need a spiritual practice that teaches us how to use our senses instead of merely shutting them off or repressing them.

We need a practice that empowers us to integrate all the rejected aspects of self to form a strong, healthy gay identity, which confers a spiritual advantage in deep spiritual practice. We need a spiritual practice that recognizes that gender and gender identity are fluid, that we all contain elements of the masculine and feminine. We need a spiritual practice that recognizes not only that same-sex love is possible, but that our love can powerfully energize a deep quest for Self-awareness and enlightenment.

We need to realize that any feeling of shame or unworthiness connected to our gay being shackles our spirit and blocks us from the full realization of God/dess within, for the Divine Being is gay, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387088676

William Schindler

William Schindler obtained a B.A. in Sanskrit from UC Berkeley (1975), where he also studied Bengali and Hindi, and a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University (1986). He lived in India for two-and-a-half years from 1972-1977 first as a pilgrim, then as a student at Banaras Hindu University, and finally as a monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He has written novels, short stories, and numerous essays on gay spirituality. His non-fiction book, GAY TANTRA (Xlibris, 2000), is the definitive work on the topic of traditional Hindu Tantra adapted to the spiritual needs and aptitudes of gay-identified persons. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where he offers spiritual instruction and counseling for gay men.

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Gay Tantra

GAY TANTRA

Second Edition

William Schindler

Second Edition Copyright © 2017 by Ashram West

ISBN #: 978-1-387-08867-6 ebook

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Introduction to Second Edition

Much has transpired since the publication of the first edition of Gay Tantra in 2000. Society's attitudes have shifted at light speed toward greater acceptance of gay love and relationships. Marriage equality exists now in all 50 states in the U.S., and it is becoming unacceptable for politicians and other public figures to spout homo-aversive[1] and homo-hating comments in public. Anti-bullying programs in schools have brought attention to a long-standing abuse that countless LGBT youth have suffered, sometimes with deadly consequences. I expect few of us anticipated these changes would happen so quickly, and it is unsurprising to see a backlash in more conservative parts of the country, as those accustomed to intolerance are left trying to catch up with whirlwind changes in public opinion. However,   conservatives in mainstream religions like Christianity, Islam, and fundamentalists of all stripes remain unrepentant in the condemnation of homosexual behavior, and it is still tantamount to a death sentence in some countries to have one's gay sexual-affectional orientation known publicly or even just to one's own family.

The persistence of homo-aversive and homo-hating attitudes and actions in society and religious institutions make gay-centered spirituality as relevant as ever. Although it is heartening to see young gay persons growing up today facing less stigma than in past generations for their gay identities and loves, many still face persecution in their families, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Many gay persons have long abandoned mainstream religions as places where they are unwelcome if their inner truth were known. Some still substitute sex, drugs, or both for the fulfillment that only comes through enlightenment and the liberation it brings.

We gay folk, who inhabit bodies of the type we naturally desire sexually, require a sex-positive spiritual practice that celebrates and utilizes our gay being instead of opposing it. For us there is no escaping the distraction of the desired sex by fleeing to ascetic monasteries or convents. We need a spiritual practice that teaches us how to use our senses instead of merely shutting them off or repressing them, as in purely ascetic systems. We need a practice that empowers us to integrate all the rejected aspects of self to form a strong, healthy gay identity, which confers a spiritual advantage in deep spiritual practice. We need a spiritual practice that recognizes that gender and gender identity are fluid, that we all contain elements of the masculine and feminine. We need a spiritual practice that recognizes not only that same-sex love is possible, but that our love can powerfully energize a deep quest for Self-awareness and enlightenment. We need to realize that any feeling of shame or unworthiness connected to our gay being shackles our spirit and blocks us from the full realization of God/dess within, for the Divine Being is gay, too.

Traditional South Asian Tantra[2] remains the only spiritual system with an established, unbroken lineage of wisdom transmission I know that easily adapts to these needs of gay-identified spiritual aspirants. Training of the senses figures prominently in tantric methods, as does learning to understand and use one's sexual and gender identity in spiritually productive ways. Sophisticated Tantric rituals celebrate sensuality as doorways to revelation. Tantra also harnesses our natural feelings of same-sex love to move us closer to the God/dess within.

The first edition of Gay Tantra remains a resource for its ground-breaking exposition of traditional Tantra for gay-identified persons. A common comment has been, however, that some of the material is exceptionally dense with meaning, making parts of it hard to understand easily. This second edition aims to unpack, clarify, and illustrate some of the more difficult concepts contained in the original to correct this shortcoming. I have added some illustrative stories and employed new or additional examples to clarify the material. Time and experience working with students have taught me how better to represent the tradition for a western audience.  I have added a chapter on overcoming obstacles, which reflects two decades of working with students with the spiritual practices described herein. I have also updated and revised as needed to make the text more accurate and relevant to changing times, including converting most references to God into the more encompassing term God/dess, which more accurately reflects the tantric concept of deity.

As one of my Gurus, Swami Swahananda, wrote to me after he had read my essay Gay Love as a Spiritual Path I wrote in 1997, "…it might be the genesis of a new sect, which Incarnations[3] are apt to create." In private he told me that in a hundred years people might look back to that essay as the beginning of a new movement, a new understanding of spirituality and spiritual practice. Twenty years after the first publication of that essay online the first edition of Gay Tantra continues to sell steadily world wide without the benefit of any but word-of-mouth promotion and the Ashram West website. A swami of a different order in the United Kingdom read the book and said, The Sanātana Dharma has a new expression. Traditional Tantra has dominated and influenced ritual and other spiritual practice in South Asia for most of the past 1500 years precisely because it is pragmatic more than dogmatic and because it easily adapts to new circumstances. So long as persons who identify as gay exist, Gay Tantra will remain relevant for those drawn to lives dedicated to Self-realization and liberation. It will appeal to those who believe this world is a manifestation of the Divine Source and provide a practice that makes the direct experience of that Source possible. Tantra provides a spiritual practice not only for gay-identified persons but for all sincere spiritual aspirants persons of any identity, monastics or laypersons, with a longing for personal fulfillment, enlightenment, and liberation.

Brother William, a.k.a., Swami Mahavirananda

Los Angeles 2017

In this edition I added diacritics to Sanskrit and Bengali words using the standard convention of Sanskrit transliteration. However, I kept common South Asian proper and place names in their familiar spellings. The following partial guide will help those who wish to know how to pronounce the Sanskrit words in this text:

a—like u in but

ā—like a in father

i—like i in bit

ī—like ee in beet

u—like u in put (as in to place not as in golf)

ū—like oo in sloop

ṛ—like er in water

e—like e in they

ai—like i in Idaho

o—like o in open

au—like ow in now

c—like final ch in church

ch—like initial ch in church

Letters with a dot underneath such as ḍ are pronounced as their English equivalents but with the tip of the tongue in the roof of the mouth.

ś—like sh in should

ṣ—like sh but with tongue in the roof of the mouth

---

[1] Homophobia is not, clinically speaking, a true phobia. Therefore, I coined the terms homo-aversion and homo-hatred instead to describe two degrees of anti-gay antipathy.

[2] I use the word Tantra throughout mainly to refer to Kulācāra Tantra, the tradition in which I trained. However, most schools of Tantra with which I am familiar share common aspects that make them suitable for gay-identified persons.

[3] Of God/dess. He was specifically referring to the Ramakrishna Incarnation.

Introduction to First Edition

Sex and spirituality are two topics guaranteed to arouse strong feelings, both positive and negative, in anyone but most especially in gay-identified persons because of the history of religious persecution of gay people. Many of us were taught explicitly or implicitly that sex, especially gay sex, is the opposite of spirituality. Despised and rejected by traditional religious and spiritual groups, many gay persons reject religion and substitute sex, drugs, or both in its place. Yet the human spirit will never rest satisfied with mere sensuality no matter how much it is chemically amplified. Any aware person can see that pleasures that depend on the physical body will fade as the body’s vitality fades with inevitable disease, aging, and death. No amount of pumping iron or plastic surgery will stave off this decline forever. We yearn for meaning and fulfillment in a world that at times may seem hostile and hopelessly isolating. But the usual channels of spiritual wisdom are often blocked for us by homo-aversive religious institutions that tell us we can only be saved if we give up our gayness.

Gay desire is nothing so mild as a preference or even an orientation, something to be given up or changed at will. As the gay Buddhist author Tom Moon writing in Queer Dharma put it so well, our need to love another of our same gender is a force of nature  that will not be denied. (p 324) People readily risk the loss of job, family, friends, and the approval of much of society to live openly gay lives. Our inner truth is much stronger than the lies they told us about ourselves since our earliest childhood. Furthermore, our gayness is not merely about sex, as homo-aversive critics would have everyone believe; gayness is about whom and how we love, and love is the most fundamental of spiritual emotions. To give up our gayness is to give up love. If God/dess is Love, as the old saying goes, then giving up our love is giving up God/dess as well.

Gay persons are justified in rejecting homo-aversive and homo-hating religious institutions and their anti-gay teachings that drive countless gay persons to the point of suicidal despair. Their doctrines of hatred and fear are the opposite of spirituality, not our gay love. But let us not throw the baby out with the bath water. The hunger of our souls for lasting love and fulfillment will only be satisfied by connection with the spiritual dimension of being that does not decay or die with the physical body. The spring of human spiritual wisdom runs deep, and its waters can slake our thirst for understanding and higher love, but we need a way to access this wisdom that embraces and engages our gay love and our gay ways of being in the world.

Gay persons through history have distinguished ourselves in the arts, from the music of Tchaikovsky, and the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, to the poetry of W.H. Auden and the vibrant, sensual prose of E. M. Forster. Those of us who do not create art enjoy it in one form or another. Gay popular culture thrives in the senses, be it opera, dance music, or leather. Furthermore, our sensuality is deeply rooted in homoeroticism, in the inescapable fact that we inhabit bodies likely to be erotically stimulating to ourselves. We need a spirituality that works with our sensuality, not against it. Traditional Hindu Tantra offers us exactly this type of spirituality.

This is not a sex manual, however.

It is necessary to state this at the outset when writing about Tantra these days, because the word Tantra has mostly come to mean spiritual sex in popular usage, especially in the United States. Georg Feuerstein, in his 1998 book on Tantra, coined the term Neo-Tantra to describe sexual practices currently taught in the West in the name of Tantra but with little or no foundation in traditional Tantra. The Body Electric School of Erotic Massage, for example, which has sometimes used the word Tantra to describe its practices, falls into this category. The founder of that school, Joseph Kramer, readily admits that his massage techniques were developed from his own experimentation, and that he used the word Tantra, not to indicate a direct link to traditional tantric philosophy or practices, but because some people find the erotic massage experience spiritual. Many people who have had the experience claim benefit from the Body Electric training, and I personally support any technique or process that helps gay men especially make a stronger connection between loving feelings and sex, which is one of the purported benefits of the training. But this book does not deal with erotic massage nor with any other sexual techniques specifically, for these are not the substance of traditional Tantra, the goal of which is not extended or intensified orgasms nor even enhanced emotional intimacy but nothing short of spiritual liberation, which is the goal of all systems that claim a basis in Vedic tradition.

This is not to imply that traditional Tantra has nothing to do with sex. Of all traditional spiritual systems Tantra addresses sex and all other forms of sensuality much more directly and positively, advocating in general the integration of these in one’s spiritual perspective rather than renunciation of them as is more prevalent in other spiritual systems based on Vedanta philosophy or Yoga. Tantra has become primarily associated with sex not only in the West but also in the popular mind in India because it alone among post-Vedic orthodox systems incorporates sexual elements prominently in the overall body of spiritual practices. To say that these sexual practices define the system would be a distortion, however, somewhat analogous to defining Christianity by the practice of confession, which, although an important element of the practice of some of those who call themselves Christians, is by no means universal among Christian denominations nor considered even necessary by many of them. Some Tantrics practice sexual ritual and some never do. Tantra teaches how to spiritualize the whole of life. To the extent that sex is a part of life, Tantra teaches how to spiritualize sex.

It is not sex specifically that distinguishes tantric practice but sensuality in general. Yet even here one unfamiliar with the tradition is liable to misunderstand the system as hedonistic if one understands sensuality to refer only to pleasing sensations. In fact sense experiences may be either pleasant or unpleasant, and both extremes have their place in tantric practice. Sensuality in a tantric context refers to any sense experience, including those that occur in fantasy and memory, pleasant or unpleasant.

One hallmark of Tantra from the very beginning has been purposeful ritual violations of social norms, setting aside caste distinctions, reversing gender roles, violating conventional notions of purity and piety, using forbidden intoxicants, and stretching the boundaries of sexual morality. This combined with a tradition of secrecy has contributed to Tantra’s unsavory reputation in India that is not entirely undeserved in cases of abuse or excess, but which, unfortunately, has until the latter part of the twentieth century prevented many scholars and serious students of Hinduism, Western or native, from studying the tradition, which actually underlies and pervades much of popular Hindu practice and belief. The concept of Kuṇḍalinī, the coiled up spiritual energy, the cakras, or spiritual centers, image worship, and special reverence of the Divine Feminine, for example, are all popular tantric innovations.

This book is deeply rooted in traditional Hindu Tantra, but it is at the same time non-traditional in dealing with a subject matter that traditional Tantra, as far as I am aware, entirely ignores—gay identity. We can only speculate why a spiritual system that almost defines itself by violating social norms, and which typically ignores the restrictions society creates to separate people by gender or social status, might have overlooked the needs of gay persons in its practical formulations.

However, before speculating about why traditional Tantra may be silent on the issue of gay identity, it is first necessary to define what I mean by the word gay. Although the term is often used as a synonym for homosexual, both as a noun and as an adjective, the terms are not equivalent. The word homosexuality, from which the term homosexual is derived, was coined as a medical term, a diagnosis of what was once thought to be a mental disorder. A homosexual was someone suffering from the disorder of homosexuality. Thus homosexual is a term that was used by (presumably) mentally healthy people to describe (presumably) mentally ill people, with all of the condescension that relationship implies. Homosexuality is no longer classified as a mental disorder, of course, and the term homosexual today is properly used only as an adjective to describe same-sex feelings and behaviors. Its use as a noun today by non-gay persons has a distinctly pejorative connotation that is thinly masked, at best, by it’s ring of medical terminology. It would be unusual, for instance, to hear a person described in the media as a heterosexual. But it is not uncommon in the media to hear someone described as a homosexual, a usage I find distasteful.

The word gay was adopted by people who experienced homosexual feelings and behaviors to identify themselves. The exact origins of this usage may be unclear, but the semantic force of the term is quite distinct from the term homosexual. The term gay refers to a person’s identity, the way a person experiences himself and his place in relationship to other people. As a self-adopted term, it implies self-awareness and acceptance of one’s sexual-affectional identity and pride in that identity. Homosexual feelings and behaviors may lead to the development of a gay identity, but often they do not. A fully developed gay identity, typically, is achieved through years of personal struggle, pain, persecution, self- examination, and finally triumphant self-revelation. When the popular comedian Ellen Degeneres declared, Yep, I’m Gay, on the cover of Time magazine,[4] that declaration expressed all the relief, pride, and poignancy of a long, personal growth process that I’m homosexual, would not have. I believe the word gay also should only be used as an adjective and never as a noun.

I use the term gay in its most inclusive meaning to describe men and women who have sex with or experience a sexual or affectional attraction to members of the same biological gender. I consider anyone gay who identifies as such. As I wrote in my essay Gay Love as a Spiritual Path, (Appendix D) gay identity in my opinion includes experiential awareness of the possibility of same-sex love and also experiential awareness of the fluidity of gender identity and gender roles. This broad definition includes people who identify as bisexual and transgender. It also includes those who identify as heterosexual but who are aware of their own homoerotic feelings, and who are aware of the blend within themselves of traits that we may call masculine and feminine. One could say a heterosexual person with this kind of expanded awareness has achieved a gay consciousness. Being gay for me is about inclusion, not separation. Everyone is gay, therefore, by my definition, who does not separate himself or herself from others by identifying as not-gay. (See Appendix B Holographic Sexuality for more about gay identity theory.) I reject the term queer because of its persistent negative connotations for me and for many others, though I salute the spirit of activists who have attempted to reclaim the word for our own use.

Some gay persons reading about traditional Tantra may get the erroneous idea that Tantra’s heterosexual imagery does not apply to gay-identified persons. In fact part of the import of the conjoined male and female figures is that spiritual wholeness requires a union of male and female within each of us. I believe those who achieve a fully integrated gay identity accomplish this goal as part of the process. From a tantric perspective, therefore, a gay identity or gay consciousness is an advantage, more spiritual than a non-gay, gender-polarized identity or more limited consciousness. Tantra would have us all become more gay in the sense of integrating the male and female within ourselves and recognizing the possibilities of same-sex love regardless of the gender of our sexual-romantic partners.

There are some who assert that what we in the West know as gay identity, as opposed to homosexual behavior or homoerotic feelings, did not exist anywhere in the world before the middle of the twentieth century. That is, men and women engaged in sexual behaviors and experienced same-sex attraction and affection, but they did not define their identity by this attraction or affection. If we look at the recorded history of homosexuality in ancient Greece, Persia, or India, for example, we see homoerotic behaviors and feelings expressed in a larger context that included, typically, heterosexual marriage and child bearing. In India, as in Europe