Books We Recommend

Books We Recommend

Available from White Crane/Lethe Press

Note: PURCHASE links on this page go to Lambda Rising's website.
All books bought through Lambda Rising result in a contribution to White Crane.
So, support this vital work by purchasing through these links.

White Crane Institute & Lethe Press

We are very excited to have enterered into a partnership with Lethe Press to reprint books.
This arrangement will make out-of-print classics of gay spirituality and culture available again.

Purchasing one of these books is both a way to continue exploring gay spirit
and support the valuable work of White Crane Institute.

We are proud to announce the publication
of this landmark classic as the first volume in the
White Crane Spirituality Series
from Lethe Press.

Two Flutes Playing
A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men

By Andrew Ramer

With a foreword by Mark Thompson
and a new introduction by the author.

"A tribal mythologist, Andrew Ramer explains what is possible when two men love each other.
No one better describes the energetics of 'the dear love of comrades.'"
Joseph Kramer, Founder, Body Electric School

In a dizzying tumble of words about gay life that has left little uncovered. Andrew Ramer has something new to say. He does not rationalize, analyze, cheerlead or scold, but presents a simple vision so steeped in age-old wisdom that it appears more contemporary than tomorrow's headlines. By writing as purely from the heart as he does, Ramer engages in timeless place within us--a place beyond damage and doubt, caution and guile. Plunging fearlessly into the truth as he sees it, Ramer can't help but liberate readers from their own blinders about the saving grace of being queer.

"We had many saints, many heroes, both female and male, but I want to speak here of the saints and heroes of the gay tribes. For this is a period of human history that has been lost through time, whose return is vitally needed. For you know the heroes of the other tribes. But of this small, sacred tribe, whose history has been obscured, you remember nothing."
So tells acclaimed author Andrew Ramer in Two Flutes Playing. Within these pages can be found insight and wisdom. Ramer serves as a mythologist for gay men, providing evidence to the harmony of gender, love and sex. A new introduction by the author reveals why this book's timeless message has once more returned to print as the inaugural title in the White Crane Spirituality Series.

Mark Thompson's classic
GAY SPIRIT
Myth & Meaning

The Book That
Defined A Movement

Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning broke new ground when it first appeared in 1987, giving voice to an entire generation of gay men seeking alternative visions about the fundamental questions facing their lives. It was followed by two others, Gay Soul and Gay Body, creating a foundational trilogy that has helped shape a now international movement of spiritually aware gay men. In its deft weave of anthropology, history and sexual politics, Gay Spirit provides illuminating insight for all students of gender and religious studies.

Arguably the book the started the Gay Men's Spirituality Movement.

Critical Reviews:

“among the 100 gay books that changed our lives.” Lambda Book Report

“terrific at making the reader feel there might be something more wondrous, more miraculous to life…” Los Angeles Times Book Review

“a gust of fresh air to anyone who has ever explored spirituality outside the bounds of conventional religion.” Armistead Maupin, author Tales of the City

"calls gay people back to the Circle of Life as full participants in the dance of survival and joy...this anthology is like the rains of spring hastening our unique growth, flowering and fruition." Gay Community News

Gay Spirituality
The Role of Gay Identity
in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness

by Toby Johnson

"With provocative insight, impressive breadth of knowledge, and insuppressible optimism, Gay Spirituality shows how a guiding vision is the scaffolding of spirituality and then goes on to construct one for the gay community. A wonderful contribution... Whether you agree or disagree, buy all of it or only a part, if there's an ounce of goodness in you, this book will make your heart smile—and perhaps help us all take that next step toward a better world." Daniel A. Helminiak, author or What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality:

"Toby Johnson's book reminds me of the parable about the man who asks the sea how deep it is. 'That depends,' replies the ocean, 'on how far down you want to go.' Gay Spirituality challenges the reader with all the right questions, offering an invitation to plunge into the unknown. With equal measures of erudition and vision, Johnson takes us where we need to go just when we need it the most. Gay men seeking to uncover their mysteries will find Gay Spirituality a source of brilliant intelligence and inspiration." Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit, Gay Body & Gay Soul

Books by Franklin Abbott

Mortal Love: Selected Poems, 1971-1998
Franklin Abbott
Paperback, 161 pages
From RFD Press

Available from Toby Johnson for $11 plus $3 shipping & handling.
Send Check or Money Order to:

Toby Johnson
PO Box 12822,
San Antonio, TX 78212

"More than a volume of poems, part spiritual autobiography, part grimoire. The book can also serve as a guide/companion for awakening and deepening gay spirit. Abbott's poetry has a clarity of vision and a deep calming center." Reviewed in White Crane Journal #51

Books by Toby Johnson

Gay Perspective:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us
About the Nature of God and the Universe
by Toby Johnson

Paperback: 296 pages

"Toby Johnson reveals how gay male sensibility contributes to the leading edge of culture and consciousness, and can even revolutionize religion in ways that benefit everyone. You may never view your role in the scheme of things in quite the same way. —Bruce P. Grether, author of Mindful Masturbation: Transforming Male Self-Pleasuring into a Spiritual Practice

In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award - winning 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.

Review by Jesse Monteagudo in White Crane:
It is obvious that LesBiGay and Trans-people have a take on life that is vastly different from those held by the straight majority. In Gay Perspective, author Toby Johnson (Gay Spirituality) shows us how our status as sexual and gender outsiders allows us to think outside the box. Being gay gives us a perspective on human experience that is different from that of the great majority of people. There must be something special and useful to humanity about this perspective, since a disproportionate number of important artists, poets, religious leaders, and spiritual guides in the past were what today we'd call gay.

Gay perspective, Johnson tells us, is based on three specific aspects of modern homosexual experience: First, we are outsiders and strangers. This status bequeaths and sometimes forces on us an ability to view life from a critical perspective. Second, most of us tend to embody both masculine and feminine viewpoints and characteristics . Hence we're able to see both sides of issues and to be both strong and sensitive, both creative and receptive. Finally, by transgressing normal sexual and gender roles and by transcending the polarities of male and female, we see beyond the entire array of polarities humanity projects onto nature. Our existence or experience as queers demonstrates certain facts about nature causes us to discover certain truth about life and human psychology; and teaches us practical lessons about contemporary problems and issues. In Gay Perspective, Johnson shows us what our gay perspective tells us about life, sex, religion, the Church, God and the world.

Traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam condemn all who are different, including GLBT people, as threats to all that's "normal." Nowadays, some would argue that we are just like everyone else, with one minor difference.

In Gay Perspective, Toby Johnson admits our differences, glories in them, and show how our differences allow us to make unique contributions to our society and to the planet. While most people are trapped in a cycle of birth, reproduction, parenting, and deathwe who are gay are opting out of time and are witnesses to life lived in the present moment. Thus there is a lot that others can learn from us, in times like these.

— Reviewed in the Winter 2003 issue of White Crane

Getting Life in Perspective: A Romance Novel
by Toby Johnson

Order from TobyJohnson.com

"The fresh naivete in [Johnson's] style rings pleasantly in the ear,
like a 'boy's book' enthusiastically devoured at age 12." Marvin Shaw, reviewer

Getting Life in Perspective is a post-modern gay novel about a big city literary editor who, when faced with serious illness, retires to the country to relieve stress and to write the novel he's always been intending to write. Living alone in a ramshackle old mansion in the Texas Hill Country, he begins to imagine that the characters of his novel are real. Two young gay men from the 1890s appear to him and recount the story of their lives.

In the turn-of-the-century story, the two characters, having managed to find one another against great odds, seek refuge in a gay utopian colony in Colorado loosely modeled after Edward Carpenter's farm in Sussex, England. There they discover a gay positive, post-Christian, Whitman-inspired spirituality.

The writer is never clear whether he is seeing ghosts or simply very vividly creating his novel. But the Topper-esque ghosts playfully assist him in coming to terms with his own self-pity and fear of dying.

It's a sweet, occasionally sexy, historical romance with a contemporary spiritual/philosophical message woven in--along with justs a touch of the Twilight Zone.

Secret Matter: Updated, Expanded & Revised
-----released November 2005 by Lethe Press
by TobyJohnson

With Afterword by Mark Jordan

Paperback: 248 pages

Order from TobyJohnson.com

Sweet romance, social commentary and entertaining science fiction--the sort of easy-going read rarely found in gay fiction, and very welcome. —Richard Labonte, A Different Light bookstore

Lambda Literary Award winner in the category Gay Men's Science Fiction. One of five books nominated to be the first title ever inducted into the Gaylaxian Science Fiction Hall of Fame

Secret Matter is a science-fiction romance novel. It won a 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Science Fiction. In 1999, it was one of five books nominated to be the first ever inducted into the Gay Lesbian Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It has been rereleased by Lethe Press in a revised, updated, and expanded version in 2005.

The story tells of the arrival of a race of aliens. They have cameleon-like autonomic functions in their skin coloration which reveal their emotional and psychological states. Thus they are fundamentally unable to lie. For them homosexual activity is consistent with their biology and normal in their culture. Recognizing our society's objection to homosexual activity, however, they try to hide their true nature. The tension created between the two cultures confuses their mission in coming to our world.

The plot is a sweet love story about the relationship between a young gay man and one of the aliens. Through several levels the protagonist slowly uncovers the truth about the aliens' "secret life," including, finally, the fact that they aren't really alien at all, but rather come from a parallel world of Earth. The punch line is that in the creation myth of the Garden of Eden in their world their "Adam & Eve" did NOT commit original sin and their reward was both their inability to hide the truth and their homosexuality. The novel is about the importance of coming out and the innocence of gay experience.

Plague: A Novel About Healing
by Toby Johnson

Paperback: 250 pages

Order from TobyJohnson.com

The story of an AIDS educator who uncovers a misconceived plot to suppress an effective cure for HIV. As he begins to realize the sinister nature of his discovery, he is forced to take seriously teh teachings about healing and about the nature of evil presented in A Course in Miracles, which he has been talking about with members of an AIDS support group he facilitates.

By Perry Brass

How to Survive Your Own Gay Life:
The Adult Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships
Edited by Perry Brass & Tom Laine

Format: Paperback, 224pp
Pub. Date: August 1998
Publisher: Belhue Press

A book about surviving your gay life in today's culture and, more importantly, how to create rewarding relationships and a strengthening inner life.

Everybody has a philosophy, in this ancient and noble sense of the word. But few writers have Mr. Brass's credentials. Author of numerous works of poetry and science fiction, he's also been involved with gay liberation and health institutions since their inception. So he knows a little something about survival, and it shows. Mr. Brass's lovely phrase for the special contributions we make is "the gay work." The gay work involves, for example, open friendliess to strangers, in contrast to the paranoid insularity of general urban experience and the ever-beleagered Great American Family. The gay work includes "celebrating male beauty," which in Mr. Brass's vision, is somewhat closer to understanding Whitman's poetry than to subscribing to the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue I may find so much of this book appealing because its author is my peer in age. But is it possible it's also because he's wise? Maybe its because he suggests queerness might authentically have something to do with living by your own rules, not fulfilling either a clinical or political set of criteria. How to Survive Your Own Gay Life is a book that looks forward, not backward. — Bernard Welt writing in Lambda Book Report, November, 1998

Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom
Perry Brass, Tom Laine (Editor), Vince Gabrielly (Photographer)

Format: Paperback, 96pp
Published by Belhue Press

In The Lover of My Soul, Perry Brass offers us a biography of himself, as well as a spiritual journey of nakedness, surrender, and transcendence. On this journey he finds the "lover of my soul," that immense, deep Connection found in moments of intense feeling. He finds the Lover in many places, including the mysterious metaphor of Jesus ("What a Best Friend I Have In Jesus") and in one of the most poignant "S & M" poems in print, "My Master Richard Has Returned" from "Three Los Angeles Poems." He talks about his family, his growing up, his dog, his partner, the luminous, lost figure of his father and the disturbing one of his mother. There are moments of icy anger ("A Warning to Fag Bashers"), and of full-throttle eroticism.

Books by Bob Barzan
The following books are available from Bob Barzan.
Bob Barzan founded White Crane as the White Crane Newsletter back in 1989.
After publishing the newsletter and then journal for seven years, he moved on
to book publishing.

Erotic Discernment: The Art of Making Good Decisions
by Robert Barzan

$3.95 (includes postage and taxes).

Send a check or money order to:

White Crane Press/Bob Barzan
404 Patrick Lane
Modesto, CA 95350

By Arthur Evans

Critique of Patriarchal Reason by Arthur Evans
Illustrations by Frank Pietronigro

Paperback, 384 pages

$29.95 + $3.25 p&h (CA residents add $2.40 tax).

Send a check or money order to:

White Crane Press/Bob Barzan
404 Patrick Lane
Modesto, CA 95350

Critique of Patriarchal Reason stands as a shining exemplar of grassroots philosophy."
— Ruth Robson, Lambda Book Report

Evan's book is written in an accessible style, and includes original illustrations by San Francisco artist Frank Pietronigro. This joint project in philosophy and art is an award winner from the San Francisco Art Commission. Critique of Patriarchal Reason opens the window of Western philosophy. Read it, and you will discover a whole new way of looking at your own life and at the world around you.
An explosive indictment of analytic philosophy and science. Arthur Evans exposes the patriarchal biases underlying modern "rationality." Evans shows how these biases have infected formal logic, higher mathematics, and the scientific method. He demonstrates the harmful impact they have had on women, gay people, artists, indigenous societies, and the natural environment. In place of these biases, he offers a new, liberating view of the role of reason in human life. Among the many thinkers discussed in the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein. A surprising connection is uncovered between Wittgenstein's theories of logic and language on one hand, and his conflicted attitude toward his homosexuality on the other.

Arthur Evans is the author of The God of Ecstasy (St. Martin's, 1988), and Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Fag Rag Books, 1978).

Excerpted from Critique of Patriarchal Reason by Arthur Evans
Wittgenstein tried the classic strategy of flight from the flesh through spiritualization of the intellect. He read ascetic writings, considered becoming a monk, and eventually attempted a kind of psychological self-mutilation. Hence his mystical quest for a higher meaning above the flat world known to science was no mere intellectual endeavor. Hidden behind this flight lay a context of powerful emotional needs. He hints at these needs in his notebooks, where he speaks not merely of "the mystical" but also of "the drive to the mystical."
This kind of strategy-trying to overcome erotic impulses by redirecting them into allegedly higher paths-is an old chestnut for emotionally isolated closet-homosexuals with spiritual aspirations. Not surprisingly, those who take this tortured path are often drawn to authoritarian ideologies, while yet engaging in secretive, compulsive, and guilt-ridden sexual encounters on the sly. (The Catholic hierarchy is a magnet for men thus divided against themselves; for example, the late Francis Cardinal Spellman.) In Wittgenstein's case, maturing as he did in pre-war Vienna, the particular authoritarian ideology to which he turned was that of the protofascist Otto Weininger.

Wittgenstein was not alone among his compatriots in showing a sexual context to fascist interests. A number of self-hating (because misogynist) homosexuals of his generation later flocked to Hitler for similar reasons. Among these men the most notorious was the butch-posing, uniform-loving Ernst Roehm of the S.A. Hitler found such admirers useful for a while, until he personally led a band that killed many of them on "the Night of the Long Knives" (June 30, 1934). Despite their initial appeal to certain masculinist homosexuals, the Nazis suppressed the nascent gay-rights movement in Germany. Nazi authorities rounded up large numbers of homosexuals and sent them to death camps, where they were forced to wear a pink triangle. It should not be overlooked that Wittgenstein, although viewing the Nazis as gangsters, never publicly condemned their treatment of Jews and homosexuals.