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Toby Johnson Ph.D.
(1945 - living) U.S.A.

Toby Johnson

Author, activist

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Edwin Clark (Toby) Johnson was born in San Antonio Texas. Toby 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 JohnsonJohnson has been partners with Clifton D. (Kip) Dollar since 1984. Kip, born in San Antonio in 1959, is younger than Toby by 14 years. Together they operated Liberty Books, the gay and lesbian community bookstore in Austin Texas. Toby and Kip sold the store to Crossroads Market in 1994.

In 1997, they moved to Conifer, Colorado in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Denver where they ran a gay B&B called The House at Peregrine's Perspective. In 2000, they moved back to Texas to operate a B&B in a little artist colony/river resort town mid-way between San Antonio and Austin in the Texas Hill Country, called Casa Peregrino. And in 2003, they moved back to San Antonio, hometown to both of them.

Kip and Toby were among the couples featured in Merle Yost's "When Love Lasts Forever: Male Couples Celebrate Commitment." They were the first male couple registered as domestic partners in Travis County, Texas. An account of their first 14 years together appears in Merle Yost's book on long-term gay relationships: When Love Lasts Forever.

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.

Toby wrote 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.

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Published works:

  • The Politics of Homosexuality (1981)
  • Sons of Harvard: Gay Men in the Class of '67 (1982)
  • The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness (1982)
  • In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld (1983)
  • Plague: A Novel About Healing (1987)
  • Secret Matter (1990)
  • Getting Life in Perspective (1991)
  • The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell (1992)
  • Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness (2001)
  • Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe (2003)
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