Joseph Perez (born 1969 in Moses Lake,

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered on ...

) is an American writer in the fields of

spirituality The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape o ...

and Integral theory.

Life

Born as Joseph Perez in 1969 in Moses Lake

, Perez attended public schools until beginning his academic career at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he earned a bachelor's degree in The Comparative Study of Religion with Philosophy as Allied Field in 1991. Subsequently, he attended The Divinity School at

The University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the be ...

. Perez is an openly gay man, having come out during his senior year at Harvard. Perez wrote a bi-weekly newspaper column called ''Soulfully Gay,'' which was distributed by the Contax Guide and The Weekly News in Florida, among other publications. He is the founder and manager for four years of the Gay Spirituality & Culture Weblog that originated around the time of the 2004 Gay Spirit Summit (the blog is still published today as the MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog).Toby Johnson
"Book Review: Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God"
White Crane Journal (WC74), 2008. Retrieved on 2009-12-7. The Gay Spirit Summit was a gathering of gay men identified as leaders or change agents seeking to shift consciousness in the gay community and raise visibility of transformational experiences in order to change the conversation about what it means to be gay.

Works

Perez is author of two books on spiritual development: ''Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God'', a book combining a variety of short writings including memoir, journal entries, reviews, and interviews, about his discovering of an Integral approach to understanding the spiritual significance of homosexuality; ''Rising Up: Reflections on Gay Culture, Politics, Spirit'' which advances an agenda for gay activism informed by an evolutionary psychological model. ''Soulfully Gay'' is a memoir developed from a blog, and chronicles his efforts to come to grips with illness and spirituality. It is a chronologically organized diary through which Perez describes the events that led him from being a Catholic youth from a working-class background to a Harvard student, and then on to sexual rebellion, drug abuse, living with HIV/AIDS, and ultimately discovering himself as a mystic and philosopher. The philosopher and psychologist Ken Wilber wrote a column for BeliefNet over a year before the book's publication, in which he compared Perez to the French dramatist

Antonin Artaud Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the E ...

, in that he "rescued his life from disaster by turning it into art." Perez's primary insight, according to Toby Johnson, is defining what he calls "The Importance of Being Gay." In a series of short essays he argues that there are four major patterns, archetypal and universal: masculine, feminine, other-directed, and same-directed. In Perez's philosophy, Love is said to be a manifestation of the soul's desire to be reunited with God both as love for others (heterophilia) and love for the self or similar (homophilia). Perez himself, in a dialogue with Ken Wilber published by Integral Naked, said that he views the autobiographical climax of his book to be a reflection of homophilia in its positive and negative forms, Love (Agape) and Fear (Thanatos). He lives in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, Washington.Joe Perez
"About Me"
, Joe-Perez.com. Retrieved on 2009-12-7.

As author

*''Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God'' *''Rising Up: Reflections on Gay Culture, Politics, Spirit''

References

External links

Official Website of Joe Perez
{{DEFAULTSORT:Perez, Joe American gay writers 1969 births Living people American writers of Mexican descent Harvard University alumni University of Chicago Divinity School alumni