Finding God in the Sexual Underworld: The Journey Expanded

Toby Johnson offers a remarkable positive and life-affirming description of sexual and homosexual consciousness as a source of transcendent vision and personal life fulfillment.

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.