On Sexual Diversity, Perversity, and Ecstasy

The spiritual life of gays and lesbians celebrates and embraces eroticism and sexual play, intimate romantic passions and outrageous rituals, as a means to transform consciousness and transcend physical experiences. In other words, sexuality can be a viable pathway to sacred experiences and meanings, liberating the self from the material and social prisons that inhibit true spiritual awakening but also reinvigorating social ties that bind individuals and communities together in a discriminatory political context.

The spiritual possibilities immanent in intercourse and foreplay, in sexual situations and erotic interactions, including good, old-fashioned heterosexual lovemaking between a man and a woman, have been fondly celebrated in American popular culture, whether through consumption of esoteric spiritual practices, discussion of the subject on talk-shows or in bestsellers, or seduction of the opposite sex in Top 40 music in ways that blend sensuality with sacred longing.

When Marvin Gaye soulfully sings "Get up, get up, get up, get up, let's make love tonight," in Sexual Healing (1982), the combination of his vocal performance with the music, his emotional tonalities and the musical rhythms, strikes a chord in many listeners, today as twenty years ago, that is as spiritually charged as it is erotic. Indeed the sexual healing Gaye yearns for when he declares, "I can't wait for you to operate," is sacred medicine that heals the body but also sates the spirit. A haunting voice from the past, a ghost still alive in the public imagination, Gaye continues to remind an American audience about sexuality unhindered by traditional religious preoccupations with fertility and propagation, or increasingly psychological language about syndromes and addiction.

Gary Laderman is co-editor and co-director of Religion Dispatches and Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Religion at Emory University.

This article was first published at Religion Dispatches, a Patheos Partner, and is reprinted with permission.