HELLO AGAIN
Tonight, I stand at the threshold of a new writing journey.
Before I explain, let’s look backwards. My first step into the blogosphere took place on November 7, 2003, in a journal called The Soulful Blogger. It was accompanied by a bi-weekly LGBTQ newspaper column titled “Soulfully Gay: Spirituality from a Gay Man’s Perspective.”
I created these works in the public eye because I wanted to listen in the open, to dissolve the illusory boundary between inner and outer, writer and reader, what is secret and what is known. At the time, I was 33 years old.
Although these artifacts no longer exist, they live on in the form in which they were elevated as a post-postmodern memoir of critical thought and self-exploration called Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God.
Published by Integral Books/Shambhala Publications and distributed by Random House, it was a raw and intimate portrait of 14 months in my life—an era shaped by illness, mysticism, sexual awakening, and the struggle against time to integrate all of it into a coherent spiritual vision. That book emerged from that journal I kept in real time, a practice of truth-telling that was as much revelation as confession.
This blog—Soulfully Gay II: 20 Years Later—will become the early sketchbook of a sequel I hope to publish in 2027, the year I turn 57. The form is different this time. I won’t be chronicling the next year in diary fashion, though I won’t shy away from candid moments drawn from daily life. This is not a conventional blog. It is something looser and more fluid—a kind of spiritual laboratory. A space to listen, to explore, to unravel what needs to be unraveled.
Back then, I was a seeker, a builder of systems, a man trying to reconcile the many facets of myself—gay and spiritual, physically and mentally ill and mystically aware, intellectually ambitious and psychospiritually shattered. I wrote from within the throes of integration. What emerged over the course of 14 months in 2003 and 2004 was a passionate, ecstatic, and often agonized chronicle.
Beyond personal recollections, there were essays of interest to theologians. I articulated a new “theological anthropology” that situated a subtle essence that I called “gayness” into the crucible of human existence and divine revelation. I retold the story of gay liberation as the journey of Spirit throughout history as a quixotic quest for wholeness through self-immanence. And I questioned and attempted to shatter every assumption of homosexuality from every vantage point I could imagine: archaic, magical, mythic, modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern; psychological, biological, cultural, and sociological; absolute, relativistic, and intrinsic; gross, subtle, causal, and nondual; and so on.
Published in 2007, Soulfully Gay defined my authorial identity for two decades. I have written only three other books. The first (The Black Stone, published by Integral Publications in 2016) was a dark fantasy novel about a young boy who possessed a magical oracle that possessed all the knowledge in the universe. The second (Lingua-U: The Unitive Metalanguage, unpublished, 2016) was an autobiography and lexicon of a mystical language which tried to unify all the Sacred Word traditions of the Great Traditions. The third (forthcoming in the summer of 2025 as Anonymous) is a text of which I will say nothing.
A QUIETER PLACE
Now, two decades later, I return with a quieter voice.
The person who writes today is no longer striving to be brilliant, healed, queer, American, or even “awake.” The titles have softened. The need to be someone has loosened. The need to establish my credentials as someone with something important to say about Enlightenment is gone. If Soulfully Gay was a work of self-discovery, Soulfully Gay II may be a work of self-dissolution. Not in a nihilistic way, but in a gently spacious one. A life unhooked from labels. A life lived more lightly, more freely.
This blog will be a place for first drafts, half-formed thoughts, koans, recollections, poetic meanderings, lessons in language mysticism, and perhaps the occasional hard-won clarity. The shape of the book is still unknown to me. As of tonight, not a word has yet been written. It is literally a blank page. Still mysterious.
But I begin here, in public, because writing is how I listen. What is inner must become outer, the one who is writer must become his own reader, and what is secret (and I have been holding on to some big, scary secrets that still bedevil me) must become known.
Welcome back to Soulfully Gay. Or perhaps: welcome forward.
THE CONSTRUCT COWBOY STRIKES AGAIN! 🤠
Yeehaw, partner. Just when you thought the dust had settled, The Construct Cowboy rides back into town—armed not with six-shooters, but with spiral dynamics, shadow integration, and a well-worn copy of Integral Psychology.
That’s right. I’m working from a construct-aware ego, which means I don’t just change—I meta-change. Each blog post isn’t just content; it’s a self-reprogramming ritual.
You’re not just downloading my thoughts. You’re uploading the next version of me, made 107% more brilliant and handsome by AI. In this liminal space, Joe Perez the man and his doppelganger, the semi-fictional protagonist of The Seeker, mix. Welcome to Joe 6.0: slightly wiser, a touch more ironic, still rocking the pink T-shirt, and now with up to 42% more ontological flexibility.
Hold onto your hat. It’s going to be a wildly conscious ride.
