Heavenly LoveEnrolling soon
A gay intellectual history, from the Greeks to now
Somewhere in you there is a love story you were never told was yours. This course gives it back.
It runs from the shared tombs of ancient Egypt to the poets of Muslim Spain to Whitman writing about the men he loved on the Brooklyn ferry, and it has always been about the same astonishing thing: people who loved their own sex, and who reached, through that love, for something holy. A warm, plainspoken tour through three thousand years of gay and queer feeling, taught not by a historian at a distance but by a depth psychologist who has spent his life in the room with this longing. We read gorgeous things together, poems and dialogues and love letters, and keep asking the question that matters most: what does this do to a soul.
What the course is really for
- To help you rediscover your heritage, and feel the relief of belonging to a lineage older and more beautiful than the shame you were handed
- To turn that heritage into self-esteem, the felt knowledge that your love has ancestors and a place in the human story
- To teach real psychological principles you can use to read your own loves and longings with more understanding and less fear
- To feed the creatives, and everyone who has felt a pull toward greater depth and did not know where to bring it
Read My Real Religion Is Gay, the free essay series this course grows from →
The nine modules
- Where we're going, and the image that holds it all: Diotima's ladder (free)
- Before anyone had a word for it: Gilgamesh, Jacob, David and Jonathan
- Athens I: Socrates, and the teaching of desire
- Athens II: the ladder, and the man too in love to climb it
- The medieval beloved: when the face became the face of God
- The Renaissance: Michelangelo pours the whole ache into his sonnets
- The nineteenth century: comrades, democracy, and love made civic
- The twentieth century: the trial, the arguments, the birth of gay psychology
- Now: the sacred keeps breaking through, even in our secular present