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Gay Men and the New Way Forward – why being different is a gift

In conversation with Raymond L. Rigoglioso

Raymond L. Rigoglioso is the author of “Gay Men and the New Way Forward” and Founder of “Gay Men of Wisdom”. Ade Adeniji, Co-Founder of The Quest, talks to him about the unique gifts gay men have as a result of being different.


Ade:  I think a good place to start our conversation would be on the title of your book “Gay Men and the New Way Forward”, how did you come up with it?

Raymond: I wrestled with the title and had about 6 different working titles throughout the whole process. It was at the end of writing the book when this phrase “the new way forward” appeared. It struck me as the essence and the core of what we’re really about, which is – introducing new ways of being in the world.

Also, at a time when we’re so out of balance because of patriarchy, with the masculine running amok and the feminine devalued. This idea of a “new way forward” is one that integrates balance of masculine and feminine, human activity and nature, and individual rights and group responsibility. It really struck me as very core to the essence of gay men – what we’re really doing, without even conscious awareness; by coming out and by living openly. We can lead humanity through the new way forward when we become aware of our capacities, what we’re currently doing, and then using those skills purposefully.

Ade: I guess this ties in with what you call ‘the new gay hero’s journey’ and the stages of awareness. Could you talk me through those stages of awareness?

index~~element46Raymond: Absolutely. As I conceptualized the gay hero’s journey, I began thinking, “what do we currently agree on?” “What’s our story?” “What do we tell each other about what it means to be gay?” The gay hero’s journey as it currently stands begins with being painfully repressed, and you move through stages of awareness, and then you come out and you fully integrate your sexuality, and it ends there.

The new gay hero’s journey invites gay men to go beyond. To step into social purpose and social roles, and to recognize what it is we do for society. Each of us will have a different array of gifts and roles, but it is about understanding, acknowledging and consciously employing our role as evolutionary leaders for humanity. The new gay hero’s journey moves through various stages of awareness, until we get to this point where we fully integrate our role as evolutionary leaders.

Ade: What do you think are some of the things that stop many gay men from integrating into this role as evolutionary leaders?

Raymond: I think it begins with our identity. It begins with what we think about ourselves. That’s one of the core challenges that this book issues – to see ourselves larger, bigger than our current conception; because our identity says we are homosexual.

We believe that our defining characteristic is that of homosexuality and that limits us. Our primary limiting factor is our lack of awareness that we actually do different things. When you begin to look at how we are different, you begin to see – whoa, we play very different, important and socially critical roles.

The first step is simple awareness. There will be that resistance to this idea. I see this in some of the presentations I’ve given, this resistance to this idea that we are different.

Ade: It’s interesting you say that. I was at an event last week where they were looking at gay identity, and they only focused on sexual identity. I found that really frustrating, because I thought, “what about the gay man who is not having sex with men, the one who has simply chosen not to have sex? Does that mean he is no longer gay?” There are other identities that we have. I’m curious around the responses that you’re getting from say, the media and presentations that you’re giving. What are the things that are coming up in terms of the resistance?

Raymond: What’s really interesting is that I’ve given readings now in thirteen cities in the US, and there’s always a point at which I see the resistance change to understanding.

There are multiple layers of resistance. I think people come to this work with this idea that I’m presenting a very simplistic framework of who gay men are, but when they understand that it’s actually quite complex and that it invites all gay men to consider which of these many gifts that we posses apply to them, it’s actually a very nuanced argument. Then people begin to say, “Wait a second, I see it,” and when I begin to talk specifically about the gifts and how we are specifically different, the light bulb goes on. I’ve seen it in every single presentation. People who have fought me at the beginning, and then realize, wait a second, when we get gay men together and then ask each other how we’re different, we really are. We can really see it and we can measure it, we can observe it, we can quantify it.

Ade:  In terms of that resistance, do you think there is something around – in the past society saw us as different, or outsiders, which was seen as bad and wrong. For many of us, we simply wanted to be ‘normal’. In a way your book is emphasizing that we are different, but that different is good.

Raymond: Yes. This entire approach flips patriarchy on its head because wanting to be normal is a response to patriarchy, where you have one value that is dominant and above all others, The core imbalance is masculine over feminine. This translates into all sorts of hegemony of one group over another. We have this idea that if we are to be acceptable, we must be like that dominant culture.

This whole work looks at that completely differently and asks, “What is it about differences that make life worth living? What is it about a difference that contributes to the welfare and vitality of the human family?”

Let’s just imagine we go traveling somewhere. Do we want to go to another country and see the exact same people, the exact same food, the exact same landscape, the exact same ideas and mode of dress? No. On some level, human beings value difference, but there’s still this very core patriarchal idea that says, if I am to be accepted, I must be like the majority and I must deny those parts of myself that are different. This says let’s explore those differences and get very specific about how those differences contribute to the societal welfare.

Ade: Why do you think the gay media is not talking about those differences and celebrating them?

Raymond: It’s so complex. I think in some ways it’s because of the successes we’ve had, especially in the West, US and in Europe. It’s still not done even here, but I think there’s this very strong desire to assimilate and simply be like the other.

There is also simply a lack of leadership. We don’t have the kinds of structures in place that we used to have. Part of it is that you have all of those structures that supported us in really seeing each other, many of them have diminished – the publishing houses, the bookstores, the community spaces, the bars; the internet has changed everything, so we interact differently. This is not just gay men, this is our society.

There’s an ingrained resistance, this idea that we just want to blend in, we just want to be like everyone else, and that is very dangerous. Some people will accept that and live perfectly fine lives, but they’re stepping back into another kind of closet, because they’re denying things that are very obvious about themselves. It’s a more subtle and more pernicious closet, because we’re going to wake up one day in our white picket fence world and realize, ‘you know what, we really are not like the others’. We might be able to get married and have children, but we are still fundamentally different. That’s not going to change. I think we are at this point in our culture where there’s this huge pressure now to marry and to be like the hetero-normative model, and that’s never going to fit us. We will wake up.

Ade: In the book, you identify 14 distinct gifts that we as gay men have and divide them into three main headings. There’s Serving and Healing, Reinventing Manhood, Freeing and Enriching the Human Spirit. Let’s start with “Serving and Healing”, tell us a little bit more about that.

distinctgifts3

Raymond:  This is one of those areas where when you get gay men talking about what we do that’s different, this one pops up really quickly. The first gift in this grouping is a gentle collaborative social orientation – that we are oriented socially to people in a different way. We bring an egalitarian, non-hierarchical collaborative way of being. We bring this into our day-to-day work environment.

I run a program called Powerful U, and we are exploring all of these gifts. All 14 gifts over 3 months, during which the guys begin to really recognize how they influence people in their work environments. You have your typical man who brings a “my way or the highway”, “top down” or “this is how it’s going to be” approach. Then you have the gay man who says, “no, let’s listen to both sides of the story”, “Let’s empathize”, “I’m intuitive” or “I’m picking up on something”. I have a doctor in the group and he talks about that. He can listen to a patient and understand what has to be done, because there are protocols that have to be responded to. But to be a real healer, you must be able to see, witness the patient, and hold them, and also be able to attend to their medical needs. That’s a very different way of being from a typical doctor.

This collaborative way of expressing oneself influences everyone around. You develop all kinds of innovations, you heal the patients and you bring new ways of being into the world. This work is all about bringing consciousness to this, so that we can see on a day-to-day basis how our social orientation changes the vibration around us.

Ade:  It’s interesting you say that, because when I think of it now, I know very often when we look at people who are working in the service industry, there is this feeling of, “Of course they are gay, they’re bound to do that”. So we view that person and their profession as very stereotypical – in a negative way – rather than celebrating and honoring it.

Raymond: This is the other gift – an orientation towards service. Our gentle collaborative social orientation, primes so many gay men to be of service. Just look at the priesthood. The priesthood would fall apart without gay men. Gay men are exquisitely imbued with the gifts that priesthood requires – empathy, caring, service, listening, providing actual service.

Our ability to move in and out of the masculine and feminine makes us supremely suited to be of service. We can fulfill obligations and we can hold ourselves accountable and deliver excellent service; we think of these as masculine traits – when we deliver on promises. But the hairdresser is really going to listen to that client and provide something that is more than just a service itself. That’s the foundational gift that I talk about, masculine-feminine intelligence. The fact that we possess both masculine and feminine in balance, and that we can move in and out of each effortlessly. Straight men have a hugely difficult time doing this.

Ade: I was at a meeting today, and it was with two straight alpha males. I noticed that the guys became much warmer and playful as the meeting when on. When I left I thought, “That’s very interesting. If I was a straight guy, would the meeting have gone that way?” There was something that I felt I brought to the meeting that influenced that dynamic.

Raymond: Yeah, what you most likely brought, and I’ve known this from having spoken to you before, is giving them permission to express and access the feminine. To actually listen to different viewpoints, to be open and maybe even to be wrong, to be open to feelings, to allow intuitiveness, to allow cooperation and empathy into the room changes how we problem solve. It changes our world. That’s what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis.

When you go back to that meeting the next time, you can use that much more consciously and say “hey, I know what I’m doing here, and I’m going to help lead these guys to access and be much more in touch and express the feminine side, because that’s really needed to counterbalance this very solid masculine”.

Ade:  For gay men who are in this realm of “serving and healing”, I can’t help but think of the shadow and how the shadow can sometimes come up and bite us in the backside. I’m thinking of religion for instance, the example you gave earlier on, where many gay men went in to be of service, to bring about healing to the world, but because many religions do not accept being gay, being lesbian, that in a way creates some unspoken stuff and it feels kind of murky, dirty and toxic.

Raymond: It’s an enormous shame that religions don’t recognize the value and the fact that they derive their soul from gay men. If you look at the Catholic priesthood, a very large number of priests are gay and they’re in the closet. They are providing the kinds of service that sustain their congregations, but it gets warped because they can’t be themselves. They’re walking this fine line. They must hide, they must subvert, they must deny. They can’t be their full selves. If every gay priest came out and left the church, the church would collapse, but if the church actually honored the gifts that gay men bring, just imagine.

I talked about this with my parents. My parents are very staunchly Catholic people, and I said, “Just imagine if your priests could fully be themselves, just imagine the kind of healing and sustenance and empathy and care that they could provide you and every member of your congregation or your parish.” The churches deny the gifts of the people who make it happen. It’s a tragedy, it’s terrible. Not all priests are gay, not all pastors are gay, but a very large, way disproportionate to our numbers in priesthoods.

Ade: What are some of the things we as gay men can do to celebrate and honor this gift of serving and healing?

Raymond:  That’s a good question. To me it always goes back to awareness. It’s recognizing that something changes when you understand that you have social value. You talk about celebrating and honoring; it’s on an individual and group level. When you can walk into that room and know that you play a different critical important role; that you are fundamental, that you are essential to the functioning of the human race; that you can celebrate yourself. We talk about overcoming shame on gay men and lesbians, and we can do a lot of work around that. This is a different way of approaching it.

Ade:  Definitely. One of the reasons I loved your book and really wanted to talk to you is that it’s so in alignment with what we do at The Quest, but we both have different entry points. The entry point we use is to get gay men to connect with their gifts by exploring the things that get in the way.

We do a lot of work around shame, vulnerability and limiting beliefs. What we say to program participants is, “once you’re able to become more aware of those things, you’re able to start cultivating wholehearted living”. I think wholehearted living is what the gifts are all about. That’s the way I see it.

51uw7V5LB0L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_Raymond: Yeah. They’re two different and complementary approaches, because I think you can do them at the same time. I think that there’s real value in honestly confronting our shame and looking at those things that get in the way. My whole work is an assets-based approach that’s going to change our relationship to that shame as well. I’m a coach and this has coaching written all over it.

Someone might be thinking “Wow, being attracted to men and having sex with men, I don’t feel great about that because of societal messages”. The approach I’m talking about moves that person to look at what they do in the world and how important that is; then they are going to see having sex with men very differently, because they recognize, “oh my God, I am important, and it’s not just because someone says so, but because I can see it, and because I can name it, and I can recognize it, and I can see it on a day-to-day basis”.

Ade: One of the other headings that you have under the distinct gifts is “Reinventing Manhood”. Could you say a little bit about that?

Raymond: Sure. This is my focus of this new program that I created called “Celebrating Gay Manhood”. There are a couple of premises underlying this. This heading has three different gifts; “being friends, soul mates, and co-revolutionaries with straight women”, “being aesthetic outsiders and gender tricksters”, and modeling what I call “sustainable manhood”.

When we look at what gay men model, we offer a different way of being men. When you look at the millennial generation for instance, the younger folks who have come up at a time – at least in the US, I don’t know if this holds true in Europe – but in the United States, young men have a much broader conception of what manhood is. There are many more permissions that the younger generation give themselves. I think its no accident that they have come of age at a time when you have generations of openly gay men who have lived and express and model a different way of being men.

This reinventing manhood is bringing manhood back into balance. We are much more powerful than we realize, because for instance, Ade, when you walked into that room, you changed the dynamic in that space. You didn’t teach consciously, but everyone in that room got it, that on some level, it’s okay to actually be in touch with your feelings and to express your feelings. That’s a huge shift.

One of my premises is that we’re sort of consorts with straight women. We have this very close bond, and we show straight women the kinds of men that men can really be. They fall in love with gay men because we embody all those things that women want, minus one important characteristic, which places pressure on their expectations. It changes their expectations of what they want from their men, and that’s going to change the dynamic between heterosexual men and heterosexual women.

We expand this whole idea of what it means to be men because we toy with gender. We’re happy; we do it gleefully. Not all of us, but many gay men. We bring the masculine and feminine in balance. The big argument in this area is that the dominant version of manhood is leading us to destruction. It will lead to humanity’s destruction. Gay men can help flip that and reintroduce balance. That’s part of what our evolutionary role is right now.

Ade Profile 1Ade: Thinking of what you just said, in terms of gay men and how we are with straight women and this whole idea around celebration, I’m looking at what’s going on in the landscape of being gay right now. In the UK there’s a lot of stuff around crystal meth and Chemsex. I’m talking about gay men who take meth in order to have sex and often can’t have sex without these drugs. There’s a group of people who say, “Actually, this is all about celebrating being gay and having as much sex as I want to have”. For them, they might also say, “I’ve fully integrated my sexuality and this is the way that I’m expressing myself”. In terms of reinventing and celebrating manhood, is there a healthy and unhealthy way?

Raymond: What I would want to say to these people who are celebrating chemsex – I’ve never heard of that term before – is just wait a few years and see how that serves you. When you introduce addiction and substances like this that can really destroy your life, that’s not freedom. Freedom and prison can be two sides of the same coin, and it’s a very slippery slope. You can enter this believing it’s a freedom, and you could wind up in prison because you now are a slave to this addiction that can destroy you, that can destroy your body, it could destroy your ability to emote and to relate to other people, so it’s very shadow. It’s very dangerous.

The underlying drive may very well be positive, to say, “Look, I’m going to celebrate sex and sex is a positive force. Sex is a good thing when I connect with other people and I think that’s beautiful.” When you introduce something like this, you have to have your eyes open, because there are very real consequences to introducing highly addictive, destructive substances into that.

Ade: I guess with all these gifts, there is an awareness that goes alongside, for it to be a healthy expression, as opposed to a destructive or unhealthy prison type expression.

Raymond: I think probably with every gift we could look at a shadow side, absolutely. For instance, if we take “aesthetic outsiders and gender tricksters, the art of camp and drag”, this is perhaps an extreme example, but camp is this unique form of expression created by gay men, and when you really look at it, what it’s doing is expressing solidarity with people and ideas and creativity that fall outside the norm. By embracing and expressing camp, we are saying we get “the other”. We are “other” and we recognize “other” wherever it appears. We embrace those people and those ideas that stand outside the norm. If it goes too far, camp can be extremely bitchy and destructive and mean and mean spirited, and it can easily descend into that. Every one of these gifts has a shadow.

Ade: The final main heading is “Freeing and enriching the human spirit”. What’s that all about?

Raymond: It’s about a few things. The gifts contained within this are “sexual leadership”, “fine attunement to beauty and creators and keepers of culture”, “A ‘gay’ spirit”, “Models of authenticity and courage, cleansers of shame”, and “outsiders driving evolutionary advancement”.

There’s so much information here to unpack and I can just hit some of the highlights. One of the premises of ‘sexual leadership’ is that – and we’ve talked about this sexual expression – when we look at how gay men express our sexuality, sexuality and creativity are so closely aligned. We express our sexuality in an out-sized manner, and then you look at how we contribute to culture, how we create and channel creativity and beauty into the world. I make the argument that our sexual expression fuels our social expression, our cultural contributions, so that we are known – and not all of us, but so many gay men are known for ‘being keepers of beauty’, for maintaining our bodies beautifully, our homes, in the arts, in all sorts of all manner of beauty. Creativity and sexuality are like this; they’re so linked.

Our sexual expression drives the contributions we make, so society benefits from our way of having sex, because we’re channeling creativity and beauty and art and culture into the world that everyone benefits from. That’s just one gift.

Ade: Are you familiar with the book by Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage?

Raymond: Yes, I’ve read it.

Ade:  One of the things Alan talks about in The Velvet Rage is “compensating for shame”. It’s that phase where a gay man knows he is gay – he is no longer denying his sexuality, but he is going to be super gay in order to be accepted. So this is where I think, “if I get my six-pac or get my beautiful house and all that kind of fabulous stuff, I will be loved and validated.” You were talking about aesthetics and I couldn’t help but think of some gay men who might think they’re expressing their gifts by having their fabulous homes etc, but really for some it might be that they are compensating for shame.

Raymond: Yeah, and I had a really hard time reading The Velvet Rage. I purposely waited until after I wrote my book to read it because I knew it would be like that. I read those sections on the fabulousness and expressing our aesthetics. I think you can look at it two ways. Yes, there can definitely be an underlying shame motivating that behavior, but I think the danger by naming it shameful is to shame the actual gift that is inherent in it. Those individuals perhaps may feel that they must go over the top and they must be exceptional in every possible way in order to receive acceptance, but they may actually be expressing something beautiful, something that is inherently valuable, something that changes, that is important for them to express and changes the environment around them. When I read that section I thought, he sees this as shame. I’m looking at the gift side of this, because there’s benefit. If we ignore the benefit, we really dismiss the full picture of what’s happening.

Ade: Isn’t there room for both to coexist? I think back to when I bought my apartment and wanted it to be beautiful, with really nice things in it. At the same time, I noticed there was also a need to be validated by the place. I wanted people to come round, and go, “Oh my god, Ade, you’ve got such amazing taste and your furniture is so wonderful,” which is where the shame came in, and at the same time, my gift was that I was able to choose fabulous things.

Raymond:  Because you’re fabulous, yeah!

Ade:  Indeed! The shame and my fabulousness went hand in hand, without demonizing one or the other.

Raymond:   I think it’s both. I think it’s important to make the place for both because either can be going on at the same time. They can coexist. The issue I have is naming it, is shaming it, without recognizing the potential asset there.

Ade:  I guess it’s one of the reasons I love the work of Brené Brown, the Shame and Vulnerability researcher at the University of Houston. One of the things she does, when she talks about shame is that she does not shame shame; she makes people know that actually, we all have it, and the only people who do not have it are sociopaths. One of the ways she defines shame is, “shame is the fear of disconnection” – i.e. If this person sees or knows this side of me, something is going to be disconnected in our relationship. They might not want to know me anymore.

For me, going back to the example of the furniture, I guess I was able to go, okay, yes I know shame was a driver because I want people to come round and I want to feel connected to them. I don’t want them to go, “oh my God, you have no taste,” but at the same time, I know that I do have taste. It’s a paradox really, with these gifts. I suspect going back to the point on religion, for some people who are gay who are maybe in the church, there might be people who are saying to them, “Why are you in that church? It’s homophobic.” At the same time they’re going, “Okay, I am in this church and I feel uncomfortable around the dogma and stuff, but I really, really believe in the essence of what the scriptures are about.” Again comes in this paradox.

Raymond: There’s someone I know who is in the priesthood who is a gay man. He talks about this, and his belief is that he always believed that in order to change the institution, he must do it from the inside. That’s of course his belief. What I look at in the book is how gay men and lesbians – I think we can really safely include lesbians on this because they’re very much on the frontlines of this as well – are pressuring religions to choose love over hate. From the outside, by leaving religion, gay men and lesbians are sending a very clear message that that’s just not acceptable to us. Those who stay in and are vocal, they’re also changing. Religions are not democracies, so change is going to happen at a very different pace and on a very different level, but when you look back, even from the 1950s to the present day, the pretty vast changes in at least some of the Protestant denominations, it’s been pretty amazing. Episcopalians, I don’t know about the Anglicans, I can’t speak to the Anglican community, but I know in the United States there’s been a 180 from the Episcopals for instance. There’s change happening by being inside and also by being outside, so it’s both.

Ade: What was your process in deciding on these 14 gifts? I guess it could very easily be 21 or 8, how did you get down to 14?

Raymond: This was so difficult. I should note that this book and these gifts represent my synthesis of the gay spirituality literature. Going back to Harry Hay, I read many, many books and I cite them in the book. There’s like 136 citations I think. It was a very challenging process because what I read in the gay spirituality literature were all these wonderful, beautiful, inspiring narratives about how we were gifted and how we changed things, but they were amorphous. I couldn’t contain them. I run programs, and I couldn’t find a structure to help gay men really see themselves. I couldn’t see myself. What is this actually? What is a gift? What’s distinct from the other? I ran discussion groups for 2 years. I ran weekend programs. I got all of my notes out. I took every single note that I had and I put it into a word document. From my large format easel pages, from my weekend programs, to my notes from all of my discussion groups, everything I’ve done, and I looked at it and I thought, okay, what are the buckets? What makes sense? I moved things around. I had 12 gifts. I had 13. I had 15.

What I wanted to do was to present gifts that had something discretely unique, recognizing that every gift overlaps with something else. In the book you’ll see the visual image of those 3 overlapping circles, I did that consciously because the gifts overlap. You’re going to see pieces of each gift in every other, in most others.

I can’t really answer the question except it was a puzzle that had to be solved, and I believe I have solved it well, and I believe there’s enough distinct difference in each of these gifts to make you really see yourself. The way I likened it in my programs is to say, imagine you’re looking at a Greek statue in a museum and it’s up on a pedestal, and you’re walking around it, so you’re going to see one part of it from this angle, then you go over here, you’re still going to see that other angle but you’re going to see something new. Those are the 14 gifts. We’re walking around ourselves so that we can fully see ourselves.

Ade: How can gay men go about finding out which of the gifts are alive in their lives?

Raymond: Take the assessment. There’s a self assessment at gaymenofwisdom.com, it’s free when you sign up for the mailing list. I wanted this to be very concrete. My challenge was I couldn’t see myself; I couldn’t find tools to help gay men see themselves either. It’s a 19 page assessment; it takes about 35 minutes to complete, maybe a little bit longer – you go through a series of checklists and questions. Then you bring all of your answers to the end where there’s a gay men’s gifts wheel, and you can chart and visually see the gifts. For the primary gift – masculine-feminine intelligence – I created what I call a 3 dimensional masculine feminine profile, so you rate yourself on 3 dimensions: on personality traits, on external traits, and on energy. This will give you a really good picture of what applies to you and to what extent.

Ade:  Once they’ve identified their gifts, what are some of the ways that they can go about taking action so that it starts to become a reality?

Raymond: It’s a few things. I want to emphasize that just because you’ve taken the assessment doesn’t mean your life changes. The new gay hero’s journey is more subtle, but also more profound. The first step is becoming aware of what happens when you express these gifts in your day-to-day life. That’s the first step. The second is recognizing what changes in the people around you when you express those. The third is understanding how to use those consciously, to express them with knowledge. This happens on a personal level.

There are other things you can do. You can start a discussion group in your community. Buy the book, talk about it. Guys in Seattle are doing this right now. I’ve got a colleague out there who is running discussion groups on my book. Start a discussion group, it’s free. Just buy the book and talk about it. Join the programs. I run Gay Men of Wisdom programs and there’s also Powerful U. I created programs so that we can implement and employ. It’s one thing to know this information in the abstract because you’ve read it, and it’s another to see it show up in your life. I created these group programs so that we can do this together, celebrating gay manhood, when I give it at Easton Mountain and elsewhere.

Ade: Mark Nepo talks about a head, heart, and hands approach. I could read a book and get it in my head, I can get it in my heart in terms of my feelings, but I need to get my hands dirty which is around the application – how am I showing up in my life, in my interactions with people.

Raymond: It’s subtle, and I’m seeing this. It’s so exciting to see the guys in this group really become aware of what they do in their jobs, and then be able to think of themselves differently and come across with a totally different energy.

Ade: My final question; what would you like readers, gay men in particular, to take away from reading your book?

Raymond: That they have important contributions to make. That being gay is about much more than just sexual orientation, it is also about social roles and contributions, and that we are here for a very important purpose, and we serve a very critical evolutionary function at a time when humanity deeply needs us.

Ade: Great. Thank you very much Raymond for this very rich conversation.

 

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