Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society
By Robert N. Minor, PhD
HumanityWorks Press, pb, 233 pages, $14.95

Robert Minor is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He’s a lecturer, writer and workshop leader on issues of gender, sexual orientation, and active change. His earlier book, Sacred Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to be Human, was a 2002 Lammy nominee (and was a great influence on this reviewer in the articulation of ideas on gay spirituality in the book Gay Perspective).

Since 1998, Minor has written a regular column, titled “Minor Details,” for the Kansas monthly LGBT magazine, Liberty Press. His new book Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society is a compilation of those columns.

That the essays were written over a span of some five years means that some are a little dated or, at least, time-bound. The column for October 2001, for instance, demonstrates the “shock and awe” the American nation was feeling in that time period. Yet, even then, Minor was precocious in observing that “Nothing was said [by the President and the media] about how we’ve trained most terrorist leaders or of the decades of self-serving, often anti-democratic, U.S. foreign policy.” His critique then is as salient now.

Wisely, the essays in Gay and Healthy are not ordered chronologically, but are arranged according to topic. Among the twelve subject areas are: Coming Out, Growing Up in the USA, Sex, Romance, Politics, etc.

Minor often takes a refreshingly odd-ball perspective on common topics. His discussion of the priest/pedophilia scandal, for example, observes how celibacy itself is a kind of “sexual addiction,” i.e. an obsession with sex far beyond a simple and healthy human experience. As the title of the collection makes clear, Minor sees modern society as sick and the various problems as symptoms of that societal disorder, not as the sign of the sinfulness of certain categories of people who get popularly scapegoated.

Throughout this collection of essays, Robert Minor demonstrates that a sex-positive and Gay-positive perspective on life naturally results in socially desirable and ethical attitudes and behaviors. In our transcending polarized gender roles and gender expectations, Gay people truly represent a beacon to a society hopelessly drowning in negative anti-sexual and life-denying attitudes. Minor is holding up that light for all to see. Readable, entertaining and unfailingly sensible, Minor's analyses of modern life and especially modern Gay life deserve a second incarnation in Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society.

For information, visit Minor’s web site at: www.fairnessproject.org