Can queers be ordaed as Buddhist monks? The qutn sparked tense bat on social media when Pataradanai Setsuwan, a well-known openly gay celebry, entered the monkhood late last month.
Contents:
JAPAN HAS A BUDDHIST MONK FIGHTG FOR GAY RIGHTS?
Redisverg Buddhism’s LGBT history of gay monks, homoerotic samurai, and genr-nonnformg practners and gods * gay buddhist monks *
It helps work wh the wounds of homophobia, regnizg ternalized self-hatred for the ln and dkha [sufferg] that is. ” After meetg wh gay and lbian activists 1997, he noted that the same l applied to straight and gay people alike, and that they were not part of the direct teachgs of the Buddha and th might evolve over time. In 2014, he reerated the view that for Buddhists, homosexual acts are a subset of sexual misnduct, but that this was a matter of relig teachg and did not apply to people of another or no relign.
Other rpoch have disagreed and fully affirmed gay and lbian liv. Many Theravada and Mahayana texts, for example, refer to the pandaka, a term which, Cabezon shows, has a wi variety of meangs, enpassg “effemate” male homosexuals, tersex persons, and others who exhibed non-normative anatomil, genr, or sexualy tras.
* gay buddhist monks *
Third, there is a fair amount of male-male homoeroticism Buddhist textual history. The Jataka tal [parabl om the Buddha’s past liv] clu numero homoerotic stori featurg the future Buddha and the future Ananda; addn to the tal themselv apparently beg told whout a sense of sndalons, the stori suggt an tertg appreciatn of the homoerotics or at least homosocialy of the teacher-disciple relatnship. And as the Greek mol, there were clear l and rol that need to be followed; nanshoku was not hedonism but a homosexualy that was socially nstcted.
This culture has left the greatt llectn of homoerotic Buddhist texts of which I am aware.
This isn’t gay-huntg or a naïve apologetics that siphons off the bad and leav only the good. Wele to the Gay Buddhist Sangha.