The spiritual and religious lives of gay men and lesbians are often misunderstood by counselors who have too little information about this richand diversepopulation. This articleoffersan explication of the challenges facing gay persons, a model that will be useful in counseling sessions, and a list of resources for further information.
This articleis a final response by the authors to S. M. Donaldson'scomments (1998) on their article, "Spiritual Experiences of Gay Men and Lesbians." The original article focused on the experiences and spiritual issues of self-identified gay men and lesbians.In his commentary on our article (Barret & Barzan, 1996), Donaldson (1998) accuses us of committing the crime of intolerance (p. 88). He goes on to make a number of inferences from our work and then issues his commentary on the basis of his own inferences. He speaks as if his interpretation of what we wrote is, in fact, what we wrote. And therein lies the major shortcoming of his comments. We would like to take this opportunity to render a quick response to his critique.The purpose of our original article was to assist counselors working with men and women who are in the process of embracing (or who already embrace) a gay or lesbian identity, and who also wish to integrate that identity with some sort of explicit spirituality: those who want to be "simultaneously gay and spiritual" (p. 4). This is the context in which everything was written and in which the article should be read and interpreted. The original article was not the place for a discussion of the causes of sexual orientation or for an expose on their mutability. Such discussion was irrelevant to the issue. Nor was it a place for a discussion of how to counsel men and women who want to change their sexual orientation, or how to counsel lesbians and gay men who do not wish to acknowledge an explicit spiritual component to their lives. Because this is clear in the original article, we can only assume that Donaldson has either misread the article or has a personal agenda motivating his response to it. His accusations that we are intolerant fly in the face of the text in the original article, and we cannot understand how or why such an accusation could be made.
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