On Being Soulfully Gay
Noah Crane has covered LGBTQ culture and politics as a journalist for nearly two decades, and he arrives at Tim Z. Brooks’s study with a healthy skepticism about anything that smells like mythologizing the community. Compact and watchful, he sets his phone on the table, starts an audio recording, and then gives Tim his full attention. He has long since learned that the most revealing moments in an interview rarely happen while a reporter is busy taking notes. Tim, for his part, is in his mid-fifties now. His short beard has become a blend of brown and gray, and the years show themselves there more readily than in his eyes, which remain as alert and searching as ever. Noah has come to ask about the phrase that gave Tim’s first book its title—”soulfully gay”—and whether it still describes the man sitting across from him.
Noah: Tim, let me start with the obvious question. “Soulfully gay” — is that anything more than a nice-sounding brand? What are you actually talking about?
Tim: I’m claiming a paradox, quite literally. If soulfully means “with deep feeling”, and the word carries associations of sadness, of melancholy, and gay means “happy,” in its older usage, then soulfully gay reads as something like deeply, even sadly, happy. A joy touched by sorrow. A bittersweet aliveness: the laughter that comes after grief, the smile that still remembers pain.
Noah: And you think that describes gay people specifically? Because I’ll push back right there. Aren’t plenty of us are just happy? Full stop. The tortured-homosexual narrative is exactly what my generation of journalists spent twenty years dismantling.
Tim: I understand the worry. But hear the claim carefully. The experience of being born homosexual into a world of heterosexual normativity and extensive homophobia is never one entirely free of sadness. Not because we’re tragic by nature, but because of what the world does to us. Then, when same-sex love and desire become inescapable, in the teenage years or adulthood, those feelings emerge into a sexual identity — gay, bisexual, lesbian. And at that stage, gayness becomes a task: informing joy with sorrow, happiness with depth. Embracing a paradox within our inner being that points toward wholeness.
Noah: A task. So the sadness isn’t the point. It’s the raw material?
Tim: Exactly. It’s a theme as old as spiritual art itself. The deepest joy is often born of sorrow. Rumi taught that sorrow sweeps the house clean precisely so new joy has room to enter. And gay people often know that truth as autobiography, not just as poetry.
Noah: You’re telling a story about pain. But most people associate gay culture with joy. How do those two belong together?
Tim: Because I’m not celebrating the wound; I’m noticing what it opened. For many of us, being gay or queer is not just a social identity. It’s a spiritual initiation. We enter the inner life early, forced there by shame, silence, or fear. The wound often drives us into the closet, where we become estranged from ourselves long before we are estranged from anyone else. And because the self cannot remain hidden forever, many of us learn to compensate by extending ourselves elsewhere—into scholarship, art, music, athletics, performance, achievement, or service—hoping that excellence in one part of life might quiet the shame in another. Those gifts are real, but so is the wound that sometimes called them forth. Before we come out, we often go inward. Before we dance, we ache.
Noah: Alright, the sorrow side. What about the joy side? Because when straight critics look at us, “soulful depth” isn’t what they see. They see Pride floats and drag brunches and call it frivolous.
Tim: And they’re misreading what they’re looking at. The gaiety in “gay” is not shallow happiness. It’s defiant celebration. Our festivals, our parades, our drag performances, our flamboyance. These aren’t mere entertainment. They’re survival rituals. Joy becomes sacred. It becomes our way of insisting: we are still here, still beautiful, still worthy of love.
Noah: Now here’s where I get uncomfortable, Tim, because your next move — I’ve read the blog — is to say some gay men chase the ecstatic surface while avoiding the shadow underneath. That sounds suspiciously like respectability politics. Judging the party boys for partying.
Tim: It’s a fair challenge, and I want to sit with it rather than swat it away. I’m not policing anyone’s pleasure. But I do think the joy is misunderstood, by our detractors, yes, and sometimes by ourselves. When someone becomes disconnected from their soulful depth and chases only the ecstatic surface, the danger isn’t immorality. It’s that the paradox gets lost. When we forget that to be soulfully gay is to be both joyous and deep, we risk becoming caricatures of ourselves rather than the whole, radiant beings we’re meant to be. That’s a loss I’ll name, even if naming it makes me sound old-fashioned.
Noah: One more objection, then. You’ve said gay people tend to be “more complex” than we’d have been if born straight. More mature, even. Isn’t that just reverse essentialism — the flattering mirror image of the pathology model?
Tim: It might be, if I claimed it as biology. I claim it as autobiography. We’ve had to navigate our identities in the face of resistance. We’ve learned to integrate opposites: longing that lived alongside shame, ecstasy that never quite outran heartbreak. That work leaves a mark on the whole of our being.
Noah: And you think that autobiography explains why your books range so far beyond questions of sexuality?
Tim: Exactly. Once I began following where those experiences pointed, they led me into theology, philosophy, psychology, contemplative practice, mythology, and the history of ideas. I couldn’t make sense of one without the others.
Noah: Which means your readers are about to leave familiar territory.
Tim: They are. And I’d like to say something directly to them. The conversations I’m inviting you into will sometimes be more complex than you expect, drawing on both ancient traditions with deep roots and modern schools of thought with careful distinctions. Don’t resist the complexity. Set the ideas down if you need to, then return in a more contemplative frame of mind. Understanding LGBTQ spirituality requires looking through many different lenses. The complexity isn’t a burden to shed. It’s part of the wisdom itself.
Noah: Before we get too far into what you’ve changed, let me say something in your favor. When Soulfully Gay came out, it wasn’t controversial because it flattered gay readers. Quite the opposite. You challenged almost every camp. You questioned traditional Christianity, but you also questioned assumptions many gay people treated as untouchable. You seemed willing to offend everyone if you thought the truth required it. As a journalist, I respect that. It didn’t read like advocacy. It read like someone following an idea wherever it led.
Tim: I appreciate that. At the time, I wasn’t trying to be provocative. I was trying to stay honest.
Noah: I believe you. But sincerity isn’t the same thing as truth. Maybe that’s what I’ve been circling all afternoon. I don’t doubt your sincerity. What I’m still deciding is whether your vision of the world is true.
Noah: So where does it land? If I’m writing the summary paragraph, soulfully gay means what?
Tim: It means refusing to choose between the depths of sorrow and the heights of joy. Dwelling in both, fully and freely. Claiming our right to be fully ourselves, whether that is sad or happy, soulful or spiritually empty. When the protesters chant and hold up signs saying, “Pride is the sin of Sodom”, we march unafraid to show our true colors. Knowing, perhaps more deeply than most, that life is not an either/or, but a dazzling, aching both/and.
Noah: And that’s a gift to us. But you go further. You call it a gift to everyone.
Tim: Part of our collective offering, yes. We have to recognize it in ourselves first, embody it, and then let the light shine forth. In our wholeness, we don’t just survive; we help the world remember what it means to be fully alive.
Noah: (closing his notebook, then pausing) You know what I can’t decide? Whether that’s a beautiful vision or an enormous weight to hang on people who mostly just want to live their lives.
Tim: (after a moment) The irony is that I’m not asking people to live extraordinary lives. I’m asking whether ordinary life is already more sacred than we’ve been taught to believe.
Sitting With It
A journaling contemplation. Fifteen minutes, pen and paper. Recall one moment in your life of what this chapter calls soulful gaiety: a joy with sorrow inside it, the laughter after grief, the celebration that knew what it had cost. Write the scene down plainly, without interpreting it.
Then ask, on paper: what did the sorrow make possible? Not what it took — what it opened. Depth, tenderness, defiance, the capacity to recognize joy at all. Name it as specifically as you can.
Do not resolve the two into a lesson. The exercise is complete when joy and sorrow are held in a single attention and neither cancels the other. Does joy feel like an ascending spirit? Does sadness feel like a descending soul? That both/and, held without flinching, is the practice this whole book will keep returning to.
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