Gay Men: February 2008 Archives

Toby Johnson, Catholic monk turned activist, psychotherapist and spiritual writer, was born in 1945 in San Antonio TX. He entered religious life after high school, first as a Marianist and then as a Servite. After leaving seminary in 1970, he moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Integral Studies from which he received a master's in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."