Abstract
ABSTRACTGay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) people from culturally diverse and religious backgrounds may sometimes feel that we must choose between keeping connected to our religious/ethnic communities while denying our gender-identities/expressions and sexuality, or connecting to a broader Australian GLBTIQ-community that is White/Anglo-dominant and normatively hostile to overt expressions of faith, religiosity and spiritual longing. In this paper, I explore working definitions of the terms ‘spirituality’, ‘religion’ and queer corollaries of spiritual community, paying particular attention to non-religious secular manifestations. I will argue that gender, sexual and political liberation within a multicultural society can and must accommodate both pluralist and integrative approaches to seemingly paradoxical ideas around secularism and religiosity. I will discuss my experiences as a cisgender gay Buddhist Malaysian-Chinese Australian man and my relationships with a group of Asian gay men from religiously diverse backgrounds as case examples, to explore possible frameworks for how these may be manifested and enacted.
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