20 Preachers, Priests, and Religious Guys on My Sausage List

I have always been attracted to preachers, priests, monks, seminarians, and religious guys of all types.  There's something about a devotion to the spiritual world that makes your presence in the physical world especially erotic.  Maybe the paradoxical juxtaposition of muscles and Bibles, penises and prayer.

Or maybe it's because God has blessed religious guys with exceptional beneath-the-belt gifts.

I've dated or hooked up with members of most of the major world religions.  Here are the most interesting and memorable:

College

1. Fred, my first real boyfriend.  He was student clergy when we met, during my sophomore year in college.  Then he took a church in Omaha, and I followed him there, with disastrous consequences.  United Church of Christ.


2. During my junior year, Corey was a follower of the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, and wanted to learn to fly. When I brought up the subject of gay people, he claimed to be opposed to "perversion." But years later I ran into him at the French Quarter in West Hollywood. He was living in San Francisco with his partner. Transcendental Meditation



3.  Peter, the priest with the pushy mom, spent most of our dates talking about why the Greek Orthodox Church wasn't homophobic, in spite of its homophobic policies.  The first time I spent the night, Mom came into his room without knocking. But Peter was #1 on my Sausage List. Greek Orthodox

4. At Indiana University, one night I went to Bullwinkle's, the local gay bar, and hooked up with a Nigerian guy who had a tattooed penis and about a thousand books on magic and witchcraft.  He performed a spell for me.  Traditional African Religion

5. Asher, from the night of six naked men at Indiana University, was the first (but by no means the last) Jewish guy I dated.  Judaism.

6. When Viju, my friend and roommate at Indiana University, invited me to visit him in India,  I hooked up with several Hindu guys, plus Arshad, a Parsi, a follower of the monotheistic religion founded in Persia by Zoroaster (Zarathustra) about 600 BC. There are only about 60,000.  Another gay Parsi was Freddie Mercury of Queen.  Zoroastrianism

Texas

7. My most embarrassing hookup was with Warren, a shy, middle-aged guy who thought I was a hustler. He said he was from the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but later I found out that his distinctive underwear was "temple garments," the special underclothes that worn upon your "endowment" in the Utah church.  So....Latter-day Saints.


West Hollywood

8. When I first moved to West Hollywood, I met Alan, a student clergy at the MCC who used to be a porn star, and, earlier in his life, Pentecostal.  He went back and forth from "gay is good" to "God hates gay people" three times. But he was a nice guy, and #4 on my Sausage List. Pentecostalism.

9.  While I was visiting Alan in Japan, I looked around for religious guys.  Nearly everyone in Japan is nominally Buddhist and Shinto, but who still believes in the old rituals?  Turns out that Jin, one of Alan's hookups, was actually training to become a Shinto priest.  Shinto.

10. Finding Buddhists at Mugi, the gay Asian bar in Hollywood, was easy.  My favorite was Tranh, the Vietnamese gym rat and UCLA undergrad who I dated for a few months.  He was vegetarian, meditated every morning, and had a gigantic 3-foot tall statue of the Buddha in his room. Buddhism.

11. Rev. Jasper was a preacher at a Baptist church in Gardena, not out to his congregation ("but we're working on it").  He believed that the Bible prohibited anal sex, but not oral, so we were free to engage in all the oral we wanted.  Two dates were enough.  The American Baptist Convention

12,  Panther, my housemate Derek's ex-lover, the naked man in the bath tub, worked as a church organist, but he was also belonged to the Radical Faeries and a Wiccan coven.  Paganism.

New York

13. It's not easy to find Mongolians anywhere outside of Mongolia, and only about 2% practice the traditional, pre-Buddhist religion, so it was quite a stroke of luck to find Tomor at a gay bar in Paris, of all places.  He told me that Mongolian shamans are all bisexual, since they see beyond male and female to the beauty of the soul.

And he turned out to be gifted beneath the belt, with a Bratwurst+.  Mongolian Folk Religion.

14. My friend Andre, who was straight but celibate, belonged to a "traditional Catholic" spiritual community that disapproved of Pope John Paul and practiced only the Latin Mass, but supported female priests and gay rights.  One day he invited me to the exorcism of a  young recruit named Barry.  The demon turned out to be homophobic, Barry turned out to be gay, and I ended up with a date. Traditional Catholicism

 15. Shen, an undergraduate history major from Hong Kong, told me that he was the world's biggest fan of Confucian philosophy.  Confucianism.

16. The Amish Boy in Red Bikini Briefs.  Ok, it was just a sausage sighting at a rest stop on my way south from New York to Florida, but it's the closest I've ever come to a hookup with an Amish guy.

Florida


17. Arjun.  Have you heard of the Urantia Book?   It was published in the 1920s, or rather channeled, and it tells about our place in the galactic civilization. Lengthy descriptions of the galactic government.  One of the students in my Sociology of Religion class was a devotee, and invited me to get coffee after class in an attempt to convert me. I didn't get converted.   Urantian Fellowship. 

18. Raphael, the Gay Psychic Angel whose arms didn't work, the hottest guy I have ever seen, told me about my past lives.  I wimped out on the date, but at least we kissed.  He was affiliated with the Science of Mind, a new age religion founded by Ernest Holmes in 1926 that teaches that we create our own reality.






Ohio

19.  I have to include the Catholic priest in my bed, even though we didn't really hook up -- Father Christopher and I shared a room at a retreat.  But I did get a sausage sighting.  Roman Catholicism.

20. Farshad, the French Moroccan.  I had been with Muslim guys  before, but Farshad was especially devout.  He helped found the first gay masjid in Europe.  Islam.

See also: When Your Boyfriend's Religious Brainwashing Kicks In and all of my stories about growing up Nazarene.

Tomor the Mongolian Shaman of Paris

Paris, July 1999

I spent the summer of 1999 in Paris, ostensibly researching French social thought, but really just...well, being in Paris. Every day I took the metro to the National Library to do research for a few hours.  In the afternoon I visited the parks, churches, and museusm, and in the evening, just after work, I dropped by a gay bar or bath house.  The Parisians were very friendly, very willing to talk. More often than not, they invited me out to dinner.

The tourists were not so friendly -- they came to Paris to meet Parisians, not Canadians with bad accents (I always claimed to be Canadian to avoid the hostility).  So one night at the Duplex Bar, , when I saw an Asian guy holding the wall up, I kept my distance.

He was cute though, slim, hard-torsoed, golden -skinned, with dark eyes and a beard and moustache.  And there weren't a lot of Asians in Paris.  So eventually I thought "What's the worst that can happen?" and approached.

"Bonjour.  Je suis Boomer, dans Toronto," I began.  

"Tomor.  Dans Mongolia."

"Mongolia!"  I repeated, thinking of all that I had heard about Silk Road, the empire of Genghis Khan, the stately pleasure dome of Kublai Khan, the semi-nude wrestling competitions; the penis statues. the men.

"I'm not Khalka, I'm Baad," he said in fluent French.. "From the Uvs Province, near the Russian border."

"Ok, ok.  My friend Yuri is Russian.  He loves Mongolian guys.  Especially if they have a lied grand."  Yuri had never expressed a particular interest in Asian men, but he was into super-sized lieds.

"Et moi aussi."  

Tomor told me that he had come to Paris to study history at the Sorbonne, and to get away from the homophobia at home.  It was the Khalkha, the ruling tribe of Mongolia, that instituted homophobia, he said.  And the Buddhists and the Communists.  In the early days, before the Buddhists came, same-sex relations were honored.  They made warriors brave.

"Wait -- the Buddhists?" I asked.  "Aren't most Mongolians Buddhists?"

"Most, maybe.  Not me.  I worship the old gods.  Tengri the Sky Father.  We journey in spirit to the other worlds."

With a start I realized that it was 8:00 pm, early for dinner for most Parisians, but late for me.  We walked down the street to a Vietnamese restaurant near the Rambuteau Station, and then took the Metro to Tomor's apartment, which he shared with another Mongolian

"Is he Tengrin, also?" I asked.

"Oh, no, Buddhist.  I'm not out to him.  Well, I'm out as gay, but not as Tegrin."

In his bedroom, instead of a statue of the Buddha, he had a photograph of a mountain he called Burkhan Khaldun.

I thought of Ibn Khaldun, the famous Medieval explorer, but Tomor said there was no relation.

Tomor said that the shamans of his religion were all bisexual, because they could look beyond the physical gender to the beauty of the soul.  During their spirit journeys, they usually changed gender, men becoming women, women becoming men.

Then he showed me a mask called a Tsam, a demon who could scare off the forces of darkness, including the force of homophobia.

I could use one of those back in my apartment in New York.

Suddenly I looked at the time.  It was 11:00!  I had been so busy talking that I forgot about our hookup!

"My apologies!" I exclaimed.  "I'm sure that you did not invite me here to talk about your religion!"

"But I did," Tomor said.  "Every guy wants sex, but nobody wants to hear about what is really important, the world of the spirits.  But what good is a physical act without the spiritual?"

"Sorry, I don't understand."

He touched my shoulder.  "Sex is one of the gate to the other world.  Your lover takes on the spirit and becomes your guide.  Otherwise it's just recreation, like going to a movie."

This sounded a lot like Tantric Buddhism, in which sexual acts of various sorts lead to enlightenment.  But I wasn't going to tell Tomor that, and offend him with more Buddhist contamination of the old religion.  I wanted some enlightenment.

He had a nice physique, and a surprising Bratwurst+ beneath the belt.  But the activity itself was unconfortable, a lot of jabbing and twisting, and weird pretzel positions.

Still, how many guys can say that they've been with a Mongolian shaman?

See also: The Ten-Foot Penis of Mongolia; 20 Preachers, Priests, and Religious Guys on My Dating List.