Joe Perez

Diagnoses

Passions

Vocation

American writer in the fields of spirituality and Integral theory. Perez attended public schools. At Harvard University, he earned a Bachelor's degree in The Comparative Study of Religion with Philosophy as Allied Field in 1991. Subsequently, he attended The Divinity School at The University of Chicago. Perez came out as gay man during his senior year at Harvard. Perez wrote a bi-weekly newspaper column called Soulfully Gay, which was distributed by the Contax Guide and The Weekly News in Florida, among other publications. He is the founder and manager for four years of the Gay Spirituality & Culture Weblog that originated around the time of the 2004 Gay Spirit Summit (the blog is still published today as the MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog). The Gay Spirit Summit was a gathering of gay men identified as leaders or change agents seeking to shift consciousness in the gay community and raise visibility of transformational experiences in order to change the conversation about what it means to be gay. Perez is author of two books on spiritual development: Soulfully Gay: How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God, a book combining a variety of short writings including memoir, journal entries, reviews, and interviews, about his discovering of an Integral approach to understanding the spiritual significance of homosexuality; Rising Up: Reflections on Gay Culture, Politics, Spirit which advances an agenda for gay activism informed by an evolutionary psychological model. Soulfully Gay is a memoir developed from a blog, and chronicles his efforts to come to grips with illness and spirituality. It is a chronologically organized diary through which Perez describes the events that led him from being a Catholic youth from a working class background to a Harvard student, and then on to sexual rebellion, drug abuse, living with HIV/AIDS, and ultimately discovering himself as a mystic and philosopher. Link to Wikipedia biography