Excerpt from Leathersex Q&A

By Joseph Bean

Leathersex Q&A can be found at www.amazon.com

Leathersex Q&A is a wealth of information about this special style of sexuality. The author, Joseph W. Bean, addresses a wide range of topics including SM, bondage, relationships, safety, spirituality, history, and much more. The answers in this book are responses to actual letters sent to the author over several years of his career as a lecturer, columnist, and editor of a gay men's leather magazine. Each question is answered with the sensitivity and insight only someone with a vast amount of experience in this style of sexuality could provide. Although originating from a gay male forum, the answers are generally of use to any man or woman who wishes to venture into the world of leathersex.

Here's an excerpt: From Psyche, Spirit, and the Social Creature   p.185

Q: I can understand that sex and spirituality are related, but I can't see how in a way that makes sense. Can you help me?

A: Sex and spirituality, as it seems to me, are powerfully linked in at least two primary ways. First, the sexual impulse is intertwined with human yearnings for continuity and even a form of immortality (offspring), which makes sex a material response to a spirit-perceived need. Second, sex is among the human activities than can provide access to ecstatic states in which time-locked, material view can sometimes be transcended or (if only rarely) replaced by a deeper and broader view of reality, one that is indistinguishable from the visions of the mystics.

Any number of writers have composed books about this one question.  Purusha Larkin's Divine Androgyne comes to mind and, although not related to leathersex particularly, the poetry of James Broughton is often directly relevant to the question of how sex and spirit are linked.

No one in modern times or recent centuries has produced anything to compare with opening chapters of the Bible. There, by engaging a capacity to read the material afresh rather than merely reflecting on the standard scholarship, we see that the ancient thinkers believed that many of the elements we see as defining us as human beings were initiated at the same moment. Sex, death, human will, and the first reasons to strive for higher states of being and a better relationship with God, according to the writers of Genesis, were all brought into being together. These things form, in fact, the Biblical definition of humanity at the moment of The Fall. In less Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Mormon terms, these things all share a single point of origin in ourselves.

Reading this, I sense a truth. Meditating on it, I discover evidence of truth. Testing it against my experience, I see it is true. Sex, as it turns out, is central to what I see in myself and identity as human spirituality. It is, therefore, equally empowered to advance or retard my spiritual development. More sex may lead to a more spiritual life, or it may mitigate against my spiritual goals. Sex approached with more honesty and with an ecstasy-inclined inner adjustment can only lead to a clearer spiritual vision. Any soul-to-soul contact between humans awakens spirit, and every degree of awakening is a boon to spiritual development.

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Copyright 2003
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