Subtitled "Twenty-One Authors Discuss the Gay Near-Death Experience as Spiritual Transformation," this book concerns an absolutely fascinating and compelling phenomenon. What a great idea! Obviously gay people die too. We must have interrupted experiences of dying just like the people who are written about in books like Life After Life or depicted in movies like Resurrection. And with so many people hospitalized with life-threatening conditions resulting from AIDS, maybe we have even more such NDEs in our population.
Liz Dale, a research psychologist in San Francisco, set out to investigate this topic after hearing a speaker at the 1996 convention of the International Association for Near-Death Studies mention that there was no research on this phenomenon in the gay community. Over a couple of years, she gathered a group of about thirty gay men and lesbians. It was a liberating experience, she reports, for them being able to talk about their NDEs without fear of dismissal, ridicule, or bafflement. She has collected twenty-one of the stories for publication.
In some ways, the research did not result in the findings Dale was probably expecting. That is, most of the accounts end with the subjects' answer to a couple of questions about how their sexual orientation affected their NDE and how their NDE might have affected their attitudes toward their sexual orientation. Since the subtitle suggests the gay Near-Death Experience is a spiritual transformation, one would expect the subjects to report positive changes in these attitudes. But, in fact, almost every account ends with the subject saying their sexual orientation had NO effect and their attitudes toward it were unaffected.
Nonetheless, the accounts themselves are wonderful, moving, and even inspiring. What they seem to describe isn't so much about death, but about the mystical component of the subjects' lives. While most of the accounts are of true NDEs, that is, experiences of leaving the body following a medical emergency, like an automobile accident, several are of more generalized mystical phenomena and several are of drug-induced states (often suicidal overdoses).
The book is less important for arriving at scientific findings than for offering examples of how to think about and prepare for dying.
The NDE phenomenon seems to demonstrate that "afterlife" happens in the process of dying. The brain's shut-down procedures can be experienced as timeless and eternal and infinitely meaningful and blissful. It really doesn't matter what happens next. We can never know since truly no one comes back from having fully died. (Interestingly, even Jesus whose great saving act was dying and rising again never reported what was on the "other side." Did the Apostles just forget to ask? Maybe there is no intelligible answer.)
But if dying can provide a mystical experience of entering into bliss and reunion with all the love in one's life, then it'd be a good-and necessary-thing to prepare for it by creating some self-fulfilling prophecies for how you're going to react when you realize the time has come and you're about to die.
That's the beauty and importance of this book. It offers templates. It promises to get you thinking. It might inspire you to plan your dying.
I'd have liked this book to report that the gay people who had NDEs all said there were gay pride banners adorning the tunnel of light and that the glimpse into heaven relieved them all of any fears or misgivings about their sexuality. Well, it didn't. But it certainly got me obsessed for days about how I want to die when the time comes and inspired my meditations with positive expectations. Clearly, one of the functions of meditation should be to routinely remind ourselves of our mortality and to prepare for how we'll react when mortality is realized.
"You do not know the time nor the hour," said Jesus. "Be prepared." Liz Dale's research could have truly salvific consequences in your life-and death.
Reviewed by Toby Johnson
in the Winter 2003 issue of White Crane
A Journal of Gay Spirituality
This is meaningful work in a genre that has, for the most part, ignored our gay and lesbian experience. I hope the author will continue to research this subject area and publish her results. I believe there is a big demand for more information about gay and lesbian near death experiences, both scientific and anecdotal.
