Queer Spiritual Spaces

This You Tube video has captured a lot of people’s hearts.

Sally, of the Queer Spiritual Spaces team wonders

• Why is this video queer?
• Is it the cross-species love?
• Is it that the heterosexual couple look so similarly gendered?
• Do you think it is spiritual? — Maybe for some, maybe for others this doesn’t cut it or may even be offensive?
• What do you think?

Feel free to comment.

At the end of July I visited Findhorn to do the last of the interviews for the Queer Spiritual Spaces project. The community was in full summer mode with a garden party and an open day being held on Sunday afternoon.

I stayed bed and breakfast in the straw bale house, one of the many innovative and ecological buildings at the Park, just outside Findhorn village. This is a lovely, light, airy house and no, you can’t actually see the straw bales as they are covered by the walls, but it does have a nice blue roof and a lovely garden. The interviews were harder to organise this time; I couldn’t get hold of some people I wanted to interview, as they were away or otherwise too busy. But two people did agree to be interviewed and spoke very openly about their experiences of being spiritual and identifying with alternative sexualities. I also took some photos of the beach, the bay and the gardens, to give some idea of the location. I also found time to catch up with some friends who live in the community, and enjoyed the lovely sunset on the last evening.

Heather White, as her avatar, Rhombus Gatter, interviews Jubilant Quackenbush, a resident of Second Life (SL). SL is an online virtual world, and people participate in it as avatars they chose and create themselves, which makes it a fascinating site for examining questions about spirituality, sexuality, gender, and embodiment. The interviewer, whose “real life” (RL) embodiment is as a conventionally gendered woman, participates in SL as a male avatar with dragonfly wings. His conversation partner, Jubi, is the SL female avatar of a RL transwoman. When this picture was taken, Jubi was explaining to Rhombus that she started participating in SL after seeing beaches like this one: “I thought any ‘game’ where people put time and energy into creating a beautiful and relaxing environment is the game for me.”