ABSTRACT
If you’re already outside the ‘norm’, the things that keep people asleep, you’re
in a better place to wake up.
(Jubilant, research participant)
This chapter examines the practices and connections formed around LGBTQI spirituality on social networking sites, blogs, and webpages. It brings into focus the crossings of queer, spiritual and digital. Whereas some of the other case studies in the Queer Spiritual Spaces project examined already affiliated groups, this case study explicitly sought the ‘non-aligned spirituality curious’, or those who might call themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’. Participants for this case study responded to an inquiry, posted on various online sites, for LGBTQI individuals ‘interested in spirituality’. This call attracted a wide variety of self-selecting participants with multiple spiritual interests. Confounding our intentions to investigate the ‘non-aligned’, many research participants listed at least one (and most gave more than one) religious affiliation. This constituency tended to give religious identities in hyphens and slashes: Zen-trained Catholic/ Daoist, Christian/earth-based spiritualities, agnostic/Buddhist/integral, ‘complicated interfaithness’.2 The contours of this case study thus evolved through a reciprocal dynamic; as our inquiry shaped the object of study, our participants, in turn, shaped what we were examining.
