What is gay spirituality? And is it a crucial or even relevant question anyway? Gilles Herrada, author of The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love, argues that spirituality is the context in which any other type of knowledge (like science) and self-knowledge (like psychology) unfolds. Tonight Herrada will engage in a conversation about the different forms and meanings that gay spirituality can take, the various paths that have been pursued since gay liberation, and the alternative vision that he offers in his book The Missing Myth.

Gilles Herrada, Ph.D., is a research scientist, a writer, and life coach at LifeAsacreation. He has worked at the universities of Nice, Paris, Columbia, and Harvard and is published internationally. While at Harvard, he discovered a large family of genes involved in the detection of pheromones, those “secret” odors that trigger animal sexual and social behaviors.

Gilles also attended and facilitated programs in what is commonly labeled as “personal development.” These workshops gave him the rare opportunity to discuss with homophobic men in an open and intimate setup. This offered him a unique chance to inquire into the mechanisms of homophobia empathically, that is from a homophobic standpoint.

Part of his research work regarding homosexuality’s history was presented at the First Integral Theory Conference in 2008 and will soon be published in an anthology titledEmerging Visions of Women and Men: An Integral Exploration of Sex, Gender and Spirituality at the SUNY Press.

Today Gilles Herrada lives in New York City.