Open, self-aware conversation

Part 3: Identity locations & intersectionality

May 05, 2025

Two truths about human beings:

We can only name what we can perceive and observe.

So long as we insist on a discrete, bounded identity, we miss knowing much of ourselves and much more of other people and of the rest of the living universe.

When I retold my coming out story in Part 2, I had in mind the problem of “identity” that so often sabotages our individual and collective growth to adulthood. Lama Rod Owens offers some insightful ways to transcend this trap in “Do you know your true face?” (Buddhadharma, Fall 2016, pp. 30-33). He begins with his own example:

About a year after I finished the traditional three-year retreat program and had begun my work as a dharma teacher, I experienced a kind of breakdown, a severe sense of being stuck and uninspired…. [It] quickly became clear that my identity as a lama and resident teacher had somehow choked my identity as a queer Black man. I was privileging the lama over Rod.
Rod was the person I had earned the right to be; Rod had gone through years of working directly with self-hate, depression, and low self-esteem to emerge fierce, fabulous, edgy, and beautiful. Meeting the dharma had furthered my personal and interpersonal transformation, but now I was trying to fit into the mold of being a lama, a role largely informed by tradition and by other people’s expectations of me. (30)

Throughout primary and secondary school, I was trying to fit the mold of a hetero-normal boy and, at the same time, that of a good little Lutheran boy. To borrow Lama Owens’ terminology, I was privileging those two culturally prescribed identities over the mysteries of my true self.

These external expectations were all I could perceive and observe. Every child undergoes some version of such so-called “socialization.” But except within the confines of scholastic and church achievement, I missed out on all the other ways in which I could be blooming. I was hiding myself within roles “largely informed by tradition and by other people’s expectations of me.”

In college those attempts at conformity gradually collapsed in on themselves. My delight in scholarly exploration was fulfilled, but my emotional and spiritual life remained closeted. As I wrote last time, I ground to a halt as a junior, unable to complete some first semester courses and floundering through senior year. Then I entered Lutheran seminary, mainly because the also-closeted boy I was in love with said he was going.

By the time I committed to the school he had backed out, but I went ahead. It was not a wrong choice for a lifelong student, yet it led to the most unexpected awakening of my young life. The joy of first quarter seminary studies and communality distracted me for about half a year. Then I hit the same dead end, this time because of a crush on a roommate. As I used to joke, that was when God tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. You have to come out first before you can do this.”

In truth we are each of us a maze of what Lama Owens calls identity locations. Not discrete identities or separate pieces of ourselves, but realms of awareness and self-expression and—most importantly—of connection with other people.

Back in my college town, I discovered in myself a fascinating yet confusing crowd of identity locations. First, of course, I was now an out queer boy, floundering through sexual and emotional mysteries that should have happened during adolescence. That meant both sharing joys and acting out self-absorbed cruelties with other young men. It also meant joining an aggressive post-Stonewall Riots gay activism that was part liberating self-assertion and part resentful get-back for years of being bullied.

At the same time I was growing into young adulthood as a university library employee, singing in Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, learning Balkan line dance, smoking pot, devouring Woodstock era music. I began practicing the religion of Jesus but left behind the religion about Jesus that humans invented later on. I stepped aside from the oppressiveness of patriarchal culture by referring to the Divine One as Goddess or Mother-Father God. I was exploring Carl Jung, Carlos Castenada, Buddhism, and neo-Paganism—and getting ardently confused by walking too many paths at once. Eventually this all came crashing down too. Because I still didn’t know who I was.

Lama Owens gradually found a method of integrating his own array of identity locations by using intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw [see Note]:

“Intersectionality” speaks to the reality that we are influenced by any number of identities, all of which are informed further still by our social and political locations. We are not just white or Black or gay or transgender. We are an expression of a community of identities and influences that may not be apparent to those around us—or even to us.
In my experience, authenticity…requires a kind of radical presence. “Radical” speaks to a sense of remembering and returning to a simple and basic way of being in the world, one that reduces the violence to oneself and others; it honors one’s own passions and aspirations and relates to the world from a place of equanimity.
When we choose this way of being in the world, we feel at home in our own body, with no desire to leave it; because we feel at home in the body, we feel at home in the world. That is radical presence. And at its heart is an awareness of one’s own intersectionality. (30-31)

He writes of himself, “I am a Black, polyqueer, able-bodied, cisgender male lama who is of mixed class and radically minded.” Observing the interactions among these aspects of self, he says, reveals great complexity. “And these identities are always shifting. Practice grants us the space to allow this shifting to happen and to call that shifting our home.” (33)

Calling that shifting home. This is the insight that wakes me up and allows me to be the ever-changing creature that I am. I used to joke that I am a “Lutheran-Buddhist-Quaker-faggot-witch.” But I could add any number of other identity locations. The point for all of us is that we are not an “identity.” We are each a point of consciousness that is constantly moving among different focuses of experience and attention, both within and beyond ourselves.

Almost all of our suffering arises from our attempts to fix in place who and what we are and are not. And by then struggling to make that “place” secure from both inward and outward threats and changes. Worse still, we try to manipulate the people and circumstances around us, sometimes violently, in order to preserve this impossible fantasy of personal boundaries.

Worst of all, we enleague ourselves with others whom in a superficial sense we imagine to be “like us.” Others who want to fix in place the same artificial boundaries of safe belief, behavior, fellowship, and so on. And, of course, to push away our “enemies.”

The next post will weave together Premawardhana’s tribal wisdom and Lama Owens’ identity locations and intersectionality. There are ways that Americans might cross the illusory, sometimes violently enforced barriers of identity politics. Instead of being people on opposite sides of our problems, we might become sometimes disagreeing collaborators who face those problems together.

Way might open.

Walking the empty path

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