A queer critique of Buddhist renunciation - Bernat Font-Clos

The LGBTQ+ community is known for its parades. While there are quiet gays too, as Hannah Gadsby rightly spotted, the celebration is there to balance the shaming and repression. Celebrating our bodies and queerness, I believe, affirms that ‘this is worth it’. It sends the message that one is not willing to be defined by the pain. This sounds good and brave, but less obviously, it sounds un-Buddhist. Or to be more specific, it doesn’t fit with renunciation-based Buddhism, which is a lot of the contemporary dharma available today, even that which does not present—or sometimes conceive—itself as renunciant. 

At a Sakyan city in the Land of Lumbinī
A Being To Be Enlightened, a Priceless Jewel,
Is born in the world of men for welfare and weal;
​Because of that we are extravagantly gay.
— Snp 3.11.¹

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