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SHINRAN, A RADICAL thirteenth-century Japanese monk, exile, and refugee, founded the Jodo Shinshu tradition. A people’s Buddhism, it was specially created to be a way of including those who are marginalized and oppressed in dominant society. As a result, Jodo Shinshu has a comparatively good track record on LGBTQ+ issues: we were the first Buddhists to perform same-sex marriages, to provide pastoral care to gay people by trained chaplains, to host PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) groups, and to officially denounce homophobic maneuvers by politicians. But plenty of people still question whether they belong in the Jodo Shinshu community because of our deeply heteronormative culture.
Considering the queerness in Shinran’s life and teaching allows us to