Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Issan Dorsey articulated queer Buddhist care as a form of grassroots spiritual mobilization during the early AIDS crisis. It explores how street-level Buddhist practices transformed compassion into collective care, solidarity, and ethical response within queer communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Issan Dorsey (1933–1990), a former drag performer, sex worker, and recovering addict who later became a Soto Zen priest, articulated a form of queer Buddhist care that functioned as a grassroots spiritual mobilization during the early AIDS crisis. Situated at the intersection of queer subcultures, spirituality, and activist care practices, Issan’s work offers a bottom-up response to moral stigma, governmental neglect, and the affective violence surrounding AIDS.

Drawing on textual and cultural analysis, the paper explores Issan’s teachings, public presence, and community-based practices as forms of spiritual engagement rather than individualized religious devotion. In a context shaped by public panic and moralizing discourses on sexuality, Issan reframed suffering not as punishment but as a relational condition that demanded proximity, shared vulnerability, and everyday practices of care. Through what I conceptualize as “On the Streets of Zen,” together with the AIDS Bodhisattva Path and his queer inflection of Dōgen’s notion of Uji (Being-Time), Issan accompanied addicts, sex workers, and unhoused LGBT+ people across San Francisco’s queer communities.

The founding of Maitri Hospice exemplifies how Buddhist spirituality became embedded in grassroots caregiving, transforming compassion into a collective and embodied practice of solidarity. By integrating queer temporality with Buddhist ethics, the paper argues that Issan’s “Queer Uji” articulated an alternative cultural politics of time that challenged dominant narratives of purity, urgency, and moral failure. In doing so, queer Buddhist care emerged as a modality of politico-spiritual mobilization that reimagined crisis as a site of ethical relation and collective transformation.