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Kaelan Strouse wants to know why sex and God are ‘separate things’

After seven years, Kaelan Strouse was expelled from his ashram by email. Since then he’s posted nude online, kept talking about God, and written a book that one of the most decorated queer presses in the country will release in March 2027.

Archive Daddy · September 2026

There’s a siren going somewhere behind him when we start. He apologizes for it, says he lives downtown in D.C., “that very kind, sensitive, welcoming capital of our country,” then laughs at his own joke.

He’s 39. He lives in Washington with his husband, Anthony, a few rescue animals and more houseplants than he’ll admit to. Close to a million people follow him online. In most of what they see, he has no clothes on and he’s talking about the divine.

I asked how he’d introduce himself to someone who’d never heard of him.

“I am a spiritual guide, an author, and somebody who is really uncomfortable with lines that divide the sacred and profane.”

Then he said the line he’s clearly used before.

I’d been watching him online for months before I asked him to sit down. The nudity is what everybody notices first. What kept me watching was that he won’t keep it in its own box. On OnlyFans he teaches meditation with nothing on. On Patreon he writes poetry about his husband. He doesn’t run those as separate accounts for separate audiences.

“I think we do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we fragment,” he said. “In one person at a temple or church I’m a different person. In my friend group I’m a different person. At work I’m a different person. What if we stop hiding those parts?”

He points out that this isn’t a new idea, just an unpopular one. In smaller communities, he said, we would all have seen each other naked. We would have all had sex with each other or watched other people have it. In ancient Greece you could leave the house nude with a piece of fabric over your arm and nobody blinked.

“I think we’re the weird ones in this modern world that have divorced all these things, and then wonder why there’s such intense rates of loneliness.”

Marginalia / 01Seven years of rising at five a.m. for two and three hours of meditation — then out the door to audition. Nine years involved in total. The expulsion came by email.

Seven years in

He grew up in the Midwest on the edge of a forest, meditating out there before he knew the word for it, talking to the lake. In first grade he got fixed on his own breathing at his desk and something rolled through him: colors, the sense of coming loose from his own body. It kept happening. He went looking for an explanation at the library and at his church and came back with nothing.

By college he was visiting temples and sitting in on meetings, trying to find something that fit. He found it in a woman teaching yoga at his local gym who read aloud from her guru’s book. A scholarship sent him to an ashram in Colorado for a month the summer before his senior year. He calls that a homecoming.

After graduation he moved into an ashram in Chicago. Up at five. Two or three hours of meditation. Service in the mornings. The gym. Auditions, because he was working as an actor. Performing most nights. Back for more meditation. Bed at one or two, sometimes three. Two or three hours of sleep. Then again.

He did that for seven years.

He’d asked, early on, whether it was a cult. He was told it wasn’t. It was.

He says the guru and his wife were abusing their own child, who had come out as trans. He spoke up. All he said, by his account, was that the kid seemed happier than he’d ever seen them. Shortly after, an email arrived. Don’t come back. You’re no longer my student. Don’t contact anyone in this community again.

Nine years of his life, ended in a paragraph.

“This person was supposed to reincarnate with me lifetime after lifetime until I reached liberation.”

He calls it the best thing that ever happened to him, and he doesn’t say it the breezy way people say that about their divorces. He says it forced him to take responsibility for his own growth and handed him back something he’d given away.

What he believes now

Most spiritual systems point at an exit. Heaven, nirvana, liberation, merging back into the source, breaking the cycle of rebirth.

Kaelan thinks the exit is a misunderstanding. If the divine’s function is to generate realities, he argues, then dissolving back into it only means you’ll eventually be sent out into a new one.

“So great, we can merge back to source. Congratulations. Now what?”

He has a name for the alternative. Incarnational sufficiency. This life, with the backaches and the bunions and the nasty ex-boyfriends — his list, not mine — is the gift. Refusing it is refusing the only thing you were actually handed.

Some traditions call themselves the path of fire. He’d rather call his a path of falling water. A raindrop falling alone thinks it’s separate. Then it hits a river, or the ocean, and evaporates, and falls again. The work is learning to enjoy the cycle instead of plotting your way out of it.

Marginalia / 02Not the path of fire. A path of falling water — the raindrop that believes itself separate, reaches the ocean, evaporates, and falls again.

Where the shame starts

I asked what shame he’d had to unlearn as a gay man. He pushed the question back further than I expected.

Being born queer is traumatic on its own, he said, and it starts long before any of us have a word for what we are. We know we’re different before we know how. Difference registers as danger before you can think about it, because for most of human history getting pushed out of your tribe meant dying alone.

So we start performing. The funniest kid, the smartest kid, the most useful kid. “We become the best little boys in the world.” We learn our worth is conditional, and we carry it into adulthood, and coming out doesn’t undo it. He mentioned The Velvet Rage, and why that book keeps circulating through friend groups where almost nobody has been to therapy.

He doesn’t exempt himself.

He told me he wants a muscular body partly because he likes it and partly because it feels like protection. The kid who got bullied for not being masculine enough is still in there.

That kid sat alone at lunch every day because nobody would talk to him. He found notes shoved in his locker. Once he found a bag of urine poured into it. He came home to a slur painted across the driveway that took most of a decade to wear off.

He didn’t kiss anyone until he was 25.

“I look back on my earlier life and I frankly think, how did I not commit suicide?”

At 24 he was six foot one and 140 pounds and assumed nobody would ever want him. The body came later, in his thirties. He still hears a compliment about it and assumes the person is responding to something behind it.

On gay cruises, he said, the compliment he gets most has nothing to do with the body at all. It’s that he was the only person on the boat who actually talked to anybody.

Holding both at once

His retreats run four days, clothing optional, application only, co-facilitated with his husband. His sound baths have been fully clothed so far.

He draws a line inside all of it that surprised me: no overt sexual contact in the work.

Not because he thinks sex is unholy. He thinks the opposite, and he’ll give you the evidence. A lingam carved with an erect figure. Temple art in Turkey older than almost anything we have. Renaissance painters who gave Christ an erection on the cross. A Sanskrit word that covers both enlightenment and orgasm.

The reason he holds the line is practical, and it has to do with what most men’s nervous systems can manage at once.

“For a lot of guys, the ability to hold the sacred and the sexual simultaneously is not a natural skill.”

His example is a steam room. Somebody’s looking at you. Instead of reciprocating, he walks over, puts out his hand, and introduces himself. He says you can watch the switch flip. Suddenly it’s a guy named Brian asking how his day’s going. Most people can’t run both channels at once.

So at retreats he asks men to hold each other instead. Give your full weight to another person, let them carry it. Every time, he says, at least one man starts sobbing, because nobody has held him like that in years. Ask those same men to do something explicitly sexual and they wouldn’t hesitate. The holding is the harder ask.

He’s just as direct about his own tastes, which are quieter than his feed suggests. Eleven years with his husband, and by his estimate 99 percent of their sex life has nothing to do with penetration. Cuddling, kissing, crying on each other. He identifies as autistic and says he overstimulates fast. He tops or bottoms for about fifteen minutes before he gets bored and politely closes up shop.

What he says he wants is to be witnessed, romanced a little, not left alone while somebody gets dressed.

“I think that’s what we as humans want more than anything else, is to be truly witnessed in this brief, mortal existence.”

The book

Ecstaticism: A Transmission from the Threshold is his fourth book and the first one he calls a thesis.

The three before it were self-published. A self-help guide. A fantasy novel that reworks his childhood into allegory. A companion volume to a 48-card oracle deck that funded on Kickstarter in three days.

This one runs in three voices, braided together and cycling, and the strangeness is deliberate.

The Philosopher is the straightforward spiritual writing, the part a reader picks up the book expecting.

The Poet carries nine psalms telling one love story across nine lifetimes. Two gay priests who keep finding each other at the end of the world, through floods and burning skies and ice, and keep remembering that the love was the point. It’s his marriage, extrapolated backward across a hundred thousand years.

The Trickster is the one doing the structural work. There’s an old tradition of a scribe annotating sacred text in the margins, and he’s put a heckler in the margin instead. If the Philosopher is on a mountaintop delivering a grand truth, the Trickster is walking back down, stripping, asking somebody to pass him a beer. One chapter is about kindness. The next one undercuts it.

Which is how there ends up being so much poop in this book. He brought it up before I could. He and his husband ask each other about their bowel movements, sincerely, every day. That’s life, and nothing about life gets left out, so in it goes.

He knew it was a hard sell. Then Bryan Borland, who founded Sibling Rivalry Press, messaged him out of nowhere and asked to read the manuscript.

For anyone who doesn’t know the press: Borland published Ocean Vuong’s first chapbook in 2010. He published Carl Phillips, who went on to win the 2023 Pulitzer in poetry. It’s the only house to have taken Lambda Literary Awards in both gay and lesbian poetry. In 2015 the Library of Congress inducted the entire catalog, past and future, into its Rare Books and Special Collections vault. Every title they print goes in.

Borland’s response, as Kaelan tells it, was that he’d never seen anybody write about what queer spirituality actually feels like, and also that he couldn’t believe how much poop was in it.

I asked what success looks like from here.

He doesn’t count it in copies and has never wanted to be a household name. What he wants is to be one of the people who comes to mind when somebody goes looking for a spirituality that belongs to them instead of one imported from somewhere that never wanted them.

He said he gets an email or a message once a week or more from a stranger saying he changed their life without knowing it.

Earlier in the conversation he’d said something about his own body that I keep coming back to.