Last Updated on August 27, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
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What if Christ met Krishna? Christ and Krishna are two of the greatest teachers of love that the world has ever known. Would they speak of love, even make love? This delightful possibility is considered here today in honor of Krishna’s birthday or Janmashtami, which is celebrated every year in August or September. This year it is Aug. 26, 2024.
Many have noticed the similarities between Christ and the Hindu deity Krishna, but now the two god-men are portrayed as gay lovers in the work of artistic visionaries like artist Alex Donis and poet Brian Day. His poem “Krishna and Jesus in Algonquin Park” is reprinted in full below.
Those who value love, sexuality and interfaith dialogue may find enlightenment by imagining an erotic encounter between Jesus and Krishna.
Like Christ, Krishna is a savior who taught love. Both are believed to be divinely conceived by God and a human woman, making them human AND divine. Jesus called himself a shepherd and Krishna herded cattle, but both healed the sick, worked miracles and forgave enemies.
One difference between the two is that Jesus is considered celibate in Christian tradition, while Krishna is a fantastic lover who is “all-attractive” to men as well as women. Legends glorify Krishna’s many amorous encounters with all kinds of admirers: female and male, milkmaids and cowboys, human and divine.
The idea of a queer Jesus shocks and offends some traditional Christians, but it can be liberating for LGBTQ people and our allies. The pansexual Krishna may play the same role among Hindus.
People throughout history have pictured Jesus looking like one of them: black Jesus in Africa, white Jesus in the West, and Jesus who looks Asian or Latin American in those parts of the world. It’s OK to add queer Christ to the mix because he taught love for all and embodied God’s wildly inclusive love for everyone, including sexual minorities. Gay Jesus images are needed now because conservatives are using religious rhetoric to justify discrimination against queer people.
Would sparks fly if these two great teachers of love did meet? Toronto teacher Brian Day writes about their ineffable intimacy in “Krishna and Jesus in Algonquin Park,” a poem from his book “The Daring of Paradise.” The book, which explores the commonalities between multiple religions in a homoerotic way, was released by Guernica Editions in 2013. Algonquin Park is a provincial park in Ontario, Canada.
If Jesus and Krishna met, would there be conflict or kisses? Brian Day’s new poem offers a beautiful glimpse into how they might love each other.
in Algonquin Park
They hoist their canoe to the lichened rocks
and face the smooth light they’ve paddled across.
Shucking the weight of their pale-coloured clothes
and plunging to the knuckly cupped hand of the lake,
they meet in the green, share their scents with the water,
feel their bodies enlivened with cool liquid sensation,
and turn in the still black waters of their minds.
As they ripple the mirror between world and world,
each sights the stroking phantoms of the other’s limbs,
and touches skin as papery smooth as birch.
They climb the smoothed ladder of rocks at the shore,
their abdomens slick and quick with their breath,
and lie with their backs baked sweet with stone.
Blue and clouds tumble to creation in their eyes.
Leading each other down pine-cooled trails,
the air sultry with blueberry and warm golden grasses,
they step to the island’s needled shade,
and each scents the lake-sweet on the other’s skin.
When evening has come and their hungers are sated,
their senses warmed by the perch where they sit,
their thoughts float calm as loons on the water—
then plunge to surface, later, someplace else.
Their bodies as languid as the swaying of trees,
they listen to the applause of breeze in the aspens,
know the touch of each star as it plays on their skin,
and lie down in the circling of heavens on earth.
Another Day poetry book, “Conjuring Jesus,” features homoerotic poems about Christ. His book “Azure” includes “The Love Between Krishna and Jesus,” a poem that begins, “They approach one another with cool flowers of language…”
Art shows an interfaith kiss between Jesus and Lord Rama
“Jesus and Lord Rama” by Alex Donis
In a related work, California artist Alex Donis painted a sublime interfaith kiss in “Jesus and Lord Rama.” (Krishna and Rama are both blue-skinned incarnations of Vishnu.) It is part of his “My Cathedral” series of kisses between unlikely same-sex pairs.
The Donis exhibit electrified viewers when it opened in San Francisco in 1997. Heated arguments erupted in the gallery, followed by threatening phone calls and letters, and then physical violence. Vandals threw rocks and traffic barriers through the gallery windows—not once, but twice in three weeks. They smashed two of the artworks: first Jesus and Rama, and then Che Guevara kissing Cesar Chavez. The Christ-Rama image and its harrowing story appear in the book Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More
People throughout history have pictured Jesus looking like one of them: black Jesus in Africa, white Jesus in the West, and Jesus who looks Asian or Latin American in those parts of the world. It’s OK to add queer Christ to the mix because he taught love for all and embodied God’s wildly inclusive love for everyone, including sexual minorities. Gay Jesus images are needed now because conservatives are using religious rhetoric to justify discrimination against queer people.
Krishna-like figures are shown in more sexually explicit homoerotic scenes by artist Attila Richard Lukacs. They can be viewed in his “Varieties of Love” series at the following link: Diane Farris Gallery
Here are other popular images that add Buddha to the mix to depict interfaith friendship at the highest level.
“May Loving-Kindness Abound” from Changingworld.com shows figures from three religions offering blessings. Jesus holds a lotus blossom as he sits cross-legged between Krishna and Buddha.
The above image of three religious figures is often posted online with a quote from bisexual spiritual teacher Ram Dass: “We’re all just walking each other home.”
Did Jesus visit India?
Considering love between Krishna and Christ raised the question of whether Jesus visited India. Krishna’s worship dates back 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, so they could not have met in the physical world, but it is possible the Jesus did travel to India. One popular theory suggests that Jesus went to India during his “unknown years” between ages 12 and 30, the period that is not documented in the New Testament. There he learned Hindu and Buddhist wisdom that is similar to his teachings in the Bible.
Most modern scholars reject the theory that Jesus visited India, but the idea has been explored in many books, including the 19th-century volume “The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ” (The Life of Saint Issa) by Nicolas Notovitch and “Jesus Lived in India: His Unknown Life Before and After the Crucifixion” by Holger Kersten. There is even a movie version, “Jesus in India,” based on the book “King of Travelers: Jesus’ Lost Years in India” by Edward T. Martin.
A thoughtful analysis of the similarities of Hindu-Christian philosophies is presented in “The Gospel of John in the Light of Indian Mysticism” (Christ the Yogi) by Ravi Ravindra.
Hindu deities have full spectrum of genders
Krishna also plays a central role in another Hindu festival that is especially popular with third-gender people. The Aravan Festival, held in April-May in south India, celebrates the marriage of Krishna and the male deity Iravan, considered the patron god of transgender communities. Iravan’s dying wish was to marry, so Krishna granted his wish by switching to his female Mohini female form and wedding him.
For more info on Krishna and other Hindu deities who transcend sexual and gender norms, visit the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association at:
http://www.galva108.org
The GALVA website is packed with fascinating material on Hindu saints and deities who embody the full spectrum of gender and sexual diversity, including but not limited to lesbian, gay, “third sex,” deities who are half male and half female, deities who change genders, and deities with same-sex parents.
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Related book:
“Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex: Understanding Homosexuality, Transgender Identity, And Intersex Conditions Through Hinduism” by Amara Das Wilhelm.
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Related link:
Hindi Rainbow Christ Prayer highlights India: इंद्रधनुष मसीह को प्रार्थना (Q Spirit)
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Top image: “Krishna and Christ,” artist unknown. Does anybody know who created the picture of Krishna and Christ at the top of this post? Or the one of Christ, Buddha and Jesus walking together? They are all over the Internet, but I haven’t been able to identify the artists. I would love to honor the artists by name.
“Krishna and Jesus in Algonquin Park” is reprinted with permission from the book “The Daring of Paradise,” published by Guernica Editions.
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBTQ martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
Hello,with all due respect i request you to not insult or hurt our religious sentiments.Those pictures of Krishna and Jesus kissing each other seem really weird. Both of them were straight.Krishna is an avatar of vishnu (divine masculine)and he has a wife lakshmi (divine feminine)and only they can come together.The meaning of Krishna means all attractive .It was in a divine sense ,like we say God is omnipotent perfect.There is no fault in him.So i request you to stop doing such things and please take down this article you are hurting millions of people’s religious sentiments.Just because someone hurt yours doesn’t give you the right to hurt others.
Dear “Truth” — May I ask you in turn: “with all due respect i request you to not insult or hurt our religious sentiments”. Your comments do not respect the religious sentiments of LGBTQ+ people who, like you and all human beings, have a legitimate spiritual need to relate to the Divine in their own image. You imagine the Divine as heterosexual. Well, as a gay man I imagine the Divine as homosexual. Gnostic scripture says that the Divine appears to each person in a form most appropriate to that person. Indeed, the devotees of Krishna have enumerated many ways one can relate to the Divine, to Krishna — including as His Friend, as His Parent, as His Child, and as His Lover. And both male and female devotees are allowed to relate to Krishna as His Lover. In Christian tradition, male as well as female monastics are considered “married to Christ”. Connect the dots. Sex and Spirit are both manifestations of the same Divine Love and Power. The Divine is the Totality that encompasses All, and therefore cannot take offense. Shall we not try to emulate the Divinity that we really are?
With all due respect, your beliefs about gay people seem “really weird”. This is a free planet. If you are offended, leave.
Please remove this article ASAP as it offends deep religious sentiments of many adherents. We wish to respect different views but cannot have an article like this on the digital world.
Your comment offends my deep religious sentiments, but I am allowing it anyway out of respect for different views. My deep religious belief is that homosexuality is part of the good diversity created by God.
Don’t you ever try to spoil .
Our Christ isn’t a comparable entity.
The mystical and the erotic are both similar and complementary. To imagine two great symbols of love loving each other and celebrating love by making love is beautiful and invites us to explore the sacred with our wholeness. Rev. Cherry’s use of art, literature, history, myth, and theology to explore the sacred and affirm human dignity continues to inspire and delight me. Bless the lovers: human, divine, cosmic, avatar, prophet, sage, Saint and other…May the one that expresses through many always bless love and lovers.
A couple of observations. The lead image and several like it are widely used by Hindus to link Jesus with Krishna, apparently without any concern that this would offend Christians who hold traditional beliefs. So, a lot of the outrage seems hypocritical.
Hindu sacred stories regularly represent the gods as engaging in sexual activity. Of course, many present-day Hindus take this as symbolic, metaphorical, or metaphysical. But that’s not really the point. What’s upsetting people is not the idea of deities being sexually in love. It’s the idea of them being same-sexually in love. Some of the negative comments are pretty clear on that, insisting that Jesus and Krishna were “straight.” Ironically, the nasty comments serve to make a major point for the article: heterosexism plays a big role in how religions traditionally operate.
THANKS, Kittredge for pushing back against that religious heterosexism.
Thanks for your supportive comments here and in the LGBTQ Saints group. One reason that I approve ignorant negative comments is because they are useful in revealing the bias against LGBTQ people. The Q Spirit blog gets lots of hateful comments from right-wing Christians, but the right-wing Hindus provide some interesting variations, showing how cross-cultural misunderstanding, racism and colonialism intertwine with homophobia to make communication even more difficult.
Thank you so much for this wonderful post. As Q-folk our histories and mythologies have largely been obliterated and you do us a great service by recreating them in a form like this. ❤️
Now you’re fantasizing about sodomy between spiritual beings? And Jesus defined love as a willingness to “lay down one’s life” for others, not sex (which is about self-gratification, not self-sacrifice). It’s also dubious to link Christ and Krishna by claiming they’re the same, the chief link seemingly being a similar title but in two different languages and hence there’s no linguistic link between the two either. As usual, you’re making up nonsense.
What about Emmanuel, the Incarnation? Jesus we worship by living with is not mere spirit. If the both are god-in-flesh, why not sanctify all flesh? IMHO sex is too about sacrifice, part of one’s gift to another, and ultimately to the progress of a species. It doesn’t seem nonsense to me that, should Jesus meet Krishna, he would love him.
This is a reply to “L”, since there’s no reply button next to his/her response to me on Sept 9. St. Catherine of Siena, Hildegard von Bingen, etc relayed quotes from Jesus and God the Father condemning any form of homosexual sex (further confirming the plain, long-accepted meaning of Biblical passages on the subject), which supersedes personal speculation. And it should go without saying that suffering severe pain or death for the sake of others is the opposite of seeking pleasure for yourself from someone else’s body. I could add that “L” was one of a host of accounts that posted in rapid succession all of a sudden on Sept 9, each with different names and to different previous comments but one after another despite the lack of any other activity in this thread for quite some time. Curious.
Thanks for your comments, L and CGesange! I understand that it may seem suspicious when multiple comments appear at once, but there is a simple explanation. More comments come in right after I send out the monthly Q Spirit Newsletter. Then I tend to approve them in groups every few days. As the admin of this blog, I can see more info on “L” and I can assure you that she is a real person who did not post other comments on this blog at the same time.
Wow! The hatefulness of some of these comments from religious people! It makes a good case for the world being better off without religion– like John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Personally I believe we are all one in divinity (which I regard as Goddess), so it makes no difference whatsoever what you are or what you perceive ultimate reality to be.
Loved it!
Me too.
Very strange article. IMHO Jesus is an historical human being who attained enlightenment, Krishna and Rama are considered descents of Vishnu. But most of all, these three are obviously straight. Jesus with Mary Magdalen, Krishna with Rukmini and Rama with Sita. I have nothing against LGBT but please check the fallacy called confirmation bias.
It’s amusing to see someone refer to “confirmation bias” after having just insisted that “these three are obviously straight,” especially by citing “Jesus with Mary Magdalen” over against centuries of Christian claims that Jesus was celibate and that his relationship with Mary was completely nonsexual.
What a disgusting gut wrenching nincompoop article. Do not use your rainbow pride to cover up the liberal agendas. Next you’ll be talking how a man and a fish can mate. Don’t bring up your personal sexual preferences and mark it as a pedestal to judge anyone. You don’t realise that you’re creating worse future for all of us where everyone will be having an identity crisis & existential crisis. Be Bound by Natural Law. Especially we don’t need any white lgbtq fanatic supremacist to spread any racial & hurtful slurs to our God. In the end, i hope sense prevails. Hare Ram Hare Krishna!
Won’t say anything was bad, but Jesus and Krishna both were straight men, Especially Krishna, because he was a warrior who had a true love called Radha, so it was rather misleading than offensive
First, how do you know they were straight? Are you over 2,000 years old that you have evidence of your own eyes to contradict scripture from both the Gita and John’s Gospel that is at least ambiguous about their homosexual natures?
Please, ma’am, you seem like you are a mature lady, don’t use gods to forward your agenda,
Yes, I agree. Using “gods” and love to push an agenda. Scriptures say, “God is love!” NOT LOVE IS GOD!
I just read this cuz I googled Jesus/krishna because my sense of their identicality (in the collective unconscious, which is where all religious mythologies come from) popped into my mind reading The Bhagavadgita when Krishna begins telling who he is and where he resides relative to the cosmos and to human-kind. I realize he was saying exactly the same thing of himself as is the key notion in the archetypal Christ story: there is a secret knowledge that when revealed shows mankind to be – in esoteric reality – a hybrid of Man and God in a radically unified both/and synthesis. All systems of spritual seeking have this as the reported understanding from those who have taken up the quest. The idea of messiah or savior is an irrelevant red-herring in the way of the truepurpose of religion and spiritual practice, which is for man to realize there is nothing to be saved from; he was god before during and after his temporary sojourn as a mortal creature. From the ancient east has come the saying “thou art God”. Both Krishna and Jesus testify to the fact, as the mystics of both global hemispheres have corroborated.
WTF, Krishna was more than 3000 years older than Jesus. He wasn’t gay either. Jesus was also not gay. If you are a straight person, will you marry a man who is 3000 years older/younger and also straight? I am not against LGBT, infact some LGBTs are considered good luck in Hinduism and are invited in weddings for blessings. But no need to make saints gay.
“What if Krishna and Christ made love”
Krishna and Christ are pointers to the discovery that Love is your true nature — natural state.
I received negative comments (including some that were too obscene to allow) recently after a Twitter alert against this article went viral and was retweeted 500 times. It is hard to understand, but it seems that Hindu nationalists in India think I am a missionary who is insulting Hindu gods by showing them as gay in order to win Christian converts in India.
This is a big misunderstanding. First of all, I believe that being gay is good. It’s not an insult.
Second, I’m not trying to convert anyone. I mostly hope to help heal LGBTQ people who were hurt by the church and never heard that God loves them. This article might actually make some LGBTQ people consider converting to become Hindu.
Sadly, Hindus are as homophobic as many traditional-minded Christians. I believe being gay is every bit as being straight or bisexual.
Who the hell are you bloody bastards ????
How dared you to compare your so called ‘#god’ with eternal “#ADIYOGI_SRI_KRISHNA” & “#MARYADA_PURUSOTTAM_SRI_RAMCHANDRA”?????
If you have guts then share your details with me then I will show you ,What is result of messing with a Real HINDU ?????
जय जय श्री राम जी
️️️️️️️️️️️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️
Hey what is this nonsense. Krishna is Supreme god and Jesus is his son, be shameful portraying father-son relationship like this way. Krishna is above the platform of this bodily conception of life. So, stop portraying him as a Gay. He is supreme loving master of everyone including Jesus. Platform of Jesus and krishna is above all this material conception of life. Please read the scriptures properly and do not concoct something rascal thing in your mind. Hope you are not offended. But it is great offense to consider Jesus and krishna to be Homosexual. Because they both are above this material platform.
Please delete Lord Krishna’s images. It is disrespectful to the Lord krishna’s devotees i.e. Hindus as west called them or Sanatani as we call ourselves.
You can have any abrahamic religious gods for eg-Mohammed, depicting your cult but please spare Hindu Gods from the India.
No disrespect is intended.
how high you have to be? i am not against your LGBTQ community but just to make jesus gay you bring in Krishna who is pansexual? Where did you read that?
I am not bias against the LBGTQ community, either. I just don’t agree with Kitredge, and her views on Christianity. I can disagree with someone, WITHOUT BEING BIAS AGAINST THEM. I don’t agree with her views on scripture, or Christianity.
No, Krishna is not Gay, maybe one of his manifestations can be, but he is a pure heterosexual warrior.
Thanks for this …Its always so nice to read Jesus Krishna story.