“I propose that we Gay Folk, whom Great Nature has been assembling as a Separate People in these last 100,000 years, must now prepare to emerge from the shadows of History because we are a species-variant with a particular characteristic adaptation-in-consciousness WHOSE TIME HAS COME!” Harry Hay
“The Radical Faeries emerged in tandem with a gay civil rights movement in the 1970s and tapped into a broader countercultural energy. Rather than relying on an apologetic posture or seeking ‘inclusion’ in mainstream social institutions and religious communities, Radical Faeries adopted a proactive and constructive approach to their queer sexualities and gender expressions. By turning to a variety of soures – such as the mythopoetic men’s movement, feminism, and pagan and neo-pagan Earth-based traditions- Radical Faeries sought not only to critique the patriarchal and hierarchical dynamics of the wider society, but also to embrace what they understood as the fundamental connection between spirituality and sexuality. This queerly creative mix of traditions and practices generated a host of ritualised forms of sexuality and relational bonds, including a number of distinct groupings within this loosely affiliated and now worldwide network.” Sadomasochism and Spirituality A Queerly Religious Challenge to the Gay Marriage Paradigm, by Patrick Califia in QUEER RELIGION Homosexuality in Modern Religious History Volume I 2011
“Why faerie? First, a definition: A faerie is a mythical creature who is changeable, can’t be pinned down, is unpredictable, thinks in an alien manner, and is more attuned to nature than we humans. A faerie is fey. Radical Faeries try to live some of these attributes: Worship nature and the Goddess, project androgyny, explore sensuality and sexuality. They are profoundly anti-authoritarian, often pacifist, following a philosophy of life in part 1960s counterculture (from which they arose). Promoting a playful, open, loving brotherhood, Faerie gatherings are magical events stressing open affections, communal meals, ceremonies and revels, often nude, sometimes in drag, in rural, outdoor settings.” STUART NORMAN, I AM THE LEATHERFAERIE SHAMAN in Mark Thompson’s LEATHERFOLK Radical Sex, People, Politics and Practice 1992
“Faeries have been described variously as a neo-pagan spiritual group, a gay tribe, a new religious/social movement, a bunch of hippy-faggot-farmers, gender-fuck activists, queer community anarchists. The number of different definitions of faerie is synergistically greater than the number of queer men and women who self-identify as part of the movement.” Fey, W. (2000), ‘Radical Faeries’, in G. E. Haggerty (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures Volume II
Mitch Walker, one of the founding Faeries, in 1997 described Radical Fae as “the first indigenous spiritual tradition created and sustained by the gay male community in modern times. By “indigenous” I mean gay-centered and gay-engendered, in contrast to the various gay synagogues, churches, covens etc. In the latter groups, gayness is incidental or additional to the tradition espoused, while in the former it is central and causal. Radical Faeries celebrate and explore the Gay Spirit, which is itself the source of spiritual existence, wisdom and initiation. Because of its indigenous, gay-centered nature, the Radical Faerie movement pioneers a new seriousness about gayness, its depth and potential, thereby heralding a new stage in the meaning of Gay Liberation.”
“Radical Faeries are elusive. Like our legendary namesakes the faeries of the British Isles, the fees of France, the sprites and wood spirits of the Mediterranean – we are experts at camouflage and visual trickery. Delighting in inhabiting the borderlands of the mainstream worldview, we are the teasing images flickering in society’s peripheral vision, which disappear (in a cloud of faerie dust to peals of bell-like laughter) when confronted with straight and four-square vision. We have to learn to look askance and use our peripheral vision to begin an investigation into the nature of the Radical Faeries…
“A description of identity based on definitions will never work for the Faeries. Rather, Faeries should be thought of as ‘becoming’, not ‘being’. Let me finish with a perceptive musing on gay identity by Michel Foucault. It could very well serve as a summation of the process of becoming a Radical Faerie:
“We must be aware of…the tendency to reduce being gay to the questions: ‘Who am I?” “What is the secret of my desire?’ Might it not be better if we asked ourselves what sort of relationships we can set up, invent, multiply or modify through our homosexuality? The problem is not trying to find out the truth of one’s sexuality within oneself, but rather, nowadays, trying to use our sexuality to achieve a variety of different types of relationships. And this is why homosexuality is probably not a form of desire, but something to be desired. We must therefore insist on becoming gay, rather than persisting in defining ourselves as such. (Foucault, 1984, p.385)…
“Faeries have been described variously as a neo-pagan spiritual group, a gay tribe, a new religious/social movement or development, a bunch of hippy-faggot-farmers and gender-fuck activists and queer community anarchists. Indeed, the number of definitions of Faerie is synergistically greater than the number of queer men and women who identify as part of the movement.” Bill Rogers, Becoming Radical Faerie: Queering the Spirit of the Circle. In ‘Popular Spiritualities’ 2006
“In conversation and in their writings, the Radical Faeries (who, while “refusing to be pinned down,” nonetheless tend to be spiritually and politically anarchistic and comunitarian) emphasize this bond with nature, often holding their gatherings in forests, deserts, and mountainous regions. My friend Hyperion describes a Faerie ritual that took place in the Arizona desert in 1979:
“It all began when one… faerie decided to go down to the arroyo and play in the mud. Soon others joined him…. All emerged from their raiment and started smearing mud on themselves and each other. Body merged with body until we were one mass. One faerie lying on the ground was decorated with leaves and flowers. Then he was lifted to the sky as if he were an emissary bringing earth and sky together.
“The Radical Faeries are among those gay seekers who have taken steps to realise the dream of HOME…. faerie communal households and farms…” Randy P Connor, Blossom of Bone 1993
“As a Fae man, I seek to live an Idea(l) of constant “Heart Space” – where there is full and mutual respect for Self and Others (indeed All Existence). My mystical journeyings (through High Camp ritual, exhuberant sex, playful nudity, song, dance, poetry, art, and many other magickal acts) have brought me visions of my connectedness to Nature, to the vast and complex web of All Existence, which in turn is the firm basis of my Fae Ethos.” My Journeys into Faerie and What I Found There by Connell O Donovan (historian, biographer, born 1961)
“STARTING IN THE LATE 1970s, alongside the enormous and continuing growth of women’s spirituality, there sprung up, in almost parallel fashion, a small spiritual movement among men. This movement was connected with the feminist critique of patriarchal notions of religion and authority, and with the attempt of both gay and straight men to create a new definition of maleness.
“One important impulse behind the notion of radical faeries was the idea that there had to be something beyond assimilation. Just as radical feminists wanted to go beyond women attaining equal rights in a man’s world, toward a notion that feminism implied a totally different reality, a different language, a different attitude toward power and authority, this group of gay men saw their own movement as implying a totally different view of the world, with different goals and different spiritual values than the “straight” world…
“In an article in RFD called “A Sprinkling of Radical Faerie Dust,” Don Kilhefner wrote that the dilemma facing gay men is “our assimilation into the mainstream versus our enspiritment as a people … “We are the equivalent of Shamans in modern culture,” said Peter Soderberg, during an interview at the 1985 Pagan Spirit Gathering. “Many gay men want to be middle-class Americans. They want to be respected as human beings and they want their sexuality to be ignored. But radical faeries are willing to live on the edge. We feel there is a power in our sexuality. You know there is a power there because our culture is so afraid of us. And there is a lot of queer energy in the men and women most cultures consider magical. It’s practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.,,
“Many radical faeries were preoccupied with questions of process and form. Just as feminist women had been struggling with questions about authority, forms of leadership, decision making, language, and control, these gay men seemed to spend much of their time struggling with the same kinds of questions. “Process is content,” Peter told me. As a person who has always felt content was more important than form, I was dismayed. But in Peter’s view, society’s violence begins at the place where creativity and self-expression is controlled. “In our system of male dominance,” he told me, “there is an unexpressed contract that says: ‘It is safer to control energy than it is to experience energy.’ In our society men are the ‘control’ referents, and women the ‘experience’ referents.” On the most superficial level this would mean: “Women are feeling people. Women must be controlled.” But on a subtler level Peter believes that this system exists within every human being. We tend to control our experiences, instead of participating in them and acting from them.
“In contrast, faerie reality says, “It is more enjoyable to experience energy than to control energy,” that the need for violence will disappear as creativity and real self-expression increase. Faerie gatherings, at their best, would be places where experimentation with new social forms could take place. They would not be a place for set rituals or workshops given by “leaders.” One man wrote: “Spirituality has to be discovered . . . by each individual. Even the Native American cultures with a highly spiritual worldview did not ‘teach’ it. Instead, the young of the tribe, as part of their initiation, went on a vision quest to seek their own personal experience with the spirit realm…
“The Radical Faerie movement continues to grow, characterized by spontaneity and anti-authoritarianism. Michael Lloyd [a founding member of the Green Faerie Grove, a worship group for queer Pagan men in Columbus, Ohio] describes it as “having a pro-humanist, pro-environment, pro-sex vision of the world that contrasts sharply with the mainstream Western religious traditions.” He adds that while some groups include straight men and women, and even children, “gender bending is a hallmark of the radical faerie movement.”
“Michael Lloyd said he believes that queer spirituality brings a sense of mystery, of “otherness” to humankind. The old gods are far from dead, he says:
‘If you go to a gay club on a Saturday night, you will feel Dionysus throbbing in the sweaty, heated air around you on the dance floor. We know that the gods continue to live in us, because we feel them on a personal, visceral level even when we don’t understand the “why” of it. Ecstatic faiths almost never arise from the upper strata of society where all the marrow has been sucked out of life in the process of screwing over the little guy while morally posturing with the Joneses. Ecstatic faiths manifest themselves amongst the little guys who are getting crapped on. The speakers-in-tongues, the shakers, and the gay clubbers all give those in power today the heebie jeebies, just as the Galli and the Bacchantes gave the Roman establishment the willies at the turn of another millennium. We have more in common with a gibbering, shaking Pentacostal than we do with any moralizing, self-righteous Baptist with a broomstick firmly lodged in his posterior.’
“Lloyd says that queer spirituality brings to the greater Pagan movement a sensibility that speaks to the gut and provides a vision of a different way of doing things:
‘Shake it up and shake it out, be hermetic, be mercurial, react, reject, rebel, look outside the bone box, look up the Goddess’ skirt, be more than they’ll let you be, breathe the free air, fight the good fight, seize the day, brave the elements, bust a nut, and live! All magick is an act of rebellion against the status quo.’” MARGOT ADLER DRAWING DOWN THE MOON 1986
“Certain fundamental core expressions (of rad fae) – By Bill Rogers
The first is the concept of the Circle: faeries use a circular meeting as a way of interacting with each other…. these ritual events validate the subjective and intersubjective meanings held by members of a group, and as such reinforce the group’s solidarity.
Another core concept is that of Queer Community. In major cities, Circles of Faeries meet, usually monthly (at the full moon), either for Gatherettes or at specific ritual times that are structurally similar to the Wiccan coven. Faeries have ‘a paradoxically anarchist and communal utopian eschatology.’ (Coneell O’Donovan)
A third core component of the Faerie Handbag is the concept of Queer Spirit. Writers such as Hay… suggest that the concept of subject-SUBJECT consciousness is a fundamental defining principle of queer spirituality. It has its basis in the notion that gay people experience and relate to the world in a fundamentally unique way. Hay proposes that subject-SUBJECT consciousness is:
…inherent to all gay people, arising from the egalitarian bond of love and sex between two similars… (and) pervade(s) all the relationships of a gay person even the relationships with things not human, such as nature, craftsmanship, or ideals. “Humanity must expand its experience of thinking of another not as object to be used, to be manipulated, to be mastered, to be CONSUMED but as subject as another like him/her self, another self to be respected, to be appreciated, to be cherished”.
The Radical Faerie experience of spirituality, then, is intimately tied up with this subject-SUBJECT perception of the world. We, as shamans, pagans, and practitioners of Wiccan and Goddess traditions hold a reverence for the earth as a fundamental principle. The earth is perceived as being a part of each and every one of us, and the divine essence that is expressed as the Mother, Gaia, or the Goddess. is imbued in every individual. Only through respect for, and healing of, the earth can a sustainable future be envisaged. This is very much a queer version of the concept of immanence as expressed by many Neo-Pagans (O’Donovan, 1999a. pp.69-70; Starhawk, 1987, pp. 16-17).
A final Faerie core concept is the practice of spontaneous ritual… spontaneity and creativity are central to many expressions of religious behaviour among Neo-Pagans. The Radical Faeries are no exception. Faeries do not need an excuse to drop everything and co-create a ritual for a particular purpose. Bill Rogers Becoming Radical Faerie: Queering the Spirit of the Circle. In ‘Popular Spiritualities’ 2006
If you have read this far then you are about to be rewarded big time:
“Let me tell you a story:
About types of beings generically called Fairies, about their characteristic consciousness, their strange awareness, called faerie. Faerie is a see-ing through polarity. In straight consciousness Bi-Polar Thought is king: male and female are opposites, win-or-lose is the game, reality and dream are separate, immutable and contradictory. But there are Fairies, who look on in gentle mocking laughter at such childishness, for they know that everyone is now ‘female’, now ‘male’, that no one ever wins when anybody loses, that reality and dream flip into each other at the flick of a glittering wand.
Fairies see polarities dancing, changing everywhere, constantly. So they know that any pole frozen by itself blocks the flow, becomes a dead weight, an illusion hiding true understanding. So they come to realise that every ‘objective’ thing is but a shadow.
Knowing this, the Fairies can’t take themselves too seriously, either, seeing as they are also an illusion. This creates a marvellous lightness! Fairies are truly blessed, truly free modes of being, for they can laugh at themselves in their deepest places, can transcend their ignorance from moment to moment, gliding out of each limit and restriction even as it manifests, emerging from hir own form like a butterfly or a moth.
This wonderful paradoxical freedom from form, this lightness, enable Fairies to fly. It grants them much deep wisdom.
“Once someone came and told me this:
“There is an essence, essence of an eternal, hidden, dark, shining, eerie secret: the simultaneous and continuous creation and annihilation of Form, which is the heartbeat of material existence, which is that beingness, that essential is-ness of all that exists there – trees, people, planets, space, time, matter, energy – all is which is Changing, an infinite Pattern, a total-living weave of beams and streams, eddies, swirls, bursts and flows of is-into-not-is, and not-is-into-is, out of and into an unnameable nothingness-One; that all shapes, forms, are bendings and corners of this flowing-is, this power/nothing, the true behind the false behind the true behind the false in a living, pulsing spiral of All-That-Is.
“And those blessed with faerie can gaze into this essence as it were a crystal ball, and it opens their gaze through swirling shapes and colors deeper and deeper until it becomes unfoldingness itself, and they can see through the earth and out to the stars and beyond, and melt into their gaze and become the point in their Eye and flow into the Crystal itself, passing to its Center, and so become themselves There which then too is Here and All and anything, and thereby they are One from the inside with the bendings and corners of realities, and so they are not yet static things but riders of lightbeams, weightless dancers along the edge – indeed they are the Dancing itself, purposeful, masterless, nothing-points of will; they are the flow, the wind, There at the Source.”
“Many Fairies are agents of planet Earth. Their faerie-being gives them telepathic union with nature’s heart, such that they flow with her completely, loving her as they do themselves. In return she gives them her wisdom, her being-ness of and deeply loving respect for the joyful fulfilment of each living creature. Thereby these Fairies become living repositories of all nature, they become planet Earth itself.
“In this way Fairies can become other planets as well, other times as well.
“Almost all human cultures had myths and stories about faerie lands and astral (star-channelling) planes.
“We have been deceived! Caught in a mythological tyranny, in a web of falseself perversions, in a maze of deceptional violence, in a world of twisted words, cut off at the roots by shadows, trapped within spells of the word-masters. We have forgotten. We became thought-slaves.
“Visionary Love starts here, in the bowels of falseself bondage.. a book of uppity queer metathought-liberation, of sissy-frying world-slipping survival tactics, of epic reincarnational trueself recovery ploys, of strategic evolutional consciousness flowering fairy tale. We manifest a mutation in consciousness, for which we have been persecuted and exploited. It’s time to stop this stupidity. It’s time to enter our maturity. It’s time.
“Darkness grows in falseself lands. This is not a coincidence. Those of us who live there live in a time-bomb, in a monstrously climaxing karmic behemoth, live in a violent dinosaurian genetic fate. Tyrannosaur Rex is a thrashing in ecstatic S&M pain, is the ultra-victim in a self-induced snuff movie involving the entire Earth, enacting his last act and ringing down the curtain on World 4.
“Gay shamanism is work in such times, work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself. Delightful communal Self realisation is the instantly real resurrection. Sorcerous faggot fighter is a menace to society, is a dangerous flaming phoenix, a glowingly rounded rebirth function, an extra-ordinary healing tool, a Rainbow-bridging eros-tool. Gay realisation is sorely needed life-light now. Concentrated eros, focussed will, activated anger, celebrated magick, shared love, are tactics to guard and guide our questing, to trans-form vision, trans-port worlds trans-vest Self.
“To be taken by loving Fairies is truly Self-transporting, truly not describable, true Self return, dis-adoptioning, un-orphanising, and real-istically dis-covering, non/sensically re-membering aerotically re-entering faerie family homes. Peace, equanimity, wholenelss. Homosexual – gay – faggot- fairy – gone.
“Think of Fairy as a symbol, representing or triggering experience of joyful freedom from the myth of One Highest, liberation of be-ings and conscious forms from the bondage of oneself, opening up to the kosmopolitan nature of Self-universe, to the multivarious unitary truth of the matter.”
Mitch Walker, Visionary Love 1980