Category Archives: Subject Subject

Ancestors, History, Philosophy, Subject Subject

subject:SUBJECT

“When we begin to love and respect Great Mother Nature’s gift to us of gayness, we’ll discover that the bondage of our childhood and adolescence in the trials and tribulations of neitherness was actually an apprenticeship for teaching her children new cutting edges of consciousness and social change. In stunning paradox, our neitherness is our talisman, our fairie wand, our gift we bring to the hetero world to….transform their pain into healings; …transform their tears to laughter: …transform their hand-me-downs to visions of loveliness.” Harry Hay.

Harry Hay posited that by empathizing with all people, relating to each other as equal-to-equal, society would change drastically and social injustices would be eradicated. He saw gay people as born with this natural ‘subject:SUBJECT’ consciousness in place.

In 1976, in a ‘position paper’ called “Gay Liberation: Chapter Two,” which he regarded as his most important piece of writing and as a central catalyst of the Radical Faerie movement, Harry Hay “used personal experiences to illustrate his points, and halfway through, recalled his peers in high school manipulating their opposite-sex dates like objects in order to “score.” This he contrasted to his secret fantasy of finding a lover who was “a wondrous being with whom I would always share as I shared with myself, not subject to object, but subject to subject.” As he wrote this, he realized he had made a breakthrough. “I was just beside myself with excitement,” he recalled.

This from ‘The Trouble with Harry Hay’, by Stuart Timmons (1990):

““Chapter Two” presents a new theory about gay people and politics. As background, Hay traced the development of models of modern thought, from the Cartesian-Newtonian model of a limited universe that man could control, to the Twentieth century view, which, though modified, still survives in most social sciences and refuses to allow for the existence of gay people.

“Add or subtract, Go or NO-GO, (if you’re not a man you’re a substitute woman—what else is there?)” was Hay’s characterization of the dominant mode of thinking, which he called binary, or subject-object, thinking. But the style Hay promoted, which he called analog thinking, factors in relativity and other expansive dimensions of comprehending the universe. He proposed that it had an attendant “subject-subject relationship” that was similarly more dimensional. He also posited that this was inherent to all gay people, arising from the egalitarian bond of love and sex between two similars, but it went on to pervade all the relationships of a gay person—even relationships with things not human, such as nature, craftsmanship or ideals.

From Chapter 2: “The way out of our comprehensional stalemate, the quagmire which the Binary inheritances of our brain-training and our cultural superstructure have hurled us would appear to be to find ways to activate the seven-eighths of our minds which up to now have not been made responsive to consciousness. Humanity must expand its experience from persons (subjects) thinking objectively thinking competitively in a nutshell, thinking opportunistically and nearly always in terms of self-advantage-to thinking subject-to-SUBJECT, equal to equal, sharer to sharer, to thinking in terms of loving-sharing. Humanity must expand its experience to thinking of another, that other, 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.”

Timmons: “With Einstein’s famous warning in mind, that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save for our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes,” Hay then called for mass change in thinking. He proposed that the qualities of noncompetitiveness and creativity, characteristics often observed in gay people, made gays naturally suited to guide this change in thinking:

Chapter 2: “Natural selection, early on in human evolution, set into the evolving whirl a small percentage of beings that appeared to counterbalance a number of prevalent characteristics of the emerging human conformity. Humanity, thus, would be wise to finally give consideration to these deviants in their ranks … to begin to grant the GAYS the peace and growing space they will need to display and to further develop in communicable words and in models of activity, the “gift”—the singular mutation we GAYS have been carrying so unfalteringly and preserving so passionately, even over the not infrequent centuries of despair and persecution since the Great Mother Nature breathed the first incandescent spark into our primevals.”

Timmons: “To Harry, this “Gay gift” was a difference in consciousness that could introduce new ideas necessary for human survival…

“Harry’s ideas caught the imagination of many who found in the concept of subject-Subject consciousness a deeply felt yet unspoken truth. The argument that there existed a gay reservoir of untapped potential was refreshing to those for whom ghetto liberation had grown hollow. Continuing his tendency to take up the baton of such thinkers as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, Harry posed that homosexuals carried an intermediary consciousness and that, once this was made clear, a new era would begin.”

Edward Carpenter had written, in ‘Intermediate types among primitive folks’ (1913) that the genderfluidity of homosexual, the “…interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.” 

In the global Radical Faerie Community, which came into being after a ‘Spiritual Conference’ in an Arizona desert, August 31-September 1, 1979, Hay’s philosophy of subject:SUBJECT consciousness is explored and expanded. At gatherings and in permanent sanctuaries, Radical Faeries meet to commune with nature and each other, build community through heart circle, get creative and “shake off the filthy green frog-skin of hetero-imitation,” as Hay put it, and become more conscious… From the start, Harry recalled, the Faeries experienced a “collective gear-shift of consciousness which galvanized us as a group. That consensus of shared consciousness subject-to-Subject was the doorway we went through, and once through it, you knew you had changed irrevocably.”

Will Roscoe, another of the original Rad Fae, wrote in his book ‘Radically Gay’ that Harry was “long intrigued with he considers to be the untapped potentials of Gay sexual responsiveness. Why is sex so important for Gay men? For Hay, the answer relates to a “vision I’ve held since I was a boy: that the overwhelming urge to sexuality I’ve felt since perhaps the age of eight or nine (and which I had always recognized was far more powerful in me than in Hetero boys my age) had been always urging me that we are supposed to discover something about our sexuality collectively-some-thing it is supposed to accomplish when we invoke it as one voice collectively”. One thing sexuality does for us, Hay believes, is heal. Beginning in 1991, he has held yearly “sex magic” workshops to explore these potentials with other Gay men committed subject-SUBJECT relating.” The Sex Magic workshops still take place, two decades after Hay’s passing.

Following the first ever Radical Faerie meeting in 1979 Harry Hay wrote an article called ‘This New Planet of Faerie Vision…subject-SUBJECT consciousness’ in which he said:

“We must not suppose that we share subject-SUBJECT vision only in the spheres of Love and personal relations. Actually, almost at once, we also begin to become aware that we have been accumulating bits and pieces of subject-SUBJECT perceptions and insights all our lives – talking to trees and birds and rocks and Teddy Bears and remembering what all we had shared by putting it down in poetry, storing it all up for that wonderful day when we finally would flash on to what it all meant. The personal collecting and storing up of these secret treasures, these beautiful beckoning not-as-yet comprehensible secret sacra, is part of the hidden misery-cum-exaltation of growing up Gay. For the world we inherit, the total Hetero-Male-oriented-and-dominated world of Tradition and of daily environment, the summum bonum of our history, our philosophy, our psychology, our culture, and very languages of communication – all are totally subject – OBJECT in concept, in definition, in evolution, in self-serving orientation. Men and Women are – sexually, emotionally, and spiritually – objects to one another.

“Under the “fair-play-without-which-there-ain’t-no-game” rules of Hetero-Male aggressive territoriality, even the Hetero-Males- precisely because they conceive of themselves as in lifelong com- petition each with the others-engage themselves endlessly in tug-of-war games of Domination and Submission…

“To all of this we fairies should be, essentially, alien. Because those others with whom we seek to link, to engage, to slip into, to merge with are others like me, are SUBJECTS… like ME! I say “we fairies should be alien” to as many aspects of our Hetero-Male- dominated surroundings as we can be sensitive to, because we also know, all too glumly, just how easily and how often we fall prey to self-invited oppressions. How often do we allow ourselves, through fuzzy thinking, to accept or to identify with Hetero- originating definitions or misinterpretations of ourselves? The Hetero-male, incapable of conceiving that there could possibly be a window on the world other than his own, is equally incapable of perceiving that we Gay People might not fit in either of his Man/ Woman categories, that we might turn out to belong to quite other classifications. He might not be able to handle perceiving that the notion of all persons being only varying combinations of male and female is simply a Hetero-male-derived notion suitable only to Heteros and holding nothing of validity insofar as Gay people are concerned...

“Let us enter this brave new world of subject SUBJECT consciousness, this new planet of Fairy-vision…

“Of course, we haven’t as yet spoken because we haven’t as yet learned how to communicate subject-SUBJECT realities. Subject-SUBJECT is a multidimensional consciousness which may never be readily conveyable in the Hetero-male-evolved two-dimensional, or Binary, language to which we are presently confined. And we need more than mere words and phrases. We need what Scientists invent out of whole cloth when they attempt to describe and communicate new concepts. We need working models, a whole new mathematics, perhaps a new poetry-allegories-metaphors -a music-a new way of dancing. We must re-examine every system of thought heretofore developed, every Hetero-male-evolved subject-OBJECT philosophy, science, religion, mythology, political system, language-divesting them every one of their binary subject-OBJECT base and re-inserting a subject-SUBJECT relation. Confronted with the loving-sharing Consensus of subject-SUBJECT relationships all Authoritarianism must vanish. The Fairy Family Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of non- possessive love-which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely selected, full potential-reaching out to one another subject-to- SUBJECT, becomes for the first time in history the true working model of a Sharing Consensus!

“To even begin to prepare ourselves for a fuller participation in our Gay subject-SUBJECT inheritance, we must, both daily and hourly, practice throwing off all those Hetero-imitating habits, compulsions, and ways of misperceiving which we constantly breathe in from our environmental surround. For this practice we need the constant company of our Fairy Families. We need the spiritual and emotional support of that non-verbal empathy which Sociologists assure us comprises almost seven-eighths of communication in any culture, that empathy we now refer to as Body Language. We need the marvelous input of each other’s minute-by- minute new discoveries, as each of us begins to explore this vast new universe, this subject-SUBJECT frontier of human consciousness. As ours are the first deliberate feet upon this pristine shore, there are no guide-posts as yet erected, nor maps to be found in bottles, nor even the prospectuses of ancient visionary seers…

“In the meantime, Fairies everywhere must begin to stand tall and beautiful in the sun. Fairies must begin to throw off the filthy green frog-skin of Hetero-imitation and discover the lovely Gay- Conscious not-MAN (anandros, as the discerning early Greeks called us) shining underneath. Fairies must begin creating their new world through fashioning for themselves supportive Families of Conscious Choice within which they can explore, in the loving security of shared consensus, the endless depths and diversities of the newly revealed subject-SUBJECT inheritances of the Gay Vision!”

post by Shokti.

Let us gather therefore- in secure and consecrated places. To re-invoke from ancient ashes our Fairy Circle… To dance…

To meditate-not in the singular isolation of Hetero subject- OBJECT praxis, but rather in Fairy Circles reaching out to one another in subject-SUBJECT evocation.

To find new ways to cherish one another…

To invent new rhyme and reason and ritual replacing those obliterated in the long nightmare of our Oppression and so, in fact, re-invent ourselves.

To break through to ever more spiritually encompassing and Temotionally resurrective Gay Families and Fairy Family Collectives, who by the very mutuality of their subject- SUBJECT sharing are strengthened to reach out contributively to the Hetero community around them.

And so finally- To penetrate ever more comprehensively the essential nature of covenants needed to lay the groundwork of a new worldwide subject-SUBJECT Consciousness SHARABLE BY ALL!

Harry Hay 1980

History, Inclusivity, Philosophy, Subject Subject

A new stage in the meaning of Gay Liberation.

“Fairies everywhere must begin to stand tall and beautiful in the sun. Fairies must begin to throw off the filthy green frog-skin of Hetero-imitation and discover the lovely Gay-Conscious notMAN shining underneath. Fairies must begin creating their new world…” Harry Hay

The organisers of the first Radical Faerie Gathering: Harry Hay – Mitch Walker – Don Kilhefner – put out a call in 1979 for a ‘spiritual conference‘ to explore ‘new dimensions of gayness’, and expected around 50-75 people to turn up – but over 200 men attended, at a remote desert sanctuary in Arizona. The next year even more came.

Harry Hay called to the early Rad Fae in the following decade to embrace their commonality with ‘third-gender’ people in traditional cultures around the world: he regarded gay men as a modern manifestation, along with trans people and lesbians, of third-nature people who embody both male and female traits, found in all cultures throughout time. Describing the spiritual behaviours of the third-gender people in the Native American tribes, the Hausa of West Africa and the Hawaiian mahu, Hay wrote in 1994: “We Third-gender men of Indo-European stock have similar talents to share.”

“I am proposing that we take a hand-up example from our potential allies in the Third and Fourth Worlds, whose cultures may well be overtaking, and even out-numbering, our Hetero Western so-called Free World sensibilities in the not-too-far distant first decades of the 21st century. I propose that we Gay Men of all colours prepare to present ourselves as the gentle non-competitive Third Gender men of the Western World with whole wardrobes and garages crammed with cultural and spiritual contributions to share.

“… time for us Gays to reclaim our Third Gender responsibilities…

“It is time for us Third Gender folk… to rejoice in the gifts we bring!”

Harry’s vision was about rooting this spiritual power in political reality. History’s shamans are today’s caregivers, healers and political leaders: “To facilitate governing by the process of mutually respectful sharing consensus, Radical Faeries and if they were of a mind, all Gay Brothers and Sisters, exercising their innate inclinations to process in subject-SUBJECT consciousness might make a major contribution to Society by helping to create the most politically healthy of all possible communities.” From Radically Gay, edited by Will Roscoe (1996)

The common root of the persecution and suppression of same sex love and gender-fluidity is the high regard given to, and sacred roles taken by people who were born that way in pagan religions across the planet, during the whole of human history, and into modern times. In the pagan worldview, and lived experience, ‘god’ was not a threatening, separate, figure in the sky, but a living, loving presence in nature, within the body and very strongly contacted through erotic, sexual expression. In order to impose the idea of an invisible Father God in the sky over that of God as feminine, manifest and sexual, the women, feminine men and ‘non-binary’ inbetweeners who were so often her worshippers and priests, had judgement, blame and shame poured onto them, sermons preached against and laws decreed against them.

The reason for legal decrees may not have been entirely theologically motivated. Accusing an enemy of illicit sexuality became a very useful weapon in the hands of autocratic rulers from Justinian to Henry VIII to Hitler. Plato had seen this coming, a millennium earlier, astutely observing that: “Male-male love is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which male-male love is particularly apt to produce.”

In 533 CE the first law that decreed death by burning for anal sex between men was enacted by Emperor Justinian in the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium (just after the Western Empire had collapsed). Exactly 1000 years later Henry VIII brought in the death penalty in England with the 1533 Buggery Act. It took a millennium for this evil to spread across and cover the continent of Europe. In the next centuries England and other European nations went on to spread this prejudice to the rest of the world. Wherever Europeans went they found third-gendered people, generally accepted and playing valued roles in their societies, and often honoured for their sacred man-woman nature and their priestly skills.

Victorian explorer Richard Burton reported that homosexual and cross-dressing practices had “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.”

In the previous century Jesuit missionary Joseph Francois Lafitau (1711-17) wrote in Customs of the American Savages, Compared with the Customs of Ancient Times, in a chapter called “Men Who Dress as Women”:

“They believe they are honored by debasing themselves to all of women’s occupations; they never marry, they participate in all religious ceremonies, and this profession of an extraordinary life causes them to be regarded as people of a higher order, and above the common man. Would these not be the same peoples as the Asiatic adorers of Cybele, or the Orientals of whom Julius Fermicus speaks, who consecrated priests dressed as women to the Goddess of Phrygia or to Venus Urania, who had an effeminate appearance, painted their faces, and hid their true sex under garments borrowed from the sex whom they wished to counterfeit?”

Lafitau also recorded the presence of gay couples, calling them, “special friendships,” among the Natives of America:

“the Athenrosera, or special friendships among young men, which are instituted in almost the same manner from one end of America to the other, are one of the most interesting sides of their customs, since they entail a most curious chapter of Antiquity, and serve to reveal to us what was practiced in that regard, particularly in the Republic of the Cretans and in that of the Spartans.”

Don Pedro Fages, a commander of the 1769-70 Spanish exploration of what is now California, wrote: “I have submitted substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing and character of women – there being two or three such in each village – pass as sodomites by profession (it being confirmed that all these Indians are much addicted to this abominable vice) and permit the heathen to practice the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies. They are called joyas (jewels), and are held in great esteem.”

But the word that stuck for the sacred shamans of the Native Americans was of Persian origin and used across Europe for a gay bottom – berdache. The word has implications of a sex slave, a catamite/kept-boy, but when used without judgement might also mean a special lover boy. This remained the general term until the late 1980s, since when ‘Two-Spirit’ has become the self-chosen term by a reviving community of shaman spirits, designed to bring reference to the many names once used in the tribes, which have in common the notion of male and female present in one body, bringing a connection to the invisible, spirit world.

This reclamation of Two-Spirit nature is the model that queer people across the whole world need as we seek and discover our own roots in pre-monothestic cultures everywhere, including old Europe.

Yet this process has in fact already begun – over 40 years ago in the Arizona desert. Since then Faeries have spread their wings and found each other around the world, established permanent sanctuaries on three continents, and held gatherings on four. There are city houses, art shows, drum circles, cabaret nights, faerie banks, potlucks and parties too, and in both Israel and the UK the Faeries have pooled their talents to create festival events to bring together more people from the whole LGBTQ+ community to expand the conversation and exploration of our essential, spiritual, nature and its intrinsic, somehow magical, interweaving with our sexuality.

Mitch Walker in 1997 described Radical Faeries 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.”

“Harry, myself and the other founders … only came to use the word “faerie” as a title for a “movement” late in our thought process (this was a collective effort) and then as a reference to the “other” world of the Little People in Celtic lore,. In our view, faeries are the supernatural denizens of a homosexual world both feared and revered by the ordinary folk.”

A more literal, historiographical view within the Faeries, developed through the explorations of Arthur Evans in a magically focussed, San Franciscan, Fairy Circle (and encapsulated in his phenomenonal 1978 book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture’), also associated the name with the survival, largely in secret, of ancient pagan worship of the Great Mother Goddess and the Horned God Pan in medieval Christian Europe.

In his book Visionary Love, published 1980, Mitch Walker shared the inspired understanding that these ‘gay men’ were getting of their true, deeper nature:

“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…”

“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…”

These words of Harry Hay, quoted in Walker’s book, bring this spiritual vision into practical, active love:

“Fairies must begin creating their new world through fashioning for themselves supportive Families of Conscious Choice, co-joined in the vision of LOVE (which is the granting to any and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected full potential). Let us gather to find new ways to cherish one another, to reach towards spiritually-sustaining and emotionally-supportive Gay Family Collectives, within which we can explore, in the loving security of shared consensus, the bottomless depths and diversities of the newly-revealed subject-SUBJECT inheritances of the Gay Vision.”

This is what Faeries have been doing quietly on the sidelines of gay life for decades, generally ignored by gay media or dismissed as laughable hippies. For a time Rad Fae became associated in some minds with cis gay men – which for those of us living through the portal of infinite magical faerie fluidity was really weird – but as a result the doors to the community are now much more visibly open to people of any gender label.

Communities go through stages and cycles, and as a community that sets out to start from heart-centred connection and communication, the Faeries have to walk an edge between the practical needs of an ever-expanding, ever-renewing tribe of people, (many of whom completely virgin to heart shares and magical rites)… and the aim of creating from heart and spirit connection, where we help each other release toxic habits learned in the outside world and release the loving nature of our core, holy, inner child out of its patriarchal, rational cage.

Faeries come together to explore and embody the philosophy which Harry Hay called subject:SUBJECT consciousness – and which is the doorway to the place in the mind that knows the world around it as a manifestation of the same conscious, loving essence that we perceive ourselves to be. Using tools such as the Heart Circle, Faeries address and heal personal and collective wounds, build empathy and compassion – as bonds deepen we stop seeing the differences between us and move through the portal of cosmic consciousness where we get to become know, feel and see the same nature, the divine nature dancing in, through and with and as all of us.

A faerie gathering can become a flow of nature if the heart is able to lead the way. A group comes together for a certain number of days to create a container in which it is safe to be open up, be vulnerable, be expressive, erotic, playful, and even occasionally OTT – you will still be loved, you will not be shamed. My experience over two decades has shown that a big heart share of, ideally, all attendees at the start of a gathering, half way through and at the close, empowers all to commit to, feel part of the space and part of holding the space for each other. More intimate heart circles on other days makes room for those who seek them and time for those who wish to pursue other activities.

I think practicality circles eg morning meetings to ‘organise’ the day ahead should be a rarity as they all too easily create a complicated web of mental energy in the group as issues get raised from the mind instead of shared through the heart. Practical circle is good at the start of the gathering, useful when there’s a big weekend ahead to rally the faeries present to be alert and prepared for what’s coming up, perhaps a surge of weekend visitors, hungry for faerie love and seeking pleasures! Good too when there’s a need to prepare the gathering closure, or if an issue has arisen via heart circle that the gathering would benefit from discussing, but otherwise, head-centred conversations can soon disperse all the good energy people may have garnered and experienced during the magic of the just finished faerie night! Toxic behaviours such as name calling and public blaming likely soon result. In a spiritually conscious community mornings are great times for meditations and heart circles. If the head still has issues after making prayer together, hearing the words and feeling the feelings coming from the rest of your tribe, that’s the time to share them. Maybe to a friend over lunch.

Sometimes people come away from Faerie space reeling from the truly transformational magic they have just experienced. The debate then arises, should we more explicit in our calls about the intensities and shifts in one’s reality that are likely to be experienced at a gathering? Would anyone believe us if we did put it that way? Should Faerie be about going into the mysterious underworld with the magical spirits of nature, to discover things as yet unknown, meeting beings so strange and new…

Perhaps every Call to a Faerie gathering should contain these words from the 1970s, written by Mitch Walker as a ‘content warning’ to the unwary wanderer into the underworld:

“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, wholeness. Homosexual – gay – faggot – fairy – gone.”

And perhaps this from Visionary Love could be the call for just about every gathering everywhere!

Build loving rings of Spirit, astral fairy *(sister)*brothers. Reclaim our heritage! Reunite our Selves.

Circles of light!

Centers of fire!

Spiralling wind!

Rainbow egg!

Let us create, conspire, organise and plot, spread, evolve, manifest our fates. Let us sing our songs, dance the Dance. Let us be/come Fairies!

Heretofore hidden Rainbow Lovers reach out to their seedling *(sister)*brothers and caress them into maturity, into their ageless soulful Rings. Self uncovers itSelf.

Gay spirit is profoundest love and knowing. A magnificent liberation is possible now for those who remember their true nature as reality-channeling as faerie Selves.

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

And then nobody can say we didn’t warn them!

*(sister) added by shokti.

read more:

Radical Faerie Origins

Visionary Love – rainbow messenger

Age, Reflection, Subject Subject

Glamour and Beguilement: Faerie Magicks

I’ve recently been very interested by points raised and issues brought up in articles posted by Shokti and Cunty (thank you both for your contributions). While I don’t want to reply directly to either, they have brought up and shone a new light on some thoughts of mine that I’d like to share.

Something that seems to be very much in the forefront of faerie consciousness is consent, and how it is affected and potentially invalidated in situations where there is a power inbalance – whether that be because of a difference in age, in sexual or romantic experience, in relative health/wellbeing, in social capital/etc. In a rather emotionally challenging circle I attended fairly recently, a discussion on how intimately/emotionally involved it was acceptable to be with those who have approached you for support descended into a faerie being aggressively accused of effectively using their position in the community to sexually take advantage. I really don’t want to make comment or take a side based on a very limited perspective on an obviously very deep and complex interpersonal conflict, but it certainly highlighted to me that this is an issue that it would be healthy for the community to start examining together, in a unified, careful and heart centred way. I was therefore very gladdened to see Cunty open up – in what I read as a very careful, vulnerable and relatively non-violent way – about the specific objectification and allure of (particularly male perceived) youth as he sees it within faerie gatherings. Personally, what he said definitely made connections with many of my observations and understandings of contemporary faerie culture. From my memories of the spotlighting and collective adoration of a select number of glamorous 20-something gay boys at the couple gatherings I’ve been to, to younger fae talking about navigating the myriad attentions and overtures of relatively older fae, to the multitude of over 40s gay men’s sharings in heart circles about feeling passed over, ignored and left out during the more festive and sexually charged modes of gatherings, my personal impression is that many faeries from all sides of the power dynamic would agree with Cunty about its existence. When I first encountered this dynamic at Featherstone, my first reaction I’m not proud to admit was envy, for the attention and adoration I perceived the young guys in their drag and glad rags as being granted. The root of this, given some time to reflect, was obvious: I have always struggled with needing validation and attention to feel accepted or appreciated socially, in earlier more male presenting times I would have flaunted and flirted my youth and form to gain the social attention and validation of other gays, and I was sore to find in this community my gender nonconformity meant I wasn’t able to misuse that dynamic as I was used to doing in queer spaces. While I have in the past definitely found select desire fulfilment by taking advantage of this sensual objectification dynamic, in hindsight it was disingenuous and caused much unhappiness: mainly because I had no intention or desire to engage sexually with the majority of the people I inticed, and interactions ended with neither party ultimately getting what they sought after.

I was interested to see the strongly differing perspectives between Cunty and Shokti on how objectification (or celebration of form etc.) fitted into Harry Hay’s binary of Subject-Subject vs. Subject-Object interactions. Obviously for Cunty, his experiences of how younger male-perceived faeries were sought after and his role in it was distressing and felt demeaning to the objectified faeries, whereas others (seemingly including Shokti) experience it as something much less inherently malign, and as compatible with empowering, loving faerie interaction. I can only stress that all I am doing and can do is lay out my own limited personal perspective, in the hope it might strike a positive chord with others, but I would like to suggest that its more complicated than that, and wrapped up in the use and misuse of a peculiarly faerie talentset, which I would like to call Glamour.

***Content Warning: contains liberal Woo, including Woo terminology and ideology***

So, lets talk about Glamour! In faerie space, I think it would be misguided to imagine that every interaction is an honest, profound and direct expression of self from one heart to others. On the contrary, we have extraordinary freedom to play with situations, to channel external energies and power, to adopt guises and personae, to perform as conduits of magick and ritual, to act out salacious and outrageous roles and desires. When we do so, consciously or not, our manifestation of Other (whatever external to ourselves we are creating the idea of) represents a channelling of our energy in order to bring about a physical change in how we are experienced by those who we interact with . This I’m going to denote with the old scots word for witchery and magick, Glamour – simply put, I’m using glamour as a blanket term for energy that is used to alter how you are perceived, whether that’s in faerie space or the concrete world.

How is this relevant to our discussions of power dynamics, of objectification and desire, you may ask? Because glamour is the tool and magic we use (wittingly or not) to work towards obtaining the reaction we desire from others: whether that is simply to enrapture, enrage, outrage, entertain, arouse, relax; or to achieve a more complex goal altogether. It is undoubtedly powerful, and does have the power to (temporarily or permanently) alter people’s perceptions of what is real and what is not, of their boundaries, of their internal senses of what is safe and unsafe, right and wrong. I see this as present in our drag and performance, in our engagement of those we are enamoured of or desire, in how we present our workshops and ideas, even in our stories, narratives and words of wisdom. Glamour undoubtedly has the power, sadly, of causing situations which can potentially lead to energetic and psychological damage to those who are more susceptible to losing themselves to it, when it is used without care and attention. Whether that is someone who has the protective seal on their inner trauma untimely broken, someone who finds themselves drawn into a cycle of indulgence that leads to a substance abuse relapse, or someone looking for paternal guidance and companionship who finds themselves in the midst of something more carnal, the reality is that faerie space – despite its beautiful, enriching empowering potential – can at times generate risks and the possibility of danger also. I don’t necessarily think this is something we should be ashamed of or feel guilt for communally, we aren’t ultimately responsible for or can control others feelings and reactions to faerie space. However, that isn’t to say that working towards making space more loving and nourishing for all isn’t an admirable undertaking for all of us who feel called to do so.

So how can we work to being responsible and loving wielders of this power, especially given the liminal nature of Glamour, and why should we? I think to the latter question, there may not be a simple right answer but my two cents is that at the foundation of faerie space is a core bedrock of being a community of love, and that by each individually doing work towards maintenance of that equanimous love we share as a community, we hold the community together and ensure its stable continuity. I think that especially those who exist towards the centre of the web of faerie energies particularly – whether that’s just for one gathering by being an organiser, social focus point or energetic catalyst say, or those who more generally are tied in to the core of continued community – tend to pool the energy to project glamour, potentially more so than they give themselves credit for. I’ve felt this myself at gatherings, when some people enter a room the energy completely changes in anticipation of them, when some people talk their words hold the listeners in rapture, and their expressed ideas naturally become the listeners reality. From what I have seen, often this is used by these faeries in a really generous and conscientious way already – easing the anxieties of unsettled newcomers, bolstering the guidance of gatherings energies towards mucking in and interacting respectfully, offering support to the disenfranchised, and helping make heard the quieter more fragile voices. To my mind though, they are unavoidably in the position of holding sway over hearts and minds, and I think recognising that power dynamic and creating a conscious and supportive collective awareness might help us harmoniously flow together around these issues.

How to wield Glamour in a safer way is something I can only offer my limited set of ideas towards, but I hope these might serve as a starter to thinking about approaching Glamour more mindfully and conscientiously. I think its important to examine our motives in how we interact with others, and try and match the Glamour we wear or project with our heart’s intentions – if our desires are sexual then wearing that on our sleeve and weaving seduction into our advances  does honour to both the magick and the recipient. Further to that, checking-in in some manner and working responsively with the reactions our glamour elicits gives us the opportunity to ensure our energies have provoked what was intended and not something else unwanted, and gives us the opportunity to regather where our audience may have gone astray. As an example, I have heard of multiple instances where gender-bending manifestations have been mis-taken as looking to elicit sexual desire, which could lead to plenty discomfort for some of these manifesting fae if left unchecked. Moving towards a subject-empowering approach in our interactions can often help avoid situations where we impinge on others self-determination. This can involve ensuring we have their informed consent throughout interactions, we are being transparent about what we are doing, and self monitoring for mistakenly projecting your needs or traumas onto them, or false convictions of knowing what would be good for someone better then they themselves do. Upholding live consent doesn’t need to be something clunky and jarring that disturbs our energy flow in interaction, for one who is used to looking for it it can be achieved intuitively and as a beautiful enhancing element of their language of intimacy. Finally, being open-minded to our own limitations – as lovers, as healers, as magicians – and knowing when something has escalated beyond our control or comfort and it is safest to tap out is an important skill we should all bear in mind, and be open to the idea of. At the end of the day, it is the chaos in the nature of humans to make mistakes, to not always achieve what they set out to do, to be reliably unreliable – this isn’t something shameful or negative! It is how we respond to signs of failure, to accept it with grace and humility, and to learn from it which to me marks out the most enlightened amongst us.

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I hope I have managed to set out my ideas on these power interplays that come into faerie space in a way that is constructive and has avoiding bringing up pain as much as possible. In faerie community one thing I particularly value is that with all the so many different faeries whom I have touched hearts with, I have not met anyone who does not in their own way have a loving relationship with the tribe as a whole, and isn’t seeking to have a more healthy and nourishing interrelationship with this community. I truly believe that we do all dynamically make our own uniquely positive contribution to the spaces we hold together, I hope that in understanding and respecting the complexities of our many differences we can all be enriched and grow together, to make ever more tolerant, loving and caring faerie space in the future.

Vessel

 

Miscellaneous, Subject Subject

Embracing subject:SUBJECT consciousness – Shokti

Radical Faeries gather around the world, creating zones of heart based communication, where we can retune our bodies, minds and spirits to the rhythms of nature, where we support, nourish and love each other, and find healing, purpose and inspiration. We are groups of Queers discovering the spiritual power hidden in sexuality, and learning to live in a new paradigm of co-operation, creativity, expansive love, consensus and Oneness.

Embracing subject:SUBJECT consciousness we overcome the hurdles within ourselves that prevent us meeting each other with love. We practice active listening in our heart circles, listening without judgement or reaction, growing in compassion and presence as we do so. This heart presence then inspires all our other activities, from cooking and washing up, to transformational workshops and ceremonies, to dancing and lovemaking. We honour the holiness of sexuality in our Love Temples and the healing touch of nature’s spirits, ancestor souls and queer deities, gradually shifting our understanding of life from the divide-and-conquer, materialist paradigm towards the full embrace of the divine dance of consciousness, co-created, expressed and shared through love, light and laughter.

Joy is the gift of spirit that we receive and develop in ourselves and that we bring to the wider world. Joy is a powerful vibration similar to love, but a more constant one – unlike love it has no shadow side. Joy is simply joy, coming from the soul and enjoyed in the body, heart and mind, it is the vibration of who we are as living spirit, fearless and adventurous, expressive and accepting, knowing and trusting, vulnerable yet strong, loving and praying. It’s what arises in us once we get the falsehoods of the ego, the fears and judgements etc of the mind, out of the way, and let who we really are shine through.

The faerie drums call out to all who are ready to hear and feel – the times are changing and queers have an important role to play in this change. For centuries our queer light and power has been denied and repressed, but in a few decades our presence in the world has undergone an incredible, mind-blowing shift. Our journey to sexual, social and political liberation has advanced in some parts of the world, and our next journey – of spiritual discovery (or re-discovery of who we have always been) and mystical emergence, which has been getting underway for some decades already in faerie groves and tantric playgrounds (mostly hidden from or ignored by mainstream gay life) is reaching a new level. What we go through, in this rapid journey from darkness to light, is forming a template for humanity as whole. Because of our long standing exclusion from the rituals of the rest of society, the hunger in some of us for tribe, for liberation, is very strong, and is fuelling our growth. We are fulfilling our archetypal role as scouts of consciousness, and if we can consolidate, strengthen and develop our tribe of hearts we will be a beacon for the rest of the lgbtiq+ cosmos and the whole world.

Rad Fae communities are one of the key places that we Queers are exploring new ways of relating and communicating. We are circles of people exploring what it can be to live in the presence of love, with trust, respect and in safety, in the sacred connection of souls having a multi-dimensional experience. We are emerging as a global force, a tribe of hearts.

People come to faeries from all kinds of backgrounds and spiritual/religious experience. We are a melting pot of ideas, vibrations and potential. Whether we have spiritual beliefs/practices or not, in faerie community we can get a direct experience of love-in-action, of heightened frequencies, of deep intimacy (with each other and all creation (on a good day)), of life as a cosmic dance. In mystical language, it could be said we open the gates to the goddess – to the shakti presence in us and all creation – which the queer interplay of gender energies within us enable us to attune to and be aware of. This shakti presence uplifts, transforms and changes the game of life. Queers work and play with this magic all the time, in faerie space we get to turn the volume UP.

This is why it works – in the realm of the Goddess there is no search for enlightenment, only the experience that it is already here, connecting us, feeding us, enabling us, blessing us, encouraging us. When we are feeling free, bright and joyful we do not seek anything, we are experiencing ourselves in our natural state. The search for answers, the need to address our issues, the fear of the future, disappear and we live as love. Once open, this shakti gate just keeps on giving, and when our issues and fears resurface we will find new ways to address them. Faerie gatherings are held within sacred circles, where the unconditional love of the divine channelled through the elements that give us life meets our aspirational heart energies to reveal the way to healing, magic and splendour.

At some point we might find the abundance of emotion and experience overflows and overwhelms us. Then we may feel inclined to run away from faeries, and perhaps need to for a while – but where else in the world will we find such a pioneering, queer, eccentric and ecstatic tribe of playful, sexy, warrior souls? Faerie space is not perfect – it’s not designed to be a utopia escaping reality – it’s a transformational playground pointing the way to better quality of life experience, the like of which has never existed on planet earth before. The ride will not always be smooth, but there is no ride quite like it. For queers seeking deeper connection, both internally and externally, greater intimacy and meaning in life, Faerie space is providing a glimpse into what might be possible.

We don’t have to ‘become’ a faerie – to take on another label in any fierce or dogmatic fashion. In fact to do so would be so un-faerie. Faerie gives us the chance to embrace ultimate flexibility/fluidity, shapeshifters that we are – here is a space where queers who are called to explore the magical, mystical power within the human soul can gather with others and have the necessary, frequently ecstatic, fun to release it. Call it what we like, here we are scouts of consciousness taking and tackling the ‘essentialist’ route towards fulfilment of our queerness (ie exploring what makes us unique in the human panoply), as opposed to the ‘assimilationist’ path of the mainstream gay culture. We get to discover that we are witches, shamans, fools, that we are healers, artists and agents of transformation. For queers who already feel this or know this in themselves, and for all queers who have this in them, faerie space is a true homecoming – but not the end of the journey, it is a beginning.

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Some humans are born with a sense of the numinous, the worlds beyond the physical, already built into their awareness, but many of us experience some kind of ‘revelation’ moment when the bigger picture of the creation opens up for us. This is often called an Awakening, and can come to us through all sorts of situations, both pleasant and unpleasant. It might be that we are ‘programmed’ to wake up to more levels of existence as we get older and ready to deal with what they bring to us. As the mainstream culture of our times does not recognise this process it is very common for the symptoms of awakening to be misunderstood and medicated away. It is possible that a lot of mental illness is due to this fundamental denial in the culture of our evolving, emerging, soul natures. Life conspires to bring us direct experiences of that nature, then leaving it in our hands as to when and how we adapt our lives to harmonise with it. If we are resistant we are to doing that, life will continue to try to push us into it, quite possibly through crises, illnesses etc.

Once we have seen the light, we need to find our own way to walk in it. Every part of us that is in darkness, in shadow, will be illuminated. The path of light, of conscious growth, means facing, embracing and healing the shadow in ourselves, and ultimately in all things.  It helps to remember we are on a path of healing – and not fall back into believing in pathological labels given to us by the materialist paradigm when things get tough.  Taking the time to focus and mark the seasonal shifts (equinoxes, solstices etc) and moon cycles can keep us on track, keep the deeper purpose high in our minds.  This can have very powerful effects, hastening our healing and evolution, especially when shared with others.

The religious paths of the Father, with their written treatises, rules and disciplines of yoga, meditation etc – and their promises of enlightenment and salvation (usually considered out of reach, at least in this lifetime) can provide us with vital tools to ground and centre ourselves in the changeable and challenging moments in community and in life in general.

The paths of the Mother Goddess are found in the cycles and rhythms and beings of nature, of the sun and moon, the planets and stars.  They stem from the fact that all this Creation around us is ONE DANCE constantly in a state of communion and communication. The power of the heavenly bodies and nature’s cycles is often revealed to us through direct experience of faerie ritual and community living. Through observing, honouring and studying the seasonal shifts, the moon cycles etc we discover that the shakti presence and wisdom is always there on offer to us, to help us open our minds and heal our souls. The ‘brainwashing’ we received from the rationalist, materialist school of thought that likely dominated our education makes many of us resistant to embrace the intuitive arts of astrology, tarot, kabbalah, shamanism etc, but these arts, that require the interplay of our left and right brains in order to be mastered, hold the keys to our souls. Whether we are actively ‘spiritual’ in a conventional sense or not, they can reveal the dance of spirit in matter, remind us that we are in fact That, release us from the cage of separation and existential angst that science may have dropped us in, however well meaning it’s efforts, and reveal to us just how magical, marvellous and divine our existence, both individually and collectively as a tribe of hearts, truly is.

Once awake we have to HEAL

in order to HEAL we have to FEEL

open our HEARTS and walk with COURAGE

distinguish between what is FALSE and what REAL

The Cosmos is calling us HOME

to CONSCIOUS LOVE-IN-ACTION

to the true nature of the HUMAN SOUL

AND TO THE QUEERS TO REMEMBER OUR ROLE