From the possible/imagined perspective of Collared Dove,
There i was, welcoming spring one morning, about to coo to my love when, all of a sudden a noise that sounded like ‘’YOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO’’ emanated from the warm rectangle cave below.
I was struck dumb with awe and infatuation. What beauteous dove has come before us? Such a booming sensual call could only come from the strongest, healthiest, beige-est most collared of our species…
I flew down without a care onto the horizontal deadwood creations to try and get a glimpse…
Such a sight was presented to me that I should not wish upon the most lowly city pigeon…
Behind the solid water barriers I beheld a monstrous gathering of humans, of all shapes and sizes and smells. Dressed in the most ludicrous colours (if they were dressed at all). Bustling and jostling for the comfiest roosting spots…
One of their number, with a large white flapping appendage sprouting from their hands suddenly motioned, the solid waters were parted and their cry went up again, ‘’YOOOOOOOOOHHHOOOOOOOOOO’’
I was floored. Despite the grotesqueness of this human grouping, which usually spells trouble for all other species around, (which by all rights should have sent me flying away in fear!)
I saw in them a beauty, a connectedness, a boundless biophilic way of being that I have not heard of in their species anywhere other than in the oldest of dove tales…
I could not help but stare, beak open, feathers a-fluster… Could this be what we have been waiting for? The old tales talked of long ago times where humans were present, living intertwined with us birds, the plants, the sun and stars, talking with us…but I always thought this were as realistic as a mole up a tree…But here now, in-front of me, in their fiery nesting hole they were calling in a language of love, an inter-species call of togetherness, of welcoming to the new day and all the ancestors of every being…
I could do nothing but COOOO! I cooed and cooed until my friends came down and upon the humans next cry we joined in ‘‘YOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOO’’ and we rejoiced and cried with laughter, finally the humans are waking up, finally they are alive again, finally they are calling the Earth and we can understand again! We answer with Love: WELCOME HOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMEEEEEE!
Mackerel Sky xxx
P.s. This gathering was such a warm, loving and cosy space. The vulnerabilities and joys and playfulness that come when waking up from Winter darkness where held and loved. The feeling of joy is deep, can’t wait for the next one, love and miss you all.
This year’s Imbolc gathering was a literal rebirth for me. After my long journey with chronic pain and spine surgery, it was wonderful to be able to share energy, touch, mirth, music and magic. When we speak our truth and are heard, when we learn to balance individual and community needs, there’s no limit to what we can manifest. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Here are a few reflections I’d like to share, sparked by many conversations at the farm.
Growing pains are natural and welcome – they are our teachers.
Community is always work in progress and messy – and this is good.
Our spaces for growth are where we show up in community, seek to heal fractures experienced by the community and expand what we can be together. We can best serve our evolution by focusing energies on our gatherings, diversifying the types of gatherings, placing magic at the centre of gatherings and using gatherings to more fully engage faeries in wider community matters.
Social media is not faerie space!
Safety at gatherings allows healing and is challenging – it takes time, focus, learning/unlearning, sustained effort.
Taking responsibility for personal behaviour at gatherings is courageous. Enabling this, without punishment or fear of exclusion, and with genuine support for change, is radical. Take a breath with me. “There are no rules in faerie space” cannot mean one fae’s freedoms override the freedoms of others. If this is a difficult thought, that is good: it should be, for it is where “community” stops being a word and becomes a transformational power. Take another deeper breath and allow this reflection to settle. So we grow.
“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 theportal 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!
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.
While many experience Faeriespace as a welcoming, healing space where personal growth is not only possible but inevitable, this is not the case for all. It has come to be described as a “safe space” and thought of as specifically inviting troubled and vulnerable people to come and experience healing. We heard at Featherstone in Autumn how, for faeries of colour, those with disabilities, and recovering addicts, and for others too, the Safe Space ethos fell short of expectations for various reasons.
What we are is a very open space, one that welcomes anyone who wants to be there, and never asks for credentials or explanations, no-one is even asked to state that they identify as a faerie (though we are asked to agree that we assume responsibility for our own safety and will exercise due care, and to state that we have read the call to the gathering). So, we welcome those who’ve heard that it’s a great party space and you can do anything you want and everyone’s cool with it, and we welcome those who’ve heard they will be completely accepted and nurtured and have a chance to heal. Both of those are sometimes true, but sometimes they don’t sit together too well.
Many of us as Queers carry a lot of Stuff/emotional baggage/psychic wounds/family trauma etc. etc., and we gather together as Faeries and ramp them up. Emotions run high, we talk about them and scream and cry about them, and show them to each other. It can be overwhelming. For someone who is very vulnerable and expecting healing, that’s actually a very stressful and challenging environment, not necessarily what they think of as a therapeutic one.
The Faeries are not a therapeutic community; Welfaeries are not necessarily in any way trained to deliver emotional first aid, and have no obligation to be available or to make themselves available, as we are all volunteers. That’s not to say that you won’t get help when you need it, I always do, but I know that I can’t always expect it right from the moment I need it, or that anyone has a responsibility to me to provide it.
It’s been said that there are no rules in Faeriespace, and while that might sound great to some, it means that if we object to behaviours that make us feel unsafe, and that we were told we wouldn’t see, then that objection can simply be dismissed. What we don’t have are sanctions, or any mechanism, other than Heart Circle, to deal with situations that some find unacceptable, and no-one can be made to engage with Heart Circle if they choose not to. We are not an organisation, that can provide formal training and check competence, and have defined rules and ways to deal with transgressions. Many might say that this is our strength, this is how we are Radical, and this is precisely what helps us learn and grow, as we deal with disagreements.
It’s clear, though, that this is not what people expect of a Safe Space. We can’t guarantee that no-one will say or do a thing that is deeply problematic for someone else – for example racist micro-aggressions that were recently experienced. We always now hold consent workshops and make it very clear that consent for physical contact must always be obtained, and this is a vital part of Faerie culture, but we can’t guarantee that it will always be respected. As well as clearer information about lack of accessibility at our venues, and whether to expect to see drugs and alcohol used openly, we need to be more clear that Faeriespace is challenging and is not suitable for everyone.
This isn’t to say we are not working hard on changing culture. From the last gathering there were offshoot groups on antiracism, and meetings on how to make the Albion faeries more inclusive to people with disabilities as we grow, there were also Heart Circles for people with neuro-diversities which were smaller, and people could share a common ground.
That said, the Radical Faeries is a counter-culture movement, and it requires participation from all to make change. We welcome talk that’s sometimes difficult and challenging, but enables us to grow more inclusively. We welcome feedback from our gathering and take it seriously. Anyone can be involved in organising a gathering, and be involved in organisation of the Faeries of Albion.
I propose a statement such as the following be posted on the Albion Faeries website, in each Gathering Call and in emails sent to those who book.
“Faeriespace is not a ‘Safe Space’. While we strive to make it as inclusive, tolerant, welcoming, healing and safe as possible, this is work in progress and we are yet to get it right. We may never get it right, because Faeries are people, we are growing as a tribe, and we welcome all who want to come. This includes people who you may find challenging and situations you may find difficult, and while we do our best to help anyone who needs it, we can’t take responsibility for anyone else. We welcome all energies working towards creating Safe Space, but we cannot guarantee it. Please consider very carefully whether coming to a gathering will be right for you.”
I welcome edits, revisions, other suggestions, and further discussion.
‘Fairy was championed among hippie gay men, a self-referential term like the more inclusive “flower child.” It contained a reference back to childhood fascinations with insight into hidden, magical realities which the regular people, the adults — the straight people — knew nothing of. After all, people couldn’t see fairies unless the fairies wanted to be seen. For many in the “first generation of gay men” — those who came out as they were entering young adulthood at the time of the rise of gay liberation in 1969 — the same generation that years later was struck hardest by AIDS, fairy was a reference to Peter Pan, the creation of the 19th Century homosexual English writer J. M. Barrie, revivified by Walt Disney in the 1950s as that obviously “cute young gay guy” with the pixie friend who saved middle-class children from normalcy with the “good news” that if you just believe (i.e., if you’re not fooled by the socially accepted conventions about how things should be) you can fly.
“Fairy” was a term of derision turned positive in the style of “Jew” for Hebrews and of “faggot” for homosexuals. Though, in fact, “”fairy” was never, like faggot, an angry term of derision with overtones of violence and hate; rather it conveyed — and conveys — a delightful suggestion that, just as we are, gay men are light-hearted, whimsical and non-serious, i.e. “flighty.” In the hard, deadly serious, macho competitive dog-eat-dog world of modern, urban heterosexual males, the news that it’s okay to be non-serious is the proverbial breath of fresh air. It’s why everybody loves an effeminate homosexual as comedian (Are You Being Served’s Mr. Humphries, for example). It is interesting to observe that the effeminate comedy figure is often the truth-teller, the jester who can say anything to the King, the one who can “tell it like it is.”
‘Toby Marotta argued in The Politics of Homosexuality that gay liberation was the flower of the counterculture, the perfect demonstration of the notion of revolution through consciousness-change. Clearly when homosexuals changed how they thought about themselves, spurred on and supported by the work of the early activists (Harry Hay, Donald Webster Cory, Frank Kameny, Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, Randy Wicker, Arthur Evans, Arthur Bell, Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, Bruce Voeller, Mitch Walker — to mention only a few), instead of miserably suffering their homosexuality, hiding and trying to change, they came out to playÉ and they discovered there were more of them than they’d ever imagined. They weren’t alone. And the others they discovered were wonderful people: attractive, appealing, sensitive, considerate, plucky — sometimes, maybe, a little “fucked up in the head,” as it were — but overall great people to have as comrades-in-arms (the flesh-and-blood kind). And that discovery changed gay community and gay identity forever.‘
‘In early 1979, Harry Hay, his longtime companion John Burnside, Don Kilhefner and I issued a public Call for a Spiritual Conference of Radical Faeries that unexpectedly drew hundreds of gay seekers to a remote desert retreat over the Labor Day weekend. We had modestly expected 50-75 guys to respond for this meeting on Gay Spirit, but the way-overflow crowd was so enthusiastic and the resulting weekend so fabulous that we immediately resolved from then on to foster Radical Faerie gatherings and circles wherever possible. At our second national gathering in the Rockies the next summer, even more queer men responded, and the resulting week-long effort had an even more smashing impact building on the first. And thus a grassroots social movement was born, the Radical Faerie Movement. Since then, Faerie circles and gatherings have spontaneously sprouted all over, nationally and overseas, and have become an ongoing feature of gay community life for over fifteen years.
‘Not only is the Faerie movement a significant part of contemporary gay life, but it is a uniquely influential one. It is 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.
‘Over the years two strands of thought have developed about what the Faerie Movement was and should be — and some significant animosity between them. These strands can be identified by two charismatic characters in recent gay cultural history: Arthur Evans and Harry Hay.
‘Arthur Evans was a homosexual graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University who was politicized by the student uprisings that rocked Columbia during the spring of 1968. After the Stonewall Riots the next year he became involved with Manhattan’s fledgling Gay Liberation Front, and he helped establish the Gay Activist Alliance to supercede GLF. Then in the early 70s, Evans moved to San Francisco and, still the scholar, in 1973 began publishing articles on his own researched, philosophized and radicalized vision of gay history. In 1975 he and some friends formed a small pagan-inspired ritual group called “the Faery Circle” to act out the ecstatic pansexual revels he believed he had uncovered in the hidden past of Western Europe. In 1976 Evans gave a series of public lectures on his research, and in 1978 published his influential book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture.
Arthur Evans
‘According to Evans, a pagan-influenced counterculture had long survived in Europe after the triumph of Christianity, featuring ecstatic sexual worship of nature, the Great Mother and a horned consort god typified by figures like Dionysos, Pan and Cernunnos, and a salient feature of this pagan counterculture was that its leaders were often women and gay men. It was this non-conforming counterculture that the Christian Church persecuted as “witches.” Famous from this argument is the notion that the epithet “faggot” derives from the use of homosexuals as tinder for the bonfires that burned witches and heretics.
‘Evans argued that by following this pagan-descended, goddess-centered, pansexual baccanalian spiritual tradition, gay people today could integrate a sense of gay pride, love of nature, and spiritual power into an ongoing experiential synthesis. This historical tradition, he said, was the basis of what has come to be called the Radical Faerie Movement.
Harry Hay
‘The other strain of thought can be identified with Harry Hay, co-founder of the Mattachine Society in 1951, and perhaps the pivotal figure in the creation of the modern gay movement. Hay was an idealist, non-conformist, and Marxist in the 1930s; he taught music history at the Southern California Labor School, and even as early as 1948 was trying to organize his homosexual friends into a political movement for social change. Important to Hay’s development is that his first homosexual experience had been with someone who had known a member of the short-lived Chicago-based Society for Human Rights in the 1920s that had been modeled on the earlier homosexual rights efforts in Germany by such men as Magnus Hirschfeld. Through that homosexual bonding, Hay was connected to a history, and a succession, of homosexual identification. Indeed, already by 1950 Harry Hay, building on earlier gay-centered thinkers, like Edward Carpenter and Karl Ulrichs, was defining gays as a separate people with our own characteristics and dimensions. And by 1970 he was articulating a magical “gay window” on reality entirely “other than” and alien to nongay thinking. In the early 70s he established a “circle of loving companions” to purposely live and explore these insights in gay consciousness. Hay’s fundamental concept is that what we today call a Gay People can be found in all times and places, such as the “third gender” people of tribal societies, or in European tradition, such as the original Mattachine brotherhood of free-thinking, liberated troubadours during the Middle Ages. These Mattachines were not simply homosexuals among groups of pagans. These were consciously homosexual people, and if they were attracted to paganism it is because, as homosexuals, they were opposed to the oppressiveness of mainstream culture, and were not “sexually liberated” because they were worshippers of Pan, but because they were queer (see Harry Hay, Radically Gay).
‘Harry Hay and Arthur Evans make for a fascinating contrast. Here were two gay men, each basically unknown to the other, promulgating similarly magical visions of gayness with parallel theories of sacred gay roles in past societies. Yet their visions went in diametrical directions. Arthur’s led to pansexual ecstatic revels infused by a man-and-woman-loving horned god and his mother, whereas Harry’s vision led to a reunion with one’s lost original Lover in concert with others through “subject-Subject consciousness” to thereby attain a homosexual cosmic wholeness that unlocks spiritual and creative treasures.‘
Mitch Walker
‘Harry, myself and the other founders — holding to the viewpoint of a Gay People — 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, not to the outlaw worshippers — of all sexes and orientations — of the “old religion” of medieval Europe. In our view, faeries are the supernatural denizens of a homosexual world both feared and revered by the ordinary folk. The original faeries were so-called not because they worshipped the Three Fates, as Evans says about the fey leaders of pagan traditions, but because to encounter them was always highly fateful. In my opinion, Arthur Evans’s pansexual Dionysian vision is not actually gay-centered. The Faerie movement is “Radical” not because it is anti-Establishment but because it makes a revolutionary shift to homodeity itself as source of spiritual truth, rather than to alien sources — whether the breeder God of Christians or the bisexual Bacchus of Arthur Evans. Evans is, not surprisingly, a constructionist on gay orientation, claiming that the “dichotomy of homosexual vs. heterosexual is itself a modern cultural construct and that it fails to apply to the pan-sexualism of many ancient societies.” In contrast, Harry Hay and I are essentialists who feel there is a unique Gay Spirit separate and different from other sexual truths, occurring in all times and places. When we called the Faerie gathering in 1979, we were aiming to reclaim and explore the magical homosexual universe known by queer wisepeople in all cultural traditions. The tradition of gay radical essentialism expressed in the 1979 Call marks a historic break with the earlier-70s efforts at repossession of stigmatized gay labels: the Sissies, Faggots, Faeries, etc. of that era. These earlier efforts sought to theoretically desegregate then-current movements such as the counterculture, feminism, and socialism to include homosexuality, in effect subsuming gayness toward other agendas. Such efforts reflect a political position that minimizes group differences. In contrast, the Radical Faerie movement successfully arose on the ashes of these earlier efforts precisely because of its source in a different, gay nationalist tradition.‘
(Joe recently connected with the London Rad Faeries at a drum circle and offers us this introduction to his work…)
My name is Jospeh and I am a Pagan priest. I am also a Queer person.
What is a Pagan Priest you might ask? Well, in essence, it’s a choice to dedicate a life, at least in part, to be of service to my community by bringing an opportunity to connect with self, the natural world and the Divine to those who are so inclined. “Priest” is just another word. Many people who do what I do, do not choose that particular label. I did spend a couple of years training as a Priest within a Pagan community, but this is not the only route to this path. More about that later.
I started on my journey with spirituality at about 15, I am now 35. At the time, being a Baby-Witch gave me a sense of empowerment, purpose and strength. As a queer teen I had the usual experience of many queerlings, a sense of being different, having to find myself in a world that tells me to conform, navigating fear and bullying and also, the joy of discovery. Identifying as a Witch meant I had to come out of two closets, the queer closet and the broom closet. Truly, I believe that rather than complicate the matter of finding myself and expressing that to the world, the intersection of my queerness and my paganness supported and strengthened these two complementary parts of who I am. Queerness can correspond to encountering challenges, especially at a young age, but to believe I could overcome anything with just the right combination of crystals, herbs and words certainly gave me courage.
Fast forward twenty years and my Paganism now plays a different role in my life. It is now a tool for connection and healing. I would say I was called to take the leap from solitary Witch to ceremonial leader after encountering the dark night of the soul, otherwise known as a complete collapse in mental health. For a while, crippling anxiety and panic were everyday experiences. Obsessive existential fears controlled my life, and I was lost to depression. The only light at the end of the tunnel was my relationship with my spirituality. In a sense I had to die to be reborn. I had to face my darkest fears in order to overcome them. From that point on I was called to leap deeper into spirituality and discover what I could offer the world. So, this led me to train as a Priest as part of a community of Goddess worshippers in Glastonbury. This was not an easy ride and what began here was a discovery that diversity and inclusion were not a given in Pagan communities. One side of myself, my paganness was fulfilled, but the other, my queerness, was not. What I found was that some spiritual communities are plagued by the same fate that befall many organised religion. A hotbed of transphobia, queerphobia, a lack of basic understanding and essentially a community that could not meet the needs of LGBTQ Pagans, not to mention people of colour or my disabled kin.
I was then pulled towards a new path. A path where queer people were at its centre not the peripheral. Where the focus was on actively developing Pagan practice and ceremony that spoke to diverse people. The path of radical inclusion! We deserve to be able to look into the face of the Divine and see ourselves. To see God as a pregnant trans man. To see Goddess as a disabled woman of colour. To experience connection with a deity who was beyond the binary. And so, my journey has led me to where I am now. Working towards Pagan practice that is fully inclusive and to designing ceremony that celebrates the lives of queer people. And so Indigo Earth Ceremonies was born. I walk my own path, a path of my own creation. The path of Indigo Earth.
The Radical Faerie Queer Spirit Drum Circle has been meeting at south London’s Wheatsheaf Community Hall to celebrate full moons since 2012, and returns to the Hall for the Beltane Full Moon on May 14th 2022 after two years during which the venue was used as a coronavirus testing centre.
Often drawing 70+ people prior to the pandemic, the Drum Circle is where magically-minded queers of London meet for an evening of ritual, music, dance and socialising. We get in touch with, express, release the rising emotions at full moon – which at Beltane invites us to playfully and joyfully unite the physical body (Taurus Sun) with the deep passion and erotic power of the emotion and spirit within us (Scorpio Moon).
We will dedicate this Beltane Full Moon Circle to the liberation (physical and spiritual) of LGBTQ+ people the world over: to send the energy of solidarity to queers fighting for their right to exist and to fuel the emancipation of our queer spirit, which opens hearts, minds and gates of consciousness, connects worlds, helps souls pass through the veils, and channels creativity, healing and grace into the world.
Full moon Beltane peak of spring – a time to energise our lives, our projects, our relationships, through connecting the body and spirit. As at Samhain, the veils are thin – nature spirits want to dance with us and assist in weaving back together the many levels of reality. We do this weaving through music and dance, rhythm and movement, connecting, releasing, dropping the mind, getting out of the head and deeply into the body, the heart and emotions, until the spirit is moving our bodies on the dancefloor or our hands on the drum. Every taste of ecstasy is an opportunity for healing.
In order to prepare a space to open up our energy fields we attune to the elements and to the unconditionally loving source of consciousness, reclaiming and renewing for today the ancient link between queer people and the Goddess plus certain male and trans deities.
Invoking ancient queer deities of Europe:
PAN and DIONYSUS, good time deities who revelled in music, wine, sex and ecstatic connections.
ARTEMIS/DIANA, moon goddess with her virgin priestesses and eunuch priests, worshipped in London at site of St Pauls.
CYBELE, the ancient Goddess from Anatolia became the Great Mother of the Roman Empire, served by her queer and outrageous Gallae priests (who self-castrated in honour of ATTIS, the resurrected lover of the Goddess) for thousands of years until the rise of Christianity, ,
APHRODITE URANIA, considered the patron Goddess of same sex love in ancient Greece
GANYMEDE, who became the cup-bearer/lover of Zeus, king of the Gods, then became Aquarius in the zodiac. In Greece love between older and younger men was praised for its spiritual potential, as the centuries passed and life became less inspired by noble philosophy Ganymede evolved into catamite, meaning a boy used for sex, in Roman and medieval times.
Which divine beings would you invite to the party???
Around the world gender fluidity and homosexuality have always been associated with magic, priestcraft, shamanism, divination, ritual – especially with ecstatic ritual that lifts the human mind into states of union and elation. This is the part of our history that the modern Gay Liberation movement has yet to embrace and explore – through this journey of discovery we remember who we are.
At the Faerie Drum Circle the warriors, scouts, shamans and flute players gather. WHEATSHEAF HALL, WHEATSHEAF LANE off SOUTH LAMBETH ROAD, LONDON SW8 2UP. 7 – 11PM 14 MAY 2022
There is an ancient religious text from Persia that directly associates men who love men with the magical underworld of demons and faery spirits – the Vendidad of the Zoroastrian faith. Written around the same time as the 5th book of the Jewish Torah, Deuteronomy, which forbids Israelites from cross-dressing, becoming temple sex-workers, or bringing the earnings of female or male sex-workers (the males were known as ‘dogs’) into Jewish temples, the Vendidad basically calls men who sleep with men ‘faeries’.
In Deuteronomy the Hebrews were attempting to clearly define themselves as different to the many other tribes around. The prohibition in Leviticus against men sleeping with men uses the word word ‘toevah’, which has been translated into English as ‘abomination’ but etymologically is related to foreign ritual practices, and very possibly related to the Persian term used in the Vendidad. In the Zoroastrian text men who have sex with men are named ‘daevas’, translated as demons and related to the ‘deva’ spirits of the Indian sub-continent. Devas however are simply magical beings in India, not associated specifically with evil, whereas the Persians over time came to regard them as supernatural entities to be avoided. The oldest Zoroastrian text, the Gathas, calls the daevas ‘gods that are to be rejected’. In the Avesta, they are divinities that promote chaos and disorder, and in later tradition they become personifications of every evil possible.
The Vendidad is an early Zoroastrian text, dating back to around 800 BCE, that records conversations between the prophet and God, Ahura Mazda. One goes….
“Ahura Mazda answered: ‘The man that lies with mankind as man lies with womankind, or as woman lies with mankind, is the man that is a Daeva; this one is the man that is a worshipper of the Daevas, that is a male paramour of the Daevas, that is a female paramour of the Daevas, that is a wife to the Daeva; this is the man that is as bad as a Daeva, that is in his whole being a Daeva; this is the man that is a Daeva before he dies, and becomes one of the unseen Daevas after death: so is he, whether he has lain with mankind as mankind, or as womankind.”
— Avesta, Vendidad, Fargard 8. Funerals and purification, unlawful sex, Section V (32) Unlawful lusts.
From nearly 3000 years ago we have this religious text directly associating gay sex with the underworld of magical spirit beings. At this period, and for another millennium until the rise of Christianity, across southern Europe and the Middle East gender fluidity and homosexual acts were strongly associated with worship of the Goddess. She was known in many forms and by many names, all served by women and gay/transgender priest/esses, and that service could include sexual acts that brought connection to the deity. In fact round the whole world gay/queer beings once served in sacred roles, as shamans, medicine men, priests and sacred sex workers… our power was taken away, as was that of women, by men seeking to dominate and rule over others, to conquer territory and accumulate wealth. This process has now reached its apogee, the world is on the brink of global disaster unless humanity changes the way it lives.
To achieve this women and queers need to be brought to the table as equals to men, and all forms of love respected and honoured.
To achieve this we all need to seek deep within ourselves to find our reconnection to the planet, to the spirit and go beyond ego to our true divine selves.
To achieve this the Gatekeepers are needed.
The journey of Gay Liberation, the gradual emergence and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people around the world, is still in its early stages. Queer people have more to discover about who we are….
SOBONFU SOME, priestess of the Dagara Tribe of western Africa – a tribe that remembers the magical role of what we call queers – said in her book ‘Spirit of Intimacy’:
“The words gay and lesbian do not exist in the village, but there is the word gatekeeper. Gatekeepers are people who live a life at the edge between the worlds – the world of the village and the world of spirit…
“Gatekeepers in the village are able to do their job simply because of strong spiritual connection, and also their ability to direct their sexual energy not to other people but to spirit.
“There are many gates that link a village to other worlds. The only people who have access to all these gates are the gatekeepers. I should mention here that there are two different kinds of gatekeeper.
“The first group has the ability to guard a limited number of gates to the other world, specifically,those that correspond to the Dagara cosmology – water, earth, fire, minerals, and nature – because they vibrate the energies of those gates.
“The second group of gatekeepers… has the responsibility of overseeing all the gates. They are in contact not only with the elemental gates but also with many others. They have one foot in all the other worlds and other foot here. This is why the vibration of their body is totally different from others. They also have access to other-dimensional entities such as Kontombile, small beings who are very magical and knowledgeable. They are known as leprechauns in the Irish tradition.
“Gatekeepers hold keys to other dimensions. They maintain a certain alignment between the spirit world and the world of the village. Without them, the gates to the other world would be shut.
“On the other side of these gates lies the spirit world or other dimensions. Gatekeepers are in constant communication with beings who live there, who have the ability to teach us how to deal with ritual. And gatekeepers have the capacity to take other people to those places.
“Gays and lesbians in the West are often very spiritual, but they have been taken away from their connection with spirit. My feeling is that without that outlet or that role in the culture, they have to find other ways of defining themselves.”
FROM TWO FLUTES PLAYING, channelled by Andrew Ramer:
“It is time for the gay community to heal itself. It is time for the gay community to assume the place in the human community that it was created for. It is time to come together in loving communities, for gay men to explore their inner femaleness so that they can help men and women communicate. It is time for gay men to own their capacity for youthfulness and their ability to be wise elders, so that they can once again sit with a child and be an adult who remembers being a child, so that they can talk to parents who thought they needed to forget their inner child in order to have children of their own. And it is time for gay people to start using, for planetary transformation, the global network that already exists, spreading information, love, advice, support, money, food, clothing.
“The gay community can heal. It will not heal from focussing on combatting disease alone. A healing must include a spiritual element. And this is what has often been withheld from gay people. The religious communities of this planet have for the most part excluded, or at best ignored, their gay members. But religions is not necessarily spirituality. And it is through a spiritual connection, not a religious one, that the human community of this planet will find its healing.
“What is spiritual, what is sacred, is being redefined. It is being redefined in a fluid way. Gay people, by their very nature, exist in a state of internal fluidity that will make us vital in this time of planetary challenge. As we enter the Age called Aquarius it is useful to remember that the constellation Aquarius represents the youth Ganymede, who Zeus took up to Mount Olympus to be cupbearer to the gods, and his own lover. Gay people have a share in this coming transformation. To the ancient Epyptians, the water carrier was the source of the Nile, pictured as a man with breasts. When Jesus was preparing for the Last Supper, it is recorded in Luke that he sent his disciples into the city to meet a man carrying a jar of water, in a culture where only women were supposed to carry water.”
“To be gay is something that begins within ourselves. In begins in our hearts, in that place that is never separate from the living heart of Infinite Oneness. To be gay is something that begins with ourselves, that finds itself mirrored back, echoed back to us by the tribe of men who love men. This tribe, our people , is a scouting tribe, a Walks-Between people, bridge-making people, walking between men and women, between night and day, between matter and spirit, between the living and the dead.”
“When purposeful, spiritual connection is forgotten, the depth of sexual connection often takes it place. Sex points one in the right direction, deep into the self, into the mystery. But sex alone is not the answer to the gay dilemma of the present, the sense of meaninglessness. A sense of spiritual participation in the community of the planet is the answer. For no one else will tell us our purpose. Its discovery must come from ourselves.”
Since 1979 gay men, and nowadays an increasingly queer medley of magical folk, have been meeting in Radical Faerie gatherings and sanctuaries, seeking to create community from the heart, in harmony with nature, and to reclaim and explore our innate spiritual magic. The term Faerie was chosen as a reference to our connection to nature and spirit, as well as being a positive reclamation of the term ‘fairy’, so often used as an abusive insult in western cultures – and therefore implying a folk memory in Europe too between gay men and nature’s magic. Radical refers to getting to the roots of who we are:
HARRY HAY 1912-2002, gay rights activist and Radical Faerie Duchess:
“We have been a SEPARATE PEOPLE…. Drifting together in a parallel existence, not always conscious of each other.. yet recognising one another by eyelock when we did meet… here and there as outcasts… Spirit people… in service to the Great Mother.. Shamans.. mimes and rhapsodes, poets and playwrights, healers and nurturers… VISIONARIES… REBELS”
“Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. Under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again.”
What is a Pagan Priest you might ask? Well, in essence, it’s a choice to dedicate a life, at least in part, to be of service to my community by bringing an opportunity to connect with self, the natural world and the Divine to those who are so inclined. “Priest” is just another word. Many people who do what I do, do not choose that particular label. I did spend a couple of years training as a Priest within a Pagan community, but this is not the only route to this path. More about that later.
