Tag Archives: Harry Hay

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, Philosophy

An Ancient Reference to Gays as Faerie Spirits

An Ancient Reference to Gays as Faerie Spirits

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.”

:)