The Fire in Moonlight
Stories from the Radical Faeries
1975-2010
Edited by Mark Thompson and
Richard Neely (Osiris) and Bo Young, Associate Editors
Foreword by Will Roscoe, Ph.D.
Printed by White Crane Books at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 White Crane Institute.
White Crane Books is an imprint of Lethe Press
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the White Crane Institute.
Published as a White Crane Book, March 2011
Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave, Maple Shade NJ 08052
www.lethepressbooks.com
www.whitecranebooks.org
978-1-59021-338-4
1-59021-338-6
_______________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Fire in moonlight : stories from the Radical Faeries : 1975-2010 / edited by Mark Thompson ; Richard Neely (Osiris) and Bo Young, associate editors ; foreword by Will Roscoe
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-338-4
ISBN-10: 1-59021-338-6
1. Gay men--Religious life. 2. Radical Faeries (New Age movement) I. Thompson, Mark, 1952- II. Neely, Richard. III. Young, Bo.
BL65.H64D36 2010
299’.93--dc22
2010039292
• THE WHITE CRANE WISDOM SERIES •
White Crane Institute’s guiding principle: “fostering the gathering and dissemination of information about the critical role sexuality and gender plays in the development of cultural and spiritual traditions and to provide a nurturing environment for the continuation and expansion of those explorations for the greater good of all society.”
As Gay people we bear wisdom. As Gay people we create culture. White Crane is proud to present these valuable treasures through our Gay Wisdom Series. Our aim is to provide you with fine books of insight, discernment and spiritual journey.
White Crane Institute is a 501(c)(3) educational corporation, committed to the certainty that gay consciousness plays a special and important role in the evolution of life on Earth. White Crane Institute publishes White Crane, the Journal of Gay Wisdom & Culture. Your contributions and support are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
White Crane Institute
172 Fifth Avenue, Suite 69 • Brooklyn NY 11217
www.gaywisdom.org • editor@gaywisdom.org
Also from White Crane Books
Gay Spirit: Myth & Meaning
Mark Thompson
ALL: A James Broughton Reader
edited by Jack Foley
Two Flutes Playing
Andrew Ramer
Gay Spirituality
Toby Johnson
Take Off the Masks
Malcolm Boyd
Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling
edited by Toby Johnson & Steve Berman
Gay Perspective
Toby Johnson
A Prophet in His Own Land: A Malcolm Boyd Reader
Edited by Bo Young & Dan Vera
Queering the Text
Andrew Ramer
Dedicated to Harry Hay and John Burnside
A Circle of Acknowledgments
From the Editorial Collective:
We thank Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., for first suggesting this collection and his support of it, especially during the beginning stages of the project. His dedicated efforts on behalf of the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community during the past four decades is likewise deeply appreciated.
We wish to thank the wonderful and trusting contributors to this volume. Thanks also to Joel Singer for his inspired cover image, Will Roscoe for his magnificent Foreword and William Stewart for compiling and writing the Radical Faerie Resource section. And, of course, thanks to the late, great gay poet James Broughton for his poem, “Call to Devotions,” used here as an Epigraph.
Finally, our gratitude to the late Bradley Rose for his original illustration, “Faerie Tongues,” used here as the book’s Frontispiece.
From Mark Thompson:
Bows to my colleagues for their unwavering belief and hard work in bringing this timely book to fruition. Blessings to my life partner, Malcolm Boyd, who knows well what it means to have wings.
From Osiris:
I wish to recognize a love that knows no end. To my husband, Tim, thank you for always being there to support me—no matter how far out on a limb I’ve gone.
From Bo Young:
I want to thank Harry n’John for summers under the walnut tree and the Faeries for sanctuary. I want to acknowledge my life partner, my love, William J. Foote, for unquestioning support, a gentle, skeptical eye and for being there to spoon up when all the late nights of reading, fine tuning and editing were done and the lights were turned off.
Table of Contents
• THE WHITE CRANE WISDOM SERIES •
Dedicated to Harry Hay and John Burnside
Frontispiece:
“Faerie Tongues”
by Bradley Rose
Prelude: Welcome to Planet Faerie
by Will Roscoe, Ph.D.
Call
to Devotions
by James
Broughton
by Stuart Timmons
After Long Ages Resuming the Broken Thread:
Walt Whitman & Edward Carpenter Dream Up the Radical Faeries
by Joey Cain
Queer Spirit Memories Grown in the Midwest
by Donald L. Engstrom-Reese
An Evocation of the First Spiritual Conference
by Allen Page
by Sequoia Thom Lundy
by David S. Cohen
by David Cawley
Standing on the Shoulders of My Ancestors
by Eric Lichtman (Toozy)
by Orlando
by Franklin Abbott 96
by Leopard
Living on the Body of the Mountain
by Jan/Nathan Falling Long
by Jonas (Peterpansy)
by Trebor Healy
by Mockingbird
by Michael Rumaker
by Tim Doody (Query)
by Mac Del Ray
By Michael David (Mykdeva)
by Carol Kleinmaier
by Marissa Zaknich
by Gregory Barnes
Notes from EuroFaerie Lovestar
by Marco Shokti
by Efthimios Kalos, Junis and Eliendes Wasser
by Vyvyan Chatterjie (Notre Dame des Arbres)
Heterowashing Gay Liberation and the Radical Faerie Antidote
by Jerry Berbiar (Jerry the Faerie)
by Chris Bartlett (The Lady Bartlett)
Impressions of an Improbable Faerie
by Artwit
by David Finkelstein
by Henry Holmes
Chants of Silence: Notes of a Deaf Radical Faerie-in-Spirit
by Raymond Luczak
Stewarding the Future: A Call for Sacred Witness
by William Stewart
by Mountaine Mort Jonas
by Pete Sturman (Mockingbird/Pistol Pete)
by Tyler Tone (Stitch)
by Wow
by Yusef Leo Schuman
by Ian MacKinnon
by Dennis Miles
Memory, Trees, Children and Queens
by Robert Croonquist (Covelo)
by Mati Livinit
Crooked Faerie Tales: Remembrances of a Middle-Class Fae
by Giuseppe
by Pat Gourley
by Don Perryman (Dawn)
A Day and a Night in the Desert
by Mark Thompson
An
Afterword:
The Radical Power of Roots
by Bo Young
Faerie Tongues by Bradley Rose
—Introduction
Thirty is a delicate and decisive turning point in a life. Adolescent flings are in the past and unknowable questions remain ahead. One can as easily fall back into sleepy denial or charge ahead to meet future challenges. And so too it is with the Radical Faeries, the gay community’s last authentic global grassroots movement.
Since their sudden inception on a remote site in the American Southwest in 1979, the Faeries have grown like some exotic species of flora around the world. That seminal first Gathering—a three-day flash point of profound revelation and personal reclamation—resulted in a kind of gay tribal diaspora, with each of the two hundred participants returning to home roots in every corner of the United States, Canada and Europe.
What happened next is the story of this book. Like fertile seeds scattered to the winds, the Faeries began to grow and cultivate new gardens for being. A new way of living for gay men flowered—an identity and a mythos still largely ignored or not comprehended by more mainstream cultures, no matter what color of the rainbow they may be. To large populations of culturally assimilated gay men the Radical Faeries remain an enigma, something akin to a shimmering mirage once glimpsed or heard about. To non-gay people, the Faeries seem like a ridiculous fiction or, at best, a bizarre aberration on the lowest end of the gender totem pole.
But we Faerie-identified men (and now some women) live among you as the realest of Planet Earth’s real people: contrary and complex guardians for the best of the old ways, zealous and righteous advocates for new possibilities in a world of diminishing returns. We are the last of the original tribes to spring out of that heady brew concocted by late 1960s gay liberation, sexual revolution, civil rights, environmental concern and feminism. Much has changed during the forty years since that big bang, but the questions regarding authentic self and essential goodness remain—at least in our hearts and minds.
So what exactly is a Radical Faerie? The phrase itself sounds more than a bit preposterous, if not a tad louche. One way to explain would be to claim there have always been Faeries, and we don’t mean those fictional characters found in children’s books or a garden dell. The word fairy has long been a slang term (often pejorative) used to define homosexual men, usually those with an effeminate bent. This was the spelling used on the “call,” or broadsheet, that was circulated announcing the first National Conference for Radical Fairies in the desert outside Benson, Arizona. (Perceptive readers will note that spelling is retained when referring to that historic event.)
But once the Faerie idea—indeed, ideal—began to carry itself across the land in multiple regional Gatherings, weekend retreats and even households and permanent sanctuaries in the decades to follow, the more generic and sanctified usage of the word quickly took hold. A true fae spirit is one who is fanciful, to be sure, but also gay-centered, engaged and revolutionary. And so like the actual faeries of yore, we gay folk today, who carry the word as a living tradition and cloak of honor, strive to uphold those qualities.
Too cute for words, or utterly serious with a divine mission and purpose? Perhaps a bit of both, which makes being a Faerie at once a questionable act and a highly principled one. The real truth of the matter, as exasperating it may seem, lies in a mixture of both. That paradox, enhanced by our own unique style, is what being a Radical Faerie is all about. There are dark Faeries, silly Faeries, ponderous Faeries, fabulous Faeries and Faeries with no fashion sense. There are Faeries adrift and way too many Faeries permanently gone.
But at the core of this jumble of identities and intents, we, the editors of this book, assert that there now exists a Faerie Nation—albeit one made of invisible borders and defined as much by a state of mind. It is an actual living world with great significance and potential created wholly from the lives of queer folk soulfully led. As Harry Hay, that grandest of Radical Faeries said: “It is time to pull off the ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity.” And so we did. And continue to do.
A story has to start somewhere, so this one does three decades and a year ago. But there have been many antecedents and many ancestors for what follows in these pages. Self-aware gay men have always existed on society’s borders and margins. But after the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969—a three-day uprising in New York City that set off alarm bells around the world—the liminal territories we had traditionally occupied were suddenly enlarged. We jumped from being a half-caste people to full-bodied ones and all sorts of political and cultural experiments in redefinition took strength.
Hard-boiled rage was bottled in many forms of political activism, especially on the East Coast. The Western United States, with its vast undeveloped lands and more permissive cultural influences—from Hollywood dreams to Beat poetry to postwar Zen Buddhism—yielded a more laid-back approach, open to a wider synthesis of cultural forms. Things here were not so much reformed as reinformed and in many cases outright birthed. There was a palpable pioneer spirit in the air, no less so for gay people.
Hay, one of the creators of the Radical Faeries, first came to prominence in 1950 as the galvanizing force behind the creation of the Mattachine Society, the nation’s first ongoing gay organizing group. The political machinations following his bold moves have been well documented elsewhere. But out of this gutsy seedbed arose two decades of steady achievement, no matter how burdened by inside winnowing and outside fear mongering.
The nation’s first gay publications, educational and religious groups and other cultural infrastructure were largely coined here. Similar activities were being posted up and down the West Coast during this time as well. It was time for the credo of a manifest destiny to really come home and roost. These forward steps were inevitably betrayed by homophobia-fueled retaliation. Yet slow but steady gains were made. The progress noted was all within the dominating system of patriarchal control, however. It took the deep rumblings of balls-out gay lib—in which Faerie co-creator Don Kilhefner played a pioneering role—to make any sort of viable alternative culture happen.
By the early 1970s, avowed gay liberation activists from all over the country were setting up new home camps in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and other sister cities. The more deferential and conservative methods favored by a previous generation of gay leaders were suddenly out of style. It was no longer enough to cautiously reform society, but to make society vividly anew. The old tropes about what constitutes a religion, the state, one’s gender and sexuality, were all fodder for the blender of fast-changing times.
By mid-decade, Bay Area proto-Faerie leaders Arthur Evans and Murray Edelman were inviting intimate circles of gay men to explore their spirituality by “drawing down the moon” and to evoke ancient gods and goddess, such as Cernunnos (the Horned One) and Gaia.
A landmark 1976 conference titled “Faggots and Class Struggle” was held on queer-owned land in Wolf Creek, Oregon. Its cultural reverberations were widely noted. Two years later, Mikel Wilson hosted the first of three Gatherings exploring the frontiers of gay identity on Running Water Farm, nestled in the mountains of North Carolina. Among those attending from around the Southeast was a liberated group of young gay men from New Orleans, Louisiana Sissies in Struggle, who were already defining themselves as Faeries.
Visionary writers like Carl Wittman (author of the seminal 1969 essay “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto”) were advancing new paradigms through which gay men could see themselves differently, in upstart publications like RFD1, San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine and Boston’s Fag Rag2. Such fresh and daring explorations into radical forms of gay consciousness were emerging everywhere.
But these brave soundings into the deep unknown didn’t find a national unity until the First Conference for Radical Fairies was called on Labor Day weekend in 1979. Where before there had been sparks, now there was a fire—a fire mirrored in the hearts and souls of nearly every man who attended. Now there was a wide scale and abiding faith in being fae—that is, a Faerie. At long last, the joke was no longer on us.
That fire quickly spread. It burned bright in some places, then dimmed or jumped elsewhere. But the concept of being a Faerie was carried person to person, like runners with a torch, continent to continent, until it was known around the world. This book of many voices continues that early call—a call for freedom of mind, body and spirit from the petty, awful tyrannies of those who have tried every means to destroy us. It is about how being a Radical Faerie has changed a life. May these stories inspire you to action, putting wind beneath your wings.
— Mark Thompson, Los Angeles, 2010
1 Originally RFD: A Country Journal for Gay Men Everywhere. Founded in October 1974 in a drafty farmhouse in Grinnell, Iowa. RFD continues today, celebrating thirty-five years of publishing.
2 Gay Sunshine was founded August 1970 by a collective of gay men living in Berkeley, California. In its first editorial Gay Sunshine vowed to unite all people oppressed by the white, straight, middle class. In 1971, the Boston Gay Liberation Front established Fag Rag. In the early days of Gay Liberation, numerous small newspapers and magazines popped up all over the country; in addition to those mentioned above: The Gay Liberator (Detroit), The Gay Alternative (Philadelphia) and The Body Politic (Toronto). They were small, with irregular publication schedules and financed out of pocket.
Prelude: Welcome to Planet Faerie
by Will Roscoe, Ph. D.
A flash of lightning lit up the canvas walls of the Big Tent and thunder rumbled in the mountaintops. Inside, the heavy air vibrated. A hundred Faeries, knees touching, leaned forward in anticipation as the old man took a deep breath.
“I am saying to everybody who will hear that now we must begin to maximize the differences between us and them.”
Squalls of thunder and lightning appeared several times over the second Radical Faerie Gathering, held in Colorado in the summer of 1980. But it was the bolt of Harry Hay’s words that struck closest to me. Their implications made me shudder even as I found myself whispering, “Yes!” under my breath.
Looking back now, I realize that day marked my point of no return, when I committed myself to a radical way of being with little idea where it was going to take me—and it was too late to turn back.
It is hard to convey the fervor of those first Gatherings or the times in which they occurred. Three months before I stepped into my first Radical Faerie circle in Arizona I had been throwing bricks at City Hall in the riots that erupted in San Francisco following the trial of Harvey Milk’s assassin. The double assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone; the horrific Jonestown suicides (a community that was to have been a progressive utopia); the steady unraveling of a decade’s progress as Anita Bryant triumphed in Miami and gay-rights ordinances were repealed across the country; the rise of an energized Right proposing increasingly repressive measures to deny the fundamental human rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people; the spread of anti-gay violence; and, in our own community, determined assimilationists squelching the last vestiges of gay liberation’s radical, noisy origins. We arrived in Arizona part of a generation of queers who had rushed out of the closet, emboldened by the sight of the burning bridges behind us. It was 1979. It was time for the other shoe to drop.
Something was about to happen.
For those of us who made our way to the first Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies, as it was officially called, this feeling of anticipation was palpable. But whether what was to come would be the dying gasp of patriarchy, with a New Age to rise from its ashes or the darkening clouds of a new, American fascism taking gays as the object of its genocidal fantasies, we didn’t know.
Harry Hay’s writings in those years, a series of inspired essays widely circulated among the early Faeries (if not always widely understood) are riven with this ambivalence. Under such titles as “Gay Liberation: Chapter Two, Serving Social/Political Change Through Our Gay Window,” “A Contribution to the Principles of Gay Liberation,” “New Breakthroughs in How We Perceive the Nature of Gay Consciousness” (a workshop co-facilitated with Don Kilhefner), “Towards the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision…subject-subject Consciousness,” “Some Beginnings to a Sacred Quest…the Search for ANCESTORS,” Harry interspersed ecstatic visions of a political and spiritual New Age, Faeries in the vanguard, with grim forebodings of repressive political regimes and dire economic crises. These seemingly opposite impulses were perfectly balanced in the project that Harry considered the calling of his life. Indeed, for Harry, those early Gatherings were not to be ends in themselves, but springboards for this vision, what came to be known as the Faerie Land Trust.
This was the subject of the meeting that summer in 1980 when Harry first uttered his “maximize the differences” maxim. This was the royal road to “shedding the ugly green frog-skin of hetero imitation,” an ungainly slogan he first used at the Arizona Gathering and which, in the months and years that followed, became our mantra. But to do it right, to truly escape the heterosexual hegemony, we needed a sanctuary. In Harry’s words:
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.
The sanctuary would be located on land to be held in trust and preserved in a natural state, in perpetuity. It would not merely serve as a site for Gatherings, although that would certainly happen. Its main purpose was to provide a home for a collective of Radical Faeries—a Faerie Family of Conscious Choice—pursuing queer spiritual studies and practices day in and day out. The breakthroughs that awaited us at the frontiers of subject-subject consciousness—Harry’s term for the unique way of perceiving and interacting with the world he believed the Faeries bore witness to—could only be achieved through intense practice and deep interpersonal commitments. What lay ahead of us was nothing less than the re-examination of “every system of thought heretofore developed, every Hetero-male-evolved subject-object philosophy, science, religion, mythology, political system, language....”
These breakthroughs would take the form not only of ideas and insights, but, in Harry’s words, “visions and visitations.” When the Faeries at the first Gathering embraced the hidden dimensions of their inner selves, Harry wrote, “The explosive energies released by the jubilations of those reunions were ecstatic beyond belief.”
Membership in the on-site collective—the Circle of Loving Companions, a name Harry had first used in the 1960s—was not open. Those who would join had to demonstrate commitment and be accepted by consensus of the existing community. Behind Harry’s back we often called the project the “Faerie monastery.” But I signed up for the duration and in early 1981 became a member of the Faerie Land Trust collective, along with Mark Thompson and my partner Bradley Rose. In Harry’s master plan, laid out that afternoon in Colorado, a network of Faerie land trusts and sanctuaries would one day dot the land, growing soybeans and quinoa, building rammed-earth huts and yurts and generating electricity for their computers from falling water and windmills. (Actually, we didn’t have personal computers yet in 1980—Harry added that later.)
“Do you realize,” Harry wrote in March 1979, with his effusive punctuation, “that—with all our hard work over the last three years and our gratifying breakthroughs in Gay-conscious thinking—we may actually be on our way to learning...AS FAIRIES...TO LEVITATE!” When the car I was riding in back to the airport following the Arizona Gathering broke down on a dirt road miles from the freeway, we formed a Faerie circle around it, closed our eyes and chanted. The car started on the next try and we were on our way again. Faeries were reporting collective visions at Gatherings and Gatherings were transforming lives. Suddenly, everyone had a new name and an amazing story to tell.
Back in San Francisco, I began having dreams of levitating.
Something was about to happen.
And lo, much has happened!
In the three decades since that circle in the desert, the Faeries have been busy. Without any form of institutionalization above the local level, Faeries and their friends have created sanctuaries and retreats in Oregon, Tennessee, New Mexico, Canada, Australia and, I’m told, France! Various websites and informal events in nearly every major city provide an entrée for those ready to spread their wings and discover, as one Faerie put it, that there’s more we can do with our sexuality than just accept it. Many creative and busy souls have found inspiration dancing with the Faeries. The spirit of the Gatherings has been captured and shared widely by writers and artists such as James Broughton, Mark Thompson, Andrew Ramer, Toby Johnson, Randy Conner, Franklin Abbott, Agnes De Garron, Dan Nicoletta, Richard Feather Anderson, Charlie Murphy and teachers and mentors such as Clyde Hall and Joseph Kramer. (Goddess forgive me for all those I’ve forgotten to mention!) Cross-fertilizations connect the Faeries with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Black Leather Wings and Billy community, the Comfort and Joy camp at Burning Man and publications such as White Crane, RFD and the Faerie Dish Rag. Indeed, thanks to Eric Slades’ documentary film of Harry’s life, Hope Along the Wind, and occasional vignettes in the popular media (a Queer As Folk episode featured a character based on Harry), the Faeries have gained a toehold in the American popular consciousness.
But above all, the Faeries have held Gatherings, faithfully following the magical spell that the organizers of those first events taught us. Tap your heels three times. Find a safe, natural space, away from urban centers, free from prying heterosexual eyes and ears. Put out the call. And when the tribe has gathered, close the gate behind you. Begin to function, for a few days, as a community of equals. Decide by consensus; feed, shelter and care for each other; listen to stories without judgment; create rituals and get nonlinear; strip off “the ugly green frog skin,” “slip the ego”—and when you do all these things you will surely soar!
At Faerie Gatherings, gay and queer men find out who they might be, how they might talk and walk and adorn their bodies, what might be the feelings they could share if, for one moment, judgment, rejection, condescension, or the ever-present threat of violence did not hang over their heads.
But the Faeries have an importance that reaches far beyond these all too brief interludes, for they are the bearers of an alternative version of queer history, one that mainstream GLBT historians have neglected. This genealogy addresses one of the fundamental questions facing modern homosexuals. Given the institutionalized homophobia of Western culture, the absence of gays from its stories of the past, how do we find insight into the meaning of our difference? How do we answer the questions that Harry proposed to the Mattachine founders in 1950 (America’s first grassroots gay organization) and again to the Faeries in 1979:
Who are we? Where did we come from? What are we for?
Many mainstream GLBT scholars today, for reasons of “theory,” say we have no proper history and cannot claim one; that what we are is a socially constructed identity, a kind of fiction, with no essence beyond a label. This is the logic of assimilationism: the only difference between ourselves and heterosexuals is what we do in bed.
But Faeries have answers to these questions. Faced with Western history’s blank pages, we look beyond and find ample evidence of queer social roles in which sexual and gender differences are not only expressed but integral. Many times these roles encompass religious and creative activities. And some of those who bore these identities contributed to all our histories.
The most well known examples are the Native North American two-spirits. Referred to as “berdaches” in the anthropological literature, two-spirits were males and females (and no doubt inter-sexed individuals as well) who occupied an alternative gender role that was neither male nor female. Often, they served as religious leaders and shamans. For Harry, two-spirits were the premier example of how being queer could be the basis for a distinct social contribution. He devoted many years to learning whatever he could about these traditions.
Now we know of many other alternative gender roles and identities, in Oceania, Asia and Africa and in cultures that preceded or survived the rise of the patriarchy in the Old World. A fruitful field awaits Faerie researchers who will uncover more about these remarkable people and their stories.
The other important historical lineage of the Faeries is represented by the writings that were so avidly photocopied and passed around at the early events. Some of these authors, like Harry Hay and Edward Carpenter—are acknowledged pioneers of gay rights, but without the interest of the Faeries their contributions to gay spirituality and psychology might be forgotten. Other key writers in the Faerie canon include John Addington Symonds, Gerald Heard, Arthur Evans and Judy Grahn. In the 1970s, Don Kilhefner gathered together many of these texts for his “Voices and Visions” workshop; several appear in Mark Thompson’s Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning and Harry’s collection Radically Gay.
Standing at the head of this lineage is the mercurial figure of Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s poetry, same-sex love and desire give rise to an exalted, universal form of consciousness, which is described with the imagery of a shamanic trance. For Harry, Whitman was always our most important teacher. Without role models or traditions, Whitman found spiritual expression for his homosexuality through reflection on his own nature and on the deepest yearnings of the American experiment. Same-sex love, he believed, was distinguished from heterosexual love by the sameness and equality of those it united. Whitman called this adhesive love. Harry, drawing on twentieth-century advances in psychology and sociology, took these insights one step further, giving a name to the distinct mode of awareness this love of sames and equals fosters—subject-subject consciousness.
I’m not sure many heard Harry’s call to “maximize the differences” that rainy day in Colorado. Perhaps the thunder drowned out his words. I suspect many Faeries simply found it too separatist, too in-your-face. I did not hear Harry repeat it often, whereas “shedding the ugly green frog skin of hetero-imitation” remained among his favorite catchphrases.
The Faerie Land Trust had a similar fate. The self-governing collective of Faerie adepts it envisioned struck many as elitist. Since the project needed the material support of Faerie brothers in the urban centers, this made it impractical. By 1982 the project crashed and burned, the collective in disarray. From its ashes arose Nomenus, the organization that has successfully operated the Faerie Sanctuary at Wolf Creek for the past twenty-five years.
I played a role in transforming the Faerie Land Trust into Nomenus. In retrospect, I find myself wondering what we gave up as well as what we gained. The “gay monastery” of Harry’s vision was to have been a place of study and introspection, an exploration of collective living, where Faeries, each with distinct interests and talents, would be in heart-circle mode 24/7. Brad and I got some small glimpse of what this would be like by living with Harry and John for six months in 1982. It was a heady experience of nonstop conversation, reading, cooking, Harry taping music from the radio into the wee hours of the night, John building his kaleidoscopes in the workshop, while Brad and I practiced applied meditation in the camper parked in the driveway.
Could it be that after all these years there are still dimensions of Faerie experience and insight yet to be discovered? “Let us enter this brave new world of subject-subject consciousness, this new planet of Fairy-vision and find out,” Harry wrote in 1970.
For those seeking a road map for the next thirty years, I humbly suggest that we start with a re-engagement with our dual lineages: the heritage of alternative gender roles and the writings that inspired the early Gatherings.
Here I must begin with a complaint. Too often at Gatherings of Faeries (and others!) one hears Native two-spirit roles spoken of in the most sweeping generalities, as if the tradition existed everywhere, in every tribe, in precisely the same form and that it was universally accepted. In fact, two-spirit roles have been documented in only 150 of the estimated 400 tribes that occupied North America at the time Columbus arrived. Each tribe had its own word for the role—lhamana at Zuni, winkte among Dakota speakers, he’eman in Cheyenne, bote in Crow and so forth. From tribe to tribe the characteristics of these roles varied a great deal. We are fortunate knowing the life stories of such traditional two-spirits as We’wha, Hastiin Klah and Osh-Tisch. These were remarkable individuals with abilities our Western mindset cannot fully explain. But not all two-spirits were remarkable and not all tribes had such gender roles or tolerated homosexuality. That’s why, when I speak of two-spirits, I try to refer to the traditions of specific tribes that I have taken the time to study and to use tribal terms for them (even at the risk of mispronouncing them).
As the film Two Spirits powerfully reveals, Native American LGBT people often face virulent homophobia within their communities, where two-spirit traditions have been broken or forgotten. If the Faeries truly wish to affirm the Native two-spirit tradition, they need to find concrete ways to support contemporary Natives seeking to restore this tradition and provide essential services to their brothers and sisters.
Harry himself never advocated imitation of two-spirits or any other Native American tradition or ceremony. In his view, two-spirit people were embedded within specific cultural contexts. Their magic, which could be powerful in that context, simply would not work in ours. And so he would say and I can hear his words now, “If we can’t rediscover…reinvent.”
This is the real lesson Harry learned from his years working with Native people. In an oral culture, tradition is reinvented in each generation and he observed many instances of Native people seeking to restore broken traditions by doing just that. But ultimately, Harry believed we had to turn to ourselves and each other and draw out of our own experience, using the language of our own time and place, the meaning and purpose of our sexuality.
To my thinking, Harry’s concept of subject-subject consciousness remains his most important and beautiful gift. Many Faeries may not realize that when they pass a talisman in Heart Circles, allowing each person time to speak without interruption or competition, when they listen intently to each others’ stories for hours on end, when they make decisions, painstakingly, following the principles of consensus, they are observing practices that were inspired by the idea of subject-subject consciousness. For Harry, these customs were merely the etiquette that served to create, in the short span of the Gathering, space for the truly mystical dimensions of subject-subject consciousness to unfold.
Now I see that Harry’s call to maximize the differences was not misfired but merely premature. Back then we hardly knew what we were for and what our differences were, let alone have the means for maximizing them in the face of the dominant culture. Now we have the words and the exemplars we need to describe our differences. The challenge is to fully actualize them and this requires that we focus our attention on them intently, discuss them, share them and act them out in safe settings. I can think of no better maxim to guide this exploration than the one Harry offered in 1980.
Maximizing the differences is the touchstone to a hero’s journey—a journey we are called to, not only by our own inner voice, but by the times we live in. It begins with a separation from a culture that has denied and repressed us and a turning inward to find within our psyches that which precedes patriarchal socialization—what has escaped it and survived. We must relinquish lingering, residual attachments to the approval of others—take the risk of rejection, of being incomprehensible—and move forward believing that there is still something more to know about being gay. Maximize the differences leads us on a quest into unfamiliar inner spaces and faraway times and places. But in due course, the separation realized, we return to the larger community empowered fully to contribute what we distinctly have to share.
Welcome to Planet Faerie! The preface is over; now the story begins.
Call to Devotions
Come forth brother souls
claim your liberty
Time for devotion
time to fraternize
Bring your orbits
into harmony
Time to plant starseed
in one another’s eyes
Cavort together
in singular twos
firm in your footloose
crazy in your wise
Comrades come forth
hurdle the taboos
Joy will be the wonder
love the surprise
— James Broughton
—Faerie Roots—
The Making of a Tribe
by Stuart Timmons
Remember, the serpent is still living in the Garden of Eden—only the heterosexual couple was expelled.
— Edward Carpenter, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure
In the Faerie circle, each man’s story matched down to the subtlest details. The green meadow, the blue sky, and their very bodies seemed to glow as each shared early memories of feeling different. They had always been called sissies, but they always knew that they were somehow strong. And however many years they had been out of the closet—succeeding in business, in organizing or in the bars—they felt that until they found the Faeries, something had been missing.
A carved talisman was passed around the circle, and where it stopped the group’s undivided attention focused. A delicate black man wearing only a sparkling scarf and hiking boots took the talisman into the circle and while walking slowly, addressed the ring of two hundred. “We Faeries need to stop saying, ‘My consciousness is better than your consciousness.’ That’s heterosexist. No one person, no one group, no one ideology has the answer. You need a spirit.”
It was the search for such a spirit that had led them all there, including Harry Hay. A short time after he had gone into retirement, he was out again, and was part of the circle—in fact he had worked hard to call it into being. Privately, he regarded the Radical Faeries, as this new phenomenon of gay identity came to be known, to be a flowering of the Circle of Loving Companions, a joint quest for an adhesive gay comradeship. The Radical Faeries responded to the emptiness of both the straight establishment and assimilated gay society. Those who flocked to the Faerie gatherings had found little distinction between the two—to them, both were oppressive, shallow, and mired in such macho value as male competitiveness and dominance. Don Kilhefner, who with Harry helped create the Faeries, wrote that “gay activism has given us a little breathing space” from the stifling decades of oppression. It was the aim of the Faeries to find out what could grow in that new atmosphere.
The spirit seemed to flow through the circle. A heavy-set, gray-haired man wearing a floppy hat stepped into its midst and told of his career as a lawyer. “I deal every day with people who fight with each other—and they’re all he-men. Policemen who abuse power. Judges. And because I am a Faerie, I feel great pain in that world.” He struggled momentarily with his emotion, then continued. “All of those people are he-men. I come to my fellow Faeries because I need the love that I get here. And so many times in the gay world I do not get that. I get the same kind of alienation that I get in the world of he-men.”
A young, hardened street person from San Diego spoke. A long strand of bells stretching from his neck to his left sandal strap tinkled in the still mountain air when he walked. He offered the Circle a verse from Jean Genet: “Faeries are a pale and motley race that flowers in the minds of decent folk. Never will they be entitled to broad daylight, to real sun. But remote in these limbos, they cause curious disasters which are harbingers of new beauty.”
The crowd whooped and applauded. A voice called out, “Right on, Madame Genet!”
When the Circle closed, the men came together, arm-in-arm, body-to-body, and a deep om began to sound, vibrating through the huddle of men, each more completely a living part of the Circle. Male voices rose in humming harmony and the sound gained momentum, like dozens of fingers on wineglasses. As they dispersed, flute music played as if from a sylvan sound track. Voices accompanying it sang: Dear friends, queer friends, let me tell you how I’m feeling/You have given me such pleasure, I love you so.
The Radical Faeries, like their mythological antecedents, cannot be easily defined or pinned down. A mixture of a political alternative, a counter-culture and a spirituality movement, the Faeries became Harry’s “second wind” as a major figure in gay culture and found him enmeshed in a new kind of organizing—a networking of gentle men devoted to the principles of ecology, spiritual truth, and, in New Age terms, “gay-centeredness.”
The term “movement” could not contain what the Faeries were all about; in fact Harry carefully avoided that term at first. He saw the Faeries rather as a process or way of life. Just as he took to describing gays as “not-men,” the Radical Faeries could be called a “not-movement.” One early participant, David Liner, attempted to explain the phenomenon thus: “What Harry Hay did was give thousands of gay men the space to get over the most painful wounds that this society could possibly inflict on them.”
It was Harry’s idea to couple the words Radical and Faerie, and the combination was carefully chosen. “Radical,” in this case, meant “root” or “essence” as well as “politically extreme.” The term “faerie” also had two meanings, one modern and one ancient. In recent times “fairy” was a scornful epithet, but one that many gay men were now re-evaluating. (Parallels of this in other minorities include “Chicano” and “black,” which both began as pejorative terms.) The ancient fairy, on the other hand, was an immortal, luminous nature spirit who danced in circles in the moonlight and did good deeds at whim. By combining these meanings, the Radical Faeries expressed one of their basic tenets, the oft-bandied notion that gays are a spiritual tribe.1
Harry always used the antique spelling in what seemed an effective visual reminder that this was a new—or at least resurrected—meaning of the word. The potency of the image came partly from its mythic heritage. In selecting fairies as a role model for gays, he combined logic with inspiration to surpass the medieval Mattachines—to a pre-Christian time and beyond human limits.
Harry’s thinking on this had evolved over several years and reflected an obsession with homosexual semantics that had concerned him since the Mattachine days. In 1969, in a speech commemorating the 150th birthday of Walt Whitman, he had wrestled with the old problem of a lack of language to describe who gays were instead of who they were not. He wrote, “What had bedeviled Gays and Lesbians in particular was that, from the very first days of the re-invention of ‘Gay Identity,’ we kept trying to explain in STRAIGHT language…and it kept coming out all wrong...which is the Butch and which is the Femme? Which one does the dishes? Our explanations seemed to raise more questions than they answered.” Over many years he considered a basic question: Since gays had always organized in reaction to the brutish forces of oppression, could not a newer, greater wave of the movement base itself on an essential nature of gay people?2
The following year, in his keynote address to the Western Homophile Conference on February 14, 1970, Harry coined a new phrase to explain gay people in new terms. “We are a minority of a common spirituality,” he said, “[and] this shared commonality of outlook is a world-view totally unfamiliar to the accrued experience of our parent society. It is a view of the life experience through a DIFFERENT WINDOW!” The term he soon settled on—and with which he liberally sprinkled his discourse—was “Gay Window.” At the end of that address, he slipped in the word “faerie” as a positive description of gay people. “Let the Spirit be betrayed, let coercion or opportunism bind us against our will, and PRESTO, like the Faeries of Folk-lore, suddenly we are no longer there.” He sensed that this quality of quicksilver elusiveness explained why a gay movement had gone unorganized for so long, noting, “Our Faerie characteristic is our Homosexual Minority’s central weakness.” But, he added, “paradoxically, [It is] also the keystone to our enduring strength…We Homosexuals are moved to act ONLY when the call—as heard in our hearts—is a spirit call to freedom.”
By the time he moved to New Mexico from his life-long, Los Angeles home in May 1970 Harry freely promoted the term “Faerie” as well as “Gay Window” and “Gay Consciousness,” all with related theories. He pondered, researched and started paper after paper about these ideas; often he was unable to get beyond the first page.
Meanwhile, the gay public, from which Harry had retreated, was evolving. The counterculture wave of the 1960s, with its open-minded spirit, hit gay people in the 1970s and the emerging gay community became a bubbling laboratory of names and identities. Long-familiar words such as “queer” and “queen” were tried out, along with newer ones like “groovy guy.” The most enduring proved to be “gay,” although in some regions, the militant “faggot” was a close second.
Sometimes there was an air of competition; in San Francisco, gays known as the Sissies professed disdain for those they called STIFs—straight-identified faggots. Genderfuck, an outrageous form of costume combining exaggerated signals from male and female—such as a beard, bouffant hairdo, and glittering Kabuki eye makeup, all on one person—was employed as a cultural guerilla attack on rigid sex roles. As the decade turned, gender-fuck groups like The Cockettes and the Angels of Light spoofed political events with camp, consciousness-raising spectaculars in both San Francisco and New York.
At the same time, popular interest in non-Western spirituality was growing, as epitomized by the Beatles’ pilgrimage to the Maharishi. This cultural drift affected gays too. In 1976 writer Arthur Evans mingled radical politics and pagan models to begin “the faery circle” in his Haight Street apartment in San Francisco, where a dozen men explored the Dionysian tradition of “the magic of nature and the creative sexuality of gay men.” The faery circle was part of Evans’ research into the spiritual history of gay men which he published as several articles in the gay journals Out and Fag Rag and in the book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978).3
As the 1970s wore on “gay ghettos” sprouted in cities across America. These rapidly expanding gay neighborhoods were quickly seized upon by an army of entrepreneurs; both gay-owned and straight-owned ventures sought to exploit the new territory. The gay community became the gay market. So many gay businesses eventually formed that gay business councils formed around them.
The new-style resident of the gay ghetto was the “clone,” a close descendant of the straight-identified faggot. In the sexually active age-bracket, the clone was athletic, square-jawed and swinging. His trumpeted masculinity was almost caricature: muscles, mustache, mirrored “cop” sunglasses, bomber jacket and boots became a veritable uniform for the scores of gay men so identified. (The gay painter Buddha John Parker christened this rampant new breed as “male impersonators.”)
Fashions, urban hot-spots, and in that pre-AIDS decade, sex itself were steadily packaged by ever-creative marketers. Because their gay identities had been delayed, clones were perfect consumers, ever living out long-suppressed fantasies. This emphasized such a restless, materialist outlook that many gay men complained that the chase from object to object tainted their ability to achieve intimacy in relationships. The dubious ideal of the clone was, in reality, only a high-profile minority of homosexuals. Nevertheless it was widely emulated.
Some clone-weary gays retreated from ghetto life. Big cities, the traditional “end of the rainbow” for gay men, had for years offered anonymity and opportunity to those fleeing small towns and stifling straight society. But as the 1970s progressed, a few began to leave the cities, some carried by the hippie back-to-the-land movement, some just burned out from urban excess. Though they hardly constituted an organized group, rural gays had established several collectives by the mid-1970s.
One of the most long-lasting was the RFD collective, founded in Iowa in 1974. When the countercultural Mother Earth News refused to run an ad with a gay reference, this seven-member group began a home-spun publication that sold for fifty cents: RFD: A Magazine for Country Faggots. While protesting the “adamant heterosexuality” of existing rural magazines, RFD also provided recipes, poetry, farming information, and pictures for isolated gay people living on the land. RFD took its name from the postal designation Rural Free Delivery, but extended it every issue to “Really Feeling Divine,” “Raving Flamer’s Diary,” “Rabbits, Faggots and Dragonflies” and further amusing titles. The contributors and readers of RFD overlapped substantially with those gays who would soon call themselves Faeries; gatherings of rural gay men were already advertised in its pages during the 1970s. However, the favored term at RFD was “faggot.”
The piece Hay sent to RFD in 1975, which he dedicated to his mother, was the first of many of his writings that RFD would publish. Poetically written, it discussed gayness as a genetic mutation difficult for the individual but ultimately beneficial to the group. “To be a true homosexual,” he proposed, “is to be…put at odds with home, school, and society…We are so other that we have to learn early how to protect our very survival.” He finally called for “Gay love, Gay life, Gay vision, and Gay creative self-fulfillment.” His conclusion that gayness lay in “our stubbornly perverse genes” elicited a lively commentary from the publishing collective.
One member, Carl Wittman, provided the most supportive response. Revealing the depth of Harry’s challenge, he wrote, “I yearn for such words. I am embarrassed to use them. Who talks of vision, light, splendor and strength? It certainly would not do, not on Castro Street or in the pages of Fag Rag … The notion of foundling, growing up a foreigner in family and culture, and returning to the larger whole—this notion I put on gently, like a new robe, wondering if it becomes me.” He found that the concepts in Harry’s essay “fit,” though Wittman still expressed some doubts. “But politically, is it misleading? Where are my hard-won ideas about separatism, confrontation, group consciousness? Isn’t it a bit spiritual, ignoring the real needs to unite politically? I reread it and decide not… Yes. Brothers from New Mexico, thank you.”
Harry held the affirmation from Wittman especially dear. Carl Wittman was a Red Diaper baby who had grown up to be national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and was highly visible and effective in the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements. Wittman became a Gay Liberation celebrity for his Gay Manifesto which he wrote a year before the Stonewall riot and which was widely published and read. Hay and Wittman’s interest in a political analysis of the gay movement were close and they later developed a friendship and correspondence.
The following year, 1976, Harry refined these ideas even further 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. This self-described “position paper” was inspired by a bitter exchange of letters he read in the alternative press between a young gay Leftist and his straight comrades in the Pacific Northwest. Distressed that struggles between gays and the Left continued twenty-five years after his own separation from the Communist Party, Harry wrote a letter to Faygele Singer, the embattled gay Leftist, hoping to comfort him with “newer levels of Marxist perceptions which were emerging in me as gay values.”
Harry used personal experiences to illustrate his points and halfway through recalled his peers in high school manipulating their opposite-sex dates like objects 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. “I ripped the letter out of the typewriter and began to write the position paper.”
“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 similar.
It went on to pervade all the relationships of a gay person—even relationships with things not human, such as nature, craftsmanship or ideals. “Humanity must expand its experience of thinking of another not as object—to be used, to be manipulated, to be mastered, to be CONSUMED—but as subject— as another like himher [sic] self, another self to be respected, to be appreciated, to be cherished.”
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 non-competitiveness and creativity, characteristics often observed in gay people, made gays naturally suited to guide this change in thinking:
Natural selection, early on in human evolution, set into the revolving whirl a small percentage of beings who appeared to counter-balance 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.
To Harry this “GAY gift” was a difference in consciousness that could introduce new ideas necessary for human survival. In the 1950s he had argued that in the ancient world it was the gays who passed on certain craft skills with greater devotion than heterosexual family lineages, whose blood devotions surpassed all other. This sort of role in favor of cultural evolution always shifting with changing social needs, was, he suggested, the biosocial reason for gays—and could be used as their political justification. Hay concluded his essay by calling on “Gay Liberation Faeries” to “reassemble” and help society at large “learn to respect us precisely for our behavioral and perceptual differences… [then] the laws and customs favoring us with Space and Freedom…will take care of themselves.”
This paper served as more than one milestone for Hay. Aside from achieving a theory for gay identity—a goal toward which he had long worked—it showed a rare distancing from his past political ideas. By moving beyond the “binary” basis of Marxist dialectical thinking (where opposites of thesis and antithesis produce a new truth), Harry was able to release some of his loyalties to Marxist formulas. His paper bemoaned that Marx and Engels, who he said were of “exemplar integrity,” had been born too soon to reorient their theories in the light of the Twentieth-century discoveries—an oblique and polite bow away from his idols who, like so much of the rest of the world, had shut out gays.4
Harry Hay’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.
Hay submitted his paper for publication to RFD. “They rejected it as gobbledygook,” he shrugged to a friend in a letter, and indeed, his eccentric use of mixed typefaces with italics and capital letters could be visually wearying, as was his insistence on writing “subject-subject” to emphasize his new idea. Harry continued to send copies to friends and colleagues and promoted its ideas at every opportunity.
Hay’s most receptive listeners were two Californians, Don Kilhefner of Los Angeles and Mitch Walker of Berkeley. By 1978, along with Harry, they formed the cabal that would catalyze the Radical Faerie movement. Since Hay was then sixty-six, Kilhefner thirty-nine and Walker twenty-five, they spanned the generations. Their personalities held strong parallels but also striking differences.
Kilhefner was known for shouting down anti-gay bigots at public events but when it came to friends, he mildly addressed everyone as “Toots.” He had grown up in an Amish-Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, left at seventeen and went to Howard University, where he studied cultural history. He came out at Howard and became active in anti-Vietnam War campaigns and in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the civil rights movement. Following graduation came a stint in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, then a move west to U.C.L.A. By the late-1960s he was involved in the Peace and Freedom Party and carried Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. With Morris Kight (also in the Peace and Freedom Party), Don led the main activities of the Gay Liberation Front, which lasted from late 1969 to 1971.