I attended Over the Rainbow, an LGBTQ+ History Month conversation between Simon Fanshawe and Mark Simpson hosted at Verdurin, a cultural project space in east London, by art curator and critic Pierre d’Alancaisez.
Simon and Mark are veterans of the Gay Liberation movement – Mark was part of the grassroots Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group in the mid 1980s, went on in the ’90s to establish himself as a commentator on gay life with his controversial book Anti-Gay, a collection of essays by authors including Peter Tatchell that strongly critiqued the way that the gay community was developing. Simon Fanshawe, comedian and commentator, a hero of the gay movement having been a co-founder of Stonewall, and famous for being critical of the organisation for its recent ‘ideological’ campaigns. After leaving Stonewall Simon was one of the founders of the LGB Alliance, a group that is condemned by many queer people as transphobic and divisive. Simon has since left the Alliance, and in his comments tonight I certainly did not sense any transphobic attitudes. On the contrary he strikes me as a well-intentioned champion of diversity.
When Mark spoke about his book Anti-Gay it was clear he and the other authors in it were being deliberately provocative with a good intention – to make gay people think more deeply about who they are. But the year that book was published I was reading a book on that very subject written with a rather different approach, also featuring contributions from a number of gay thinkers. Gay Soul by Mark Thompson features interviews with queer pioneers including Joseph Kramer, Harry Hay, James Broughton, Andrew Harvey, Clyde Hall and Ram Dass, presenting positive views of gay nature and the spiritual potential queer people carry. This set my path clearly for me, and for the past 2 decades since recovering from AIDS I have been creating spaces for queer people to meet and explore that side of who we are. I am a Radical Faerie activist,and an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival. I host a monthly Full Moon night of drumming and dancing, the Queer Spirit Circle, in Vauxhall.
When Gay Soul and Anti-Gay came out I was living with full-blown AIDS and mentally preparing myself to leave this lifetime. Having been a firm atheist since teenage years I suddenly found myself pulled into a spiritual quest (after a decade on a sexual and romantic quest), wanting to know why I existed in the first place, and on that journey my sexuality suddenly revealed itself to be a doorway to my soul, for it is through erotic love with men that I find ecstatic connection, joy and artistic, divine inspiration. The conversations in Gay Soul enlivened my spirit and set me on a path to discover the spiritual secrets of my queer nature. AIDS brought many of us to place of transformation – I call it my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self. I became a walker-between-the-worlds, which history shows us queer people have always been. In its critique of gay culture, Anti-Gay seemed to not consider the incredible pain and loss people had experienced in the past decade, and blind to the incredible growth of community spirit, compassion, and self-consciousness that the AIDS years had engendered, the spiritual energy it released in us.
The two veteran campaigners, now aged 68 and 59, spoke of their frustrations with recent LGBTQ+ campaigning. Simon explained his view that queer activism has shifted away from its roots, which were about gaining equal rights and acceptance in society, into an ideologically motivated attempt to ‘educate’ society about gender and diversity, an education society was not seeking. This has brought a new wave of hostility towards LGBTQ people, and opened up conflict within our own community.
Mark expressed his bewilderment with the situation by highlighting the evolution of the rainbow flag from Gilbert Baker’s 1978 design into the plethora of modern variations and the sensory-overload of the multi-coloured ‘Progress Pride’ flag. Gilbert’s original design had included pink – apparently for sex, but surely that’s red, pink is actually the colour of love and compassion, qualities queer people have in abundance. Equal marriage could be said to be a recognition of our loving relationships, but our compassionate nature is massively unacknowledged, yet was powerfully visible during the AIDS crisis; and also turquoise, representing magic and art. Mark shared this observing that Gilbert was ‘a bit of a hippy’, to a predictable, pre-programmed chortle from most of the audience (unaware this new age pagan hippy was waiting in the audience for his moment to drop an unexpected URANIAN comment into the proceedings!).
In the six band rainbow flag that became our united symbol for decades we lost the references to compassion and magic, but we had a united, simple symbol that already included everyone, that’s the point of the rainbow! Spirit – violet – was still in it, but little discussed amongst us! (But we know we got spirit! That’s why our parties, our scenes are so vibrant, why we make great art and music, why we dress so well!)
In the past decade there has been an explosion in flag designs, possibly encouraging the sense that we are separate groups that do not belong under one rainbow. Mark highlighted and puzzled over the ‘abrosexual flag’, which has green, white and pink stripes (it’s a very recent design). An abrosexual experiences their sexual identity fluctuating over time, often very rapidly between different desires. Mark scratched his head. His horror at the sci-fi, almost totalitarian look of the Progress Pride flag was apparent.
I appreciated their points but with reservations. In conversation with Simon before the evening kicked off I was surprised to discover he seemed to know nothing of the global history and tradition of ‘3rd-gender’ people being respected in their cultures for their spiritual gifts. So long repressed in western world, people think gender fluidity is a recent development. Simon is a big fan of biology, and mistakenly believes that biology proves the gender binary is ‘reality’. Simon, we are not simply physical creatures, we are also emotional, mental and spiritual beings. We are actually each a mix of masculine and feminine, physically and psychologically. Every fetus actually starts out female, ie everyone is part feminine! When free to be ourselves, queer men can be an example of the divine masculine in society – men deeply in touch with their feminine side! Some people are a truly balanced blend of male and female – the androgyne is an innate, constant, trait in humanity, that can re-emerge now because of the safer atmosphere that Gay Liberation has created. We can learn from pre-Christian cultures around the world that androgynous, hermaphroditic and ‘3rd-gender’ people have always existed. There is simply no need to limit everyone to two identities, on that front biological determinacy is as closed minded and authoritarian as medieval Christianity.
In ancient and medieval Europe medical text books wrote of 3 genders, male, female and hermaphrodite. Edward Carpenter, over a century ago, used the term ‘intermediate types’ and wrote of their spiritual role in ancient cultures and around the world. He and others wrote back then that the reason the Hebrews and later the Christian culture turned against gender-variant and same-sex loving people was because we had held prominent positions in the pagan cultures. The modern Gay Liberation movement, riding on the secular wave of consciousness that gave us the opportunity for liberation to happen, has avoided tackling the religious roots of homophobia. But our Liberation journey will not be complete until we take it all the way home to our souls – spiritual liberation from the after effects of centuries of religious condemnation is the next step for our global community.
Surely trans people today are simply asking for the same thing that gay men and lesbians demanded in the 1970s – recognition of our validity as people, our right to live in safety, free to express ourselves authentically and to love whomever we wish to. If some trans campaigners seem to be asking for more than this, let’s remember that in the early days of the Gay Liberation Front there were some who sought the annihilation of the traditional family, thereby totally frightening the straights. Those fierce activists were projecting their personal wounds onto the whole movement, and some queers do that today. I would like to see queer elders lightening up about what how the new generations are steering the ship. It’s too easy to fall into the grumpy old man archetype. Let’s ask the question – why is there a massive surge of questioning around gender going on? What is there to learn from it?
The answers are not biological.
What is our movement if not one of self-discovery, liberation and realisation? It’s really not about LGB being sexual identities and T being a gender identity – it’s about the fact that all us have been persecuted, our nature suppressed, by the Christian establishment for centuries. Psychology from the late C19 followed the established pattern, labelling all queer people as sick until very recent times. We’ve had to fight hard for the freedoms we’ve gained but there’s further to go.
There’s a surge of gender fluidity in the world because a long suppressed trait is able to re-emerge in a world made safer thanks to the work of pioneers of gay liberation.
The result of the lack of awareness of this in the wider LGBTQ+ community is that some gay men and lesbians feel no kinship with trans people and prepared to kick them under the bus, forgetting that it is exactly the subversion of gender roles that underlies homophobia as much as it does transphobia.
History shows us that ‘third gender ‘ people have existed in all cultures of the world, often associated with creativity, healing and magic – the turquoise band, and with spirit – the violet band of the rainbow flag, one that is still there. The Native Americans understood that a person who was born both female and male was also a bridge between people and spirit. In ancient Europe it was the same. The trans priestesses and gay priests served in the pagan temples until the Christian armies wiped them out. Not long after that they started burning gay men, because same sex love was associated with the pagan past and because rulers were determined to suppress ‘feminine’ traits in men as patriarchal cultures were established that wiped out the old cultures of the Goddess and fiercely dominated and controlled women.
Gay liberation needs to study its history. We’re a much older people than almost anyone on the planet realises. We’ve always had our part to play.
As Over The Rainbow was drawing to a close, I got my moment to be the suprise Uranian bolt out of the blue, injecting the idea that spiritual liberation is the next step for our movement. The natural, authentic, gender, sexual and spiritual expressions of LGBTQ+ people have been attacked for centuries — but our ancestors have often made massive impacts of culture, and we’re such a powerful people that in just 4 decades we have gained sexual, social, political freedoms, the change is massive and we need to reflect on that, as Mark Simpson was trying to get us to do in the mid 90s, rather than get lost arguing over what are really just ideas and opinions, then get ready for the next step.
Liberation is ultimately a spiritual concept and experience, and our collective spirit is damaged – our gentle queer hearts minds and spirits are damaged and still polluted by centuries of religious (and legal, social and scientific) homophobia. This is patently visible in the drug fuelled mental health crisis going on in the gay male sexual underworld right now – with addiction destroying lives and overdoses removing people from the game in a way reminiscent of the AIDS years – but this harsh, sad, painful fact of gay life at the moment GOT NO MENTION at this evening of discussion about the state of LGBTQ+ activism.
Due to past religious conditioning, some queers think spirituality means depriving themselves of pleasure, so they veer away. Quite the opposite is true, spirituality teaches us how to get more out of pleasure, and I would love gay men to be discussing this sage, spiritual advice that Edward Carpenter left us in his 1908 book The Intermediate Sex:
“Sex-pleasures afford a kind of type of all pleasure. The dissatisfaction which at times follows on them is the same as follows on all pleasure which is sought, and which does not come unsought. The dissatisfaction is not in the nature of pleasure itself but in the nature of seeking. In going off in pursuit of things external, the “I” (since it really has everything and needs nothing) deceives itself, goes out from its true home, tears itself asunder, and admits a gap or rent in its own being. This, it must be supposed, is what is meant by sin–the separation or sundering of one’s being-and all the pain that goes therewith. It all consists in seeking those external things and pleasures; not (a thousand times be it said) in the external things or pleasures themselves. They are all fair and gracious enough; their place is to stand round the throne and offer their homage-rank behind rank in their multitudes-if so be we will accept it. But for us to go out of ourselves to run after them, to allow ourselves to be divided and rent in twain by their attraction, that is an inversion of the order of heaven.”
Busy focussed on some apparent radical gender ideology infiltrating and dividing our rainbow community, are activists today ignoring the harsh truth that gay men are still suffering -and dying- from the after effects of centuries of homophobic attitudes – and avoiding questions like why are lesbians barely visible in the community and have so few social spaces? If we elders feel the new kids are pushing the boat out in the wrong direction we need to find a way to gently explain that to them while at the same time making the effort to listen to them, meet them where they’re at, to understand their perspective. But also remember to look at ourselves!
Gay, lesbian, bi and trans people could be taking the liberation journey we began in the 1970s all the way home to our souls, instead of getting caught up in battles with each other over identity and privilege. Liberation has sexual, political, social – and spiritual aspects, but in the end the point is surely everybody’s right to have the freedom to be themselves, to remove stigma around same-sex relationships and gender-fluidity, and LET LOVE FLOW.
Simon’s feathers seemed slightly ruffled by my input, he had declared himself an atheist to me in our earlier chat (ah how I remember those simple days! LOL – Then while living through AIDS I saw that I had actually just been avoiding the subject), but Mark I noticed referred twice to ‘soul’. Mark, please read Mark Thompson’s Gay Soul, if you haven’t by now!
As far as I can see the new ideology that we’re all supposed to bow to today is Biology. When it comes to ‘gender ideology’, I can’t relate to the idea that the current queer community is pushing some divisive ‘gender ideology’ on the world as that just isn’t my personal lived experience. It may be where the media pulls our focus, but my very queer life involves connection with literally thousands of LBGTQ+ people exploring life spiritually, shaking off religious chains and discovering the path of awakening and Self realisation. (I meet these people at Radical Faerie Gatherings around the world, Queer Spirit Festival in the UK and as admin of Gay Spiritual Men group on Facebook which has 24K members). Spiritual growth is the next step of our liberation journey and it starts with the freedom for all of us to be who we are… Gay Liberation paved the way, and its message is still vital.
But I get people’s resistance to connecting queerness and the divine – God has long been used against us. I was a hardcore atheist in my teens and twenties. AIDS pushed me into the journey of self discovery – the secular brainwashing, oops I mean education, I received as a child had convinced me not to ask questions about the meaning of life.
AIDS became my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self, the cosmic being inside all of us. HIV for me = Healing Is Vital, healing from the human condition of separation and alienation from our source, spirit. When we understand this, queer people will be able to step fully into their natural roles as healers, shamans, ritual magicians and transformational artists. We’re here to reconnect human minds and hearts to the realms of the spirit.
Edward Carpenter wrote “…as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of color, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third, as to the “God-intoxicated” Arab of the desert, a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus–so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the making of a universal consciousness?”
Carpenter was a Uranian – the word many educated late 19th century gay men preferred over the new ‘homosexual term’, because Uranian evokes our connection to the spirit, to creativity, to Heaven! Aphrodite Urania was the Goddess of Same Sex Love in the ancient world.
For those of you attuned to life’s cosmic perspective let me point out that the planet Uranus was squaring the full moon on this evening – I got to manifest a touch of revolutionary Uranian spirit at this LGBTQ history month discussion on gay activism, where the two speakers on stage were shining full moons proud of their achievements over the decades and looking down critically at the current state of LGBTQ activism. I got to be the unexpected lighning bolt coming from further out in the solar system – coming from a deeper place in our collective consciousness (which AIDS was the catalyst leading me to discover) – I noticed as I spoke that a few in the room recoiled in horror or even shook in fear as the foundations of their materialist world view trembled.
In this time of decolonisation and liberation from patriarchal attitudes there is so much wisdom about queerness to be found in non-white, pre-Christian cultures. It’s time we listened. How many queer activists know that Dagara teacher from West Africa Malidoma Some said in the 1990s:
“Why is it that, everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing, and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident. The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth sent them to heaven, wherever that is. And everyone who aspires to the gods must then negotiate with Christianity, so that the real priests and priestesses are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.”
His wife, Sobonfu Some wrote:
“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… Most people in the West define themselves and others by sexual orientation. This way of looking at gatekeepers will kill the spirit of the gatekeeper…The gatekeepers stand on the threshold of the gender line. They are mediators between the two genders. They make sure there is peace and balance between women and men…
“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. This could be one of the reasons why they would want to get married or make themselves look as though they do not have a unique purpose…”
Malidoma:
“…the thing about it is that humans are going to be begetting gatekeepers, no matter what. This is the chance that we’ve got. So maybe that means that sooner or later we’re going to wake up to the horror of our own errors, and we’re going to reconsecrate our chosen people so that they can do their priestly work as they should. Otherwise, I just don’t understand. I just don’t understand. My position about it is not so much that gays be just forgiven. That’s just tokenism. But that they serve as an example of the wrong, or the illness, that modernity has brought to us, and that we use that to begin working at healing ourselves and our society from the bottom up.” read more: https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2018/06/23/gatekeepers-gays-in-the-dagara-tribe/
The next goal of LGBTQ+ activism, in my view, should be our collective spiritual healing – for, from the indigenous, pagan and spiritual perspective, queer people are healers for the rest of the human family. A huge task huh! Fortunately, on the sidelines of the gay mainstream, groups such as Radical Faeries have been exploring the healing path of the Gay Spirit since the 1970s and have much to share. In the UK we have held 5 Queer Spirit Festivals since 2016, where, at our 5th festival in 2024, 750 people came together to enjoy nature, dive into workshops and rituals, flirt, play and celebrate our free spirited queer qualities of Love Laughter Liberty Light, and to engage and expand our healing, magical, powers.
LGBTQ activists are more than welcome to come join the fun, come back to nature with us queer ‘hippies’, come for a dose of earthy, cosmic, Uranian magic that CHANGES EVERYTHING.
I believe the next step for the LGBTQ+ movement is surely to move on from PRIDE (which we’ve always known comes before a fall) into POWER, a time of liberating our souls from religious oppression, reclaiming our spiritual gifts and learning how to use them in the world today.
rainbow messenger 