Gayness as a Spirit Path

“The sense of gayness as a Spirit path is growing. As we break out of straight mind-bindings we naturally recoil from seeing ourselves and each as either mono-sided homo-sexualists or homo-oriented straights… for many of us come revelations of feminist thought/ practice: we discover women exposing, breaking free of sado-slavery into whirling fiery gyn-ecstacies of loving magickal sister-Selves. …We discover anarcho-sissydom, life-loving faggotry and more. We begin to suspect the existence of hidden universes beyond the pale of straight space/time delusions,

“Our straight socio-cultural enculturations have blinded us. We must turn to the freer world of our imagination, fantasy, dreams, myths…. Let us build fairy mythologies – gay ways of thinking and doing – to realise and protect our loving soulful brotherhood, to reclaim our Selves, recreate our culture, regain our heritage, remember our fates as beings of Spirit, wisdom, power compassion, truthfulness, light.”

So wrote Mitch Walker in the 1970s, this was published in Visionary Love, 1980. Back in the first decade of Gay Liberation there were some men who felt that the movement was quickly assimilating into hetero-normative societal standards: “The homophile movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary. Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.” Mitch was to become one of the founders of the Radical Faerie community, which held its first gathering in Arizona in 1979, advertised with a goal of “exploring breakthroughs in gay consciousness” and “the spiritual dimensions of gayness.” Parallel to pagan lesbian feminists, such as Starhawk and Zsuzsanna Budapest, who were leading a surge of ‘spiritual feminism’ at the time, the Faeries sought to embody a new way of seeing and interacting with the world – by embracing all beings as part of a living wholeness. “All faggots are feminists, and militant ones at that. To cultivate your woman-energy, your feminism, is to increase your ability to see and walk through the great portal. In fact it’s essential.” wrote Mitch.

Harry Hay, the most well known founder of the Radical Faeries, believed that gay men were born with what he called ‘subject:SUBJECT consciousness’ – the ability to meet and treat other as self. “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… 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.”

The AIDS years from the early 1980s shifted the focus of gay activism from consciousness expansion to survival. The plague removed many men born in the 1950s and 60s from the picture – and although the Radical Faerie community has grown and spread across the globe in recent decades, the magical/spiritual insights that the Faeries, following in the footsteps of Mitch, continue to discover about gay/queer nature have remained largely hidden from the rest of LGBTQ+ culture.

The focus of Radical Faerie magic was originally male oriented, but its essence is not at all separatist. Faerie is an androgynous gateway, opening “the doors through which gay vision can take us,” doors which lead to uncovering and celebrating the polarities (receptive/active, yin/yang, female/male) of the divine Self. Faerie spirituality also focuses on the importance of harmony between the Earth and all of Her creatures and the ultimate necessity of healing our relationship with the Earth.

“Faerie is a see-ing through polarity. In straight consciousness Bi-Polar Thought is king: male and female are opposites, win-or-lose is the game, reality and dream are separate, immutable and contradictory. But there are Fairies, who look on in gentle mocking laughter at such childishness, for they know that everyone is now ‘female’, now ‘male’, that no one ever wins when anybody loses, that reality and dream flip into each other at the flick of a glittering wand…

“Being a crazy faggot is part of our radio-reception equipment for the signals across the Bridge. Our no-role emptiness provides the tuner to receive the spirits. That’s why we’re called fairies, faerie being the name of the spirit-land in Celtic mythology…

“Think of Fairy as a symbol, representing or triggering experience of joyful freedom from the myth of One Highest, liberation of be-ings and conscious forms from the bondage of oneself, opening up to the kosmopolitan nature of Self-universe, to the multivarious unitary truth of the matter.” Mitch Walker was calling gays to wake up to and embrace multi-dimensional, cosmic, consciousness, and so open up our natural gifts as healers, mediums and shamans.

“Modern western society is so disconnected from the “supernatural”energies which exist in the kosmos that it denies them. However, basic growth can happen to a person only as they reawaken to this level of reality. To do so is not to give up logic or reason, but to reopen to the roots of life and energy. The spirit-beings exist inside us in potentiality, and we can shape them and work with them for the higher good of ourselves and humanity.”

Mitch believed queers to “manifest a mutation in consciousness, for which we have been persecuted and exploited. It’s time to stop this stupidity. It’s time to enter our maturity. It’s time… Darkness grows in the falseself lands. This is not a coincidence. Those of use who live there live in a time-bomb, in a monstrously cli- maxing karmic behemoth, live in a violent dinosaurian genetic fate. Tyrannosaur Rex is thrashing in ecstatic S & M pain, is the ultra-victim in a self-induced snuff movie involving the entire Earth, enacting his last act and ringing down the curtain on World 4.”

By falseself, Mitch was referring to the “the living myths that define the people, that are sex roles, work roles, sexual behavior roles, collective standards of moral belief, politics, religion and so on…

“The falseself system as a human institution is itself the source of all hierarchies involving status and power. Since falseself mythology originates from outside the individual, a person must be taught their falseself identity, and for this to happen a person must submerge their autonomy, allowing themself to be led by others who ‘know’.”

Mitch and the early Faeries were pursuing the cause of expanding consciousness that had kicked off the in 1960s – these men were taking the sexual revolution to its spiritual climax. They believed in “A new age, a complete change in all current forms of society, a complete change in what it means to be human,” and that “…gay people have been put in an important place on humanity’s path towards this goal. Edward Carpenter, the great gay visionary, was one of the first to notice this publicly when he wrote in 1919 that gay people “point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness.” (in Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk)

Writing in the mid 70s, with no idea what was coming in the next decade, Mitch prophetically proclaimed: “Gay shamanism is work in such times, work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself. Delightful communal Self realization is the instantly real resurrection. Sorcerous faggot fighter is a menace to society, is a dangerous flaming phoenix, a glowingly rounded function, an extra-ordinary healing-tool, a Rainbow-bridging eros-tool. Gay realization is sorely needed life-light now. Concentrated eros, focused will, activated anger, celebrated magick, shared love, are tactics to guard and guide our questing, to trans-form vision, trans-port worlds, trans-vest Self.”

The AIDS years changed the conversation.

We had to survive. From both radical and conventional angles, gay activism stepped up. A global LGBTQ+ community was born. We took on governments, pharmaceutical companies and society’s prejudice. We won.

And during those years some of us, well at least me, went through the gay shamanic transformation, facing death of my body but instead experiencing death of my false self. And since those years I have been pursuing ‘delightful communal Self realization’ amongst the Radical Faeries, and now as an organiser of Queer Spirit Festival in the UK.

As the fear of AIDS slipped gradually away, and HIV ceased to be a death sentence, the big gay party that had begun in the 1970s and so quickly stalled, erupted back into life. The advent of Prep medications that prevent HIV infection taking hold, of undetectable viral loads meaning positive men on meds are not infectious, plus dating apps and a surge in usage of certain drugs have all whisked gay life into a hedonistic cauldron like the world has never seen before. There’s generally little room for spirituality until addiction or breakdowns force people to embrace it. But just as AIDS was a catalyst for my spiritual awakening, I am aware that addiction can be also lead us there – and quite simply we do have to go through the dark to get to the light. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’

As Mitch would put it, the tyranny of the falseself system does not want us to wake up to our god-given creative powers and inner liberation, it would rather keep us as drug-addicted, promiscuous outsiders. The most radical ‘sorcerous faggot fighters’ left us in the aids years and the more conventional queers led the way into the campaign for equal marriage rights. Gay culture has been bought off, it is no longer a menace to society – assimilation in action– except when it blurs and challenges the gender norms. Trans people are now the advance guard, challenging hetero-patriarchal society’s – and some gay men and lesbians’ – understanding of the mythological consensus.

The Gay Spirit teaches us that we are all human and spirit, female and male. Fluidity is the key to freedom.

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

“Imagine that Visionary Love is first seeing, then recognising, and finally joining a vital, mythic, on-going struggle for the universe of free being, for the universe of your true gay being, for worldwide justice for all beings on all levels, a deeply revolutionary com/passionate karmic work with pattern and purpose involving evolution, consciousness, creatures of false and true self, of straightman’s societies and anarcho-communual Spirit utopias, forms of living zombie death and magickal spiralling kozmic ecstasy, reality-forms of a multi-level, multi-sexual political melodrama.

“NEW AGE FAGGOT BECOMES SORCERER

“At this time and place we have access to much wise knowledge. Sometimes we have to dig for it, sometimes it comes right at us, unbidden. This knowledge is available to aid you on your path. Much of it relates to spirit energies, to enhancing rapport in their realms. … All kinds of fairy tales cultural myths, religious objects such as statues and paintings, are highly symbolic. All spiritual and religious holidays, rituals, dances and orgies are methods to summon the energies. If you see them in this light, they can help you on your way.”