What an enormous honour and thrill it is to see my hand, enlarged, protruding from a wall and pointing the way into Tim Walker’s Fairyland exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. This exquisite show features fantastic, inspired photos of 250 queer pioneers of the last 50 years – activists, artists, performers, characters who have influenced and helped shape the modern queer culture and community. To be included in the exhibition, coming due to my contribution to community explorations among the Radical Faeries and as a founder of Queer Spirit Festival, is truly epic. Thanks Tim!
Tim has built this show from a vision which reaches back to his childhood, when, he tells us, he “loved fairies, pixies and elves… Fairies had magical, mystical powers. I was happiest when I was a fairy, and I always wanted to believe.” At school he learnt to hide his own fairy nature from the homophobic bullies, but he “never stopped believing, not for one minute.” Tim’s Fairyland is a homage to our long-repressed queer community which over the past half a century has liberating its creative magic – discovering, remembering, reclaiming, reinventing itself – creating new realities, finding Fairyland. The exhibition brims over with imagery full of emotion, spirit and magic. Each room has its own power and presence. The show suggests – reveals – that we queers are in tune with, and have the potential to co-create, a more magical, enchanted, compassionate, liberated, joy filled reality than most of the world can even imagine is possible.
Tim invited me to be part of the exhibition because I have spent 25 years as a Radical Faerie co-creating exactly the kind of environment Tim is dreaming of in the quotation above – our sanctuaries are the party at the bottom of the garden where the ancient and mystical forces gather. I have played a key role in the development of Radical Faerie community spaces in the UK and France during the past two decades, and am a founder of Queer Spirit Festival. I believe that when I met Tim, my tales revealed to him the extent of the largely hidden undercurrent of Radical Faerieness – the queer spiritual counter-culture. In this global tribe of nature-loving queer folk we are doing exactly what Tim has dreamt of – we are creating Fairyland, we are creating home for each other, home that also includes nature, ancestors and Goddess. We are, as gay spiritual teacher Ram Dass famously put it, ” walking each other home.”
My journey into Radical Faerie gatherings, which take place usually out in remote, wild places, came after my retreat from London’s gay scene in the mid 1990s as I became sick with AIDS – but instead of a death sentence, AIDS became what I like to call my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self – Self in the spiritual sense, the Cosmic I Am – that humanity is blindly – pathetically – failing to recognise that we all are, despite enlightened teachers and mystics throughout time telling us how it is. Most remain stubbornly ignorant of the spiritual reality, despite social, environmental chaos pushing our world to the edge. AIDS was once described as ‘the training ground for the apocalypse – well here we are folks. The planet has AIDS. The collective is being pushed to the edge – destruction or awakening are the only two possibilities. As one who went over the edge 30 years ago, faced destruction but found awakening – and has been living partly in the worlds of spirit ever since – I encourage queer folks to open their eyes, minds, hearts – and not just their arses – and let the cosmos in. For we are more than our sexuality, more than our gender. Amongst our kind are healers, creators, messengers of spirit, let’s bring this aspect of queer nature into the picture.
Hovering at the edge of life and death for over 2 years I spent my time studying spiritual, mystical and magical teachings. I journeyed into the subtle realms of consciousness – expecting to die, I had nothing to lose, so was willing to surrender my individuality into the cosmic whole. I eventually learned that this is what queer shamans have done throughout time – one of our queer roles in ancient Goddess and Earth honouring cultures the world over, was to be channels, healers, links to the spirit world. The suppression of pagan cultures by Father God worshippers started with the suppression of the queer priests – this happened in Europe from the last century of the Roman Empire (with Goddess temples ransacked and genderqueer priests killed or expelled) and it happened over 1000 years later in the Americas (where the gender-bending shamans were called berdache by the European invaders, a Persian word for a gay bottom boy kept for sex – that word becoming the anthropological term until 1990 when Two-Spirit was adopted by the shamans of today – 2S is now added to the LGBTQ+ alphabet in Canada) and of course in Africa. In India the English tried, but failed to outlaw and eradicate the sacred ‘third-gender’ hijra population in the late 19th century, attempting to impose a gender binary as the only recognised reality.
Tim Walker has featured my hand, with the Herb Robert flower emanating from my fingertip, pointing at the doorway to Fairyland in recognition of my dedication to the path, since surviving AIDS, of creating transformational queer community. From the year 2000 I set out to find other queers exploring a spiritual connection – I found them in queer pagan camps, men’s community groups and radical faerie groves around the world. Nature connection, I learned is crucial to wellbeing – the elements, earth air fire water, reflect the 4 parts of us, body, mind, spirit, emotion. We need good connection to the elements and to all parts of our Self, if we are to live at max vitality and creativity. Crucial too is community of the heart – I discovered in Faerie gatherings that community can go deep and high into the cosmic realms, it can be transformational, healing and liberating – and indeed, to me the queer scene at its best is this also. Drag bars, leather bars, ecstatic nightclub nights were a crucial part of my personal development as a proto-Faerie. Our spaces always have a touch of Fairyland about them.
Despite the bitterness and hate directed at us, queers have long shown our ability to create great art, fashion, music, parties. Love and creativity is at the core of our nature – more than sexuality, more even than gender, Spirit is at our core – the raw, erotic, nature spirit that came to earth to play and explore, to make love, and to change the world. In Radical Faerie spaces we explore what it’s like to live together in deep communion with the earth, the spirit and each other. Operating from the Faerie principle of subject:SUBJECT consciousness, where no-one is seen as ‘other’, we create Fairyland, where the fairy within whom we learnt to suppress as a child can come out and discover the full potential in their natural magic.
The LGBTQ+ community is at a point in our collective history and journey of liberation where some amongst us who have gained rights thought impossible just three decades ago do not want to support the ongoing struggle for recognition, rights and safety by other parts of our queer community. We are arguing among ourselves, with some gay men and lesbians apparently unable to see that the struggle has always been about the right to love, acceptance and freedom of expression – for all people. History shows that ‘third-gender’, androgynous, ‘trans’ people have always existed – it is thanks to the achievements of Gay Liberation that these long-suppressed traits are freer to express again.
We are at a point when we need to be asking ourselves does queer liberation come only through the recognition of rights or also through the possibility of building different ways of living and being together?
In Radical Faerie sanctuaries we have been exploring new ways of living together, developing rituals and celebrations that connect us deeply to the natural flows of the cosmos, and bring out the best of who we are. This has led to Queer Spirit Festival, of which I am one of the founders and part of a huge team of volunteers who pour our hearts into creating a safe, playful, love-filled space of self-discovery. For a decade now hundreds of lgbtq+ people have been meeting at Queer Spirit for a 5 day summer camp with workshops, performance, ceremonies, healing space, crafts, djs, a temple of sacred sexuality and much more… Since 2023 Queer Spirit takes place in the stunning grounds of Bridwell Park in Devon and we are looking forward to returning there next summer. Queer Spirit Festival website here.
I believe we queers need healing sanctuaries and festivals in every land where we can discover our powers and heal from the attacks of the world, and also the freedom to bring the fullness of our artistry, our joy, our love, our spirit into the world. Our challenge is political AND spiritual. Tim Walker’s Fairyland points to our potential, our power, our love. But he reminds us the struggle is global and it is not over yet.
Radical Faerie sanctuaries are places queers can go to build our strength, power and resilience – and Tim’s magical, healing creation holds that same spirit, offering an empowering experience to every visitor passing under my hand. I am happy it’s just my hand on show, I’m not ‘known’ in the world on the level of the amazing pioneers in this show, all of whom I admire so deeply, my contribution is something different. I been working in secret with the Goddess, building community in the queer spiritual underground, the Faerie world, and I know that the Faeries, both human and spirit, have beautiful, empowering things to share with the whole queer community.
