The modern gay liberation movement was born in a secular age –
but back in the 1970s Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner and others were feeling a deeper call – the call to uncover the cosmic in our queer consciousness, and reclaim queerness as part of nature.
“In conversation and in their writings, the Radical Faeries (who, while “refusing to be pinned down,” nonetheless tend to be spiritually and politically anarchistic and comunitarian) emphasize this bond with nature, often holding their gatherings in forests, deserts, and mountainous regions. My friend Hyperion describes a Faerie ritual that took place in the Arizona desert in 1979:
“It all began when one… faerie decided to go down to the arroyo and play in the mud. Soon others joined him…. All emerged from their raiment and started smearing mud on themselves and each other. Body merged with body until we were one mass. One faerie lying on the ground was decorated with leaves and flowers. Then he was lifted to the sky as if he were an emissary bringing earth and sky together.
“The Radical Faeries are among those gay seekers who have taken steps to realise the dream of HOME…. faerie communal households and farms…” Randy P Connor, Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connection Between Homoeroticism and the Sacred, 1993
“STARTING IN THE LATE 1970s, alongside the enormous and continuing growth of women’s spirituality, there sprung up, in almost parallel fashion, a small spiritual movement among men. This movement was connected with the feminist critique of patriarchal notions of religion and authority, and with the attempt of both gay and straight men to create a new definition of maleness.
“One important impulse behind the notion of radical faeries was the idea that there had to be something beyond assimilation. Just as radical feminists wanted to go beyond women attaining equal rights in a man’s world, toward a notion that feminism implied a totally different reality, a different language, a different attitude toward power and authority, this group of gay men saw their own movement as implying a totally different view of the world, with different goals and different spiritual values than the “straight” world…
“In an article in RFD called “A Sprinkling of Radical Faerie Dust,” Don Kilhefner wrote that the dilemma facing gay men is “our assimilation into the mainstream versus our enspiritment as a people” … “We are the equivalent of Shamans in modern culture,” said Peter Soderberg, during an interview at the 1985 Pagan Spirit Gathering. “Many gay men want to be middle-class Americans. They want to be respected as human beings and they want their sexuality to be ignored. But radical faeries are willing to live on the edge. We feel there is a power in our sexuality. You know there is a power there because our culture is so afraid of us. And there is a lot of queer energy in the men and women most cultures consider magical. It’s practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic…
“The Radical Faerie movement continues to grow, characterized by spontaneity and anti-authoritarianism. Michael Lloyd [a founding member of the Green Faerie Grove, a worship group for queer Pagan men in Columbus, Ohio] describes it as “having a pro-humanist, pro-environment, pro-sex vision of the world that contrasts sharply with the mainstream Western religious traditions.” He adds that while some groups include straight men and women, and even children, “gender bending is a hallmark of the radical faerie movement.” Margot Adler, Drawing Down The Moon, 1986
Harry Hay:
I propose that we Gay Folk, whom Great Nature has been assembling as a Separate People in these last 100,000 years, must now prepare to emerge from the shadows of History because we are a species-variant with a particular characteristic adaptation-in-consciousness WHOSE TIME HAS COME!
Brothers and Sisters, isn’t it about time we started to tell our parent Society who we really are? Isn’t it about time we helped them to understand that rather than being merely a sexual variation of them, in all other senses exactly the same of they, we are a Separate People with, in several measurable respects, a rather different window on the world, a different consciousness, which may be triggered into being by our lovely sexuality?
But before we can do that, before we can tell them who we are, we shall have to begin telling each other. Up to now it’s been easier to march in the streets and scream and holler than it has been to sit in a circle and examine and evaluate. It’s been easier to pretend we’re really almost the same as everyone else, although we don’t fool the Heteros for a minute, than it is to dig and dig into the bicameral subterranean channels of collective memory – a cataloguing and a collecting we’ve been avoiding like the plague….
Our lovely and talented Gay Community with an enormous 100,000 year history of discovery and largely selfless contribution, our Minority of Ducks-in-whatever-henhouse-of-Chickens-they-were inadvertently-born-into knows that we as a Separate People comprise a total deviation of consciousness that is not to be reduced by the nasty sexual drooling of dirty legalistic inferior minds.
At the 1986 March on Washington:
“I propose that we Gay Men of all colours prepare to present ourselves as the gentle non
competitive Third Gender men of the Western World with whole wardrobes and garages crammed with cultural and spiritual contributions to share.
“… time for us Gays to reclaim our Third Gender responsibilities…
“It is time for us Third Gender folk… to rejoice in the gifts we bring!”
Harry Hay’s Queer Spiritual Vision – rainbow messenger
Will Roscoe wrote in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (1997):
“For Hay, the transcendence of the individual, the discovery that one is part of an interconnected whole, is the truth of life itself and the essence of spirituality, as well as the source of political ideals… The vision of society that emerges from this interconnection of spirituality and politics is multicultural, cooperative, and decentralized. Rather than objectifying diverse communities as ‘Other’, subject-SUBJECT consciousness fosters the extension of common humanity to all.
Affirming the other who affirms you does not require the erasure or denial of difference.
“For Hay, activism informed by spiritual values is the modern version of the community service traditionally performed by third-gender figures like the Native American Two-Spirit.”
“The Radical Faeries emerged in tandem with a gay civil rights movement in the 1970s and tapped into a broader countercultural energy. Rather than relying on an apologetic posture or seeking ‘inclusion’ in mainstream social institutions and religious communities, Radical Faeries adopted a proactive and constructive approach to their queer sexualities and gender expressions. By turning to a variety of sources – such as the mythopoetic men’s movement, feminism, and pagan and neo-pagan Earth-based traditions- Radical Faeries sought not only to critique the patriarchal and hierarchical dynamics of the wider society, but also to embrace what they understood as the fundamental connection between spirituality and sexuality. This queerly creative mix of traditions and practices generated a host of ritualised forms of sexuality and relational bonds, including a number of distinct groupings within this loosely affiliated and now worldwide network.” Sadomasochism and Spirituality A Queerly Religious Challenge to the Gay Marriage Paradigm, by Patrick Califia in QUEER RELIGION Homosexuality in Modern Religious History Volume I 2011
At Faerie gatherings we go to connect…. to each other, to the land, the elements, the soul. There are no preachers or teachers here, just community where everyone is helping everyone else to heal, grow, transform and emerge into the world as the Rainbow Warriors of Light and Love we incarnated to be. Faeries are not a spiritual community – we have no dogmas, no texts, no gurus – but we do have spirit. Faeries are a community with spirit, a rapidly expanding group of queers who are exploring alternatives to the high pressure, pumped up, chemical and alcohol fuelled commercial scenes of our cities. We are waking up to our roles in the universal human tribe as shamans, priestesses, tantric healers, mediums, transformational artists and communicators. We are still relatively few in number but can see so many of our kind lost, dazed and confused in the drug soaked, work obsessed, money worshipping general culture. Every gay guy flirting with the obsessive and insane nature of our chemical fuelled sex culture is a shaman whose spirit is not getting recognised, whose soul is desperately trying to reveal itself. https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2015/11/12/the-rainbow-people/
In the mid 1970s, before the first gathering, a Faery Circle led by Arthur Evans met in San Fransisco to explore the pagan history and spirituality of gay people. Resulting from this was a revolutionary book that was a powerful catalyst for a gay spiritual movement – the first book setting out the case to reclaim our own natural spirituality.
Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture (1979) :
“All the evidence indicates that nature people fucked for pleasure. Their purpose was to celebrate sex. Their orgies were acts of sexual worship to the power of sex they felt in themselves and in nature around them. Their religious feasts were characteristically joyous: dancing, feasting, fucking together. The Indians who have been observed in the Americas; the myths that have survived in Europe; the artifacts that exist from all over the world – all attest to the pleasure of what the celebrants were doing… they had a collective tribal feeling of the power of sex throbbing through the whole of nature; their experience of sex was so open, public, communal and intense that they felt it reverberate through the whole cosmos.”
“The Christian oppression of women and Gay people was no accident. Their freedom and high status in the old religion made them prime targets for the new religion, which was profoundly anti-sexual… Throughout its history, Christianity has been a religion of the sword. The few Christians in the past who have raised their voices against the atrocities of their co-believers have always been a tiny minority, and often they themselves have ended up being burned as heretics. The Christians hunted down heretics and witches for fourteen hundred years, from the 3rd to the 17th centuries.
Their aim, which they accomplished, was to annihilate an entire culture. For the most part, the old religion and the heresies it inspired were wiped off the face of the earth. In their place stood the grim, disciplined edifice of Christianity and the violent forces that kept Christianity in power. ”
“We look forward to creating a genuine Gay culture, one that is free from exploitation by bars, baths, and gay business owners. We look forward to re-establishing women’s mysteries and men’s mysteries as the highest expression of collective Gay culture and sexuality. We look forward to regaining our ancient historical roles as medicine people, healers, prophets, shamans and sorcerers. We look forward to an endless and fathomless process of coming out – as gay people, as animals, as humans, as mysterious and powerful spirits that move through the life cycle of the cosmos….. Like butterflies we are emerging from the shells of our past restricted existence. We are re-discovering the ancient magic that was once the birth right of all human beings. We are re-learning how to talk to the worms and the stars. We are taking flight on the
wings of self-determination. Come, blessed Lady of the Flowers, Queen of Heaven, creator and destroyer, Kali – we are dancing the dance of your coming.”
MITCH WALKER called Radical Faeries: “the first indigenous spiritual tradition created and sustained by the gay male community in modern times. By “indigenous” I mean gay-centered and gay-engendered, in contrast to the various gay synagogues, churches, covens etc. In the latter groups, gayness is incidental or additional to the tradition espoused, while in the former it is central and causal. Radical Faeries celebrate and explore the Gay Spirit, which is itself the source of spiritual existence, wisdom and initiation. Because of its indigenous, gay-centered nature, the Radical Faerie movement pioneers a new seriousness about gayness, its depth and potential, thereby heralding a new stage in the meaning of Gay Liberation.”
In the late 1970s as the gay liberation movement became more assimilationist, Mitch Walker recorded queer spirited discoveries of the early Faeries in what I can only describe as a love poem to our deepest spirit – an incredible, inspired book called Visionary Love:
I know there exists a gayness, something separate from, and alien to straight modes of being. I know that this gayness excites incredulity, opposition, fear, anger and violence. But I also know that gayness inspires strength, love and profound visions in those who are of it. I can feel these vision in my heart.
I look into my heart and hear messages from beyond, beyond that phoney who-I-thought-I was, beyond straight society, beyond western culture, beyond time and space. I see an ancient, ancient wise being in my Self, I see new forms of evolving conscious beings, new forms of society, culture, reality. I feel the strong presence of a great wheel turning, the wheel of death/rebirth.
I see visions that the life-source is changing, so that whatever is not of this Changing but is old and prior to it will be cut off, will run out of life and drop into extinction. I see gayness as very much a part of, caused by, leading into and through this Changing. I see gayness as a door, a source, a spirit, a lover, a teacher, or rather as sourcing, enspiriting, loving, teaching.
It spirits me away somewhere magickal, strange, profound. I meet teaching wierdness,
opening/expanding/dropping me into lights. I feel ecstasy, wonder, delight. I feel SPIRIT.
Let me tell you a story:
About types of beings generically called Fairies, about their characteristic consciousness, their strange awareness, called faerie. 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.
Fairies see polarities dancing, changing everywhere, constantly. So they know that any pole frozen by itself blocks the flow, becomes a dead weight, an illusion hiding true understanding. So they come to realise that every ‘objective’ thing is but a shadow.
Knowing this, the Fairies can’t take themselves too seriously, either, seeing as they are also an illusion. This creates a marvellous lightness! Fairies are truly blessed, truly free modes of being, for they can laugh at themselves in their deepest places, can transcend their ignorance from moment to moment, gliding out of each limit and restriction even as it manifests, emerging from hir own form like a butterfly or a moth.
This wonderful paradoxical freedom from form, this lightness, enable Fairies to fly. It grants them much deep wisdom.
Once someone came and told me this:
There is an essence, essence of an eternal, hidden, dark, shining, eerie secret: the
simultaneous and continuous creation and annihilation of Form, which is the heartbeat of material existence, which is that beingness, that essential is-ness of all that exists there – trees, people, planets, space, time, matter, energy – all is which is Changing, an infinite Pattern, a total-living weave of beams and streams, eddies, swirls, bursts and flows of is-into-not-is, and not-is-into-is, out of and into an unnameable nothingness-One; that all shapes, forms, are bendings and corners of this flowing-is, this power/nothing, the true behind the false behind the true behind the false in a living, pulsing spiral of All-That-Is.
And those blessed with faerie can gaze into this essence as it were a crystal ball, and it opens their gaze through swirling shapes and colors deeper and deeper until it becomes unfoldingness itself, and they can see through the earth and out to the stars and beyond, and melt into their gaze and become the point in their Eye and flow into the Crystal itself, passing to its Center, and so become themselves There which then too is Here and All and anything, and thereby they are One from the inside with the bendings and corners of realities, and so they are not yet static things but riders of lightbeams, weightless dancers along the edge – indeed they are the Dancing itself, purposeful, masterless, nothing-points of will; they are the flow, the wind, There at the Source.
We will change, we will transmute ourselves. Like Native Americans and most all nature peoples we will come to see life as essentially Spirit-full and essentially good. The sun, moon and earth feed us, and we will learn that we are each sun, moon, earth and all else. Then we will be entering our fate to become and be gay. SPIRIT – the
intelligent power shaping and sustaining matter, space, time- will bless us, and we’ll remember we were really SPIRIT all along, and then we will assume our responsibilities and complete our tasks in the kosmic scheme of things.”
A new age, a complete change in all current forms of society, a complete change in what it means to be human…. We 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.”
Being a crazy faggot is part of our radio-reception equipment for the signals across the
Bridge. Our norole 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.
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.
If cocks aren’t used as blunderbusses, they can become fine-tuning knobs on your spiritual tv set.
We have been deceived! Caught in a mythological tyranny, in a web of falseself perversions, in a maze of deceptional violence, in a world of twisted words, cut off at the roots by shadows, trapped within spells of the word-masters. We have forgotten. We became thought-slaves.
Visionary Love starts here, in the bowels of falseself bondage.. a book of uppity queer metathought liberation, of sissy-frying world-slipping survival tactics, of epic reincarnational trueself recovery ploys, of strategic evolutional consciousness flowering fairy tale. We 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 falseself lands. This is not a coincidence. Those of us who live there live in a time-bomb, in a monstrously climaxing karmic behemoth, live in a violent dinosaurian genetic fate. Tyrannosaur Rex is a 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.
Gay shamanism is work in such times, work in the mode of death, work with the dying, death of oneself. Delightful communal Self realisation is the instantly real resurrection. Sorcerous faggot fighter is a menace to society, is a dangerous flaming phoenix, a glowingly rounded rebirth function, an extra-ordinary healing tool, a Rainbow-bridging eros-tool. Gay realisation is sorely needed life-light now. Concentrated eros, focussed 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.
To be taken by loving Fairies is truly Self-transporting, truly not describable, true Self return, disadoptioning, un-orphanising, and real-istically dis-covering, non/sensically re-membering aerotically reentering faerie family homes. Peace, equanimity, wholenelss. Homosexual – gay – faggot- fairy – gone.
More from Mitch Walker: https://treeroots.org/library/
GONE – into faerie sight, cosmic consciousness, blissful Oneness
Carpenter saw it coming: “We are arriving at one of the most fruitful and important turning points in the history of the race. the Self is entering into relation with the Body. for, that the individual should conceive and know himself, not a toy and a chance-product of his own bodily heredity, but as identified and continuous with the Eternal Self of which his body is a manifestation, is indeed to begin a new life and to enter a hitherto undreamed world of possibilities….this transformation, whilst the greatest and most wonderful, is also of course the most difficult in Man’s evolution, for him to effect. it may roughly be said that the whole of the civilisation-period in Man’s history is the preparation for it.” Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)
Arthur Evans turned to the topic of Cosmic Consciousness in his later work Lady Moon Rising:
“Making the Great Reconnect necessarily deepens and expands the lives of the people doing the reconnecting. They become more open to learning from other people’s personal experinces, the cultural richness of humanity, and the wonder of the natural world. If they invest enough of themselves in the world, they will no longer experience it as an alien presence of external, lifeless objects, disconnected from their own inner needs, feelings and identity. Instead, they will come to experience both themselves
and the world as mutually engaging parts of a larger, organic whole…
“This understanding – that all things are interconnected in a great, encompassing, living unity – is what is meant by the term ‘cosmic consciousness.’ It’s ‘consciousness’ because it results from reflections on our experiences. It’s ‘cosmic’ because it expands more and more into the larger world as we ourselves become more interconnected. It involves a ‘living unity’ because the universe constantly transforms and perpetuates itself with stunning creativity, like a great living organism, and because the universe is one.
“Cosmic Consciousness stimulates creativity among the individuals who cultivate it. Because of its emphasis on connectedness, it motivates people to integrate the tactile, conceptual, and emotional parts of their lives into an experiential whole…
“Here is where we find the font of the magic of life, for that font is people themselves when self integrated, flowing with expressive creativity, and connected in body and spirit to each other and the cosmos. Here the boundaries of the self expand, and its windows open outward to the goodness and beauty of the whole, which it takes in with exuberance. From this place onward, life becomes a transformative and magical journey on an ever-opening road.”
READ ON:
https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2024/01/10/faerie-know-thyself-be-thyself/
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