Nonetheless, there are druids, wiccans, taoists, shamans, hindus, and any number of other recognized or unrecognized beliefs present among Radical Faeries. We embrace life in its entirety, yin and yang, drag and mufti. We create rituals meaningful to us in our lives, pagan rituals that validate and celebrate our lives as Gay men.
Elam: When did we become a fellowship? >
Persimmon: The terms "Fellowship" and "Congregation" originate with Elfstone, as far as I can tell. Besides Native American, there are also elements of (neo)pagan ritual used as a ritual lingua franca, e.g. calling on directions. There are folks of many spiritual backgrounds who embrace the fae.
Elam:However there are control-queens at any gathering.
Elfstone:... only "servants" to the group. Circle is a sacred space where Faeries come to share, love, and support each other. There would certainly be several "congregations" represented in any particular circle.
Persimmon: Ben & Jerry's ice cream can be a spiritual path, too. The circle as process, in its variants, seems to be common to most gatherings. But some "vacationers" go to gatherings purely to socialize or to cruise. It's more of an opportunity. I view it as an exercise in spiritual collective states. The circle assumes its own identity, more than the sum of its parts.
For legal purposes, 501(c)(3) status with the Internal Revenue Service, one faerie group, Nomenus which stewards the Wolf Creek Sanctuary, is incorporated as a Church, and the document "Nomenus Speaks to the IRS," available from them, deals extensively with how faery gatherings could be described in the language of conventional churches that the IRS wanted to hear.
Persimmon: Ritual. "For them that likes that sort of thing, it's the sort of thing they like." ---Abraham Lincoln
Elam:As much as this seems to make sense it is not true. RFD does not stand for anything. It is a running joke that it stands for radical faerie digest. In each issue it stands for something else.
Elfstone: RFD generally lists Radical Faerie contacts in different parts of the country, and lists mens gatherings with Radical Faerie participation. There is a Radical Faerie commune/sanctuary in the Tennessee Mountains near Liberty, TN. Mens' Gatherings held across the nation are frequently an opportunity for Radical Faeries to meet in large numbers. The Breitenbush gathering held near Portland, OR each February and August is a particularly popular Faerie gathering.
Persimmon: Actually, RFD, which has been around since it started in Iowa (!) in 1974, predating the name faerie, stood for a different thing every issue, like "Rimming for Dingleberries" or "Reality Finally Dawns." See also the other topics in these Persimmons pages See also Willow's link under the Homopages. Since 2003, the collective at Short Mountain TN that publishes RFD did use "Radical Faerie Digest" on some issues.
Elfstone: Harry Hay, the "father of the gay rights movement" began the Mattachine society in 1950. He was ousted from its leadership because of his communist past. (He was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.) In 1970, Hay moved to New Mexico in a quest to find a living Berdache (a Native American Gay male spirit guide). In 1978, Hay, along with John Burnside, Don Kilhefner, and Mitch Walker, formed the Radical Faeries, a group devoted to ecology, spiritual truth and gay centeredness. In 1979, the first gathering of Radical Faeries took place in the Arizona desert with over 200 gay men in attendance.
Persimmon: Harry had an Apostolic Succession, or sorts, via Wovoka, of the Ghost Dance, in his youth in Nevada. See the little Vortex pamphlet by Bradley Rose called "A Blessing from Wovoka."
Elam: Just who made you head faerie? I don't remember electing you to the job. I know many faeries that self identify as christian. The faeries that I know are quite able to allow others to believe what they like.
However, I'm sure there is some Radical Faerie out there who would disagree. I would like to hear him explain to his priest how he had a spiritual awakening while in a sweat lodge praying to the spirits of the Bear People. The vast majority of Radical Faeries are beyond their Christian past...
Persimmon: In that case it would be the priest who didn't accept faeries, not the faeries failing to accept the priest.
Elam: Myself I embrace a pantheistic idea that embraces the good parts of Christanity and reject the bad parts. At times I feel that I am at a Chinese resturant, One from column a, Two from column b and none from column c. While my selection will not be the same as yours thery are my selections and no one will tell me that my selections are the wrong ones.
If you are trying to tell me what I may believe I think that you have gotten it wrong. That is the great thing of faeries and gatherings. I am allowed to be me with my own beleifs and ideas.
I have yet to see a concise definition of radical faerie. It is just this nebulousness that attracts me. If we had hard and fast rules then it would not be the same thing. And surely I would not see the magic that I now see in faeries.
Hugs, Elam
Elfstone: Think Star Wars - long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. Some Faeries are quite hostile towards Christianity, as that religion can be hostile towards Gay men. Most Faeries simply ignore the Christian church; it has no relevance to their lives.
Persimmon: Some faeries are militantly anti-Christian; some have taken Holy Orders in mainstream Christian churches. I guess I would describe Christianity (or Judaism) as a minority view in the faeries, although, as we are emergent from a Christian culture for the most part, it crops up time and again. There are few fundamentalist Christians among the faeries, though there are fundamentalist faeries! Will Roscoe has published (2004?) a provocative book about "Gay Jesus," for example.
Persimmon: YES! Occasionally dysfunctional, occasional bearers of great healing.
Strongly disruptive substances, like methamphetamine, have been strictly banned from many faerie spaces.
Some gatherings, e.g. Short Mountain, have been co-sexual and children-friendly for a long time.
Being new to the list, I haven't figured out all the ins and outs of recent threads, so forgive me if I repeat what's already been said, but I was more than a little taken aback by the recent Radical Faeries FAQ from the neuvo list. Now, I know how hard it is to describe something like the faeries to the uninitiated, and I doubt we'll ever achieve anything approaching consensus about what a Radical Faerie is, but that isn't going to stop me from putting in my own 2 cents about what a faerie FAQ might say.
In terms of the published FAQ, my objections start right from the very first line, in its description of Faerie 'spiritual lives'. It's not that I object to considerations of spirituality within the faeries--goddess (or whatever) knows we could use much more of same, but I seriously doubt that spirituality is the defining factor of faeriedom for most of the wonderful faerie-identified types I've met. When I try to describe what draws me to the faeries, I usually talk about gay men exploring what being gay means, Harry Hay's idea of figuring out what particular viewpoint or gift we may have to offer the world. That exporation has a spiritual component, to be sure, but it also touches all kinds of other facets of life from social organization to mental outlook. And as far as I can tell, we haven't found any undisputed universals among the faeries yet. If you want to talk tendencies, we tend to be gay men (though at least on the east coast there are faerie-identified women who assert their right to be a part of who we are; I also know faeries who consider their pets to be faerie-identified...), tend to feel like we are misfits in the everyday world, tend to believe that life should offer more than the drab, rigid patterns of "normal" life...
But let's face it, honey, for every faerie who comes to a gathering to get in touch with his spirituality, there's another who's come to get sex, and another who's come for a vacation, another who's come to be with friends, another who's come to feel glamourous, and on it goes. I'd venture to say that the Radical Faeries offer an opportunity for a particular strata of misfits to find each other and to discover that they are not alone.
But centering our lives around pagan doctrines? Not necessarily. I'm not even sure I could agree that it is a spiritual path. I see the faeries more as a culture. Within that culture are many potential spiritual directions and possibilities, some of them joyfully contradictory. Even to call it a culture (which at least suggests that there are also other defining elements, from dress to language to social structure) is perhaps misleading, since the faeries encompass a variety of cultures. But yes, a kind of culture with regional and personal variants.
As for the FAQ's description of faerie structure, I'd have to say that the descriptions of group conscience decision-making, servants to the group, circles as sacred space are all aspirations of a majority of participants, aspirations that are often not achieved or that take unexpected twists. After all, we grow up learning how to function in a very different political milieu, and it wishing things does not make them so. Occasionally, we have moments of grace or epiphany where we actually achieve these aspirations for a moment or two.
As for what we do, yes, we develop rituals, we create vehicles for entertaining and inspiring each other. We put on gatherings, we cook, we sing, we laugh, we play, we try to do a little business to keep things from falling apart, we bitch about our lives, we share, we dress up, we put our hands in the dirt, we organize urban public interventions, we make friends, we send email, we struggle, we dream, we remember our dead... I would also say that we create our own holidays, occasionally drawing on the power of existing holidays, be they Christian, pagan or secular. If the moon happens to be full, all the better--but in the 11 years that I've been going to gatherings, I would have to say that that the celebrations, the rituals, the holidays I've celebrated with the faeries have been the culmination of whatever traditions happened to be there that night--whatever was convenient, significant or urgent.
Faerie resources--good as far as it goes, but there is so much more to be said here. How about talking about the loose regional structures that have been defined by the various mailing lists, mentioning other publications like Draghead, faerie.gram, FDR, Thyber Thithie and, it would appear, two listserves. Wolf Creek, Blue Heron, Amberfox, Kawashaway, etc. etc. etc. Girls, write them with your five favourite faerie groups/gatherings/publications...
Then there is the sticky wicket of the origin of the Radical Faeries. Fine to mention Harry Hay, and the conference he organized with John Burnside, Don Kilhefner and Mitch Walker, since this was where we got the name "radical faeries"--but this is a somewhat narrow and west-coast understanding of our origins. There were lots of faerie-like gatherings taking place in other parts of North America before that 1979 conference-reborn-as-gathering, and the faerie movement owes much to other ideas and movements, like hippie consciousness. Someone really oughta do a history...
Can I be a Christian? Whatever. As I've said already, I think this FAQ is far too heavy on the religion. While I don't consider myself Christian, I can assure you that some of my best faerie friends are... Anyone who's heavy into dogma is going to have problems with the contradictions of living in this hybrid world of ours, and frankly religious fanatics seem equally tedious to me whether they're pushing Hecate or Jesus--but I've been in faerie singalongs where Amazing Grace was just as resonant and rewarding to sing as the goddess chant. I'd say that most faeries have been so marginalized for so long we've learned how to pick out the relevant bits from just about any religion, philosophy or psychology and ignore (or for the more vitriolic among us, condemn) the rest.
Is the focus of the faerie on nature, ecology and rural living? For sure gatherings in the countryside are important, but I've been to gatherettes at suburban homes, and some of our biggest events have been large-scale urban interventions like the marches on Washington, the Faerie Action Gathering, and the Stonewall 25 celebrations. Personally, I don't think I'd want to live the rural life on a permanent basis, but I do need to spend time in the country on a regular basis to recharge, remember the cycles of earth and sky, and for the benefits that the physical resistance of having to do things like chop wood, carry water, build structures (oops, sorry, erections, I mean) offers. I've never seen any paradox in the fact that faeries are as much an urban as a rural culture; what is more problematic is figuring out how one can achieve one's faeire 'potential' in an urban setting.
Are the faeries without political ties? There's an inherent politicization in being a faerie, in asserting that it is not wrong to crossdress (or not dress at all...), that as a group we should aspire to non-heirarchical organization, that we are open to the joyous contradictions of all who hear the call, in not turning away those who cannot pay, and on and on. There's also a lot of highly politicized individuals who bring their activism to the faeries as part of what it means to them to be a faerie. And not all of us think of the earth as a woman, either.
Lots of articles have been written about the faeries: whoever does that history should also compile all of this info as well... There's a chapter about the faeries in Stuart Timmon's book "The Trouble With Harry" (a biography of Harry Hay), and there's chapters by faeries or faerie-identified types in Mark Thompson's anothologies "Gay Spirit" and "Gay Soul". Then there's our publications, mentioned above, and some documentaries that reference the faeries as well. A bit of research by some eager historian would be much appreciated here.
Okay, I'll stop now, since this is more than enough for a first posting--sorry to be so dogged about a FAQ that doesn't even originate from this list, but it does provide lots of fodder for discussion...
xo
Paul Couillard