Gay fairies
Radical Faeries
The Southeastern Conference of Lesbians and Gay Men served as a catalyst for the emergence of the Drastic Faerie movement and later, Gay Liveliness Visions.
From 1979, regular Faerie gatherings took place at Running Water Farm in North Carolina, as well as the Short Mountain Sanctuary in Liberty, Tennessee. The gatherings “nurtured a warm sharing among gay men in a lovely setting [and] provided a vehicle for the discussion and exploration of alternative gay male identities.”
“One of the guys [at the Southeastern Conference of Lesbians and Gay Men] was Mikel Wilson, who owned Running Water. He looked like an Former Testament prophet. He had long hair and a bushy beard. The men were sitting there. We’d never intentionally sat down just to be a group of same-sex attracted men together. We had a really beautiful, moving conversation, and at the end we all said we’d appreciate to cotinue this. It had just never ocurred to us, I assume , because of privilege, that a community of men needed a space too. Mikel invited us in June, around the solstice, to come up to Running Water. So the 1978 conference is kind of a catalyst for the Running Fluid Farm gathering.” I recently came across a passage in the travel diary of Fr. Jacques Marquette (the first European missionary to explore down the Mississippi River), in which he describes how “men” who lived as women among the Illinois people of the seventeenth century occupied a spiritually elevated position in the society. Here’s the passage: As you can see, Fr. Jacques claimed that members of the Illinois tribe who lived as women (being born biologically male) would proceed for “manitous” or “spirits.” The word manitou has a large range of meanings in Native American religion. It can be used when speaking about the Great Spirit or God, a life-force pervading nature, or individual spirits associated with natural features of the landscape. All these manitous were an object of reverence for the Native peoples, and although not exactly “fairies,” they could be nature spirits. This inevitably raises the question: What is it about living as a woman that gave some people special access to the spiritual realm and caused them to become identified with spirits? Published in:January-February 2011 issue. WHEN FUTURE GENERATIONS look back on gay liberation’s role in the greater creation of human consciousness, and what ideas helped shepherd civilization from its most primitive tendencies to more noble evolutionary possibilities, they will, in my opinion, contain to spend substantial day studying the Radical Faerie movement, which was launched in 1979. They will find it particularly informative, I imagine, to spot how two competing historical accounts would emerge about who the Faeries were and what became of them: one gay-centered and psychological, the other seemingly gay-centered but covertly anti-psychological, focused on a romantic and revanchist portrayal of how the Faeries were formed. The Radical Faerie movement is historically important because it was the first large-scale effort to structure gay-identified men on an indigenously homosexual spiritual basis, unlike gay synagogues, churches, and so on, which rely on heterosexist mythologies and dogmas. At prior Faerie gatherings, gay men came together as never before, as Harry Hay put it, “to toss off the ugly leafy frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie p “Fairy” is a usual term of homophobic abuse that lgbtq+ men have reclaimed as a symbol of their magic powers. Since the 1970’s “fairy” or “faerie” has been used as a positive name for radical gay individuality. Fairies are historically linked with gender transgression and homoeroticism in the pagan cultures of Europe. The related word “faggot” is derived from fagus, the beech tree around which fairies dance.[1] Faeries soar with queer spirit. In ancient Greece, the winged gods Eros and Hermes depict the archetype. Eros is the androgynous god described by Plato as the craving and pursuit of wholeness.”[2] Hermes is the god of crossroads, limits and thresholds. Today, queers represent this liminal realm. Lodging in the room between established alternatives – male and female, visible and invisible, possible and impossible – we guide souls from the constricting limits of what is, to the unknown, unknowable, but nevertheless yearned-for possibility of going beyond this. Fairies have a opposite nature – they fulfill humble tasks, yet possess exceptional powers. Like gender non-conforming people, they are prone to sudden transformationFairies of New England: The Petite People of the Hills and Forests
Is spiritual
Eros, Ancient Greece, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston