12.

Radical Faeries and the Growth of Men’s Spirituality

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.

Many men within Neo-Paganism have asked the question “What is our role to be?” This question is not being asked very much within the British-based traditions of Wicca. In fact, some men within the dualistic traditions of the Craft, where the Goddess and the God are given equal, if polarized, roles, simply feel that the pendulum has swung too far and that the male aspects, the “God” aspects of the Craft, have been neglected.

Starting in the 1980s, many Pagan groups began adding “male” or “god” verses to “female” or “goddess” chants. And a number of Pagan festivals added men’s rituals. Several articles in Pagan publications argued that it was time to look at the pain that many men were feeling about their own roles. In the Yule, 1983 issue of Brothers of the Earth Newsletter, the editor, Gary Lingen, wrote that he hears “the pain of Brothers who are aimlessly searching for alternatives and whose confused and oppressed natures need yet to be challenged and healed.”¹

Lingen wrote that men must accept responsibility for their own transformation, and they must connect with each other to achieve that goal. Brothers of the Earth was created to be a network—a separate place for men and boys to celebrate and empower themselves, a place to examine and celebrate the cycles of life and the passages of men’s lives.

In the past, ideas about men’s roles have been examined deeply by intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but these ideas seldom filter down to the culture at large. For years, the man who was speaking most publicly about these questions was the poet Robert Bly. Bly has lectured across the country on the subject of men. Articles sharing his views with readers have found their way into magazines like New Age. Bly argued that over the last thirty years, many men came to acknowledge their feminine side; often they became more nurturing and gentle. But often these men seemed incomplete; they lacked energy.

In his lectures, Bly often used a fairy tale sometimes called “Iron John.” In this story, there is a kingdom far away where men are constantly disappearing in a forest, and no one knows why. Finally a stranger comes to the kingdom and sets out to find the answer. He finds a strange hairy Wildman, and he pulls him up from a deep pool. The man is put in a cage. For Bly, this hairy man represents the deep and dark part of man’s psyche, a part of their natures with which they must reconnect if they are to be whole. Getting in touch with the feminine gives men one key to their nature, but, says Bly, the Wildman holds the other key.

In a second part of the story, a child loses a golden ball and it rolls into the cage of the Wildman. To get the ball, the child takes the key to the cage from under his mother’s pillow and lets the Wildman out of the cage. For Bly, the golden ball is the unity of our natures, a unity that we usually only experience as children. Bly suggests that, for men, the golden ball lies within the deep, dark, primal field of the Wildman; that men, to become whole, must go deep into this place of the true masculine. To do this, men must confront the ancient mythologies, must in some way move against the forces of Western civilization, must leave the force field of the mother and the force field of collective male society and, as the initiate, confront the Wildman alone. In this way, said Bly, men can regain their true fierce energy, but it will not be a strength based on chauvinistic concepts of domination and control.²

There have been many different perspectives in the search for new male roles, but in an article in the April/May 1986 Utne Reader, writer Shepard Bliss wrote that two viewpoints were emerging as dominant: the feminist and the mythopoetic. The feminist approach (led by organizations like the National Organization of Changing Men) emphasized the problems of sexism and patriarchy. The mythopoetic tradition, led by Robert Bly, argued against certain aspects of the feminist critique. Our society may be sexist and even male dominated, said Bly, but patriarchy means “the rule of the fathers,” and our society is characterized by an absence of fathers.³

The Pagan community has taken a very different approach than that of Bly. It was gay men within Paganism who led a fearless examination of male roles, in the same way that lesbian women forced women in the Pagan movement to examine their own situation. Just as women in the mixed branches of Paganism were forced to confront an energetic movement of women’s religion and were changed by it, in the 1980s and beyond, many men (and women) were affected by their encounter with the “radical faeries.”

From lingerie “tea dances” to explosive encounter sessions between gay and heterosexual men, the radical faeries have brought changes to the Pagan community.

The Radical Faeries

The movement of radical faeries began around 1978. Its official beginning can be traced to a 1979 gathering, a Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies that was held at a desert sanctuary near Tucson, Arizona. A couple of months earlier, Arthur Evans—whose book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture argued that gay men needed to look at the connections between gay spirituality and the old Pagan nature religions—held a faerie circle in a redwood forest. This led to a conference, “A Call to Gay Brothers,” in Arizona. As one writer wrote in RFD—a journal that has consistently detailed the growth of faery spirituality—“the conference was issued as a ‘call’ in the Sufi sense.” Those who were ready to hear the call would come.⁴

The gathering, and the subsequent growth of radical faery spirituality, came out of a deep spiritual need. As one man told me, “We all wanted something that we didn’t have and we desperately wanted it, but we didn’t know what it was.” Jody, a man who has been involved with shamanic forms of Witchcraft for a number of years, told me that before meeting with the radical faeries, his experiences in gay culture had left him frustrated, angry, and disillusioned. “When I first ‘came out,’ I experienced this rush—‘I can finally love, I can finally have sex, I can finally express myself.’ But in many ways the gay culture did not serve my needs. I felt that, in many ways, it was an oppressive parody of straight culture. It takes place primarily in bars, where music is loud and people are not encouraged to talk, or form bonds or care for each other. It imitates the worst of heterosexual culture. I found I had to become a different person to get laid, and I didn’t like that at all. I became ashamed and I wondered, ‘Is this the best we have to offer?’”

Jody went to the second faerie gathering, held in the mountains of Colorado. “When I arrived,” he told me, “I knew I was home. This is my culture. These are people who don’t become someone else in order to make love. They live their sexuality in a way that is very connected to the earth.”

At the first faerie gathering in Arizona, the rituals were often completely spontaneous and unplanned. At one point, a man said that one of his urges was to go out into the desert with buckets of water and cover himself with wet sand. In the end, forty men went with him on a Sunday morning. “What started out to be a lighthearted romp,” writes one, “turned into a serious tribal affair. Something about the nudity and the primitiveness of the chanting and the ambiance of the gathering triggered a primal urge in them all and the chanting became more real.” A bystander, taken by the spirit of the gathering, took off his clothes and started down the bank.

Immediately there was a sense of initiation. They held him on their shoulders—a completely white body amid the mud people. They lowered him into the ooze and covered him over. They held him up high again and began to chant. After they put him down another spontaneous dance broke out. It was truly watching a tribal ritual. Even the photographs I’ve seen since are uncanny—like right out of National Geographic . The men in the photos aren’t accountants or teachers or movie cameramen or lawyers or students or radical leftists or physicians or clerks or postal workers. They’re members of the same tribe. It did not escape anyone how leveling the mud was. They were all the same and they got an electric sense of unity and power from it.⁵

Another man, describing the curious onlookers, wrote, “I saw tourists with Nikons standing on a bluff above us, stealing our visions to sell and felt maybe how aborigines feel when they find their faces in National Geographic.”⁶ A third participant observed, “Joyously caked with mud and with several dozen of my brothers—singing, dancing, shouting—I evoked a sensation of timelessness that I sometimes feel during especially satisfying love making, that I am in touch with something thousands and thousands of years old. This skeptical Marxist-Buddhist-Unitarian has become a true believer in the Fairy Spirit.”⁷

There was one large, structured ritual—the Great Faery Circle. It began with a torchlight procession, parading through the Arizona desert, to the sound of flutes. “The moon grows full; we dance in its light,”⁸ wrote one. Another said, “In the twilight the gathering . . . was extraordinary. There was no self-consciousness, everyone seemed to anticipate doing a great work and they began clapping and chanting as the musicians began to play. . . . As soon as they got away from the compound and into the desert under the moon, they became quiet, and as soon as they entered the wash with its scraggy trees and low mesquite bushes, power seemed to enter them.”

A small wire cage was brought out. “There were things we had come with—thoughts, ideas, anxieties, fears, anything which chained or shackled us—we would not be taking back to our other world with us. These were whispered, spoken, screamed into the cage and never let out again. As the cage began to make its way around the circle, spontaneous chants began. . . . A low hum began but quickly moved into more agitated, coarser, emotion-filled cries. Hisses and isolated screams—and then came the most frightening of all—the animal noises. From seemingly nowhere, howls, barks, growling, roars, began softly and grew to a terrifying proportion. . . . It died as quickly as it had started and was replaced by a soft keening. I have never experienced so many people in harmony, nor had so much gooseflesh.

“When the cage had been around the circle, the leader took it to the center, and held it up, over his head. Slowly he walked around the fire so everyone could see what they were throwing away and then, with a great shout, he flung the cage and everything it contained far into the desert darkness.”⁹

“In the beginning,” Peter Soderberg, a radical faerie from Iowa told me, “we had no answers, we cried a lot, and laughed a lot, and sometimes we were cruel to each other. Living in a culture that has this idea that the physical and the spiritual are split, we didn’t even have a vocabulary for speaking about what we needed. When we say ‘spiritual’ in our society, it usually doesn’t encompass my flesh, the food I eat, the art I make, and the pleasure I get from my friends. But what I came to understand quickly was that being around faeries was the first safe place for me.” And Don, another faerie man added, “We wanted a family, not a club, not an organization.” Peter chimed in, “a place that we could be really honest with each other in this really direct way that scares people.”

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. Harry Hays is said to have once put it something like this: “People who are trying to be accepted by the ‘straight’ world pander to the straights, saying, ‘We’re really just the same as you, the only thing we do different is what we do in bed.’ No,” says Hays, “the only thing we do the same is in bed.”

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. . . . There is a reality to being Gay that is radically different from being Straight. . . . It is real. We can feel it in our hearts and in our guts.”¹⁰ But where does one find role models for such a person? One article in RFD suggested:

We gays cast our nets out into the mythic sea, searching for our own lost archetypes, our spiritual role models . . . those symbols of the human psyche which we may claim as emblematic of our particular way of being.¹¹

Gay men began looking at the role of the shaman, the berdache, and the bardajo. Writing in RFD, J. Michael Clark described the magical and spiritual role of the “berdache” in certain tribal cultures. Berdache was a term, first popularized among French explorers, which came to mean a person of one sex who assumes the role and status of the opposite sex. This person was socially accepted in these cultures and often was considered to have an enhanced spirituality. Similarly, other writers in RFD and elsewhere noted the role of homosexuality, cross-dressing, role changing, and androgyny in shamanic cultures and the fact that it is often easier for someone who is not tied down to specific gender roles to walk between the worlds. ¹²

“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 Pagan movement doesn’t give credit to this, or even know about it, but then, there’s a lot of heterosexism in modern Neo-Pagan culture.”

Similar ideas were expressed to me by Jody, as we sat in a forest in the Berkshires at the 1985 COG Grand Council. “Look,” he told me, “if most of the traditions of Wicca have been destroyed, gay spirituality has been totally eradicated. After all, think of the origin of the word ‘faggot,’ we were burned along with the Witches. Our magic was destroyed. It was not preserved like indoor ceremonial magic was preserved.”

Jody quoted from Visionary Love by Mitch Walker;¹³ he said that a door can be opened when you have psychic knowledge of male and female united within yourself. You then form a oneness that is a gate which connects you with the sexuality of nature creation. Jody believes that the elements of play and shape-changing so necessary for magic come more easily when you are one body instead of two, when the idea of gender doesn’t come between you and the various parts you might play. “It is simply easier,” he told me, “to blend with a nature spirit, or the spirit of a plant or animal, if you are not concerned with a genderspecific role.”

Many radical faeries were preoccupied with questions of process and form. Just as feminist women had been struggling with questions about authority, forms of leadership, decision making, language, and control, these gay men seemed to spend much of their time struggling with the same kinds of questions. “Process is content,” Peter told me. As a person who has always felt content was more important than form, I was dismayed. But in Peter’s view, society’s violence begins at the place where creativity and self-expression is controlled. “In our system of male dominance,” he told me, “there is an unexpressed contract that says: ‘It is safer to control energy than it is to experience energy.’ In our society men are the ‘control’ referents, and women the ‘experience’ referents.” On the most superficial level this would mean: “Women are feeling people. Women must be controlled.” But on a subtler level Peter believes that this system exists within every human being. We tend to control our experiences, instead of participating in them and acting from them.

In contrast, faerie reality says, “It is more enjoyable to experience energy than to control energy,” that the need for violence will disappear as creativity and real self-expression increase. Faerie gatherings, at their best, would be places where experimentation with new social forms could take place. They would not be a place for set rituals or workshops given by “leaders.” One man wrote: “Spirituality has to be discovered . . . by each individual. Even the Native American cultures with a highly spiritual worldview did not ‘teach’ it. Instead, the young of the tribe, as part of their initiation, went on a vision quest to seek their own personal experience with the spirit realm.”¹⁴

When they would come to conferences about men, or participate in Pagan festivals, radical faeries would often promote what might be called Discordian or Erisian energy (see Chapter 11). They would be the public anarchists. As the main, formal ritual was about to begin at a Pagan gathering in the 1980s, a group of faery men stood at the entrance to the circle, calling out, “Attention! No spontaneity! We’re the spontaneity police!” In general, they have been uncomfortable with formal workshops, with discussions by “leaders,” with models that are topdown or front-to-back. They have not wanted “elders,” or parental authority figures. Above all, they have wanted to elevate the transformative power of play.

At the Pagan Spirit Gathering, Peter told me, “If you want to come to the faery camp, bring lots of clothes, bring lots of toys. If you bring things that are fun, you will find out what the process is about. It’s the flip side of our culture. It seems nonsensical but it makes perfect sense.” “Patriarchy, in a nutshell,” said Don, “is about taking control. It permeates everything in our culture, including Paganism.” If the problem is control, faeries see spontaneity and play as the antidotes. “There’s lots of laughter and gossip among the faeries,” said Don. “We love to share and we hate secrets.”

The first Pagan gathering where there was a significant presence of gay men was the Pan-Pagan Festival in 1980. The presence of feminist women like Z Budapest combined with the men created explosive divisions and change. One afternoon at the gathering, Z Budapest led a circle of some sixty women. For many women at the campsite in Indiana, it was their first experience in an all-woman ritual. Z had enlisted the aid of a group of men, many of them gay, to protect the perimeter of the circle, since the camp was adjacent to a public camping area, and many at the ritual went skyclad (or nude).

The ritual began with a procession past a lake. Women holding branches of flowers walked through the camp singing. Many Pagans heard for the first time the words that would soon become one of the best-known festival chants:

We all come from the Goddess, and to her we shall return, like a drop of rain, flowing to the ocean.

The women gathered in a circle, chanted, danced, and wove webs of brightly colored yarn to symbolize their connection with each other. Unbeknownst to the women in the circle, one of the organizers of the festival was so angered and upset by the all-woman skyclad ritual that he tried to break through the circle of men guarding the rite, in order to pull his wife and child out. The controversy was one of several—all of them confrontations over politics or life style—that led to the breakup of the ecumenical council that had put on this gathering for four years. Three separate factions put on festivals the next summer.

Since 1981, at the Pagan Spirit Gathering, and at many other festivals—from Georgia to Ontario, from Massachusetts to New Mexico—there have been workshops and rituals for men. There have been faerie circles, but there have also been rituals and workshops where men of different sexual persuasions have come together, sometimes explosively, often joyously, and frequently with some unease.

One new development at festivals was the “tea dance.” When it first appeared at a festival put on by the Athanor Fellowship, it seemed strangely out of place—disco music, alcoholic beverages, and dressing up in lingerie and crazy clothes. It seemed more suited to the gay community on Fire Island, not a wooded setting filled with Witches, vegetarians, and ecology buffs who rarely drank anything stronger than wine. The Athanor Fellowship—a group with few gays in it—found the dance so successful that it began to take it around from gathering to gathering until an enormous number of Pagans had let down their hair, dressed in costume, put on wigs and makeup, and had simply let loose.

“I remember someone saying the other night,” Jody reflected, “that when he first entered the Pagan community, you could not even touch another man. And there were regular polarity checks in circles—you know, boy, girl, boy, girl. There’s been a wonderful loosening and blossoming in the last few years, but there is also much resistance.

“I remember one meeting of men, at a gathering, where I decided I would come in a dress. I was asked to give ‘the gay perspective.’ I talked about the evils of competitive aggression, how it alienates men from each other. When I was finished, one man rose to speak. ‘I love women and I get along with other men,’ he said, ‘but I’m a man, understand?’ and I said, ‘Look buddy, I am a man. A strong man. A man who knows how to get what he wants, and I don’t have to stomp on others to get it. And nobody backs me down.’”

But thinking over his experiences in the 1980s, Jody observed, “I do think we have a place here, a voice here and I think it’s the voice of the faery spirit coming through these men.” And writing after a week-long festival in 1982, another man observed, “This is difficult and delicate work we are doing. There are many changes that we need to make, much violence we need to transform and lots of old hurts we need to face. It is a sturdy, easily-found playfulness we are headed toward. . . . But this journey being taken by men of all persuasions (plus a few that we haven’t managed to persuade yet) is just beginning.”¹⁵

Think about the tea dance, Jody said at the end of our interview. “All those men and women in crazy lingerie, dancing weirdly and loving it! Five years ago, it would never have happened. It’s wonderful! Think of all the new ideas they may now have, now that they have found a way to get beyond their locked perceptions of role and place.”