Drawing Down the Moon (60 page)

“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:

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.”

Since this section was written around 1985, the gay spirituality movement, or what many now call the GLBT spirituality movement, has grown and diversified. There are scores of unique groups, radical faeries being only one element in the mix. At the time this chapter was written, however, the only groups providing a place for gay Pagan spirituality were the radical faeries, The Minoan Brotherhood, an initiatory mystery tradition of Witchcraft that serves gay and bisexual men (see Wicca Traditions, Chapter 5), and for women, Dianic Wicca, The Minoan Sisterhood, and various eclectic lesbian women's spirituality groups. The early history of both the women's and men's spirituality movements has been chronicled in two journals—
WomanSpirit,
which began in 1974, and
RFD Magazine,
which began a couple of years later (see Resources).

There were always gay men and women in other Wiccan and Pagan groups. But back in the 1970s, many gay Pagans found themselves in a strange position. Some gay men were initiated Gardnerian, and they had women working partners in covens that emphasized the belief in male-female sexual polarity. Many of them functioned very well, and many continue to do so. But as Michael Lloyd (Garan du), a founding member of the Green Faerie Grove, a worship group for queer Pagan men in Columbus, Ohio, observed, there was something ironic in gay people escaping the intolerance of their childhood religions and “entering a path that preached ‘all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,' only to be confronted with denunciations that some acts of love were still considered to be perversions.” Lloyd is also a High Priest in the Minoan Brotherhood and is currently working on a biography of that tradition's founder, Eddie Buczynski.

Another long-time observer of the Gay Pagan scene is Sparky T. Rabbit (Peter Soderberg), who has written some of the most beautiful Pagan chants that have been used in rituals and festivals across the country. He notes that gay men and women who came into Paganism in the 1970s and 1980s had to “squeeze their way into local communities where there was no room for them until they made room for themselves.” They entered straight Pagan groups, were tolerated and eventually accepted, but Sparky adds: “only as long as they towed the line and didn't get too uppity.” Remember, he notes, many queer people can pass as part of the mainstream:

Sparky notes that Pagan women often tell a compelling story of how they felt inferior in the religions of their families, and how important fit was to find a religion that celebrated women with powerful goddess images. Seeing oneself reflected in one's own religion was a great attraction, says Sparky, “and a big part of the healing we all need to do in order to create powerful, living communities of Pagan faith.”

But others note that there has been a fair amount of change within the Pagan community. Michael Lloyd says that many queer Gardnerians, Alexandrians, Heathens, Druids, and Santeros can be found, “and where existing organizations or ideas do not offer exactly the right blend of life-affirming philosophy and mythos to assuage one's soul, then people are free to forge one that does.”