Category Archives: Brotherhood

One Small Year

One small year. It’s been an eternity, it’s taken all of me to get here. Through this one small year.

I found myself in a music circle last night, feeling compelled to murder the above Shaun Colvin song as acknowledgement of the anniversary of my leaving last year’s Imbolc gathering and the changes in my life since then.

Immediately after last Imbolc I made the painful decision to break up for the final time with my ex-fiance. Faced with a flat that reeked of loss, a job I could hardly tolerate and a city full of memories, I hatched a plan to escape and relocate (with considerable help).

Now a full solar rotation later I am in a different country, a different job, I have less stress and I am a Novice within the Order of Perpetual Indulgence. My life is full of new people and renewed purpose.

I had plans to help facilitate the current Imbolc gathering at Paddington Farm alongside some of the team from last year. As the date grew close and discussions began it felt progressively more frustrated and at odds with the process, so I bowed out and encouraged another to take my place.

Instead I concentrated efforts on my new local community. Alongside my good friend and fellow Sister I helped at the Community Christmas Day Dinner and threw myself into manifesting in Bristol and Glastonbury, handing out condoms and lube, delivering a speech as part of the World AIDS Day or writing profanities in glitter onto shiny festive baubles.

Time passed as it does and one chance encounter led to a discussion with a local publican about putting on a queer cabaret night here in the heart of rural Somerset. The Ministry of Martha was born.

In the meantime I began to share some faerie processes and ideas among my fellow Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. They took well to hissing in circles, they wanted to hear of the magic of queer empowerment, asked about spirituality within the context of sexuality.

All this culminated this week in pulling together an astonishing event here, where Faeries, Sisters and locals mixed, laughed and played together and raised funds for each other including a new LGBTQ youth group in Glastonbury.

Our 5 Sisters were graciously welcomed to the gathering space just outside town and after a brief sleep we walked together to join the Imbolc celebrations at the White Spring and Chalice Well. Sisters and Faeries also ate together and talked a lot, found common ground and opened their hearts in circle.

It has felt like reuniting lost relative tribes this week. Sisters honour their origins that lie with Faeries and the fact that one of their founders, Sister Soami (aka Sister Missionary Position) is still living in Sanctuary space on Short Mountain.

We have much to teach each other and I am blessed to have seen the best in both organisations this week. Oddly enough I have felt more valued and able to contribute at a Faerie Gathering as a Sister than if I had stuck it out and been a Gathering Organiser.

There are challenges here still for me, whether those reveal themselves through discussions around conflict or flickers of jealousy at some of the beauty all around me. New faeries to meet, reminders of happy loving times with past lovers here, the heartache of missing those who have passed through the veil. Familiar rivalries, old behaviour patterns, recalling schisms past and feeling their repercussions still.

Also being on the farm only part of the time, just enough to host an auction and a midnight heart circle or help facilitate a workshop on being a Sister, has been disconcerting. But I think I have become a better Faerie by being a better Nun. Perhaps those in combination might help me be a better realisation of myself. Hell, at least I know by now where spare blankets and towels can be found.

Everything is different now and some of it is even making sense. Blessed Imbolc everyone. You are loved.

Cunty (Princess Cuntmuscle)/Novice Carmen Myanus

Autumn Prayer

We are the faerie spirit
that’s always lived within humanity
raw awareness in tune with nature’s dance
that sacrificed that divinity
that also lost its sanity
that became mortal, physical, solid
forgot how to shapeshift, astral travel
how to turn within to take flight
we became flesh, we learnt to die
we learnt about suffering, we learnt how to lie
but now humanity’s reached its tipping point
and amidst its madness a new age being born
remembering eternity, remembering you are me
remembering the elements, the mother, the spirit
surrendering to That and becoming This
Faerie Spirit born to flow free
born to liberate humanity
from polarities and dualities
Great Faerie Spirit-in-Action
flow through this tribe
liberate our minds from deathtraps
empower our hearts with courage
may we be who we, see who we, become who we are
may we reunite the earth and the heavenly stars
bring the power of rainbows into human eyes
as we reveal the faerie ‘neath the human disguise
we may appear at L as G, as B as T
but our queer spirit is part of eternity, is remembering infinity

Hanging with Harry Hay

Harry Hay (1912-2002) Here are some quotations and photos to assist communion with the spirit of Harry, gay activist and founder of the 1950s Mattachine Society and one of the three founding motherfathers of the Radical Faeries…. Harry was born in Worthing, UK, and lived his life in the USA.

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Give yourself permission to enjoy being gay. You do have to give yourself permission. You have been told you may not. Give yourself permission to be free.

Throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath

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When we begin to love and respect Great Mother Nature’s gift to us of gayness, we’ll discover that the bondage of our childhood and adolescence in the trials and tribulations of neitherness was actually an apprenticeship for teaching her children new cutting edges of consciousness and social change. In stunning paradox, our neitherness is our talisman, our fairie wand, our gift we bring to the hetero world to….transform their pain into healings; …transform their tears to laughter: …transform their hand-me-downs to visions of loveliness.

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harry_hayquote

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Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. Under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again.

harry4

The term ‘spiritual’ represents the accumulation of all experiential consciousness from the division of the first cells in the primeval slime, down through all evolution, to your latest insights of subject-subject consciousness just a minute ago. What else can we call this overwhelmingly magnificent inheritance—other than spiritual?

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I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I’m his son, and I’m stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn.

harry10

We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you’re going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you.

harry12

Confronted with the loving-sharing Consensus of subject-SUBJECT relationships all Authoritarianism must vanish. The Fairy Family Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of non-possessive love – which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to his own freely-selected, full potential – reaching out to one another subject-to-SUBJECT, becomes for the first time in history the true working model of a Sharing Consensus!

Subject–SUBJECT consciousness, a concept proposed by Harry Hay, believed by Hay to be gay people’s unique perspective on the world. Hay saw heterosexual society existing in a subject–object dynamic; where men, who had the culturally acceptable power, saw only themselves as subject and therefore higher than women, who were treated as objects and property. Hay extrapolated this interpersonal-sexual dynamic (male-power:female-subordinate) into a broader social context, believing that the subject-object relationship was the driving force behind most all of societies ills. Objectificiation served as a barrier, emotionally separating an individual (subject) from another individual by dehumanizing them, making them object.

When Hay looked at same-sex relationships, however, he saw a different dynamic at work. He believed that homosexual relationships were based on mutual respect and empathy for the other: a longing for a companion who was as equally valuable as the self. Hay termed this interpersonal—sexual dynamic “subject—SUBJECT” (which Hay capitalized for emphasis in all of his writings). He believed that this subject–SUBJECT way of viewing the world was gay people’s most valuable contribution to the greater society. By empathizing with all people, relating to each other as equal-to-equal, society would change drastically and social injustices would be eradicated.    Wikipedia

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There are many ways to be a Radical Faerie

Some come for the SPIRIT

some come for the DRAG

some love to create FEASTS

all come for COMMUNITY

and to experience DIVERSITY

leading to UNITY

found in the HEART

LOVE is the FAERIE ART

No matter your body shape, size, design

The call to be a faerie is found inside

No matter your colour, gender or creed

A radical passion is all that you need.

There are many motivations behind people’s involvement in Radical Faerie space. Heart centred communication as a way of creating community is definitely a major one. As is the chance to honour nature and the spiritual side of life in ways of our own choosing and devising. Faeries are creating a queer mystical subculture, where we can drop the human façade and be the magical divine child at play in the universe, where we can recognise that all life is one (the faerie mantra is ‘subject-SUBJECT consciousness’), and discover the role that queer beings are called to play in that sacred unity.

For some faeries this journey is directly about exploring the inheritance we receive from the shamanic peoples of planet earth, which tribes were often served by gender-bending, cross-dressing, shape-shifting queer souls in spiritual roles. It is about reclaiming the link between homo-eroticism, gender variance and the sacred – an intimate link that once was in play around the whole world, from ancient Greek and Roman cults that worshipped deities such as Aphrodite, Artemis, Dionysus, Pan, Antinous… to Celtic pagan sorcery, native American two-spirit shamans, African magicians and Sufi poets. Monasteries in Christian and Buddhist cultures long served as sanctuaries for same sex loving individuals.

Radical Faerie spaces enable queers to deepen our experience of life – of love, sex and community. Bonds are strengthened through gatherings and ecstatic rituals that lead us into communion with nature and spirit. In community we care for each other, form bonds of love and compassion that are extended to all who come along – we are exploring the next territories of queer life, taking our gay liberation all the way from the sexual through the social and political into the spiritual realms, attempting to build a world where LOVE is the starting point.

The doors to Albion Faerie gatherings are open to all who feel called to be there. The first Radical Faeries were gay men but they soon discovered that Faerie space involves the transcendence of labels, of limited notions of gender and Self, that society.. and the mainstream lgbt+ community.. often impose on us. In Faerie space we can drop outdated limiting notions of who we are, and open mind and heart to a magical reality that humans have long lost touch with. Inside every human there exists an indigenous soul that remembers its innate connection to all of life. It is magical and eternal, it is the Faerie child inside.

Out of the mists of our long oppression

We bring love for ourselves and each other

And love for the gifts we bear

So heavy and so painful the fashioning of them,

So long the road given us to travel them. A separate people,

We bring a gift to celebrate each other,

‘Tis a gift to be gay!

Feel the pride of it!

(Radical Faerie founding spirit, Harry Hay)

Brotherhood (by Cunty)

Every now and again things align beautifully and disparate patterns coalesce to form a path. For a precious moment things make sense and we find an empowered sense of peace. We find the balance within; we resonate with the magic around us.

It was a cold February evening in Scotland (is there any other kind?) and I was travelling to St Andrews in Fife with one of my dearest friends. A few weeks earlier I’d learned that Panti Bliss, the famous gender discombobulist and gay rights campaigner was to give a talk at the University there and I eagerly booked a couple of tickets.

There’s something else in the town that bears the name of my country’s patron saint: my little brother, who is a student there. We share the same father as a genetic anchor, though we are both emotionally unattached to him. He is half my age, lives with his girlfriend and only learned of my existence a few years ago. I tracked him down last Summer online and we’d chatted online but never met.

So on the day I was off to see Panti I logged into Facebook and discovered it was my brother’s birthday. Since we had been denied the opportunity of knowing each other, I forgive myself for not knowing such details. Shaking, I messaged his girlfriend and asked if she thought he’d be interested in meeting that night. Just before I finished work for the day she replied with the go-ahead.

On stage that night, Panti exceeded all expectations. A heartfelt plea to the young queer kids to explore and celebrate the gifts that come with their otherness was mixed with humour and a story of how she met Madonna at a funeral. The talk itself augmented and fuelled the things I know as a Faerie – that we are a tribe, there’s a purpose to us being here, that we are blessed with the ability to engage in our own forms of transformative magic.

Before catching the train back to Edinburgh, my friend and I went to meet my brother and his girlfriend. After an initial awkwardness and then 40 minutes of my storytelling mode (whilst my friend did her best smile-and-nod-to-reassure-everyone-I’m-not-going-to-pull-a-knife routine) there was much hugging and general loveliness and barriers were broken down.

The train journey home was a deeply reflective 80 minutes. My friend, the most patient person I have ever known, said I could talk the whole way home if I wanted. So I did. I expressed my excitement and joy, my fears about this important step in building a relationship with a sibling, after us both being separated as only children.  I clenched my teeth in anger that our father denied us the option of knowing one another. I delighted in the notion that we had both escaped that solitude imposed upon us, as if we had been prisoners in neighbouring cells, never speaking or seeing each other, yet conspiring through facebook notes to break out of the fortress of his emotional repression we were captive within.

I turned to my uncomplaining companion and told her how blessed I was. How my own otherness had sparked my search for my own vision of spirituality, how being a Faerie gave me the chance to connect with others of my tribe in the most astonishing ways, deeply and honestly. How lucky I was to have the words available to me to express myself and to question familial power structures that are toxic to me. What did my little brother have?

My long-suffering confidant looked at me right in the eye and said “He has you”.

And everything came into alignment. The pattern began to form in my mind.   It was the web of Faeries I know and love. It was the gift they offered freely, without the expectation of conformity that my estranged patriarch demands. Love and connection are the gift and they are what I can pass on, what I can teach my brother and learn from him again in turn. This is part of the Work too, taking the magic of Faeries back into the mundane world, sowing the seeds, waiting for wonder to shoot up between the pavement cracks. For one shining moment it all made sense and I was at peace, having passed through the anger at years wasted.

As the train moved us ever on to home, as I sat with my dear friend who was practically manifesting Kwan-Yin herself at that point, I indulged myself in naming some of those Faeries who have taught me of brotherly love, in between whatever ramblings. Even though the names meant little to her, she smiled at the tears in my eyes as I spoke, and the obvious affection name evoked in me.

Beloved, Gandalf, Wood Pigeon, Royal, Woodchild, Ant of the Earth, Lovehandel, Dogwood, Will, Octopus, Aurora, Buzzy Dandelion, Mushroom, Fanny Boy, Pikachu, Fairy Liquid, Minerva, Zeb, Dido, Future Babes, Hawthorn, Shokti, Brother Sun, Chundra, Tumbleweed, Fellina, Barbarella, Jim from Rural France Not Paris, Ladslove, Mixture, Sunflower, Mata Hari, Whatever You Want, Big Puck, White Rose, Theoklymenos, Qweaver, Joost, Topsoil, Doghood, Fagus, Rabbitstar, Presence, Efthimios, Spirit Force, Coco Pierre, Robder, Pink Sapphire, Lone Wolf. The list is not exhaustive and I apologise for out-of-date names, mis-spellings and omissions.

They helped teach me about speaking from my heart, staying connected, returning from conflict, puppy piles, listening to others’ hearts, being playful, wearing a dress, accepting touch, not being fearful of other men and that a new heart-connection is just as significant and impacting as any other. I hope I honour their gifts as I in turn pass them on to brothers of the heart or of the blood (and heart-sisters and non-binary siblings too). Wherever we go, in or out of Faerie space, or each others’ lives, or to other countries or planes of existence, we are connected in a brotherhood. If not a circle, perhaps a spiral of loving companions, throwing one arm out to the cosmos and the other back to itself and each other.