Radical Faeries
[2] Gay activists Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner, and John Burnside[3] organized the first Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries in September 1979.
[4] The network subsequently evolved alongside queer rights expansions, engaging with eclectic constructs and rituals while challenging commercialized and patriarchal aspects of modern LGBTQ+ life.
As it grew, it sought the support of wealthy gay people to finance its social work and public relations, with Kilhefner becoming concerned at its increasingly assimilationist stance and taking a leave of absence in 1976.
[18] This event convinced Hay and his partner John Burnside that they should leave their home in New Mexico and move to Los Angeles, where they settled into a 1920s house on the eastern edge of Hollywood.
Kilhefner identified an ideal location from an advert in The Advocate; the Sri Ram Ashram was a gay-friendly spiritual retreat in the desert near Benson, Arizona, owned by an American named Swami Bill.
[25] Initially, Hay rejected the term "movement" when discussing the Radical Faeries, considering it to instead be a "way of life" for gay males, and he began referring to it as a "not-movement".
[26] In organising the event, Hay handled the political issues, Burnside the logistics and mechanics, Kilhefner the budgetary and administrative side, and Walker was to be its spiritual leader.
[29] Hay gave a welcoming speech in which he outlined his ideas regarding Subject-SUBJECT consciousness, calling on those assembled to "throw off the ugly green frogskin of hetero-imitation to find the shining Faerie prince beneath".
[29] Rather than being referred to as "workshops", the events that took place were known as "Faerie circles",[29] and were on such varied subjects as massage, nutrition, local botany, healing energy, the politics of gay enspiritment, English country dancing, and auto-fellatio.
[30] Those assembled took part in spontaneous rituals, providing invocations to spirits and performing blessings and chants,[29] with most participants discarding the majority of their clothes, instead wearing feathers, beads, and bells, and decorating themselves in rainbow makeup.
As more joined the circle, they began meeting in West Hollywood's First Presbyterian Church and then the olive grove atop the hill at Barnsdall Park; however they found it difficult to gain the same change of consciousness that had been present at the rural gathering.
[34] The group began to discuss what the Faerie movement was developing into; Hay encouraged them to embark on political activism, using Marxism and his Subject-SUBJECT consciousness theory as a framework for bringing about societal change.
[35] Another issue of contention was over what constituted a "Faerie"; Hay had an idealized image of what someone with "gay consciousness" thought and acted like, and turned away some prospective members of the Circle because he disagreed with their views.
One prospective member, the gay theatre director John Callaghan, joined the circle in February 1980, but was soon ejected by Hay after he voiced concern about hostility toward heterosexuals among the group.
[37] It also exhibited an increasing influence from the U.S. Pagan movement, as Faeries incorporated elements from Evans' Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance into their practices.
[39] There, Hay publicly revealed the founding trio's desire for the creation of a permanent residential Faerie community, where they could grow their own crops and thus live self-sustainably.
[40] The gathering was also attended by an increasing number of men from outside of America, particularly Canada, but also from Australia, Norway, France and Germany, many of whom returned to their countries of origin to establish Faerie communes, such as the Wellington Boot, Common Ground etc.
Hay, Kilhefner and Burnside were outraged at being challenged with having a closed circle and acted as if Kilbourne and Ion did not exist, a terribly difficult situation for them, especially as ten people were holed-up in a small house in the pouring rain, for six days.
[44] The core circle made an attempt to reconcile, but at a meeting that came to be known as "Bloody Sunday", Kilhefner quit along with Walker, accusing Hay and Burnside of "power tripping".
[46] However, despite the division among its founders, the Radical Faerie movement continued to grow, largely as a result of its anti-authoritarian structure, with many participants being unaware of the conflict regarding disowned power agendas.
[46] These workshops stirred up controversy due to some participants' difficulty with their message of gay spirit as a sacred alchemical process involving confrontation with and transformation of insidious internalized homophobia.
A subsequent and unconnected Faerie gathering was held on 9–12 April 1982, at Mandala, a gay spiritual commune established near Uki in Northern NSW in 1974 by David Johnstone.
Guided by Mica Kindman, Lloyd Fair, Cass Brayton, and Will Roscoe, the San Francisco Faerie Circle had formed a non-profit corporation under the name of NOMENUS (varyingly interpreted as "No Men Us", "No Menace", and "No Menus"), supported by Hay.
[50] In 1987 they purchased Magdalene Farm – an 80-acre property near Grant's Pass, Oregon – from George Jalbert, who had unsuccessfully hoped to establish his own rural gay commune there over the preceding decade.
