They call themselves Radical Faeries, and they have been holding such gatherings for over 20 years.

At first glance, the Faeries seem to be holdovers from the counterculture of the ‘60s—though with a light-hearted camp sensibility that is unmistakably queer. But their central concern is serious: they believe gay people are a special tribe with a unique role to play in the evolution of human consciousness.

The roots of the Radical Faerie movement date to the mid-1970s, when a number of gay men became frustrated with the urban gay community. They criticized the banality of a culture based in bars and bathhouses and saw the rise of the “clone” look—mustache, flannel shirt, and tight Levi’s—as pandering to heterosexual ideas of masculinity.

Hoping to cultivate a community based on “gay values,” some men left the cities to establish rural gay farming communes. In 1974, one of these groups launched RFD: A Magazine for Country Faggots, where along with informative articles about farming, readers could find idealistic meditations about bonding with nature.

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the gay mystic Arthur Evans was talking about fairies. In a series of lectures in 1976, he theorized that the fairies of folklore were in fact allusions to gay male goddess-worshippers suppressed by the new Christian authorities. “Their greatest ‘crime’ was that they experienced the highest manifestations of the divine in free practice of sexuality,” Evans wrote in Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-culture (1978).

Fairies were also on the mind of Harry Hay, the pioneering activist who in 1950 had founded the first major U.S. gay rights group. In 1970, he and his partner, John Burnside, had moved from Los Angeles to northern New Mexico. It was around that time that Hay began using the word “fairy”—the slur bullies had used against him as a child—to describe the peculiar “otherness” of gays, the quality of being neither masculine nor feminine. “Only now that I’m grown up and have become a proper queer, I gussy up the spelling to make it f-a-e-r-i-e,” he later explained.

Hay concluded that because of their status as “faeries,” gays were uniquely endowed with a “subject-subject” mode of thinking, able to relate to both people and things not as objects to be consumed or manipulated but rather as “another self to be respected.” Gayness, he argued, was a necessary factor in human evolution, and gay people belonged to a special, separate “tribe.” Rather than assimilate into heterosexual society, they were called to heal it.

In 1978, Hay and Burnside became friends with two other men who thought along similar lines: Don Kilhefner, a 39-year-old activist from Los Angeles, and Mitch Walker, in his mid-20s, who was studying Jungian psychology at Berkeley. Together, the four men set about planning the first “spiritual conference for Radical Faeries,” as it was described on their flier.

Over 200 men came to that first Faerie gathering, which took place over Labor Day weekend in 1979, at a Buddhist retreat center in the Arizona desert. As they grew comfortable with one another, they began to shed their inhibitions, as well as their clothes, donning feathers, bells, beads, and body paint. At “heart circles,” a wooden talisman was passed from person to person, and each shared his feelings about being gay. In one unplanned event, a group of about 50 men began covering each other in mud, chanting, and dancing. “It evoked a sense of timelessness that I sometimes feel during especially satisfying lovemaking, that I am in touch with something thousands and thousands of years old,” one participant later recalled.

Inspired by the success of the first gathering, a second was held a year later in a mountain meadow above Boulder, Colo. Here the culture developed further, with men adopting new Faerie names, such as Oak Leaf, Marvelous Persimmon, and Ultra Violet Nova.

Since that time, several Radical Faerie “sanctuaries” have been established, from Oregon to Ontario, where Faeries live off the land, host gatherings, and welcome visitors. Faerie circles can be found throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe and Australia; there is even a listing for a Faerie circle in Estonia.

As with any loosely organized group, there have been problems. In the early ‘80s, for example, Kilhefner and Walker left the Faeries over what they considered Hay’s domineering leadership style. And on another level, some complain that gatherings have become more about style—who is wearing the most stunning Faerie outfit—than spiritual revelation.

Nevertheless, as gays and lesbians become more deeply enmeshed in mainstream consumer culture, the Faeries’ vision of an enlightened tribe, close to nature and endowed with special gifts for humanity, continues to offer an intriguing alternative model.

Suggested reading: 

• Pickett, Keri, 2000. Faeries: Visions, Voices, and Pretty Dresses. New York: Aperture.
• Thompson, Mark, ed., 1987. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Timmons, Stuart, 1990. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Alyson Publications.