Radical Faeries are a loosely affiliated worldwide network and countercultural movement blending queer consciousness and secular spirituality. Sharing various aspects with neopaganism, the movement also adopts elements from anarchism and environmentalism. Rejecting hetero-imitation, the Radical Faerie movement began during the 1970s sexual revolution among gay men in the United States. Gay activists Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, Don Kilhefner, and John Burnside organized the first Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries in September 1979.
The network subsequently evolved alongside queer rights expansions, engaging with eclectic constructs and rituals while challenging commercialized and patriarchal aspects of modern LGBTQ+ life. Faeries tend to be fiercely independent, anti-establishment, and community-focused. Contemporary Radical Faeries embody a wide range of genders, sexual orientations, and identities.
Philosophy and ritual
Hay's biographer Stuart Timmons described the Faeries as a "mixture of a political alternative, a counter-culture, and a spirituality movement." Peter Hennan asserted that the Faeries contained elements of "Marxism, feminism, paganism, Native American and New Age spirituality, anarchism, the mythopoetic men's movement, radical individualism, the therapeutic culture of self-fulfillment and self-actualization, earth-based movements in support of sustainable communities, spiritual solemnity coupled with a camp sensibility, gay liberation and drag."
The Radical Faerie movement was a reaction against the social emptiness that many gay men felt was present both in the heterosexual establishment and the assimilationist gay community. As one Faerie commented, in his opinion mainstream gay culture was "an oppressive parody of straight culture", taking place primarily in bars and not encouraging people to "form bonds or care for each other". In contrast, the Faeries "live their sexuality in a way that is very connected to the earth."
Faeries represent the first spiritual movement to be both "gay centered and gay engendered", where gayness is central to the idea, rather than in addition to, or incidental to a pre-existing spiritual tradition. The Radical Faerie exploration of the "gay spirit" is central, and that it is itself the source of spirituality, wisdom, and initiation. Mitch Walker says that "because of its indigenous, gay-centered nature, the Radical Faerie movement pioneers a new seriousness about gayness, its depth and potential, thereby heralding a new stage in the meaning of Gay Liberation."
In keeping with hippie, neopagan, and ecofeminist trends of the time, gatherings were held out-of-doors in natural settings. To this end, distinct Radical Faerie communities have created sanctuaries that are "close to the land".
Research on Radical Faerie communities show that their practices of sexuality and kinship purposefully stray from the mainstream heteronormative frameworks and trends of assimilation in LGBTQ cultures. According to scholarly ethnography, Radical Faerie gatherings are meant to support communal intimacy through ritualized expression of eroticism and the idea of a chosen family. These spaces are meant to challenge monogamy and traditional relationships in general. The Radical Faeries’ experiments with kinship serve as a spiritual and social practice that resists conventional models of gay identity and instead favors a more expansive possibility for queer belonging and connection.
History Foundation: 1978–79
Hay was a veteran of gay rights activism, having been a longstanding activist in the Communist Party USA prior to becoming a founding member of the Mattachine Society in 1950. After being publicly exposed as a Marxist in 1953, Hay stepped down from the Society's leadership, shortly before the other founders were forced to resign by more conservative members.
Kilhefner was a skilled community organizer and a main member of the Los Angeles branch of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). He began hosting gay reading groups called, "Gay Voices and Visions" in 1975 at the new center Kilhefner founded, The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, later renamed The Los Angeles LGBT Center, where he served as its first executive director, and which is now the largest in the world.
Walker had written and published many works on gay mysticism, sexuality, depth psychology and liberation, including an article published in the Jungian journal Spring in 1976, The Double: An Archetypal Configuration, a book, "Men Loving Men, A Gay Sex Guide and Consciousness Book”, published in 1977, and he was in the process of conjuring what was to become "Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Transmutational Faerie", published in 1980. Walker went on to spearhead a pioneering gay-centered psychologically minded grassroots movement through conducting hundreds of workshops, groups and work with many individuals.
The idea for a spiritual conference for gay consciousness exploration came out of Walker's deeply inspired correspondence with Hay beginning in 1976 and culminating a year and a half later when Walker flew to the desert to visit him in early 1978. Timmons writes: "Meeting Walker was a critical link in Harry's development of a new kind of gay movement...Walker and Hay formed the 'society of two' that grew into the Radical Faeries. The mythic, hidden aspects of gay identity that they had studied separately suddenly converged, with greatly increased current." After Hay and Walker were joined by Kilhefner in successfully presenting a workshop together in the Fall of 1978, "Hay told Walker that with 'this magnificent organizer,' Don Kilhefner, they were now a society of three. Their dreamed-of conference could now proceed."
Raised into an Amish Mennonite community, Kilhefner had studied at Howard University where he joined the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After university, he spent time in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps before joining the Peace and Freedom Party and becoming a leading figure in the GLF from 1969 to 1971. As the GLF evolved into the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, Kilhefner became its first executive director. 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. He proceeded to enter into a retreat run by Baba Ram Dass, where he got into an extended conversation with Hay in May 1978.
In 2019, forty years after the fact and into his eighties, Kilhefner claimed that the Radical Faerie movement came out of conversations between Harry and him alone beginning in 1973 about "the course of the Gay Liberation movement and what was missing." Kilhefner went on to further claim that the "intellectual and spiritual foundation came out of workshops [he] hosted in 1975-1981 called Gay Voices and Visions," while completely avoiding acknowledging Walker’s central role in the forming of that foundation within the Radical Faerie movement. Kilhefner's claims directly contradict Timmons' more objective interviews with the principle players, interviews that occurred while things were actually unfolding, and who directly quoted Hay stating that it was he and Walker who initially formed the "'society of two' that grew into the Radical Faeries."
In the autumn of 1978 therapist Betty Berzon invited Hay, Walker, Burnside and Kilhefner to lead a workshop on "New Breakthroughs in the Nature of How We Perceive Gay Consciousness" at the annual conference of the Gay Academic Union, held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 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. The four then decided to organize an outdoor conference at which they could discuss with other gay men ideas regarding gay consciousness and spirituality. 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. Hay, Walker, Burnside and Kilhefner visited to check its suitability, and although Hay disliked Bill and didn't want to use the site, Kilhefner insisted.
Their conference, set for Labor Day 1979, was to be called the "Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies",Hay and others switched to the older spelling, "faeries", after 1979. See Harry Hay (1996) Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder, edited by Will Roscoe. with the term "Radical Faerie" having been coined by Hay. The term "Radical" was chosen to reflect both political extremity and the idea of "root" or "essence", while the term "Faerie" was chosen in reference both to the immortal animistic spirits of European folklore and to the fact that "fairy" had become a pejorative slang term for gay men. 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". 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. A flier, which Kilhefner claims to have written, advertising the event was released and proclaimed that gays had a place in the "paradigm shift" of the New Age, and quoted Mark Satin and Aleister Crowley alongside Hay; these fliers were sent out to gay and leftist bookstores as well as gay community centres and health food stores.
Around 220 men turned up to the event, despite the fact that the Ashram could only accommodate around 75. 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". Rather than being referred to as "workshops", the events that took place were known as "Faerie circles", and were on such varied subjects as massage, nutrition, local botany, healing energy, the politics of gay enspiritment, English country dancing, and auto-fellatio. Those assembled took part in spontaneous rituals, providing invocations to spirits and performing blessings and chants, with most participants discarding the majority of their clothes, instead wearing feathers, beads, and bells, and decorating themselves in rainbow makeup. Many reported feeling a change of consciousness during the event, which one person there described as "a four day acid trip – without the acid!". On the final night of the gathering, they put together a performance of the Symmetricon, an invention of Burnside's, while Hay gave a farewell speech.
Growth, friction, and split: 1979–80