By Katie Conry; Designed by Nic Buron; Photography by Lauren Crew

Out on a photo walk with friends, we spontaneously decided to climb up to the scenic vista point of Corona Heights. With my pink plastic Holga camera in hand, I snapped shots of my friends against the backdrop of brown boulders and the skyline of San Francisco, when suddenly, a giant purple caterpillar, a gnome in a ball gown carrying a purse, and a man in a fantastic blue dress and feather hat to match appeared at the top of the hill above us. In total awe, I ran up the hill to discover who these magical humans were. A group of 15 or so introduced themselves as the Feyboy Collective, a sect of a larger community called the Radical Faeries. My pals and I had happened upon them in the midst of a magazine photo shoot. A dazzling display of glitter, sass, and some sort of mock ritual sacrifice, these Feyboys were, hands down, the best thing I’ve ever found on top of a hill in San Francisco.

It turns out the Radical Faeries are more than just a handful of beautiful weirdos living in San Francisco. They’re a part of a politically radical movement of gay men who’ve been around since the 1970s, and include millions of members around the world. Through art and pagan-influenced rituals, the Faeries are all about challenging the status quo and creating a culture that celebrates the eccentric. Unsurprisingly, San Francisco harbors the largest and most active groups of these fabulous and progressive queers.

Excited to learn more, I was thrilled by the invitation to check out the HQ — the Feyboy Mansion, which was actually Pinkfeather and fellow Feyboy Kyle’s SOMA apartment. When I arrived, they welcomed me in with a hug, and we began discussing the colorful history of the Radical Faeries. In the ’70s, founder Harry Hay was the first person in the U.S. to recognize homosexuals as an oppressed cultural minority, and the first to promote being gay as a social identity. At the time, many gays thought that in order to gain acceptance, they should imitate heterosexuals. Harry founded the Radical Faeries in 1979 as a way for gays to reject society’s norms. The Radical Faeries spread their message through artistic and ritualistic gatherings and festivals, first all over the United States, and then around the world.

“There’s an aesthetic and vibe to every city. San Francisco Faeries are glittery and fantastically over the top, but also unpolished.” says Pinkfeather. “There’s a theatricality to us. In SF, gays have often been a little more outrageous, a little more gender fuck, a littler weirder.” This proud history of theatricality includes the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded by participants in a 1979 Faerie gathering that same year.

Harry Hay was also a communist, and the Faeries have always been class conscious and concerned with social justice. Kyle explained that the very nature of their community is anticapitalist. “We are working toward something more cooperative, something more about resource sharing and support; our very nature is anti-consumerist.”

All of the Faerie events are pay what you can, and no one is turned away for lack of funds. Anyone can stay for free at the Faerie sanctuaries, and Faeries can travel and stay with other Faeries all over the world for free.

DIY and thrift is a big part of the Faerie fashion aesthetic, and all goods and services are traded and bartered when possible. “Any time we can work outside of the capitalist system we do,” says Kyle.

The Feyboy Collective was founded to create an intentional community to help further the cause of the Radical Faeries for the next generation. On the collective’s website, they describe themselves as a “queerdo community center facilitating shared creative space, hosting events from D.I.Y. workshops to sex parties and acting as a launchpad for aspiring SF radical artists and activists.” Pinkfeather comments, “Weird girls like Kyle and myself are sidelined in mainstream gay culture. We moved to San Francisco to find the radical queers. We want to push boundaries of what we can get away with culturally and artistically.”

The Radical Faeries sound like the biggest thing that no one has ever heard of. Pinkfeather and Kyle say that’s somewhat on purpose. The movement, while totally inclusive, is an underground group. They want to maintain a safe space for its members, but they also want to be out in the open, interacting with the community at large. And that’s where their events come in.

The Feyboy Collective plans and hosts Radical Faerie events and funds a variety of art projects. Several years ago they were given a large space on Market and Castro the week leading up to and including Pride. From this blank canvas, Faetopia, was born. Faetopia 2012 included queer cinema screenings, a visual art gallery, burlesque, drag, historical exhibits, a DIY fashion workshop, and sex positive seminars. On Pride Sunday, the Feyboys hosted their signature event, the Faerie Freedom Village, which is one of the largest scale Radical Faerie events of the year.

Faeries from near and far travel to attend the Faerie Freedom Village. The grassy knoll at Civic Center Plaza is walled off and turned into a magical Faerie Garden where Faeries, and anyone else who is game, are welcome to party, dance, and do whatever s/he pleases. I attended this year and surveyed what seemed to be a relaxed garden party with outrageous clothing (or none at all). Two naked kids basked peacefully in the sun with their naked parents. Things got raucous when the drag show began, courtesy of drag group Meow Mix. Nothing says San Francisco like a lip-syncing, gyrating queen a stone’s throw from City Hall.

Harry Hay promoted gay as an identity separate from heteronormativity. What I saw that day was a celebration of that identity, and any identity different from traditional culture and gender roles. The Village is an accepting space created free of any form of capitalism, where a community can come together and connect through radical expression and celebrate their beautiful freakiness.

One of those beautiful freaks celebrated that day was Crumbsnatcher, a queer musician in a little kid’s dinosaur hoodie. Crumbsnatcher strutted onto the stage accompanied by two guys in full animal costume. “This guy is a furry,” the MC declared. “Let me introduce Crumbsnatcher!” While the furry dino rapped, his animal entourage did a freak dance that grew progressively kinkier. Eventually, a partygoer from the audience joined them, until all four were writhing on the stage. This glorious display of weirdness was definitely the highlight of my day. Being yourself can be a radical thing, and performances like this encourage people to be whatever kind of person they want to be.

Later that day my friend met a cute, pixie-ish boy in a black leotard, who she insisted was her spirit animal. He invited us to follow him to the official after-party. Our adventure through wonderland continued and turned out to be a more private version of the same kind of radical expression and celebration of queerness that we saw in the Village. At first glance it seemed like a calm, grown-up party in a nice condo with a wide offering of snacks. But this was no run-of-the-mill condo party. Throughout the night, I caught snippets of heated discussions about radical politics, but it wasn’t just the conversation that was passionate. We witnessed a lot of nudity and some cuddling, and later my friends and I stumbled upon a hot tub filled with naked men and accidentally walked into a sex dungeon complete with whips, chains, swings, and even more naked men.

When my only-in-San-Francisco night ended, I thanked the hosts for helping keep our city radical. As I walked out the door, I looked back at the regalia of dressed-up fabulous freaks and remembered something one of the Radical Faeries had said to me earlier that day: “There’s more to learn from wearing a dress in one day than a suit in a lifetime.”

Gay Spirituality and the Radical Faeries

When developing gay life in America starts to surface in books about the era, gay spirituality will emerge as one of the more fascinating subjects. A significant new book that deals with the subject has just appeared. It is “The Fire In Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries,” edited by Mark Thompson, assisted by Richard Nealy and Bo Young and published by White Crane Books. The book has been nominated as one of 74 LGBT Books for Adult Readers by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association.

Described as “the gay community’s last authentic global grassroots movement,” the Radical Faeries had their inception on a remote site of the American Southwest in 1979. The book honors two men who played a key pioneering role, Harry Hay and Don Kilhefner. That historic “First Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” gave Hay an opportunity to pronounce: “I am saying to everybody who will hear that now we must begin to maximize the differences between us.” In other words, Hay was talking clearly about “shedding the ugly green frog-skin of hetero imitation.”

Will Roscoe, author of “The Zuni Man-Woman,” which received the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association, has written a brilliant Introduction to the new book. “Same-sex love is distinguished from heterosexual love by the sameness and equality of those it united,” he says. Roscoe cites Walt Whitman as a gay teacher of primary significance. He finds that Harry Hay took Whitman’s insights one step further, “giving a name to the distinct mode of awareness this love of sames and equals fosters—subject-SUBJECT consciousness.”

“The Fire In Moonlight” has many remarkable storytellers among its collection of authors. The book is staggering in its scope and depth. Robert Croonquist is a Founder and Program Director of Youth Arts New York. He describes in detail a Faerie Camp gathering. “We circle the grove and call out names.” After many names from within the Faerie community “Others called out Marilyn Monroe, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Garland, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde. The young Faeries, it dawned on me, didn’t know anybody who had died. I kind of felt sorry for them and kind of felt better than them. And kind of, but not really, felt they were lucky.”

William Stewart has embarked on a quest to connect with other gay men who share an aspiration to live together in collective commitment and consciousness. His contribution to this book is a prophetic piece entitled “Stewarding the Future: A Call for Sacred Witness.” He cites “typical gay traits” as “the skills of artists, healers, tricksters, ritual makers, shamans and intermediaries between the worlds.” Stewart believes that Harry Hays’ assertion “that social function rather than sexual preference should be seen as the defining characteristic of our kind is as radical now as when he first conceived of it in the dark days of McCarthyism.”

Another contributor to the book is Allen Page who describes himself as “an intuitive spiritual counselor, channeler, teacher and gay elder.” He writes: “We are fathers, artists, athletes and sissies. We do not fear gentleness and have no need to compete. We believe in the power of contradictions and the magic of laughter. That the quality of energy exchanged in lovemaking is more important than the gender of bodies.”

Mark Thompson poignantly pulls together a description of the historic 1979 Faerie Gathering in Arizona with his personal vision of the future:

“Music was played again and each man made an offering to a basket that was passed around: a feather from Woolworth’s, a stone from the Ganges River, a lock of hair, a handwritten poem. We began to dance with the music and in a few moments noticed we were being joined in our merriment by a large horned bull. Naturally shy, the animal was drawn close in. The bull stood and watched motionless, like some ancient hieroglyphic painted on a cave wall, then he just as inexplicably vanished.

Soon, we too began to drift away into the dark chill air. None of us would ever find again this particular place of red earth that had nourished us so. But even to prompt a return would be missing the point. Our journeys as a new kind of men, having been thusly inaugurated, meant that we would have many destinations, far and wide, still to attend.”

“The Fire In Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries” is a boundless delight to read, a poem that stirs up magic thoughts, and a piece of history as solid as the stone Lincoln

Following the Pansy Path

Forty years after its initial publication, does The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions have anything to offer the queer present?

This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.

In 1977, author Larry Mitchell formed Calamus Press to self-publish his first book, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. The slim volume was originally conceived, according to Mitchell, as a children’s book complete with whimsical illustrations by his friend Ned Asta, a fellow member of the Lavender Hill queer commune in Ithaca, New York.

In short, simple passages, the book describes the lives of “the faggots” and their various groups of friends—the “strong women,” the “queens,” the “queer men”—as they attempt to survive and find joy, beauty, humor, pleasure, and freedom in Ramrod, an empire in decline dominated by the oppressive, militaristic “men.” In The Faggots and Their Friends, Mitchell depicted queer life as it was beginning to emerge from the shadows in the late ’60s and ’70s, as communities formed and a movement blossomed. He turned his observations of pre-AIDS gay culture into a kind of parable conveying its values and conventions—such as they were—and imparting lessons meant to sustain future generations of queer people, with the ultimate goal of guiding them toward the social and sexual revolutions Mitchell hoped to see. Here is the queer world, here are its tribes, here is how they managed to survive and even thrive within a system of oppression. Beauty is currency; sexuality is sustenance. But more valuable than that is friendship—which usually involves some degree of sexual intimacy. Pleasure will keep you going. So will humor, possibly more effectively.

Out of print since 1988, a new edition of The Faggots and Their Friends was recently published by Nightboat Books. It is at once heartening and chilling how relevant it remains more than four decades later. The various queer tribes and their individual quirks and characteristics are likely recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with contemporary LGBTQ culture (though Mitchell’s characterization of all women as nurturing earth mammas could stand to be complicated). Faggots—whether we embrace the reclamation of the term or not—persist in our pursuit of pleasure. We still cruise; we still create. We still run headlong toward our fantasies and embrace those discarded by mainstream culture, sprinkling them with fairy dust and reviving them as camp. “Some of the faggots are trashy. In fact, with the inspiration of the outcast women, the faggots developed ‘trashy’ into a high form of disruptive behavior.” Yeah, that tracks with the rambunctious queer scenes in places like Bushwick.

The (drag) queens, still fearlessly irreverent, are even more visible today, embraced by a generation of fan girls thanks to VH1. The (radical) faeries still have their gatherings in their mountain retreats. I don’t know that we have a term now for Mitchell’s “queer men,” but you know who they are: The gay suits who concern themselves with respectability politics, who just want to get married, a few of whom probably still think the rest of us are setting a bad example, embodying “stereotypes” with our scantily clad antics at the pride parade. Some of them, corrupted by Reagan-era neoconservatism, probably became today’s Log Cabin Republicans. And it’s hardly a stretch, within Mitchell’s woolly, loving cosmology, to read gestures toward today’s genderqueers and pansexuals of all stripes.

I want to give a Xeroxed copy to Pete Buttigieg.

As much as he relished taxonomy, Mitchell recognized the fluidity of his categories long before we spoke of sexuality and gender as spectrums. “All the men could be faggots or their friends,” he writes. And later: “There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day than there is from wearing a suit for a lifetime.” Mitchell is invested in dismantling boundaries—between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, between sexual categories, between gender, but most importantly between people, a project that today’s radical queers continue.

More troublingly, the descriptions of Ramrod’s disintegration and the men’s hostility toward the faggots and their friends are echoed in Trump’s America. “Everyday the faggots and their friends can see, hear, and feel Ramrod’s empire disintegrating as the men lose more and more things they never owned in the first place.” Is it even possible to read that without stressing out over the apparent failures of American democracy or the wave of illiberal populism sweeping Europe? Mitchell recognized that social progress breeds backlash: “The men’s viciousness will grow as their panic increases.” And yet, you have to wonder whether he could have predicted just how bad it would get: the upticks in anti-LGBTQ violence as pro-LGBTQ sentiment increases even among younger conservatives, the push to limit legal protections for queer and trans people post–marriage equality. “It’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free.” Word.

Reading The Faggots and Their Friends for the first time in 2019, I am of two minds about the philosophy it imparts. The vision it presents of a different way of being is heartening. I want to believe that we can set aside the master’s tools and open a magic portal within ourselves, to a more peaceful, loving world. The simple language Mitchell employs to convey queer values gives queer culture the weight of wisdom passed down through the ages. In the decades since it was published, bootleg copies of The Faggots and Their Friends were passed around like an occult text. I want to give a Xeroxed copy to Pete Buttigieg.ADVERTISEMENTnull

The artist and activist Tourmaline, who wrote the preface to the new edition, has described The Faggots and Their Friends as “an invitation to be dependent and reliant on each other’s care.” Mitchell’s involvement in queer communes like Lavender Hill was a reaction to the alienation and loneliness of the closet. Before Armistead Maupin wrote his tales of “logical families” filling the void left when LGBTQ people were rejected by their biological relatives, Mitchell was turning the notion of chosen family, of radical queer communities, into a quasi-spiritual wisdom. I can’t think of a more necessary ethos at a time when social media has left us paradoxically more disconnected than ever. The Faggots and Their Friends is a timely reminder that human connection is essential for revolution, not to mention survival. As the strong women advise: “We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ’cause nobody else is goin’ do it.”

At the same time, however, I’m uncomfortable with what seems to me like Mitchell’s ultimate strategy of divestment from the world of the men. “The fairies have left the men’s reality in order to destroy it by making a new one.” When I read that, I can’t help but think of those people who want to terraform Mars instead of passing legislation that could effectively combat climate change. The closing passages of The Faggots and Their Friends seem to suggest a kind of nihilism. “They begin to know … that they cannot be free until this dance is stopped,” Mitchell writes of his queer tribes. “The faggots and their friends and the women who love women can … stop and do no-thing.”

My friend, the performance artist Dan Fishback, points out that queer culture has often flourished most in separatist environments—New York’s ball scene, the leather community, faerie communes. But in 2019, tuning in, turning on, and dropping out—doing “no-thing”—isn’t an option. It’s tempting, for sure; our individual efforts can feel futile in the face of … you know, everything. But we’ve seen what happens when we lose faith in democracy, when we sit out elections, and stop paying attention. It may seem like a revolutionary strategy to retreat to the gardens of the faeries, to unplug and go off the grid. But who gets left behind when we do that? Which of our friends suffer from our disengagement? And how long before the men find their way into those gardens?

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions reads today almost like a sacred text from the queer past. As with any sacred text, our job is not simply to receive its wisdom, but to engage with it (passionately, critically, seriously) and apply it the best way we can to the world as we find it today.

Reference

• Radical Faeries: SF’s Fabulously Weird Progressive Queers, The Bold Italic, 11 October 2012, by The Bold Italic editors https://thebolditalic.com/radical-faeries-sf-s-fabulously-weird-progressive-queers-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-ccb0f25283dd
• Gay Spirituality and the Radical Faeries, HuffPost, 20 February 2012 Updated 21 April 2012, by Malcolm Boyd https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gay-spirituality-and-radical-faeries_b_1274822
• Following the Pansy Path, The Slate, 12 August 2019, by John Russell https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/08/faggots-friends-between-revolutions-reissue-review.html