We're Here, We're Queer, We're Cosmic!

Shokti on why he's very excited about the tenth anniversary of Queer Spirit Festival: 

“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.”   Harry Hay, 1912-2002, pioneering gay rights and Radical Faerie activist.

Throughout history and across the globe queerness has been associated with magic, divination, ritual, spirit. The modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement hasn't addressed this, but at Queer Spirit Festival hundreds of queers gather to reclaim and explore this part of our story and nature...

To be 'cosmic' – from the ancient Greek kosmos – a word used by Pythagorus to refer to the order of the Universe – is to be part of Nature, connected to rhythms and patterns of the planet, the solar system and the stars – it is to know and feel ourselves connected to the Earth and the field of Oneness, to the eternal existence of Spirit.  

We're Here, We're Queer, We're Cosmic celebrates that 
HERE BE QUEERS WHO ARE 
REMEMBERING AND RECLAIMING 
OUR NATURAL ROLES 
AS CONNECTORS OF THE MATERIAL REALMS
AND THE SUBTLE LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS/SPIRIT

My own discovery and awakening to Spirit came aged 30 while sick with AIDS, my Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self: I am excited about the 10 year anniversary of Queer Spirit Festival because I believe many queers are already aware of or waking up to our nature as soul healers, ritual magicians, divinatory artists, builders of community between humans, nature and spirit - and at Queer Spirit we have a place to find each other.

As I surrendered myself to expected death from AIDS, the cosmos came alive for me, and I believe the cosmos calls to all queers to know that Self-Realisation is the best game in town! The world is waiting for the rainbow people to embrace the spiritual element of our history and nature!  

I am a Cambridge educated historian and I am keen to share some of the vast, rich history of connection between homoeroticism, gender-fluidity and the sacred that is there for us to uncover and celebrate as we liberate ourselves from religious doctrines and discover our own spiritual paths. 

10 years of queers breaking the chains of religious bigotry, connecting through the heart to community, to nature and spirit is a ground-breaking, radical step in LGBTQ+ history. At Queer Spirit Festival we build on the work of queer spiritual pioneers as hundreds come together in the south west of England to affirm LGBTQ+ people as part of nature. QS is an intersectional meeting point for queers from many races, faiths, ages and backgrounds all together celebrating the sacred in nature, in each other and ourselves. I am excited as we prepare for our 3rd festival in the bucolic settings of Bridwell Park.

I invite you to take a deep dive with me...

Uncovering the Gay Spirit

In ancient pagan and tribal rituals the community celebrated the erotic charge of spirit vibrating and buzzing in all existence, entering collective states of ecstatic consciousness through drumming, dancing, chanting, through erotic energies raised and shared shamelessly, thereby feeling united with nature, with spirit, with each other.  The priests leading these rites, and the deities they invoked – such as Dionysis, Attis, Artemis, Cybele in the Greco-Roman world - were very queer. 

Throughout human history, gender-fluid and same-sex attracted people have always existed, and until the rise of patriarchal monotheistic religions were often seen as having spiritual qualities and gifts that were there to benefit the whole community.  This was the case in nature-focused cultures across the globe - in societies that honoured the wholeness of life, recognised balance between masculine and feminine polarities, and never imagined that anything created could be 'against nature' - as became the Christian view of queer people and queer expression. Under the Christian God the masculine became elevated above the feminine, but in earlier cultures spiritual power was regarded as primarily feminine and balance was regarded as holy. Many ancient depictions of deity are androgynous, and people who were born with a balance of the genders were seen as closer to Source. And many priests of the Goddess were queer...

“It’s tragic that many in the LGBTQ community struggle with issues around spirituality. We confuse it with religion and, no wonder, given the treatment we have received at the hands of most religions... But what’s ironic about that is that before the patriarchal cultures and religions, people that we today refer to as LGBTQ were not only spiritually inclined, but were honored for the roles of spiritual service and leadership they played all over the world.” Christian de la Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually and Awakening the Soul of Power.
“The Christian oppression of women and Gay people was no accident. Their freedom and high status in the old religion made them prime targets for the new religion, which was profoundly anti-sexual.” Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture.

Racism - misogyny - homophobia - transphobia - wealth inequality: these are inventions of the human mind.  They do not occur in nature - these attitudes are literally against nature... unlike queerness, which is abundant in nature as well as humanity.

On the sidelines of mainstream LGBTQ+ life, some queers have been talking about their spirituality for decades:

At the first-ever Gay Spirituality Conference, held in Berkeley, California, January 1986, participants were recorded as saying:
'“Gay people hold the key to the next stage of human evolution—a world in which it is possible to cooperate without competing,” said a teacher of meditation. “We stress that gay people are different and that if we deny this we become second-class nongay people—that is, homosexuals,” declared a Buddhist priest. “We’re different, a germ of an androgynous tradition,” explained an Anglican scholar. “Being gay is about being in the world in a different and essential way. Androgyny permits all things,” said a lesbian psychic. “There’s something about gay people that goes beyond sexual orientation. All throughout history we’ve been very different from heterosexual people. I believe there is something about gay people that is profoundly religious,” said a shaman. “A gay person cannot live an unexamined life,” concluded a poet.' 

These quotations come from Gay Spirit, a book of essays edited by Mark Thompson, published in 1987 as the AIDS crisis was reaching its peak. That existential threat pushed many gay men to seek for deeper meaning in their lives. I am one of those men, and unlike most of those whom AIDS brought an Accelerated Individual Discovery of Spirit, I am still here to tell the tale.  Yet the roots of this search for the spiritual nature of men attracted to other men, and of all queer beings, goes back to the late 19th century and during the Gay Liberation era in the 1970s the quest was already calling those who felt there was more to being queer than assimilating into heterosexual culture.

With the adoption in the late 19th century of the word 'homosexuality' by the psychology profession, what had for centuries been regarded as a sin, and  then a crime (in England since the 16th century with death penalty until 1861), now became seen as a sickness in the mind.  But there were gay men at the time who were presenting their own understanding of queer nature, one inspired by an appreciation of the creative, romantic and spiritual qualities that it produced in themselves and their friends. They read the works of Plato, who praised same sex love as mystical, as connecting the heavens – in the Symposium we learn that same sex love came under the patronage of Aphrodite Urania – heavenly Aphrodite – while reproductive sex and lustful sex without love belonged to the more mundane Aphrodite Pandemos – of the people. 

Following the lead of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany, British writers such as John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde preferred the term Uranian over homosexual for queer men, women and 'intermediate types'. They believed that queer people represented an evolution of the species into new ways of relating and being.  

“I believe it is true that the Uranian men are superior to the normal men in this respect - in respect of their love-feeling - which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less one of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature...If it be once allowed that the love-nature of the Uranian is of a sincere and essentially humane and kindly type then the importance of the Uranian's place in Society, and of the social work he may be able to do, must certainly also be acknowledged.” Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex 

“The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class, his sensitive spirit, his wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body; and the frank, free nature of the female, her masculine independence and strength wedded to thoroughly feminine grace of form and manner; may be said to give them both, through their double nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well favour their function as reconcilers and interpreters. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world's greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament--as in the cases of Michel Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.” Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age

“This interaction in fact between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality, and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness.  It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness.”
 Edward Carpenter, Intermediate types among primitive folks

The 'double nature' that Carpenter refers to was once recognised by traditional cultures around the world. Named berdache (a Persian word for a young gay bottom) by European explorers, the gender-bending shamans of the Native American tribes, have, since 1990, been calling themselves 'Two-Spirit', a term reflecting that they were seen by their own people as bearing both male and female spirit in one body, giving them spiritual gifts. This reclamation of queer spiritual identity by the Native Americans is a model for us all around the world, though we have to dig back into European history to find that story here – back to the pre-Christian Roman Empire when Goddess temples around the Mediterranean were run by women and queers.  Christian writers railed against the flamboyant and erotic behaviours of the Gallae priests of the Great Mother Cybele...

“They wear effeminately nursed hair,” wrote Firmicus Maternus,“and dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is this?”

Of these Galli priests Church Father Augustine said, “They are the sons of the earth. The Earth is their mother”, but he also complained virulently about their habits, calling them “castrated perverts..... madmen.... foully unmanned and corrupted”.

Leslie Feinberg, wrote from a transgender person's eye-view, that: “Many Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and near Eastern goddesses were served by transsexual priestesses, including the Syrian Astarte and Dea  Syria at Hierapolis, Artemis, Atargatis, Ashtoreth or Ishtar, Hecate at Laguire, and Artemis (Diana) at Ephesus.”  Transgender Warriors, 1996

Meanwhile, from a gay man's perspective at the same time, Andrew Harvey, was writing:

“Many shamans were and are homosexual; many of the worshipers of the Goddess under her various names and in her various cults all over the world – from the Mediterranean to the Near East to the Celtic parts of northern Europe – openly avowed their homosexuality and were accepted and even specially revered as priests, oracles, healers, and diviners. Homosexuals, far from being rejected, were seen as sacred – people who, by virtue of a mysterious fusion of feminine and masculine traits, participated with particular intensity in the life of the Source. The Source of Godhead is, after all, both masculine and feminine, and exists in a unity that includes but transcends both. The homosexual was thought to mirror this unity and its enigmatic fertility and power in a special way. The tribe or culture gave to him or her specific duties that were highly important and sacred, acknowledging this intimacy with divine truth and the clairvoyant help it could bring to the whole society.”  Gay Mystics, 1997

In other parts of the world we do not have to go back so far into history to find the association between homoeroticism, gender-fluidity and the sacred. Third-gender individuals were recognised for their spiritual qualities in Asian and Pacific cultures.  In Japan homosexuality was regarded as natural for the monks because they were not allowed to have sex with women. In the 19th-early 20th centuries anthropologists reported on the presence of cross-dressing shamans in cultures from Borneo to Siberia and Alaska. Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck wrote in 1906 about the Chukchi shamans in Siberia: “The change of sex was usually accompanied by future shamanship; indeed nearly all shamans were former delinquents of their sex. Among the Chukchi male shamans who are clothed in woman’s attire and are believed to be transformed physically into woman are still quite common.” 

In distinct contrast to the negativity around queerness spreading today in many African countries, traditional African understanding was, until recently, very different. Instead of focusing on the sexual aspect, queer nature was understood spiritually:

Two wisdom teachers from the Dagara people of Burkino Faso, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some came to the west in the 1990s bearing African wisdom. They taught that in their culture gender was defined by a person's inner vibrations, not their outer physical form, and that nobody was defined by their sexuality. In fact to the Dagara 'gay' people were known as Gatekeepers. Sobonfu wrote in her book The Spirit of Intimacy, that, “Gatekeepers hold keys to other dimensions.  They maintain a certain alignment between the spirit world and the world of the village.... Most people in the West define themselves and others by sexual orientation.  This way of looking at gatekeepers will kill the spirit of the gatekeeper.  Gatekeepers in the village are able to do their job simply because of strong spiritual connection, and also their ability to direct their sexual energy not to other people but to spirit.”

Malidoma said in a 1992 interview: “My knowledge of indigenous medicine, ritual, comes from gatekeepers, it’s hard for me to take this position that gay people are the negative breed of a society. No! In a society that is profoundly dysfunctional, what happens is that peoples’ life purposes are taken away, and what is left is this kind of sexual orientation which, in turn, is disturbing to the very society that created it.”

Liberating the Queer Spirit

One of the early activists in the American Gay Liberation Movement was a western 'gatekeeper' -  Leo Martello was a witch initiated in his family's Sicilian tradition. He left the GLF after a while to focus on teaching paganism because he realised most in the gay movement were not interested in queer spiritual roots or potential. Other queers in the late 70s felt that gay rights was quickly becoming an assimilationist cause.  The Radical Faerie community was born of this frustration among queers who wanted to dig deeper for the truth of who we are and what nature makes us for – and, on the sidelines of the LGBTQ+ cosmos, thousands of queers have been exploring community and magical communion in Rad Fae nature gatherings and sanctuaries around the world ever since.

Radical Faerie founder Mitch Walker declared in in Visionary Love (1980):

“The Homophile Movement is a dead thing: dead to the gay vision, anti-magickal, counter-revolutionary.  Its spokespeople and theorists shun the roots (the radical, source of nurturance and understanding) in favour of surface values: the social norm, success, integration, acceptance, assimilation. Its shallow reality suffocates the vision in us, co-opting gay people and vitiating the creativity and potential of the Gay Movement.” 

He was one of a number of queers who were feeling there is much more to who we are than society recognises: 

“I look into my heart and hear messages from beyond, beyond that phoney who-I-thought-I-was, beyond straight society, beyond western culture, beyond time and space.  I see an ancient, ancient wise being in my Self, I see new forms of evolving conscious beings, new forms of society, culture, reality.  I feel the strong presence of a great wheel turning, the wheel of death/rebirth.

“I see visions that the life-source is changing, so that whatever is not of this Changing but is old and prior to it will be cut off, will run out of life and drop into extinction.  I see gayness as very much a part of, caused by, leading into and through this Changing.  I see gayness as a door, a source, a spirit, a lover, a teacher, or rather as sourcing, enspiriting, loving, teaching.  It spirits me away somewhere magickal, strange, profound.  I meet teaching wierdness, opening/expanding/dropping me into lights.  I feel ecstasy, wonder, delight. I feel SPIRIT.”

Connection to nature – recognising ourselves as part of nature – even as her 'faerie' children – is at the core of the queer spiritual search, as we uproot centuries of Christian propaganda claiming that the way we make love is 'against nature'. In 1970s San Francisco a group of gay men met in the Faery Circle, led by Arthur Evans, to explore the pagan history of queerness. His book Witchcraft and the Gay Counter-Culture was a ground-breaking exploration of the political and spiritual reasons for the Christian suppression of same sex love and gender-variance. At the same time queer women, such as Starhawk and Zsusanna Budapest were leading the exploration of spirituality within the feminist movement, proclaiming witchcraft as women's religion and the acceptance of all forms of love in Goddess honouring cultures. Judy Grahn's 1982 book Another Mother Tongue also explored the magical, pagan, spiritual associations of queer nature in pre-Christian, traditional cultures.  

In 1979, 150 gay men gathered in a desert sanctuary in Arizona for a 'Spiritual Conference', where they shared their life stories – a common theme of nature connection and sex-positivity emerged. This was the first gathering of what became the Radical Faerie community, now a global network of queers who celebrate and explore the natural, magical, healing and creative gifts of queer nature.

 

 

At QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL we are proud to be walking in the footsteps of so many incredible queer spirited ancestors, proud to be making space where the spiritual conversation can be continued and expanded...

From my 30 year journey with Spirit I would say that our spiritual challenge as queers is to break free of both materialist and dogmatic religious conditioning, and to embrace a direct mystical relationship with life itself. Our gender fluidity or our queer sexuality can be known as a call from the soul to know ourselves fully, being outsiders gives us perspective and the ability to find our own truths, find the keys that unlock who we are, discover all our unique talents and gifts – to realise the heaven within and become a conscious part of the collective evolution - to embrace our inner divinity as we recognise the divine beauty in others – by these means we together become Liberated. Enlightened. Realised. Cosmic.

Oscar Wilde: “'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”

There is so much more to queer folk than our sexual and gender expression. Feminist pioneer Zsuzsanna Budapest called gay people “the emotional and cultural caretakers of the population.”  Modern LGBTQ life would benefit a lot from becoming a 'Know Thyself' culture that encourages us to go further in self awareness than our sex drive and taste in fashion! Queer life has so much crisis and challenge going on but crisis makes us sit up and face ourselves. AIDS was the crisis that catalysed me to wake me up to the deeper reality of my soul. Thirty years later I have an amazing life co-creating queer spiritual spaces where we can explore and reclaim our roles as healers and magic makers, where our natural, playful, divine connection to spirit, to subtle and collective levels of consciousness, can emerge... but I am well aware that most queers in the world do not see this version of who and what we are. 

And yet some of us, more and more of us in fact, have noticed, our eyes are opening, and at Queer Spirit Festival hundreds of us come together to share our gifts and stories, to celebrate and heal and grow together, to be in love and joy. At Queer Spirit Festival we celebrate the diversity of queer spiritual expression and its potential to bring healing, joy, love, laughter and reconnection to the world. As more queers step into our magic and power, as the history of queer people in spiritual roles in pre-Christian cultures becomes more widely known, everything the western world has long believed about being gay/queer may be about to change. 

“The Uranian people may be destined to form the advance guard of that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal and other external ties which now control and confine society.” Edward Carpenter

Here!  Queer!  Cosmic! 

 

Further reading: FROM SHAME TO SHAMANISM – rainbow messenger

Gay Priests of the Goddess – rainbow messenger

Gatekeepers: Gays in The Dagara Tribe – rainbow messenger

GAY LOVE COULD SAVE HUMANITY – rainbow messenger

Radical Faeries – rainbow messenger

Visionary Love – rainbow messenger

THE QUEER SHAMANIC CALLING: Know Our History – rainbow messenger