Queer Spirit at Safertobeme Conference
The Safertobeme Conference, 23-24 October 2025, at the International Stadium in Gateshead brought together queer activists from around the world to discuss how we, as a global community, deepen solidarity and expand allyship to meet the challenge of the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.
With a theme of Local to Global, the conference website says: “In an uncertain world, LGBTQ+ rights have been weaponised and diminished by populist leaders, authoritarian governments, religious fundamentalists, and 'moral' entrepreneurs. So, it is more important than ever as individuals, organisations, politicians, governments, and businesses, to pull together in solidarity and to make a visible stand as allies.”
When I saw the call to the conference I felt this was a place for Queer Spirit Festival to appear – as we are a growing, grassroots, community of queers very much engaged in a process that builds solidarity and a sense of purpose and power, while addressing the roots of homo and transphobia: Queer Spirit is an assemblage of all parts of our broad, beautiful and diverse community, coming together to celebrate the natural creative spirit – and spirituality - of queer people. I took along flyers, posters, programmes from 2024 festival and set up a vibrant stall at the conference - between talks and breakout sessions many people came up to talk to me.
I believe that our response to rising attacks on our community should be to change the story about who queer people are – and at Queer Spirit we have been engaged in that for ten years, building on the foundations laid down in recent decades by groups such as the Radical Faeries and the Queer Pagan Camp. We are actively removing religiously based shame and stigma by exploring and reclaiming our own spiritual roots. Pre-monotheistic cultures that honoured the presence of the divine in nature often regarded people who stood between the gender binary, or who were same-sex attracted, as having a spiritual purpose – queers were there to serve the tribe, including leading rituals that connected people to the spirit world. At Queer Spirit we are overturning centuries of being regarded as 'against nature' by meeting in nature to experience just how utterly natural we are.
“..it is of the highest importance to obtain a correct conception of the steps whereby the Christian nations, separating themselves from ancient paganism, introduced a new and stringent morality into their opinion on this topic, and enforced their ethical views by legal prohibitions of a very formidable kind.” John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 1891
At Queer Spirit our LGBT community gets a chance to discuss why religious homophobia arose in the world – a task that some 19th century activists were already calling us to do, but which the modern LGBTQ+ movement has not yet addressed. Arising in a secular age, the queer liberation movement has largely stayed away from the minefield of religious issues. Nor have gay Christians addressed the root reasons for the dark homophobia pursued by the Church over many centuries and still devastatingly active in parts of the Christian world – I think mainly because Christianity did a great job of convincing its faithful that the pagans were the bad guys! My journey to discovering what was really going on was via an Anglican childhood, atheistic mindset in my teens and 20s, then a spiritual awakening while living with AIDS in my early 30s – which led me to study and explore the world's religious and magical paths and to the discovery that queerness and the sacred have a lot more in common than we are ever told! It also led me to form a deep relationship with nature and to live my life in flow with the seasons and moon cycles – all of which has brought me good health and happiness in abundance. I became a Pagan, discovering that my sexuality is a key to my spiritual nature, then working out for myself why the Father religions had wanted to suppress that nature.
At the conference Christianity came up more than once – there was reference to the amount of money poured into Africa in recent decades by evangelical Christian groups determined to outlaw and punish homosexuality – and also to the fact that those deep homophobic pockets are now directing increasing amounts of cash towards the UK, in order to challenge legal and societal advances here.
I would love to be part of a future conference directly addressing the roots of religious homophobia in the world, in order to expose the phobes as life-denying bigots and affirm to LGBTQ+ people everywhere that we are part of nature... Such an event would reveal that the suppression of queer expression has gone alongside the repression of women, all part of a power grab by straight males – quite simply, in the ancient world the spiritual side of life was the domain of women and queers, and had been for millennia. Women and effeminate men ran the temples, led the ceremonies, gave healings (sometimes sexual where the priest/ess would embody the deity to bring blessings to the supplicant). The Hebrew, then Christian, then Islamic prohibition on same sex love was part of the effort to distance those faiths from the Goddess worshipping pagans, whose rites were often homo-erotic and involved much cross-dressing/gender-bending. In those times all forms of sexuality were considered normal, part of nature's expression, and sexual energy was understood as holy – seen as the life force flowing through all creation.
“In tribal societies (where cities, temples, and money are unknown), we have seen the common practice of ritual sex with the shaman, individually or in orgies. As early Mediterranean societies fell victim to urbanism and a money economy, the function of shaman in the countryside was transformed into that of priest in the temple, and money then entered in as a form of religious donation. So we see how Gay history, the history of prostitution, and the religious history of non-industrialized societies are all tied together…
“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, 1978
But the prohibition on same sex love was also motivated by political circumstances: “When the Empire adopted Christianity, it had therefore the traditions of the Mosaic law and the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to guide its legislators on this topic. The Emperors felt obscurely that the main pulses of human energy were slackening; population all tended to dwindle; the territory of the empire shrank slowly year by year before their eyes. As the depositaries of a higher religion and a nobler morality, they felt it their duty to stamp out pagan customs, and to unfurl the banner of social purity... To repress sexual appetites was not the ruler's object. It was only too apparent that these natural desires no longer prompted the people to sufficient procreation or fertility. The brood begotten upon Roman soil was inadequate to cope with the inrushing tide of barbarians. Wisdom lay in attempting to rehabilitate marriage, the family domestic life.” John Addington-Symonds
When Rev Jide McCauley - 'the happy holy homosexual' - said to the assembled crowd at the conference that queer people “are children of the Living God,” I was delighted. The 'Living God' is the feminine aspect of the divine, manifesting in nature and in all life. That presence was hidden in Christianity – though Jesus referred to its return as the 'Comforter' – the Holy Spirit – and indeed called it Mother. If the homophobic attitudes within religion are to be overcome, it will require people like Jide, who are part of the faith, to come forward to educate the others about the true divinity potential in homo and transsexuality.
“Many shamans were and are homosexual; many of the worshippers 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.” Andrew Harvey, Gay Mystics, 1997
“At the time of the birth of Christ, cults of men devoted to a goddess flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to south Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalu, kurgarru, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident in lndia. To complete the picture we should also mention the megabyzoi, or eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedesha, the male “temple prostitutes” known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere… These roles share the traits of devotion to a goddess, gender transgression and homosexuality, ecstatic ritual techniques (for healing, in the case of galli and Mesopotamian priests, and fertility, in the case of hijra), and actual (or symbolic] castration. Most, at, some point in their history, were based in temples and, therefore, part of the religious-economic administration of their respective city-states.” Historian Will Roscoe
In the pagan era the Goddess was not seen as being separate from the world. Instead she was seen as animating all life, as present in all things. The Goddess was the IMMANENT nature of the Divine, in contrast to the transcendent, distant Father God. The Abrahamic religions removed the feminine face of God, cutting people off from direct experience of divine presence in nature– and keeping them in fear of an angry tyrannical Father, while declaring that Father to be loving! In order to do this it was necessary to remove the queer priests from the Goddess temples, but then, centuries later, when Europeans went out to explore the world they found the same phenomenon everywhere. British explorer Richard Burton wrote in the 19th century that he had found homosexual and cross-dressing practices common around world, recording that they had “been adopted by the priestly castes from Mesopotamia to Peru.” The Europeans called the shamans of the native American tribes 'berdache' – a word, originally Persian, referring to a young man kept for sex – a bottom. This word stuck for 500 years until the native American queers themselves changed it to Two Spirit in 1990, a phrase more in line with the many original native terms for them.
The native American queers are in the process of reclaiming their spiritual status in their communities, rediscovering what it is to be in service to the sacred, to the earth. They stand as an example for queer across the globe, for if we look into our history, be we in Africa, Europe or elsewhere, we will discover that what is now labelled as sexual nature was once regarded as a spiritual calling.
The only way the world will become SAFER for us to be ourselves is by addressing and uprooting the religious justification for homophobia. The only way to fully achieve this is by becoming a living example of conscious queers claiming our spiritual inheritance, learning to live in relationship with the earth and spirit. At Queer Spirit Festival we are engaged in this journey - here we build on the great explorations happening for past 5 decades in Radical Faerie and other spaces that seek the liberation of our true queer nature and the reclamation of our spiritual essence and power.
Only when the world once again knows us as natural, even sacred, beings, and allows us to love as we choose, free from fear, and encourages us to discover our inner callings, to liberate our deep inner nature can we really be confident that it has become #Safertobeme.
