Queer Spirit Festival 2024 and Me, by Al Head

Queer Spirit Festival. What we have birthed together. What came through us. What came in its own time and in its own way. What has spread out in all directions. What we hold when we are there together.

All of us have our QSF story. All of us who have worked in its creation. All of us who have been part of it over the last eight years. Everything that each of us, each of you, have put in has made QSF what it is. Each of your presences have added to its richness. Each of your stories will be unique and valuable. I would love to hear them: in a blog, in person, on Facebook, wherever and however. Some of them I know at least some of. Some of them I may never hear: but know that they are all important. As we are all important.

This is a short version of my story with Queer Spirit Festival. It's the part of the story that is present for me at this particular time, just after the 2024 festival. At another point in the past, in the future, the story will be different. But this is where it is now, today...

Twenty-three years ago Shokti and I met at Queer Pagan Camp (QPC), a place and a community that changed us and grew us. Separately and together, we began to dream Queer Spirit Festival. Nearly ten years ago I was in London running my first This Land Sex Magic workshop and I looked at Shokti and said: it's time. One year and nine months after that, Queer Spirit Festival was born in Wiltshire (incidentally not far from where my father was born).

For the first three festivals I was part of the core organising team. It was hard and stressful work, but worth it to see the festival take shape and to hear the people telling us how much they loved it, how it had transformed their lives. After the third festival I was badly burnt out and needed to take a step back. Last year I ran the sacred sexuality area, with varying degrees of success. It is an important part of the festival and I wanted to see it embedded into its heart. Many great facilitators and space holders come and contribute to a rich, varied offering. It's also a hard thing to run, with many choices and decisions to make. Some we got right, some we didn't, and this has been true of this space at every QSF. But it continues to thrive. 

Queer Spirit Festival has grown in many ways since we first birthed it. Its reality has been more or less as we imagined it as the years have gone on. In some ways it has grown nearer to our original vision: the tribes coming together, the different groups and individuals bringing their own practices, their own skills and experiences to share with others. In some ways we may have lost touch with parts of the vision and I hope they will return as we go on. I hope we go back to having compost toilets, to building in more ritual and protection to show our respect for the trees and for the land. I hope we continue our work of bringing equality and inclusion into every area of the festival. Even though I haven't been a direct part of the organising this year I have felt myself a part of holding the ethos that we wrote at the beginning: reminding, suggesting, and I intend to go on doing this, even if it is sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes not appreciated!

This year although, for the first time, I was not part of the organising of the festival. I was aware of the organising. I held the edges, was available for consultation, supported the organisers and held the ethos as much as I could. But, struggling with long COVID exhaustion, I couldn't do more, and I am hugely grateful for those who did the hard, laborious, often stressful work. At the festival I led a workshop, performed my songs with other musicians, and had the joy of helping facilitate the big ceremonies. But in between times I was, for the first time, free to enjoy the festival. I have spent four festivals saying: lovely to see you but sorry I’m on my way over there and I have to do that. This year I stopped, I said: it's lovely to see you, and how are you? I met people in the dark round the fire and heard their stories, the amazing things that people are doing. Instead of holding the space for others to be in community I felt that I could finally be part of this community we created. Every time I say this I cry. I am moved and touched by this, by our community, by who I am in it.

This year I felt truly in the heart of the community, in the centre, to the extent and in the same way as all others are in the centre.  Being in community is not joy all the time, it is not love all the time. It is all of it, all the emotions. It is joy and laughter and love and it is anger and pain and heartbreak. It is being triggered and finding a way to hold our inner children while they cry. It is being the adult who sees the whole picture and knows that we were not being deliberately hurt, at least not this time, that this time we are moving towards healing. Being in community means we are part of the stories, part of the dramas. It means that we engage with others, that we sit alongside others who are experiencing big emotions, big transitions.    

This year I wasn't just one of the people who made the space to change other people's lives. This year I felt something for myself. Maybe not a life change - I have been living this reality for a long time now. But a remembering; a returning to parts of myself that have been, if not lost, then not prioritised, not fully experienced for a while. The part of me that shines leading large groups in ceremonial space. And the part of me that loves experiencing ritual space that I am not holding, that loves remembering QPC and what I learned and was given there. The part of me who loves drumming, and who felt so happy sitting next to the person who first taught me, able to drum with them. So many things to remember, to love. Being held. Being cuddled. Snogging under a tree. Singing on stage while others joined in, in a way they don't in other spaces. Sharing moments with humans, with deer, with the land. Sharing my knowledge, my experiences, my life. Having time with people, with family: blood family, festival family, queer family. 

I remembered how much I love sitting round the big fire at night till 2am, singing, drumming, chatting, or just looking into the flames or up at the sky, seeing shooting stars. I remembered my connection with so many people that I love and have loved over so many years. All we have shared together is part of this community: we have built it year by year through the work we have done, the places we have been; queer pagan camp, queer spaces at festivals, radical faerie gatherings, workshops, four previous queer spirit festivals. There is so much shared history here. Interpersonal queerstories of love, of pain, of glory, of magic. Community queerstories of events, of happenings. There is so much interwoven here. People coming into this space for the first time feel it, they feel the interconnections, they feel the learnings, they feel the love we have woven together over so many years.

Other parts of myself were remembered, were returned to me. I spoke of Greenham Common three times in an afternoon and we made the wool-web magic that I first experienced there in my workshop and later I hung the web on the fence by my tent. People said that my life was interesting and wanted to know more, wanted to buy my book. I remembered that my life has been, is still, interesting.

One of the main things I have noticed is that I can be myself at QSF because I am not afraid. I may be sad, angry, upset, joyous, exhausted or tender. But I am not afraid. Living mostly in heteronormative society,whether I notice it or not, there is an underlying level of fear all the time. Homophobia and transphobia are alive and well and we never know when they will come at us. And so we can never quite relax. At QSF I relaxed. Even my voice was different, as a perceptive friend remarked. This is why we continue to make these spaces for our communities. 

There are still some things, some parts of me, that are not understood, that are forgotten, that not everyone can see, can feel. This sense I have now of us being earth; of what we do to the earth being directly done to us humans, this is not shared by all. Not everyone can understand why it hurts me to see bicycles casually propped against a 800 year old oak tree. Not everyone can understand why I welcome wasps and flies into my space, or why I ask permission before I hug a tree, or step inside its energy field, or into its body-space that extends below the ground further than its branches spread over the top. Not everyone understands why I welcome and celebrate both tears and anger, or why I am more likely to accept hugs from people who ask me, or why there are some people who don't have to ask, because we are so deeply connected we know without asking whether it is, in this moment, ok. But at QSF there are some people who do understand these things, and this, too, is a gift.

This is a small part of what Queer Spirit Festival means to me. Joy and hard work, love and pain, struggle and growth. We are not perfect: we make mistakes and learn from them and make some more. But we are real, and vibrant and we hold space for each other and for ourselves. We create community and we create spaces that allow us to blossom and to shine.

Here's the song that I wrote in the early days, and that we sang together again around the fire this year in our closing ceremony:

All the Queer Spirits

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing. 
Look at all the queer spirits shining in the sun. 

We’re weaving webs of power. 
We’re building community. 
We’re growing hour by hour. 
We’re finding a new way to be. 

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing.
Look at all the queer spirits, laughing in the rain. 

We’re connecting to the trees. 
We’re entwining with the roots. 
We’re combining energies. 
We’re growing collective shoots. 

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing.
Look at all the queer spirits dancing in the dark. 

We’re learning how to grow. 
We’re sharing all that we feel. 
We’re learning how to glow. 
We’re finding a new way to heal. 

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing.
Look at all the queer spirits singing round the fire. 

We’re sitting round the fire. 
Telling the stories of our lives. 
We’re singing songs of power. 
We’re telling how we survived. 

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing.
Look at all the queer spirits healing the earth. 

We’re making ritual. 
We’re making social change. 
We’re finding hope and love. 
We’re finding our own way. 

Look at all the trees, look at all the beings sitting and laughing.
Look at all the queer spirits, transforming the world.