The Quest for Queer Spirituality, by Shokti

At Queer Spirit Festival, around 700 cosmic queers will gather to liberate the spirituality to be found in queer sexuality and to celebrate the healing gifts that come with queer nature. Ever since the start of the Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s, some LGBTQ+ people have been seeking and discovering deeper, spiritual, levels to their queer nature, and have been engaged in exploring their spirituality outside of religious settings, At Queer Spirit we walk in the footsteps of these pioneers as we bring together the world's largest gathering of members from all parts of the LGBTQ+ community exploring spirituality. Happening largely away from the gaze of the mainstream LGBTQ+ scene and rarely reported in queer media, for 5 decades some queers have been gathering quietly in sacred groves and secret sanctuaries, at conference centres and spiritual retreats. Many of those strands are weaving together to form the magic of Queer Spirit Festival. 

“Queer Spirit is the most life changing and recharging festivals I’ve ever been to. A beautiful collection of people from all communities of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, privilege, coming together to recognise the connection we all have to the earth, to each other, and the impact we can have on making the world a much better, hopeful, free, delightful and beautiful place. No one left unchanged, and the workshops were so accessible and interesting that everyone could grow and learn together.” From 2023 feedback.

In the 1970s some gay men and lesbians were already sensing that the mainstream gay rights movement was quickly slipping into an assimilationist attitude. These queers sought to liberate the queer spirit, in all its potential.

“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” declared Mitch Walker in Visionary Love (1980).

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, inspiriting, loving, teaching. It spirits me away somewhere magickal, strange, profound. I meet teaching weirdness, opening/expanding/dropping me into lights. I feel ecstasy, wonder, delight. I feel SPIRIT.”

Connection to nature – recognising ourselves as part of nature – her 'faerie' children – has always been at the core of the queer spiritual search. 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. Judy Grahn's 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 personal spiritual 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 explore the natural, magical, healing and creative gifts of queer nature.

Mitch Walker in 1997 described Radical Faeries as “the first indigenous spiritual tradition created and sustained by the gay male community in modern times. By “indigenous” I mean gay-centered and gay-engendered, in contrast to the various gay synagogues, churches, covens etc. In the latter groups, gayness is incidental or additional to the tradition espoused, while in the former it is central and causal. Radical Faeries celebrate and explore the Gay Spirit, which is itself the source of spiritual existence, wisdom and initiation. 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.”
https://albionfaeries.org.uk/radical-faerie-origins

As the AIDS crisis started to hit hard, many queers were pushed into a search for meaning, and a surge of spiritual seeking produced the first-ever conference on gay spirituality that brought together queers of all kinds, held in Berkeley, California, January 1986,

Here are some sample words recorded from the diverse participants at that conference:

“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 non-gay 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." from Mark Thompson's Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (1987)

The deep searching of the AIDS era led to the rapid growth of Radical Faerie and other groups as the gay community rallied to support each other. In the UK, the Edward Carpenter Community is a collective of gay men that has been holding nature retreats and healing events since the 1980s. Edward Carpenter was an English philosopher (1844-1929) who disliked the new term 'homosexuality' because of its reductionist qualities. He sought in his work to highlight the roles that queer people had played in pre-Christian history: showing that queers have always been active in creative circles, in the deep male-bonding of the military and in spiritual circles, especially in cultures that worshipped the goddess principle, and held the body, and sexuality, to be holy. He believed in the evolutionary potential in queer nature to bring about a shift in society's attitudes towards the body, and to shift the focus of the world from money and power to love and relationships. He preferred the term Uranian for us, making an association with the ancient goddess Aphrodite Urania, the patron of same sex love mentioned in Plato's Symposium. First coined by German activist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, the term was popular among intellectual and artistic gay men. Oscar Wilde said “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble — more noble than other forms” The Edward Carpenter Community | For men who love men 

A surge in books on the topic of gay spirituality, published in the 1990s-early 2000s reflect the massive inner seeking that some men had been engaged in during the epidemic years. These include Mark Thompson's Gay Soul- Finding the Heart and Spirit of Gay Nature, Andrew Harvey's Gay Mystics, Randy P. Connor's Blossom of Bone — Reclaiming the Connections between Homoeroticism and the Sacred, Toby Johnson's Gay Spirituality and Gay Perspective, Christian de la Huerta's Coming Out Spiritually — the Next Step, John P Stowe's Gay Spirit Warrior and Andrew Ramer's incredible work, Two Flutes Playing: A Spiritual Journeybook for Gay Men.

Transgender voices also emerged in the 1990s. Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors highlighted the presence of those who crossed sex and gender boundaries throughout history. She wrote that she “... discovered abundant evidence of male-to-female transsexual women priestesses who played an important role in the worship of the Great Mother... The Great Mother was emblematic of pre-class communalism... While it's impossible today to interpret precisely how people who lived millennia ago viewed this goddess, Roman historian Plutarch described the Great Mother as an intersexual (hermaphroditic) deity in whom the sexes had not yet been split... 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.”

Raven Kaldera, who in their 2002 work Hermaphrodeities, wrote:
“Transgendered people have long been robbed of their own spiritual history, not knowing that there were once times and places where ours was considered a spiritual path in and of itself. This book explores both our spiritual history and our modern predicaments, shaping the outline of a contemporary spiritual path for those of us who don't fit into just one gender box... Hermaphrodeities features third gender myths, deities, personal and group exercises, community service project suggestions, rituals, and interviews with people from all over both the transgender spectrum. We are all sacred and it is time that the world knew it.” 

LOVESPIRIT: In London from 2010-13 a group of gay men, all long term survivors of AIDS who were transformed by that experience, invited the lesbian, gay, bi and trans community to an annual day of workshops, talks and discussions about spirituality. We called this event LoveSpirit, and it was well attended and popular. Christian de la Huerta, Toby Johnson and Andrew Harvey were among the speakers who came to London to be with us. Andrew's talk about the love of Rumi and Shams in available on Youtube.

But what can we achieve in a day? By 2016 the urge for deeper, connected, community experience led to the manifestation of the first Queer Spirit Festival, held at Thoulstone Park in Wiltshire, with 400 attending. Returning last year after the pandemic at a stunning new site – Bridwell Park in Devon, home to Lord Ivar Mountbatten and his husband James Coyle, the fifth festival is coming up this August 2024: Over 4 nights and 5 days we get the chance to get to know each other, engage in spiritual practices and share our tales of exploration, revelation and self-discovery. 

A primary challenge to reclaiming/re-earthing our queer spirituality, however defined, is the systematic way the major faiths, chiefly the monotheistic faiths, have made spirituality a property of their god; a god viewed as outside and separate from the created universe, necessitating prelates to mediate, instantly politicising these institutions. The plain fact is living and loving by our spirituality is not easy given this long shadow but is the vision and essence of contemporary queer community-makers such as the Radical Faeries of Albion. This is why Queer Spirit seeks to be more than a festival, wonderful though that is: seeks to be a movement of living, loving transformation. 

At Queer Spirit Festival it's not about what we believe – it's about who we are – as nature's children, as cosmic queers, as healing, teachers, warriors – as GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS PEOPLE claiming our spirit, our power, our beauty and strength. 

At Queer Spirit Festival we affirm that LGBTQ+ people are 
BORN OF EARTH and BORN TO LOVE.
Here to rise into our light, our power and our glory!

Come join the cosmic wave!