Are you a closeted spiritual being?

Another Brighton Pride...So you’ve done the parade, seen the show at the park, hung out in the village, got a bit wasted. You’re out and proud! You’ve challenged the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexuality/gender policing and shaming that you’ve been exposed to all your life. And it feels good.....

Now what? Maybe there’s even more to you than your queer identity?

Harry Hay (gay man, intellectual, activist and one of the founders of the Faeries) would often ask three questions at the start of a talk or a conference: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here?

Pride marches, parades and festivals have helped us to acknowledge ourselves and to recognize and celebrate our contribution to diversity. So we’re starting to know who we are. Yet we’ve some way to go in understanding where we came from and what our purpose may be.

Hay spent time researching the role of the queer in Native American and primitive cultures. He found that these societies valued and prized their queer children as Two Spirit beings. Queer kids were encouraged to develop their shamanic nature and were cultivated to take on and hold crucial positions in the spiritual and cultural life of the tribe.

Hay believed that Two Spirits seeking each other “ghosted the twilight regions” and that the process of seeking one another and categorizing their relationships led to an intellectual breakthrough. They had the gift of seeing their own socially productive relationships as roles or constructs and so were more easily able to to see the real person behind the role play. They thus considered one another and indeed the world with a radical subjectivity, seeing through the show and establishing relationships on deeper spiritual levels.

Sadly, for most of us, our two-spirit-ness has been a mark of shame and has resulted in us being hounded out of our own religious communities. Forced to choose between our sexuality and spirituality we have had no spiritual home where our queerness could be seen as central and essential to our esoteric nature. 

Harry Hay was a communist. Back in the 1970s he wrote that the West was “in an anarcho-capitalistic social and ethical stagnation” and he believed that “the Homophile” (us queers), as descendants of the Two Spirit, had the responsibility of finding the way out.

Forty years on and the ethical and social stagnation is beginning to stink! 

Are you ready to re-kindle your spiritual flame? Do you want to join forces through the development of lore, myth and ritual to inspire contemporary action? Then get yourselves along to the Queer Spirit Festival (queerspirit.net) 17-21 August in Wiltshire (BA13 4AQ).

Here you’ll find ceremony and ritual, earth spirituality, a sacred sexuality temple, spirit mysteries, yoga, meditation, dance workshops, music and cabaret, nature walks, heart circles.

Four days of camping in the sunshine (or rolling around in the mud!). Meeting new friends and nurturing ourselves. Let’s find each other and have some fun!

Less Sport, More Sexual Spirituality!

OK, so as a queer community we brought our LGBTQ-ness into socializing in pubs together, we brought it into singing together, and wow, we even brought it into doing sports together. So where is the last bastion of bravely going where we’ve never been before, visibly, together? Maybe it’s in the Arena, or rather, in the Temple of being Spiritual together!
How many of us have buried the dirty little secret of our spiritual nature, after years of being told that our marginal sexual- and gender-queerness was incompatible with spirituality? That sexual beings ‘aint welcome in spiritual communities (unless of course it’s about procreating 2.4 replacements utilizing the missionary position and thinking of England)?
What if there were spiritual congregations who not merely tolerated our queerness, but positively celebrated it? What if the spiritual leadership were queer themselves and put their queerness right at the heart of their spiritual practices and rituals?
Well, the Good News is, it’s happening right here, right now in Brighton and you could become part of this revolutionary evolution of consciousness.
If you’re on the verge of coming out to your spirituality, then, watch out, you may be about to discover your very own queer spiritual community!
Here are a few dates for your diary. First of all, though, I recommend that you read ‘Coming Out To Spirituality: The Next Step’ by Christian de la Huerta. It ought to help a little with the de-programming necessary for any Coming Out process.
Next it’s time to blow away your parochial cob-webs and get out into nature. There are a couple of festivals this summer which will give you a chance to network with kindred queer spirits. 

There is the Quintasensual Festival- a Queer Tantra Festival (30July-4August) now in its 3rd year held at the Earth Spirit Centre near Glastonbury. Here, waiting to welcome you, is a community of Straight, Kinky, Queer, Gay, Lesbian and Trans* folk living, workshopping, spiritually practicing and loving together.

In August, for the first time in the history of the Universe, is the Queer Spirit Festival (Wednesday 17- Sunday 21) in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside. A Spiritual Festival run by queers for queers where joy and nakedness and spirituality will all be positively encouraged!

If you go to either (or both) of these festivals you’ll get a chance to meet the lovely queer Spiritual Leader Al Head who recently brought their highly acclaimed ‘This Land Sex Magic’ Workshop to Brighton and is planning more in response to popular demand (Google it and then watch the space)
The interesting thing in all this is that you will not only get the chance to meet a new breed of Queer Spiritual Leaders but you will begin to realize that you, yourself, are in the vanguard of a whole new era of Spirituality where the very core of your sexuality and gender-queerness is celebrated and can be integrated into the magic and mystery of your conscious awareness.

And that could end up being a whole lot of fun! See you there?

Tantric Sex and Finding The Meaning of Life......

“Every Time I find the meaning of life-they change it”
This is the title of a book by Daniel Klien that caught my attention as I was browsing at Waterstone’s last week. It made me chuckle!
The thing is, that I might just have discovered the meaning of life, the universe and everything in a book I’m currently reading about the Philosophy, History and Practice of Tantra by the respected and remarkably lucid Sanskrit scholar Christopher Wallis. 
Because Tantra is one of the few spiritual traditions which embraces sex and sexuality within its meditative practices, and because we live in a culture which generally sees spirituality as separate and somehow above sexuality, there is much confusion and misinformation about it all. 
One friend said to me when I was considering paying for a Tantric massage “Come on- it’s not worth that! Its just a posh wank”. And a few days ago I was chatting with some friends one of whom is training as a Tantric Masseur and none of us could come up with a definition of what Tantra actually was.
So, brace yourself; here’s the central belief system from page 55 of Wallis’ book

“All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject the same plus a contracted locus of self awareness.

“This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. The unbounded Light of Consciousness contracts into finite embodied loci of awareness out of its own free will.

“When those finite subjects then identify with the limited and circumscribed cognitions and circumstances that make up this phase of their existence, instead of identifying with the trans-individual overarching pulsation of pure Awareness that is their true nature, they experience what they call “suffering”.

“To rectify this, some feel an inner urge to take up the path of spiritual gnosis and yogic practice, the purpose of which is to undermine their misidentification and directly reveal within the immediacy of awareness, the fact that the divine powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing and Acting comprise the totality of individual experience as well- thereby triggering a recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity, the Whole in every part.

“This experiential gnosis is repeated and reinforced through various means until it becomes the non-conceptual ground of every moment of experience, and one’s contracted sense of self and separation from the Whole is finally annihilated in the incandescent radiance of the complete expansion into perfect wholeness.

“Then one’s perception fully encompasses the reality of a universe dancing ecstatically in the animation of its completely perfect divinity.”

Wow-just wow!

The Faeries have come to town!

The Radical Faerie Community is growing in Brighton.

GS interviews Brighton Faerie Mushoom about the Faeries and how they are busying themselves changing the world!

When and how did you identify as a Radical Faerie?

My first Faerie gathering was at Featherstone Castle just 5 years ago. I was lucky to have made friends with a guy who had already been to a few Faerie gatherings. He reckoned that I’d love the Faeries.

He was right. For me, as a lifelong secretly self-identified freak, Featherstone Castle was a magical home-coming to my very own tribe of misfits and marginals. The love of all things natural, the embrace of chaos, the acceptance of all shapes and sizes, the seam of deep spirituality yet the absence of proselytizing and hierarchy made for a very welcoming and nurturing space. It was my first taste of Faerie Sanctuary where I could begin the process of establishing my divinely intended purpose. Since then I have been back to Featherstone every year and I’ve also made a habit of staying at the Folleterre Faerie Sanctuary in Eastern France for a week or two every year as well.

I have always been profoundly affected by each and every gathering I’ve attended, learning about my gender, my sexuality, my undernourished appetites, my woundings, my capacity to self-heal and my previously unseen personal obstacles to self-love, the love of others and ultimately the love of the universe. 

 What do the Radical Faeries mean to you?

To me the Radical Faeries are a deeply rooted international network of divinely inspired beings. As a development of human consciousness, the Faeries have a natural intrinsic intent to nurture the sacred within. The Faeries  do this by generating magical faerie-space, encouraging physical, emotional and spiritual authenticity in all who encounter it directly. Once manifested this authenticity changes the world irrevocably!

What do you understand by the terms ‘Gay’ and ‘Queer’? Which do you identify with, as a Faerie, and why?

Back in 2009 I was a successfully assimilated ‘out’ Gay Man. I was a homeowner in a longterm monogamous same-sex partnership with 2.4 cats! My whole life had been an exercise in demonstrating to the wider society that I deserved equal rights.  For my generation of assimilationists, the prize we ultimately won for the LGBT community was a range of human rights- rights to civil partnership, rights to be able to foster and adopt, rights to an equal age of consent, rights even to join the army if we’d wanted to. 

Trouble was, that once I’d been fully shoehorned into my assimilated box I really couldn’t breath. I felt ungrateful. It felt unsafe to be losing the gift of my outsider status. I didn’t really enjoy my begrudgingly accepted life-style. The Church, who had caused me to throw out the ‘baby’ of my spiritual identity with the corrupt ‘bathwater’ of organized religion continued to disapprove of my nature.

That’s when I met the Faeries. They gave me permission to find a source of spiritual growth in the full cultivation of my sexuality. They invited me to discover the divine purpose of my bi-gendered nature and to reject assimilation as a bad deal. I was afforded intimate exposure, in heart-circle space, to the divine feminine (both within myself and in others)  Happily I have traveled away from the restrictive box of ‘Gay Man’ and I have arrived at the much gentler and less divisive identity of Queer Spirit. This brings me great joy!

What do you think about the rituals in the Radical Faerie community? How do they affect you personally?

1 In my experience, the most profound and transformative ritual in the Radical Faerie Community is the ritual of the Heart Circle. Revealing my heart-felt self to non-judgmental, lovingly accepting Faeries has been both challenging and rewarding. Bearing witness to the revelation of heart-felt truths in a non-judgmental and lovingly accepting way has revealed some surprising shared experiences and also enabled the cultivation of that gift of experiencing the vicarious feel of another Faerie’s moccasins as they go on their own journey. The most potent experience I have had of the powerfully transformative and healing influence of the Heart Circle Ritual was the Folleterre 2013 Sex Magick workshop. 7 days of continuous heart circling with a closed group of Faeries with the intention to create sacred ritual space for the authentic expression of loving touch. I was so impressed by its impact both on myself and others that I’m planning to attend another in October.

2 I also see the ‘Know (or No) Talent Show’ as a wonderful exercise in almost unacknowledged Ritual Space capable of promoting profound personal transformation for those in both ‘performer’ and ‘witness’ roles. As a performer I offer my creative self in total vulnerability. In the role of witness I am able to appreciate, as a practice in unconditional love, the channeled beauty of creation. I’m amazed at the growth I feel from the acknowledgement of my offering. I am enchanted and delighted by the offerings of others.

3 The Faerie Gathering itself is an extended ritual space with its opening ritual invoking the magical healing energies which will nurture the cultivation of our authentic selves. And also its closing rituals helping us to acknowledge the power of the transformative energies we have manifested but also their potential limitations to influence beyond the immediate environment of Faerie Space. 

Do you see the Radical Faeries fulfilling a role in the greater human community? 

Yes! 

What do you think it is? 

The unfurling and fluttering of a single Faerie’s wings in Faerie Space is enough to create a revolutionary wind of change for the planet!

There are now regular Faerie drum circles at the Brighton Unitarian Church.

Request details by joining the Brighton Faerie email group: brightonfaerie@gmail.com

Which comes first for me? Being Queer or being British? Are you serious?

How is it that 'identity' can cause so much grief?

It’s probably all about our current phase of psychic evolutionary development.

We have grown from reptilian lust-driven Id-centered creatures into mammalian, socially co-operative beings, capable of empathy but also, increasingly, developing a sense of egoic separateness. In the not too distant past, we have struggled to transcend the fleshly demands of our physical selves.

As animals we have always been forced to keep warm and dry, to ensure that we are fed and watered, and to satisfy the hormonally driven impulse to get our rocks off!

Consequently, in a starvation economy, we have needed to gang together and squabble with each other for territory, resources and nookie!

Maybe, as queer-folk, on the margins of all this carry-on, with the perspective of the ‘insider-outsider’, we have found ourselves in the vanguard of those insisting on respect for others and cautioning against the arbitrary identification of otherness as a cynical means of consolidating patriotic allegiances.

I am queer. My family is the international tribe of Faeries. Faeries are LGBTQ and, little by little, straight people too. We are lovers of Nature and she has no geopolitical boundaries.

As a global village we are reaching a tipping point. The numbers of us who are stuck in the lower- necessarily self-focused- reaches of primitive motivation are dwindling and more and more of us have reached a level of self-understanding. We can recognize the damaging consequences both to the planet and to each other of perpetuating the myth that we are separate from nature, from each other and from the divine.

The sooner we ditch those divisive identities tied to national separateness the better. Let us celebrate that “we are simply children of the universe dancing on the edge of time”!

St George’s Day 23/4/2014

The land of Albion shall rise!

The spirit of Albion shall fly!

The people of Albion awaken

To a brand new dream in the making

From beneath the concrete and the suits

There will emerge drumbeats and flutes

Despite the grasp of iron police fists

Freedom will come by turns and by twists

Never mind the bureaucracy and manipulation

Britannia’s giving birth to a rainbow nation

The people of Albion will feel it in their bones

This is our land, it was always our home

Not English, Scottish nor Welsh

The whole of this land is our wealth

Land rich in history, steeped in blood, so much loved

Land full of promise, she gave us her wealth

Albion’s power spread round the globe

Red was the colour of Britannia’s robe

Empire fallen the Brits fumble their way

Slaves to the economy, doped by the media

Lives lived on Facebook Twitter and Wikipedia

But Britons are not slaves to money or machine

We are not here to serve the dark dream

The spirit of Albion shall rise

And illuminate the lies

The people of Albion shall rise!

Be prepared for a big surprise!

Shokti Lovestar  (Albion Faerie)

A Guided Faerie Dream Manifestation Ritual

As queers we are a tribe with the potential to generate Joy and Love through the discovery of our unexplored purpose.

By discovering and embodying our true nature we act as beacons of hope to those unfortunate enough NOT to have been born in the margins.

Take some time out today in a quiet space. Light a candle if you can.

Breathe in through the right nostril and out through the left three times.

Breathe in through the left nostril and out through the right three times.

1 Concentrate on the base chakra (around the anus and genitals) and imagine the energy of the Earth rising up your legs into it causing it to blossom into a deep red flower.

This is the site of our lusts, appetites and capacity for self healing and is guarded by the Spirit of Earth in the North.

2 Now concentrate on the sacral chakra (inside the abdomen behind the navel) and imagine the energy rising into it causing it to blossom into an orange flower

This is the site of our sense of pleasure and balance.

3 Move your attention now to the solar plexus chakra  (just below the rib cage). Feel the energy rising into it causing it to blossom into a yellow flower. This is the site of our power to create and destroy. It is guarded by the Spirit of Fire in the South.

4 Next is the heart chakra. Feel the energy rising into it causing it to blossom into a green flower. This is the site of our emotional selves. It is guarded by the Spirit of Water in the West.

5 Let the energy move into the base of the neck where the throat chakra sits. Feel it blossom into a blue flower. This is the site of our logic, rationality and egoic personality. It is guarded by the Spirit of the Air in the East.

6 Finally allow the energy to rise to the Third Eye chakra (in the middle of the forehead between the eyes). Feel it blossom into a beautiful purple flower. This is the site of our capacity to sense joy from the realisation of our true purpose.

Imagine a white light above your head. The source of Universal Love.

Let the light pass down over your body like a shower of warm water first passing over the front of your body melting away any stresses and strains and then over the back of your body taking with it any cares and worries.

Enjoy the peace and quietness of this moment.

Now say the following:

I have a dream….

A dream of flight…. 

To Eternal Universal Love

Love For all

Love From all

Disappearance of Dualism

Emergence of Unity

Black-and-White Binaries banished

Rainbow reality manifested

Lusts and appetites melding with the

Ineffable Joy of discovering our unexplored Purpose

Melded with the Power of Authentic Emotion

Ego subjugated to Heart

Let Source be seen as the Way!

Let the Way be our guide!

So mote it be!

Aho

The Religious Destiny of Our Tribe: Queer Gender-F**k Spirituality

When I was very young my parents taught me that our family were members of an exclusive club. As such we knew what was what! We knew what was good and knew what was bad. If we were nice, then, when our lives came to an end, the “very essence of who we were” would receive an invite to a fabulous party from a kindly old Father Christmas kind of a bloke. If not then we were toast!

If we could follow a few simple rules then lifetime membership was assured. Fine and dandy until I discovered that I was ‘intrinsically disordered’- still ‘loved’ by the membership as a transgressor but acknowledged to be engaged in unacceptable practices and headed for the incinerator. My crime? I was a male lover of men.

Sadly the faerie tale with the happy ending beyond the grave blew up in my face. The club waited patiently for me to do the honourable thing but I refused to crawl away in shame.

Instead I rejected the whole non-sense of it all and signed up as a Five-Star member of the club which dedicated itself to affirming the ridiculousness of every tenet of that exclusive club. There was no ‘good’, no ‘bad’, no ‘very essence of who we are’, no kindly old bloke, no party, no incinerator! There was a scientific explanation for everything and anything considered to be inaccessible to scientific enquiry was simply decidedly dodgy.

I managed for a few years until ‘the very essence of who I was’ began to feel ignored, neglected and undernourished. Unscientifically I identified this aspect of myself as my Spiritual Nature and set about looking at how to tend to its special needs. None of the popular exclusive clubs wanted to help me. I learned the technique of meditation and found that a state of mindfulness allowed some breathing space for what came next.

I began to see that to fulfil my potential I needed to find ways of exploring and developing BOTH my Spiritual Nature AND my Queer Self in ways that had, until then, seemed impossible.

I would need to manifest and become the religion I was seeking. And finally I would learn that my Spiritual Nature IS my Queer Self!

The word religion derives from the latin word religare which means to bind. It is only relatively recently in the history of western religion with its attacks on pagan earth respecting traditions and its slaughter of cat-keeping witch-faggots that queers have been demonised by religious groups

More enlightened ancient cultures used to recognise their sexuality and gender variant members as ‘two spirit’ or ‘walkers between worlds’. They were simply respected for their giftedness. From the margins it is second nature to understand conflict and heal it. Ancient queer priest-priestesses were afforded sacred roles in the creation of tribal ritual, which served in the re-binding of the communal spirit with itself and the divine. 

Let us all therefore reclaim our ancient heritage as Queer Spirit Warriors!

Let us joyously manifest Queer Genderfuck Spirituality!

May the Church of Queer heal the wounds of our global village!

A(wo)men

Down with Pride! Up with Passion!

I feel Pride bursting my heart as I inhale
I feel shame twist my insides as I exhale 

If Gay Pride marches started as a defiant gesture towards our emotionally abusive nurturing networks, as a refusal to allow a minority socio-biologically determined feature to mark us out as pariahs, then maybe we need to explore the impact of historical societal unpleasantness on the stymieing of the spirit of joy and playfulness in our Faerie natures. 

For most of us we’ve had to brazen out the discomfort of a constant backdrop of presumed social approbation. My own response was to pull away from family and frien-emies . I had to numb my sensitivities; to seem like I didn’t give a shit. I anaesthetized my intuition and creative instincts. I stifled my feminine-sissy nature. She had already been battered and bruised over the years by the invalidation of others’ embarrassment, disapproval, and ridicule. 

Distancing myself also meant ripping myself away from the wonderfully assuring imagery, stories and understandings of a stabilising yet homophobic religious community, who had provided a basic framework around which my early spiritual growth had been flourishing. 

As I came out to a more accepting chosen family, I sensed that my male-loving masculine gender was nicely privileged. However my male-loving feminine nature was shunned. My first gay community, had not only unknowingly internalised its own homophobia but was also largely unaware of its patriarchally imposed misogyny. For lots of understandable reasons it was a spiritual wilderness too. 

As I identified a lack of spirit in my life I began to search for an accepting spiritual home. Wherever I seemed to look there would always seem to be a problem with queerness. I concluded ultimately that I would need to become the spiritual home I was searching for. I started to read daily from the book “The Essential Gay Mystics” by Andrew Harvey and slowly but gradually began the work (and play) of constructing a truly personal spiritual life where my soul would be free to dance, laugh and sing! 

In this new life I am encouraged to pursue my sexual desires and to satisfy my sexual appetites as a truly spiritual practice. My masculine-ness is honoured -as is my feminineness in a beautifully androgynous balance! By cultivating my spiritual/ sexual nature I am able to honour the 'wholeness of me' in the context of the cosmos. I can attune to the unassailable forces of inevitability. 

Rather than allowing ‘shame aversion’ to guide my actions I can now allow myself to be wholeheartedly ethically shameless following instead the discernment arising from a respect for my nature, the love of others and a joy for life. The Faeries like this! 

In Faerie community my wholeness is honoured and enjoyed. I am invited to explore my response to acceptance in social space. Do I choose to be selfish or am I generous and self-sacrificial? I learn that I am allowed to take the love I need and that I am happy to allow others to feed on the love I have to give. 

I have said goodbye to the Gay Pride/Shame binary. 
I’ve left it behind in exchange for Queer Sacred Passion. 
It’s a much more sustaining paradigm!

A Book that Changed My Life……

The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Adventures
Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy
Ten Speed Press, 2009 296 Pages

I've been practicing Ethical Sluttery for 18 months now and it's all been down to the September Edward Carpenter Community's Gay Men's Weeks

It all started in September 2009- “The Dance Between Power and Intimacy”-my first ECC experience and, there I was, all alone.

Back home I was in a long-term relationship. The erotic expression of our love for each other had stopped years before. We were maintaining a monogamous tradition fearing the potential destabilising consequences of messing with the arrangement. I had been interested in meditation as a homphobia-free means of satisfying my hunger for spiritual nourishment and, I suppose, at the time I was searching for a spiritual home.

The workshops during that week helped me to put my monogamous sexual barriers down. I explored how the experience of erotic sexual massage could combine with spiritual meditative practice and how loving intimacy was rapidly fostered between individuals who were prepared to engage in vulnerable-making self-exposure. I didn’t realise at the time that this would set a foundation for me to embark on a path of authentic personal growth and enable me to engage in loving encounters like never before. Wow!

When I returned from the week I was on fire! The stakes were high but I had to risk discussing with my partner making changes to the 12-year-old monogamous agreement we made when we’d first met. Being a naturally jealous bloke his reaction was to be cautiously OK about it. We agreed to me doing sexual things outside the relationship provided I would tell him what happened if he asked but not to tell him if he didn’t ask. I love him and I didn’t want to hurt him but I also sensed a chance to grow emotionally, spiritually and sexually. Here was a genie, which could not be popped back into its bottle.

A good friend made on this first Gay Men's Week introduced me to the Faeries and I went to three gatherings that year- Featherstone Castle, Folleterre and Wansee. As is often the case I came away from each of these gatherings with something important learned about myself. Featherstome held a mirror up to my life-long approval seeking programming. Folleterre helped me to reflect on how my father’s [patriarchy’s] disapproval of the feminine aspects of my nature set the scene for not only my internalised homophobia but also a kind of internalised misogyny of which I had been previously completely unaware. Wansee opened my eyes to how the way I presented myself to others was profoundly affected by fear of shame and social rejection.

So it was in the context of this roller coaster ride of personal growth and self-discovery that I was introduced to The Ethical Slut

I wasn’t sure if it was possible to be a Really Dirty Slut and to also be a Really Good Person at the same time. This book showed me how!

The authors reclaim the abusive term Slut in the same way that Queer has been reclaimed for marginal sexual orientation and gender identity and in the same way that Faerie is reclaimed to proudly assert our sissy natured-ness. ‘Sluts’ are those who dare to have sex more often, and in less conventional ways, than everyone else and, who refuse to be cowed into submitting to the social norms. ‘Ethical Sluts’ are those who do this openly, honestly, lovingly and caringly with the intention of harming no one.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is stopping themselves from having, or openly admitting to having desired ethical sex out of fear that it would be immoral, socially disapproved of and because the consequences would mean guilt and social exclusion.

The authors convincingly argue that our society is geared towards regulating sexual relationships so they fit into monogamous, politically and economically acceptable hetero-imitative configurations, which provide ostensibly stable environments for habitat-living-style-consumerism and child rearing. They confront the idea that sexual relationships exist in a ‘starvation economy’-' i.e. that there aren’t enough sexual relationships to go around and so sexual relationships need to be jealously protected and safeguarded. They argue that there is an infinite potential for sexual relationships of all shapes and sizes and the key to accessing these in order to meet one’s many and varied sexual appetites is, firstly, honesty in communication with one’s partners and, secondly, negotiating clear unambiguous agreements which enable the involved partners to feel emotionally safe and secure.

Of course it isn’t all necessarily going to be a bed of roses and it would be surprising if jealousies didn’t arise in polyamorous arrangements. The authors present convincing arguments about how the working through of jealousies is a potentially very good thing both for the development of the affected individuals but also for the relevant relationships.

It could even be possible that ‘compersion’ –the emotion of joy at one’s partner’s happiness with another sexual partner might even prevail!

The interesting thing about becoming honestly polyamorous [as opposed to the conventional dishonest non-consensual non-monogamous pattern of polyamory-or ‘having an affair’- prevalent in western cultures] is that it allows you to enjoy a wide variety of sexual partners without having to lie or feel bad about it. And rather than distancing you from love and spirit it has the potential to deepen you spiritual growth too. If that isn’t enough to convince, you also get a chance to feel the full force of conventional societal disapproval and to work on your own issues of guilt shame and approval seeking!

Read the book and start to change the world!

Ooh-I’ve come over all Queer!

This time last year if someone had asked me how gay I was I’d have probably just said ‘Very Gay’ and not really thought much more about it. Back then I thought Queer was a useful generic term for LGBT folk- a handy passive aggressive reclaiming of an abusive insult.
‘My God you’re soooo Gay!’ can mean so many things. If it’s being said by a 14 year old school boy then you’re being homophobically insulted because, as every schoolchild knows these days, anything described as gay is-well total crap. If you’re Graham Norton it probably means you’re being seen as somehow fabulously camp, witty, superficial and flippant.
If you identify yourself as Queer however then calling someone Gay is a political jibe with the suggestion that the person has sold out or assimilated into straight society.
Back in the days when homosexuals [as gay men then referred to themselves] were fighting for civil rights as a persecuted minority, there was a split between the assimilationists and radicals. The assimilationists argued that the only way to win the same human rights as ‘normal people’ [as most straights then referred to themselves] was by asserting that we were no different from straights other than our sexual preference, and that we could prove this by joining mainstream society, settling down into monogamous relationships, getting a mortgage, acquiring a couple of cats and dreaming of adopting children someday.
The radicals on the other hand -who subsequently became known as the Faeries- took a different view. They maintained that we were not the same as everyone else, that the difference was significant and meant something and that our purpose was to discover and develop this quality of different-ness. The Faeries believed that this was what constituted our usefulness to a mainstream society overburdened with child bearing and capitalistic preoccupation. We had the gift of prizing subject- subject relationships [ie person to person love not tied in with material possessions] that for us existed happily outside of the prevalent subject-object relationships rife amongst our straight brethren. They even went as far as to say that because of our unique ability to look like everyone else whilst being dramatically different inside, we were blessed with a special healing and spiritual power which enabled us to understand two sides of conflicting perspectives making us well placed to excel in roles as therapists, shamen, diplomats and teachers.
The faeries have, over the years battled to hold on to their Queerness and have joined with others forced into the margins by virtue of their sexuality and gender differences. Queer encompasses LGB and T with an anti-assimilationist agenda.
Twelve months ago I was one of those assimilated gay men until I met the Faeries. Three faerie gatherings later I’m a lot clearer about how an unquestioned patriarchal society attempted to batter the feminine aspects of my nature out of me and although failing to process me into a closet case turned me into a straight acting gay man with a good helping of internalized homophobia desperate to be accepted by adopting monogamy and mortgage servitude
Nowadays I’m ready to accept embellish and celebrate my queerness and I can tell you it’s so much more fun than trying to fit in.
So how gay am I? 0%
How queer am I? 100%

Are you an Eco-Puritan?

A new Puritanism is taking hold of us all, which is promulgated by the polluters of the planet. Its main tenets are:
1 An environmental apocalypse is nigh!
2 If we love the planet we need to do something now!!
3 If we stop driving cars and use public transport, stop taking holidays abroad and recycle out bottles and boxes we can stop feeling so bad about it.
4 We should try not to get distracted by evidence suggesting that doing these things is effectively a drop in the ocean of what those countries with obscenely gigantic carbon footprints might be capable of, but just don’t get round to doing!

Suggest to an Eco-Puritan that there might be a small problem with tenet number 4 and you might as well be denying the holocaust at a Bar Mitzvah, or depicting Allah as a cartoon character to an ayatollah.

I take my bottles cans and newspapers to my recycling point like any good Brightonian. But I’m not a believer! However, in the spirit of ‘being the change you would like to see in the world’ I have taken to regularly attempting to raise my awareness of myself, in my body, in the world

This is how it works: Every day as I drive to work, I take a few deep breaths. Then, as I’m looking out of the windscreen, I become aware of those things on the glass that partially obscure my view- things like specks of dirt, raindrops, reflections of the illuminated speedo up on the screen. And I think about how what I see is affected by these obscurants. I then look beyond the screen to the open road where I see shadows underneath oncoming cars and beneath trees. Most cars today have a metallic finish so the images of the cars are made up of reflected light and mirrored, distorted, reflected images. There are light sources too: headlights, taillights, road lights, traffic lights. I become aware that all of what I see is simply light reflected off matter. Usually at this stage I start to feel more acutely aware of the moment I am existing in and I’ll be grateful that I’ve brought myself out of dwelling in the past or preoccupying myself with the future.

I’m grateful because the present moment, ‘now’, is all we really have ever had and is all we really ever will have. Choosing to aware-ly exist within it is probably one of the few things we can truly have an influence over.

I then look at something I might conventionally disregard as boring- like the tarmac on the road. But instead I see it afresh in the present as fascinating. I’m now getting to know lots of bits of road which, in the past I would never have registered! Then I look for imperfections on the road. For me, finding an imperfection in something is a sure-fire way of rapidly disregarding it. So I find an imperfection and see it as something to be aware of now. Spots of chewing gum, drips of paint, pebbles, grit. And finally I find something that is creatively perfection. Something which, because of its complexity, I would previously have overlooked- grass, wild flowers, trees, hedgerows. I’ve made friends with lots of trees along the route into work this way!


As a society we are increasingly divorced from our present and from the nature in the world that surrounds us. Please become aware of yourself in your present and love it!

As queer folk we have a special gift to be able to do this more easily than our straight brethren. Spread the word. The more of us who are aware of our present selves, as part of nature, the less disconnected will we be from our beautiful mother- Earth. Ditch the Eco-Puritanism and connect with nature in the present moment as often as you can. 

Oh- and mind you don’t crash the car!


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