The Faeries are a fairly diverse bunch of queers.
However, in the early days, 40 years or so ago, at the very first gatherings of Faeries, the vast majority of attendees were gay men who were drawn to the idea of meeting together as faggots in nature to celebrate their sissy selves and explore their spiritual consciousness, asking the questions: 'Who are we, where are going, and what are we for?'
From the exploration of these questions, (and from a growing awareness that, although a lot of gay men seemed to be having a lot of sex, they were often craving an intimacy with each other which seemed forever-out-of-reach), there emerged an intensive workshop aimed at helping those who felt the call, to delve into the personal and interpersonal reasons for the many obstacles to intimacy encountered by gay men. These healing workshops, facilitated by volunteer Faeries, for the benefit of Faeries, have been running for the past 30 years and are known as Faerie Sex Magick (FSM) Workshops.
These days Faerie-space is now a much more diverse and inclusive network where those from across the full range of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum are invited to enrich the exploration in community of the questions: 'How does it feel when a) I dare to stand in the full power of my sexual orientation b) the expression of my gender identity is not only unrestrained but is completely appreciated and celebrated?'
Until now the FSM workshops have been confined to fagot identified men. The logic for this being that there is a real kind of hurt experienced by faggots growing up in a homophobic social environment, and that faggots are best able to develop an understanding of this. Fags are uniquely able to sooth and heal each other's wounds around blocks to intimacy related to this kind of trauma.
However in recent years trans* men have been invited to attend the workshop and during this time there has also been a growing momentum of enthusiasm to have FSM workshop participants reflecting the full diversity of identities and sexualities present at modern Faerie Gatherings.
So very soon there will be the pilot of a workshop which will be open to the full spectrum of queer sexualities and genders. What will happen when a fully inclusive group sits in heart circle to explore the obstacles to emotional and physical intimacy that exist between them?
The intention of the heart circling within the traditional workshop is to reach a state of community trust to the extent that co-created rituals, involving permitted group erotic touch, are able to be devised and consensually enacted.
How might this look between individuals not accustomed to considering erotic touch with genders and sexualities beyond their habitual erotic arousal patterns?
Nobody knows but it’s the beginning of a radical adventure into a better understanding of how faerie queers, with a range of sexuality and gender expression, might more freely express the erotic together in community…
Watch this space!
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?
“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!
