What does it mean to be a Faerie
Do you also feel sometimes to live on a
different planet?
Are you interested in a temporal spiritual community? Do
you like to link yourself to a group of gay brothers, who are
celebrating rituals in a free and creative way? Then you are
probably a Faerie ! And if you
like living close to nature and within an open, brotherly commune
then you will certainly like to get to know
Faerie-Gatherings. All offers are voluntary.
And of course there will be always the possibility to withdraw
from the communal activities and retreat to your own solitude...
The anounced Faerie
Gatherings are the right place to discover your Gay-Spirituality
in a peaceful, lovely way and within an international community.
Being a Faerie:
means to know and experience that everything isn't really what
it seems. Feeling and seeing things differently opens within
Faeries a source of unlimitted creativity. And the Faerie-Eros
refers to a transformative life-force, which could be
interpretated as divine. Its salvation is possible through
the soul and the body, through celebrating who you are
as an embodied person. For more on the understanding of what it
means to be a Faerie go to see: Who are
the Faeries?
Experiencing Faerie-Rituals
Faeries gather ususally, on full moons and have a ritual/circle which can involve any number of things: visualizations, dancing, singing, drumming, crafts, bitching, discussions or spontaneous talks, divers ways of male bonding, but also yoga, mediation etc. Some play dressup, dressbutch, or dressnot as an creative expression or because they like to be a festive flaming bunch of very queer guys.
Introducing Words on Faerie-Identity by Harry Hay:
For Harry Hay, who revived the „Radical Faerie Movement" Faeries invent and re-discover a more honest and genuine expression of Gay identity. For him Faerie gatherings are an example of a common sharing a vision about what it means to be gay. „At Faerie gatherings we discover that we want to share rather than compete, that we like to listen to one another and exchange our touch in loving ways." (Quote from: Marc Thompson, Gay-Soul, page 88)
Harry Hay stresses the continous need to „re-imprint within ourselves our recognition of ourselves as as separate people", which he calls a „third-gender-people" . Third-Gender-People were and are those who were assigned responsibilities, developing, and managing the frontiers between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the unknown. Harry developed in contrast to a alienate and antagonized subject-object orientation the vision of a (non-dualistic) "subject-to-subject consciousness" which refers to a consensus orientated practice of a non-competitive, non-comformative but responsive behaviour. Not being bound to the dualistic either/or ways of thinking and acting Gays are open for Harry Hay calls a 'spiritual neitherness'.
„It is from this spiritual neitherness that we draw our capacity as meditators between the seen and the unseen, as bedache, priests and shamans seers; as artists and architects; as scientist, teachers, and as designers of the possible - mediatators between the make-believe and the real, through theater, music, dance and poetry; meditators between the spirit and the flesh...
Harry Hay, (1987) A separate people whose time has come, in: Thompson, M. (1987) Gay Spirit, p. 287"
"I enjoy certain things, no one else has to enjoy them, and I see certain things in a certain way, but no one else has to see those things in the same way. And then again, no one has the right to tell me it's immoral or selfish or wrong to do what I do."
- Holly Johnson, 1984
© AUTHOR: S.W.H, + Wendelin Merlin