Radical Faeries - History

History

The Faeries trace their name to the 1979 Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies. The conference, organized by Harry Hay and his lover John Burnside, along with Los Angeles activist Don Kilhefner and Jungian therapist Mitch Walker, was held over the Labor Day weekend in Benson, Arizona and attracted over two hundred participants. From this, participants started holding more multi-day events called "gatherings". In keeping with hippie, neopagan, and eco-feminist trends of the time, gatherings were held out-of-doors in natural settings. To this end, distinct Radical Faerie communities have created sanctuaries that are "close to the land".

It was Hay who adopted the name "Radical Faerie" for this burgeoning movement, with "radical" referring to its politically extreme viewpoint. The term "Faerie" was chosen in reference both to the immortal animistic spirits of European folklore and to the fact that "fairy" had become a pejorative slang term for male homosexuals. Initially, Hay rejected the term "movement" when discussing the Radical Faeries, considering it to instead be a "way of life" for gay males, and he began referring to it as a "not-movement".

The magical and "radical humanist" views of Arthur Evans, specifically his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, influenced some early members of the movement. Evans had previously formed the Faery Circle in San Francisco in the fall of 1975, a group that "combined neo-pagan consciousness, gay sensibility, and ritual play."

However, less than a year after the first "Radical Faerie" gathering in 1979, internal pressures threatened to fracture the group. Walker secretly formed the "Faerie Fascist Police" to combat "Faerie fascism" and "power-tripping" within the Faeries. He specifically targeted Hay: "I recruited people to spy on Harry and see when he was manipulating people, so we could undo his undermining of the scene." At a gathering in Oregon designed to discuss acquiring land for a Faerie sanctuary, a newcomer to the group, coached by Walker, confronted Harry about the power dynamics within the core circle. In the ensuing conflict, the core circle splintered. Plans for the land sanctuary stalled and a separate circle formed. The core circle made an attempt to reconcile, but at a meeting that came to be known as "Bloody Sunday", Kilhefner quit, accusing Hay and Burnside of "power tripping". Then Walker resigned, in the process allegedly calling Hay a "cancer on the gay movement" (a remark Walker later denied making). Walker and Kilhefner formed a new gay spiritual group called Treeroots.