Arrival at home radical faerie configurations of sexuality and place

GLQ

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 67-96

  Morgensen, Scott Lauria ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67549137622     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2008-019     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Harry Hay co-organized the first radical faerie gathering with John Burnside, Don Kilhefner, and Mitch Walker. Mark Thompson reported from that gathering, and Randy Conner recounted the cultural histories on which gatherings drew. See Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon, 1996); Mark Thompson, "This Gay Tribe: A Brief History of Faeries," in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, ed. Thompson (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), 260 - 78; and Randy Conner, Blossom of Bone: Reclaiming the Connections between Homoeroticism and the Sacred (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
2. Insider ethnographic accounts of radical faerie culture appear in Peter Hennen, "Fae Spirits and Gender Trouble: Resistance and Compliance among the Radical Faeries," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33 (2004): 499 - 533; Keri Pickett, Faeries: Visions, Voices, and Pretty Dresses (New York: Aperture, 2000); John A. Stover III, "When Pan Met Wendy: Gendered Membership Debates among the Radical Faeries," Nova Religio 11 (2008): 31-55. Elizabeth Povinelli is the only ethnographer to have noted how colonial histories articulate radical faerie formations, while my forthcoming book uniquely examines how such histories condition the nonnative subjects of settler society and, on occasion, Native American gay men who participate (Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006], 95 - 137; Scott Morgensen, Welcome Home: Settler Sexuality and the Politics of Indigeneity [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming]).
3. This study specifically historicizes the radical faeries' U.S. formation, which by the mid-1990s included five sanctuaries managed by urban or rural collectives, at least five regional networks sponsoring gatherings at rented retreats, and small year-round collectives in town and cities across the United States, in addition to one collective in Toronto with a sanctuary in rural Ontario. My book also asks how radical faerie culture origins persist or were altered when, after two decades, gatherings and sanctuaries formed in western Europe, Australia, and Thailand. I argue that any account of these contexts must ask first how they translate the radical faeries' original U.S. formation, which addresses nonnative subjects seeking belonging on indigenous land - a historical baseline presented briefly in this article.
4. Harry Hay, "A Call to Gay Brothers," RFD, Summer 1979, 1; Thompson, "This Gay Tribe." Radical faerie demography is relevant to my analysis, although it defies quantitative accounting: no central database records historical demographics, and while the Holy Faerie Database recorded early West Coast gatherers, no list collected self-identification by race or nationality. Yet my qualitative account of demography highlights that radical faeries originated in and fully intersect the urban sexual minority communities that produced them by assuring that a rural, natural, or indigenous sexual nature exists and is sustained in their practices. Radical faerie culture thus meaningfully informs sexual identity for many more than just those identified as radical faeries, as I state in this study and elaborate in other writing: see Scott Morgensen, "Back and Forth to the Land: Negotiating Rural and Urban Sexuality among the Radical Faeries," in Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World, ed. Ellen Lewin and William Leap (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers: A Politics of Primitivity," Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2005): 251 - 89.
5. I call "berdache" a colonial object to reflect agreement among Native American Two-Spirit activists and anthropologists that the term does not describe indigenous cultures. My usage is akin to that of Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, who write the term as " 'berdache' [sic]" to mark its coloniality. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, introduction to Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, ed. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 21.
6. Keith Hennessy, "Fey Enough?" Anything That Moves, no. 16 (1998): 21; Stover, "When Pan Met Wendy."
7. A rural gay collective at Short Mountain formed in the 1970s and became a hub for gatherings after radical faerie culture caught residents' interests. During my research the Wolf Creek collective included three to six persons, while Short Mountain's numbered from ten to twenty. Each maintained the land for an extended community that met regularly: gatherings at Short Mountain in May and October corresponded to the pagan festivals Beltane and Samhein, while in 1995 Nomenus renewed a tradition of midsummer "spiritual gatherings" at Wolf Creek.
8. Povinelli, Empire of Love, 109.
9. As Povinelli argues, " 'radical faerie' can be a longstanding, deeply presupposed resource of the self . . . or it can be a momentary allegiance that is taken up, cast aside, or invaginated with other available social forms" (Empire of Love, 108). I pursue the implications of this claim in my multiple articles on radical faeries. While this essay considers how rural spaces produce collective sensibilities, my other writing on the continuity and contrast of rural and urban practices foregrounds the variability and porousness of radical faerie identities and cultures. Morgensen, "Back and Forth to the Land"; Morgensen, "Rooting for Queers."
10. Anne-Marie Bouthillette, Yolanda Retter, Gordon Ingram, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay, 1997); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
11. Allan Bérubé, "The History of Gay Bathhouses," in Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism, ed. Dangerous Bedfellows (Boston: South End, 1996), 187 - 220; Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Weston, Families We Choose.
12. Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
13. Henry Abelove, "New York City Gay Liberation and the Queer Commuters," in Deep Gossip (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 70 - 88; John D'Emilio, foreword to Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (London: Polity, 2003).
14. See the interview with Milo Pyne in James Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruits, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 142 - 48.
15. Scott Herring, "Out of the Closets, into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-Urbanism," American Quarterly 59 (2007): 341 - 72; Cynthia R. Kasee, "Identity, Recovery, and Religious Imperialism: Native American Women and the New Age," Journal of Homosexuality 16 (1995): 85 - 93; Gill Valentine, "Making Space: Lesbian Separatist Communities in the United States," in Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality, ed. Paul Cloke and Jo Little (London: Routledge, 1997), 109 - 22.
16. RFD Collective, "Faggots and Class Struggle," RFD, no. 10 (1976): 14.
17. Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978).
18. Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890 - 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
19. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
20. My analysis of radical faerie rural practices is complemented by writing on their specifically urban formation: see Morgensen, "Back and Forth to the Land" and "Rooting for Queers." Radical faeries resembled less back-to-the-land movements than they did women's music festivals, which drew subjects into brief rural retreat in order to experience radical gendered or sexual community sustained thereafter by new identity or culture (Martha Mockus, "Radical Harmonies," Women and Music Review: A Journal of Gender and Culture 9 [2005]: 111 - 16; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003], 83 - 87). A quality here that deserves closer comparison is that radical faeries meant not to transport a culture from urban life to ideal rural space but to invent a new rural or natural culture, tied to particular sites, as a key context for realizing inner truth. Accounts of rural sexual cultures' relationality to urban formations include Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Marc Stein, "Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography," GLQ 11 (2005): 605 - 25.
21. Conner, Blossom of Bone; Harry Hay, "Toward the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision . . . Subject-Subject Consciousness," RFD, no. 24 (1980): 3; Will Roscoe, "Dreaming the Myth: An Introduction to Mythology for Gay Men," in Same-Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness, ed. Robert H. Hopcke, Karin Lofthus Carrington, and Scott Wirth (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 110 - 24; Bradley Rose, A Radical Fairy's Seedbed: The Collected Series (San Francisco: Nomenus, 1997).
22. David Anderson, "On the Dangers of Faerie Anti-Intellectualism, " FDR: Faerie Dish Rag, February 1996, 1, 6 - 7; Rosette Royale, "As a Matter of FACT . . . Musings on the First 'Fairies of All Colors Together' Gathering," RFD, no. 108 (2001): 29, 47; MaxZine Weinstein, "Romancing the Stone Age," RFD, no. 82 (1995): 32 - 33. Faeries of All Colors Together, the first radical faerie affinity group to support gay men of color and address racism among radical faeries, formed in 2000 at Short Mountain. Weinstein's critique of appropriation is the only such text among contributions to the RFD special issue "Faerie Primitives."
23. Hay, Radically Gay.
24. Thompson, "This Gay Tribe."
25. Donald L. Engstrom, "The Queer God Ritual: An Introduction to the Queer One," Changing Men, no. 23 (1991): 26 - 28.
26. Hay, "Toward the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision"; The Circle of Loving Companions, "The Gays - Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? What Are We For?" RFD, no. 5 (1975): 38 - 39.
27. Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
28. Bérubé, "History of Gay Bathhouses"; David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Gayle Rubin, "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 1981 - 1996," in Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS, ed. Martin Levine, Peter Nardi, John Gagnon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 101 - 44.
29. Brian Bouldrey, ed., Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995); Philip Kayal, Bearing Witness: Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Politics of AIDS (Boulder: Westview, 1993); Nancy Stoller, Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1997).
30. Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad; Irene S. Vernon, Killing Us Quietly: Native Americans and HIV/AIDS (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
31. Anonymous, personal communication.
32. For historical references on this period in the history of Nomenus, see William Gersten, "Trouble in Paradise / How Did We Get There from Here?" Raddish 5, no. 5 (1996): 7 - 9; Jason Serinus, "What's Happening at Wolf Creek," Nomenews, no. 10 (1995): 1 - 4, 18 - 19.