Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. 

I arrived in San Francisco as a young queer man from the East Coast, carrying the habits and horizons of a world in which spirituality had been defined by Christian liturgies and secular intellectual life, with little awareness that entirely different religious landscapes even existed. I lived two blocks from Ashbury Street in the Haight, stepping into a cultural atmosphere unlike anything I had known. The neighborhood was still resonating with the aftershocks of the 1960s counterculture, yet what struck me most was the way spirituality infused everyday life—witchcraft flyers posted alongside band announcements, bookshops stocked with titles on shamanism, goddess worship, and earth-centered magic, conversations in cafés in which tarot readings and spirit animals were discussed with the same casual seriousness as politics. I had never encountered Paganism, Wicca, or shamanic practice before; in the Haight, they seemed to be in the very air. My own education in these worlds began not in a classroom but in the overlapping social circles of queer radicals, eco-activists, and mystical iconoclasts.

It was in this context that a friend pressed into my hands a weathered copy of Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Evans, himself a Haight resident and Gay Liberation activist, argued that queer people were not accidental outcasts in history, but inheritors of ancient, sacred roles—shamans, healers, witches—who lived in intimate relation with the land and were often persecuted precisely because they embodied non-normative sexuality and gender alongside animistic and magical worldviews. The book was more than a history; it was a revelation, mapping a lineage between my own desires and an older, earth-rooted spirituality that had been violently repressed. It was my first sustained encounter with what would later be called “the gay spirit”—the sense that queer identity is not only a social fact but also a spiritual vocation, a mode of being in which erotic life, creative imagination, and ecological awareness are mutually entangled.

Proto-Faerie Consciousness

Long before the term “Radical Faerie” was coined, a thread of what might be called “homosexual transcendentalism” ran through the work of figures like Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass offers more than democratic idealism; woven through its sprawling lines are eroticized depictions of male beauty, camaraderie, and a mystical unity between body, soul, and nature. A close reading of poems like “Calamus” reveals what I now see as proto-faerie consciousness—celebrations of same-sex love as part of the cosmic order, affirmations of a sexuality that sanctifies rather than sullies. Carpenter, in works like The Intermediate Sex and Pagan and Christian Creeds, advanced a vision in which same-sex love was not only natural but spiritually generative, linking it to ancient pagan cultures and their reverence for the earth. Both men articulated a sensibility that the Radical Faeries would later inherit: an integration of erotic love, poetic imagination, and nature mysticism that challenged both Victorian repression and modern heteronormativity.[^1]

Origins in the Desert: The First Gathering

The Radical Faerie movement emerged at precisely this intersection of sexual liberation and ecological spirituality. In September 1979, Harry Hay—veteran of the Mattachine Society and architect of early gay liberation—joined with Don Kilhefner, Mitch Walker, and John Burnside to convene the first Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Two hundred men gathered on ashram grounds for several days of unprogrammed yet intensely charged encounter: circles in which dreams, visions, and politics intertwined; rituals in which bodies painted in ochre and ash danced under the desert stars; conversations that moved easily from Marxism to Jungian archetypes to desert botany.

The setting was no accident. To call this a “spiritual conference” was already to suggest that something larger than politics was at stake, and to hold it in the wild desert made clear that the land itself would be an active participant in whatever was to unfold. The Radical Faeries, from their birth, were engaged in what might be called a queer reclamation of the sacred landscape.

Harry Hay’s role in the Faeries was both catalytic and deeply ideological. Known for co-founding the Mattachine Society in 1950, Hay brought to the Faerie vision his theory of “Subject–SUBJECT consciousness,” an ethic of mutual recognition he believed was inherent in gay relationships. For Hay, this consciousness stood in stark opposition to the “subject–object” relations of patriarchal, capitalist culture. He saw queer people as a distinct cultural minority with a historic mission: to model egalitarian, non-exploitative forms of relating, both with one another and with the natural world. Hay’s Marxist training infused the Faerie project with a critique of economic exploitation, while his spiritual sensibilities—shaped by Native American traditions, ceremonial magic, and Theosophy—ensured that the Faeries would be more than a political caucus. They would be a spiritual experiment in living differently.[^2]

Rural Sanctuaries and Gay Utopian Thinking

In the decades that followed, the Radical Faeries developed not as a centralized organization but as a loose, translocal network of gatherings and intentional communities, many of them rural sanctuaries. Short Mountain in Tennessee, Wolf Creek in Oregon, and Folleterre in rural France became places where the Faerie ethos was not simply enacted during festivals but lived year-round. These sanctuaries reflected a gay rural utopian thinking—the conviction that queer liberation requires not only legal rights or urban enclaves but the cultivation of sustainable, earth-centered communities in which relationships with land, seasons, and nonhuman life are as central as relationships among people.

In a culture where urban gay life often revolved around bars, commerce, and assimilation into heteronormative frameworks, the Faeries’ move to rural sanctuaries represented a deliberate reorientation toward the wild, the communal, and the sacred. These spaces became laboratories for experimenting with alternative ways of living that honored both queer identity and ecological interconnection, creating what might be understood as a distinctly queer form of bioregionalism.

Cosmology and Ritual Practice

Central to the Faerie worldview is the conviction that the Earth is not a backdrop to human drama but a living, sentient presence, often personified as the Goddess. This cosmology, deeply resonant with strands of paganism and ecofeminism, situates human sexuality within the generative cycles of nature. Ritual life reflects this: gatherings are often timed to solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days; ceremonies are conducted outdoors, in meadows or groves; offerings are made to rivers, stones, and winds. The Faerie circle itself—a democratic, leaderless gathering in which each voice is heard—is both a political form and a sacred one, mirroring the egalitarian relationships they seek with the more-than-human world.

The ritual innovations of the Faeries represent a unique synthesis of theatrical performance, shamanic practice, and political consciousness-raising. Heart circles, where participants share personal stories and vulnerabilities, create sacred space through emotional intimacy. Medicine walks connect the community to the land through contemplative movement. Drag rituals transform participants into archetypal figures—goddesses, spirits, mythical beings—that embody aspects of the collective unconscious while celebrating gender fluidity. These practices demonstrate how ritual can simultaneously serve therapeutic, spiritual, and political functions.

The Theology of Gay Spirit

This “gay spirit,” as articulated by Hay, Evans, and later writers like Mark Thompson, is both an inheritance and a calling. Hay’s concept of “Subject–SUBJECT consciousness” framed gay male relationships as encounters of mutual recognition and empathy, a sharp departure from the subject-object dynamic that underpins much of patriarchal culture. Within the Faerie milieu, this ethic extends beyond the interpersonal to encompass the natural world: the forest, the creek, the wind are addressed as subjects, not objects. Thompson, in works such as Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, captured this ethos as a weaving of mythic imagination, erotic play, and ecological reverence—a spirituality that refuses to separate sexuality from the sacred or to subordinate the more-than-human world to human needs.

This theological framework positions queer identity not as deviation from natural order but as a manifestation of nature’s own diversity and creativity. The Faeries understand their sexuality as sacred energy, connected to the same life force that moves through forests, rivers, and seasonal cycles. Their embrace of gender fluidity reflects what they see as the natural world’s own transcendence of binary categories—the hermaphroditic flowers, the sex-changing fish, the masculine/feminine polarities that dance through ecosystem dynamics.

Personal Encounter with Sacred Integration

In my own encounters with Faerie gatherings, I found this integration both startling and deeply natural. Standing in a wooded clearing at dusk, surrounded by men and others whose genders flowed beyond binary categories, faces painted in spirals and leaves, voices lifted in song to the four directions, I felt that the boundaries I had been taught—between sacred and profane, between human and nature, between sexuality and spirituality—were dissolving. What emerged was not chaos but a deeper order, one in which my body was part of the earth’s body, my desire part of the world’s desire. This was religion in its most elemental sense: a binding back (re-ligare) to the source of life itself.

The experience challenged every assumption I had inherited about the proper relationship between spirituality and sexuality, between individual identity and ecological community. Here was a religious practice that didn’t require the transcendence of bodily desire but its full embodiment as sacred energy. Here was a community that didn’t separate spiritual work from political action but understood them as inseparable dimensions of the same transformative project.

Position Within Nature Religions

The Radical Faeries’ position within the broader landscape of contemporary nature religions is both clear and contested. They share with Wicca and other pagan traditions an animist cosmology, a ritual calendar tied to the earth’s cycles, and an emphasis on immanent divinity. Yet unlike many Wiccan covens or pagan circles, which may adapt existing liturgies to be more inclusive of queer people, the Faeries have from the beginning created their ritual life around queer experience. Their ceremonies are often erotic, theatrical, and improvisational, drawing on camp, drag, and sensual play as integral to the sacred.

In contrast to the hierarchical structures found even in some neopagan traditions, the Faeries operate without clergy or dogma, with authority arising organically in the circle and in relationship to the land. This anarchistic approach to spiritual organization reflects both their countercultural roots and their commitment to challenging all forms of domination—patriarchal, heteronormative, and anthropocentric.

Theological Innovation and Challenge

This refusal of hierarchy and fixed doctrine is not merely an organizational choice; it is a theological one, rooted in the belief that spirit moves through each person and each aspect of the natural world. In Faerie sanctuaries, the forest is not a “resource” but a relative; the creek is not “scenery” but a teacher. This aligns the Faeries with indigenous cosmologies and other animist traditions, even as their bricolage of Marxist critique, Jungian psychology, pagan myth, and queer performance art marks them as distinctly modern and syncretic.

In this way, they challenge conventional definitions of religion, forcing scholars and practitioners alike to grapple with the question of whether erotic play, political protest, and ecological stewardship can together constitute a sacred way of life. Their answer—embodied in decades of community-building, land stewardship, and ritual innovation—suggests that the boundaries between these domains may be artificial constructions that limit rather than enhance spiritual understanding.

Contemporary Relevance and Future Directions

What began in a desert in 1979 has become a global network, with Faerie circles and gatherings held in North America, Europe, Australia, and beyond. Sanctuaries like Folleterre draw visitors from dozens of countries. Younger generations—many fluent in the language of non-binary and trans identities—find in the Faeries a tradition already committed to gender fluidity and non-cisnormative expression. The movement’s playful yet profound exploration of identity, sexuality, and nature resonates strongly with contemporary queer youth, ensuring its renewal and evolution.

The Radical Faeries emerge from and speak to multiple contemporary crises: the ecological devastation wrought by industrial capitalism, the spiritual poverty of secular materialism, the psychological damage inflicted by heteronormative gender systems, and the political marginalization of queer communities. Their response—the creation of sustainable rural communities that honor both erotic diversity and ecological interdependence—offers a model for what religious community might look like in an age of environmental collapse and cultural transformation.

As climate change forces a fundamental reconsideration of humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the Faeries’ integration of ecological and erotic spirituality becomes increasingly relevant. Their understanding of the land as lover rather than commodity, their celebration of gender fluidity as reflection of natural diversity, and their practice of consensus decision-making as sacred technology all contribute to an emerging paradigm that could help guide humanity through the challenges ahead.

Conclusion: Accuracy and Inclusion

For me, the answer to whether the Faeries constitute a nature religion is unequivocally yes. The Radical Faeries embody a nature religion in the fullest sense: they are grounded in the land, oriented to the cycles of the earth, animated by a theology of immanence, and sustained through communal ritual. But they also expand the category, insisting that any religion of nature that ignores or suppresses queer experience is incomplete. Their sanctuaries are living laboratories in which new forms of relationship—to each other, to the land, to the divine—are being invented and enacted. They are keepers of a queer ecological wisdom that draws on buried histories, honors the erotic body, and treats the earth not as symbol but as sacred presence.

Inclusion of the Radical Faeries in any account of New American Religions of Nature is not an act of generosity but of accuracy. To omit them would be to perpetuate the very erasure of queer spiritual history that Evans, Hay, and Thompson labored to undo. Their rural sanctuaries, seasonal gatherings, and theology of the gay spirit place them firmly within the lineage of nature religions, while their integration of sexuality, gender fluidity, and ecological reverence offers a vision of what such religions can become when freed from the constraints of heteronormativity and anthropocentrism. In their circles, the earth is not simply the stage for human drama; it is the drama, and we—queer, fierce, fragile, and luminous—are part of its ongoing sacred play.

The Radical Faeries thus represent not merely another entry in the catalog of American nature religions, but a prophetic voice calling all such traditions toward greater inclusivity, embodiment, and ecological commitment. Their gift to the broader religious landscape lies not only in their particular innovations but in their demonstration that sexuality and spirituality, when integrated rather than segregated, can generate forms of sacred community capable of healing both human hearts and damaged lands. In an age when both queer liberation and ecological restoration are urgent necessities, the Faeries offer a path that honors both, suggesting that the salvation of the planet and the liberation of desire may be, in the deepest sense, the same sacred work.

Further Reading

• Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

• Mark Thompson, Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning

• Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder

• Will Roscoe, Radical Faeries: Queer Spirituality and the Meaning of Community

• Peter Hennen, Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (“Calamus” poems)

• Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex

For More Information

• Radical Faeries Worldwide Network

• Short Mountain Sanctuary

• Nomenus/Wolf Creek Sanctuary

• Folleterre Radical Faerie Sanctuary