The Faeries are both gay men, and men who prefer to use any other moniker that might describe them, as well as women who wish to be a part of the group, and people who choose not to be called men or women and beings who choose not to be called people. Faeries are organized as a group attempting to create community out of ritual and cooperation, except for faeries who are attempting to create community out of subversion of process and structure, as well as some faeries who wish to create chaos, often celebrating it, often not admitting it.
Many faeries are spiritual, lifting whole or part of their spirituality from any one of the world's religions or spiritualities. Some make up their own. Some make a mix. Some react against spirituality and religion as it's own evil, some find a spiritual path in reacting against spirituality.
Some Faeries just want to dress up in drag and perform in the woods, some want to dress up and not perform, some faeries want to dress up anywhere they can, some faeries don't dress particularly different than they would in any other environment.
Some faeries combine their spirituality with sex, some don't, some are part of the faeries just to get laid. Some resent that. some just want to drum by a campfire, and some want to camp far away from the drumming and get some sleep. This is what faeries are, except for faeries for which none of this applies.
-- Constance Craving
From the time I came out of the closet, first to myself and then in short order to others, (I'm not sure if you realize it but you were the first person I came out to, and that was only a day or two after I came out to myself), until late last year, I have been struggling reconcile my identity with the reality of a subculture I really don't identify with at all. In fact, I largely see the gay subculture as just a replication of mainstream culture: gays seem just as eager to buy into mass-marketed definitions of what constitutes success and desirable goals in life as straights do.
So I had basically resigned myself to a life as an outsider among the outsiders. It's not necessarily the most ideal of situations, but it is more honest than pretending to be something I am not. I didn't come out of one closet only to go into another one.
Then, for about the fourth time, someone mentioned the Radical Faeries to me as if it was something that I either knew about or would be interested in. I had run into RFD magazine fairly early in the coming-out process and it had struck me 50/50: I could see a real match with about half of it, but the other half was something that looked totally incompatible with. However, the way my interests kept making other people think of the Faeries eventually piqued my curiosity enough that I had to find out. The worst (and probably most likely) thing that could happen was that I'd find Yet Another Aspect of the Subculture that I Am Not Compatible With (TM). Big deal.
After I was to my second Faerie event, it was clear to me that I had been a Radical Faerie all along and not known it. Turns out my alienation with gay subculture is almost exactly the same alienation and displeasure that prompted Harry Hay and a few others to start the Faeries movement back in the late 1970s. Not exactly the same of course, but very close. Closer that I had thought at first, actually. Some of what I had always pegged as my innate prudishness actually seems to have been a rejection of the competitive, quasi-capitalistic nature of the sexual freedom in the gay world, rather than a rejection of such freedom itself.
One of the magical things I found was that suddenly I was in the company of men, many of whom were both attractive to me and who saw me as attractive in return. The typical pattern for me is for anyone attractive to be either (a) straight, or (b) unaware that I even exist.
That was in November. After a very bizarre and screwed-up holiday season (I won't bore you with the ugly details), I get back in contact with the Faeries and learn about an upcoming gathering at Breitenbush Hot Springs (in the Cascades east of Salem, OR). I registered for it.
To cut a long story short, I had an absolutely fabulous time that exceed all possible expectations and probably ensures that I now have a yardstick by which to measure any future gathering and make it fall short.
Within a few hours of arriving, I was in the library at the lodge sitting on a couch and waiting for dinner to be served. Faeries were still arriving and the library was gradually filling up. An absolutely gorgeous hippie walked in and sat on the armrest of a couch halfway across the room. It was not hard for me to get his attention, the attraction was mutual, and he was single. Wow. I'm not a hopeless case after all. I'm not going to elaborate more because I'm it will sound like gloating and I'm afraid of jinxing things.
However, Murphy is never completely off duty. He lives in Santa Cruz and I live in Seattle. We're not exactly next-door neighbors to say the least. Thankfully, he does a lot of contract work (and has some leads on things in Seattle), and I was already in the process of disentangling myself from the commitments of full-time work (and SC is only 30 miles or so from Silicon Valley, where there are a lot of opportunities for me do do computer-related contract work).
Tom Kwai Lam, Radical Faerie. Guess who's the "absolutely gorgeous hippie" that stole my heart at Breitenbush?