Sunday 28 November 2010

Faerie Sanctuary- A Poem for Fauny for Vision Circle





This place is my heaven
This place is my dream!

A gathering place for kindred spirits from high and low, from near and far.
A place where stimulating, interesting, fascinating, challenging relationships are safely cultivated…
The fruits to be harvested as a gift to the planet!

A place to relax and relate to each other’s deity within
To affirm each other’s inner beautiful uniqueness.
A place of joyful festivity and carnival!

An escape from the divisions created by inequalities of power and wealth.
Away from orientation and identity constrictions.
A place where children are welcomed to experience a world of trust between queer adult and child

A Wild Faerieworld where the adult inner child is free and full of play.
A chance to consolidate a sense of who we are and our purpose in life.
A place to experience deep family ties
Blood is thicker than water but Spirit is thicker than both!

A place instilling strength and bravery to become who we truly are from moment to moment.
A place where the exquisite sacredness of touch is experienced and explored without fear of censure.

This place is my heaven
This place is my dream!

Where the specialness we feel which is central to our lives is ‘quite normal’.
Where our stimulating, challenging energy is revolutionary, evolutionary and ‘perfectly natural’.
Where our magick is an exciting expression of our uniqueness.

Where we are privileged adventurers having fun by simply us being us!
Feeling fresh and clean in an oasis of Faerie Wisdom
Balancing the needs of our minds, bodies and souls.
Healing ourselves!
Our emotional sacredness a sacrament to heal the world.

This place is my heaven
This place is my dream!

Where we will stop feeling awkward about being noticed as different
Where we will feel empowered to push boundaries in ourselves and each other.
Where we will foster and nurture self discovery

Where we will challenge conventional restrictions.
This is a place where there is a frisson of danger
This is a womb of safety
A place for valuing and validating

A Balanced Natural Wise Accepting Space where Fabulousness oozes out of us effortlessly!
A place for Health and Happiness and Joyfulness!
A place to explore the wondrous miracles of our sexualities and identities.

A space to tune into the understandings and ethics of our ancestors.
A space to cultivate inner peace and equanimity.
A temple where Queer Spirit will thrive

Where self understanding
Where seeking, acknowledging, and owning the light and the shade in ourselves
Is about moving away from the mirage of a unity created by agreed divisiveness.

Each of us produces a silken thread of uniqueness
In this place we find the silken thread in our own lives
And together we weave a tapestry.

This is the story of our past
The story of our present
The story of our future.

This place is my heaven
This place is my dream!

Hail and Welcome!
The Spirit of The Faerie

Tuesday 2 November 2010

Ooh-I’ve come over all Queer!


This time last year if someone had asked me how gay I was I’d have probably just said ‘Very Gay’ and not really thought much more about it. Back then I thought Queer was a useful generic term for LGBT folk- a handy passive aggressive reclaiming of an abusive insult.
‘My God you’re soooo Gay!’ can mean so many things. If it’s being said by a 14 year old school boy then you’re being homophobically insulted because, as every schoolchild knows these days, anything described as gay is-well total crap. If you’re Graham Norton it probably means you’re being seen as somehow fabulously camp, witty, superficial and flippant.
If you identify yourself as Queer however then calling someone Gay is a political jibe with the suggestion that the person has sold out or assimilated into straight society.
Back in the days when homosexuals [as gay men then referred to themselves] were fighting for civil rights as a persecuted minority, there was a split between the assimilationists and radicals. The assimilationists argued that the only way to win the same human rights as ‘normal people’ [as most straights then referred to themselves] was by asserting that we were no different from straights other than our sexual preference, and that we could prove this by joining mainstream society, settling down into monogamous relationships, getting a mortgage, acquiring a couple of cats and dreaming of adopting children someday.
The radicals on the other hand -who subsequently became known as the Faeries- took a different view. They maintained that we were not the same as everyone else, that the difference was significant and meant something and that our purpose was to discover and develop this quality of different-ness. The Faeries believed that this was what constituted our usefulness to a mainstream society overburdened with child bearing and capitalistic preoccupation. We had the gift of prizing subject- subject relationships [ie person to person love not tied in with material possessions] that for us existed happily outside of the prevalent subject-object relationships rife amongst our straight brethren. They even went as far as to say that because of our unique ability to look like everyone else whilst being dramatically different inside, we were blessed with a special healing and spiritual power which enabled us to understand two sides of conflicting perspectives making us well placed to excel in roles as therapists, shamen, diplomats and teachers.
The faeries have, over the years battled to hold on to their Queerness and have joined with others forced into the margins by virtue of their sexuality and gender differences. Queer encompasses LGB and T with an anti-assimilationist agenda.
Twelve months ago I was one of those assimilated gay men until I met the Faeries. Three faerie gatherings later I’m a lot clearer about how an unquestioned patriarchal society attempted to batter the feminine aspects of my nature out of me and although failing to process me into a closet case turned me into a straight acting gay man with a good helping of internalized homophobia desperate to be accepted by adopting monogamy and mortgage servitude
Nowadays I’m ready to accept embellish and celebrate my queerness and I can tell you it’s so much more fun than trying to fit in.
So how gay am I? 0%
How queer am I? 100%