We have been kind of obsessed with The Radical Faeries ever since we learned of them on our pilgrimage to San Francisco some years back. Rejecting hetero-normative traditions and invoking pagan tendencies, the Faeries have networks around the world and helped establish the infamous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
In the second of our exclusive Peach Pulp series looking at the LGBT community in Atlanta, Jared Dawson pens an open letter of love to the city’s Radical Faeries, as they sit for photographer Aubrey Longley-Cook.
How does one write a love letter to the Radical Faeries? A movement, begun in the late 70s as a counterpoint to hetero imitation, acculturation, and assimilation, the Rad Fae seek to issue a challenge to the developing LGBT culture by standing against the commercialization and patriarchal structures that bleed over from society at large, while celebrating and adopting pagan rituals and practices. The first “Spiritual Practice for Radical Faeries” was held in 1979 and a multitude of Faerie Circles have formed around the globe.
So often, fae are seen as merely extensions of a singular hive mind, the same way we would perceive a fanatic religious group. What I have found to love so deeply is that within them, the entire expanse is reproduced in the small. Conviction and commitment among the faemily ranges from warrior of transcendence to ladies social club. It is this permission for room, this space for self definition and engagement that I find so charming. Fiercely community-based and anti-establishment/anarchic, Rad Fae are protective of the physical sacred spaces they have sanctified on this earth. Information and invitation is more often than not a word-of-mouth, eye-to-eye, one-hand-resting-gently-on-your-shoulder matter. In respect of this cultivation of space, allow me to speak to each subject individually.
Dear Mango,
One of the gifts we can provide others that seems so easily overlooked is the provision of physical space. For people and groups to gather, there’s gotta be a “somewhere” for it to happen. And if it’s in Atlanta, it’s usually either HRo’s house or yours and Erik’s. You are linked to so many memories and senses of space. The last time I came over, all the lady goats had dry cum encrusted in their hindquarters cause they’re busy getting preggers. I spent Christmas at y’all’s hosue with fae babes instead of going home. The last time I talked to my parents in over a year was that same Christmas, sitting on a table under a porch umbrella while it poured. There’s always a potluck. There’s always a porch light on. You raise animals, and garden, and do construction improvement things to your house – what I mean to say by this is that you engage this physical world in a way that I’m not particularly adept at and I am so thankful for that.
Dear Shyne Alive,
Every time I say your name, I roll my eyes. And then smile and feel my heart swell because it takes a special soul to believe in a world full of such hope, light, and possibility, that a name like Shyne Alive is fitting. You followed me home from a Shibori-dying workshop this past fall gathering at Mx. Mountain and now I find you spilled in the morning’s light on my bed most days. You are a tangible presence of potential, an amalgam of the creative forces that offset entropy’s decay. Halloween night you wandered into Atlanta after riding a bus for hours and I, dressed as Return-of-the-Jedi-just-killed-Jabba-Princess-Leia, told you that I loved you in the first fifteen minutes and there are not words to describe or denote the light that you have brought to my life since then because language is a faulty mechanism at best, so I’ll show you later. *purple leering devil-face emoji*
Dear HRo,
When I think of you, I think of the first card of the Major Arcana, The Magician. Seen as an agent bridging the material and ethereal planes, they bring wish and thought into physical articulation upon this Earth. Actually, that isn’t completely correct – it misses a key element to your je ne sais quois. My post-bartending ritual recently has been to smoke a bowl while watching The Animaniacs (streaming now on Netflix). I have been struck by what agents of chaotic creation Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are – spinning the arc of a narrative from a non sequitur, stream of consciousness, series of gags and pratfalls. If The Magician and the Animaniacs gave birth to offspring – it would have to be you. A blending of the zany and the zen, the sacred and the profane, you cross spaces and link, connect, bind, weave – and always with a particularly precious measure of levity. Your gravitas has the giggles but it’s always got me like, “notice me, senpai!”
Dear Cody,
Look at you. Laying there, legs akimbo with the strap of a onesie running from the plumb of your ass to the cup of your jock. I knew you first as my yoga student. You could never keep still – fingers fidgeting, toes wiggling. Some people just run at a higher frequency, you know? You cut my hair in your living room. The smell of your house is one of my favorite things on this earth. Each time you take my head in your hands, I flash back to this memory: I have eaten all the mushrooms in the land and am making the short hike in the soft rain back to where we are camped. The two boys I have come with are lagging behind and you have joined our coterie. We make it back to the tent and you sit cross legged inside the flap and I lay down with my head in your lap. The two boys are dancing around and wilding out and you are running your fingers through my hair. There is so much green pouring down from the canopy of branches above us. When you touch my head, I can hear that soft rain sliding through leaves.
Dear Tastee,
You are always a face, a body, a hello, a warm smile, a figure occupying a different space on the same dance floor. So often we praise the emotionally extreme articulations of love and forget that love runs in many currents. I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s “The Four Loves” where he states, “But affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time.” I am made all the more fortunate that a sweet soul like yours is a continuing element of my environment.
Dear Orion,
Of this assembled small sampling of Atlanta’s fae folx, I have the longest history with you and I’m going to be entirely honest. I remember a conversation in a friend’s kitchen some handful of years ago. The moon was full that night. I was wearing my favorite red shirt. And multiple people had recently been getting me confused for this other bearded blonde dude. You. The slant rhyme of a doppelgänger. In some small dark corner of my heart, I named you nemesis. You were always a benchmark to beat and I found myself particularly critical of your workings. You were (and are) a shaman sister, a wizard brother, a co-warlock, concerned with the task of healing the spaces and communities around you. For some four years now, you have served as an intense space of healing, drawing aspects of my shadow to the surface and forcing me to notice them, feel them, address them. And through this all, you have done your thing and pursued your path and more than that, have consistently considered me and continued to invite my presence in. I have felt that small dark corner of my heart loosen and melt away in the presence of your actions and behavior. I am uncertain whether you are blithely unaware or concretely conscious of this practice occurring in your presence – but I am ever thankful and have nothing but love for it.
Dear Sissee,
The last time we talked one-on-one, you wanted to discuss Quantum Physics – and though my depth of relevant knowledge was but a toe touch testing the temperature of that pool, I was happy to take that plunge. I feel that you are often that insistence to me, that tug, that yearn, that effortless urge of “what is it like just a little deeper?” You are that peering around the corner, that lifting of the rug, hunting for just a bit more information; just a slightly deeper engagement that you might press against the true marrow of a thing. Every time I hug you, I am reminded in the first moment, “oh, wait, she hugs for real,” and feel myself lean in and surrender.
These earth angels are but the iceberg’s tip. The ones that happened to be free at the last minute on a Monday evening in March. There is a clever peer-reviewed article that I am unable to find at the moment to quote as source material, but we’ll just wing it here; that one of the gravest threats of homosexuality against society/structure at large is that it permits men the space to engage in open, honest, nurturing friendship with each other as opposed to what bullshit toxic fragile masculinity dictates. Fae space, to me at least, seems to take this concept, this creation of space and consideration and sharing and expand upon it. The final product isn’t always perfect and completely inclusive but there is a growing, a shifting, a changing, an evolution that began in 1979 and carries on today through so many hearts and lights.
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