Photos by Mark Souder
b y Ja y B row n
Late last month, 85 fairies gathered for a
weekend of communion and play at the
beautiful community of Breitenbush Hot
Springs. The gathering was the third held in
Oregon and one of many held each year in
different parts of the United States and
Europe.
The first fairy gathering was held in Arizona
in 1979; the gathering was called by a group
of gay activists which included Harry Hay,
founder of the first Mattachine Society and
One, Inc. Harry Hay has been in the forefront
of the radical fairy movement for many years.
Harry and his partner, John Burnside, were
at Breitenbush last month; they were kept
busy with their “talk-shops” in which they
related the history of the radical fairy move
ment and how the movement can revolution
ize the hetero-male dominated world we
inhabit
The following is excerpted from a position
paper written by Harry Hay in 1979 in which
he outline s his revolutionary concept of a
Fairy Vision.
Towards the new frontiers o f F airy Vision
b y H arry H ay
This last summer (1979) a wonderful Gay
Brother, Don Kilhefner, together with John
Burnside, Mitch Walker, and I, evoked a
SPIRITUAL C ONFERENCE FOR RADICAL
FAIRIES to be held in the Arizona Desert At
the opening of that Gathering, we called
upon Gay Brothers to tear off the ugly green
frog-skin of Hetero-male imitation — in
which we had wrapped ourselves in order to
get through school with a full set of teeth — to
reveal the beautiful Fairy Prince hidden
beneath.
Perhaps, before I go any further, I should
explain what I mean by Fairy Spirituality. To
me the term "spiritual” represents the
accumulation of all experiential conscious
Ju st O ut, March 16-March 30
ness from the division of the first cells in the
primeval slime, down through all biological
political social evolution to your and to my
latest insights through Gay Consciousness
just a moment ago. What else can we call this
overwhelmingly magnificent inheritance,
other than spiritual?
The pathways we explored, during our De
sert Retreat, to transform ourselves from
Hetero-imitating Gays into Radical Fairies
were many. Because the old ways of Fairy
transformation were obliterated during the
nightmarish centuries of Judeao-Christian
oppression, we felt ourselves free to invent
new ones. So — to begin with —
• we reached out to re-unite ourselves with
the cornered, frightened, rejected little
Sissy-kids we all once were;
• we reached out to recapture, and restore in
full honors, that magic of “being a different
species perceiving a different reality" (so
beautifully projected almost a century ago
by J M Barrie’s Peter Pan) which may have
encapsulated our boyhoods and adoles
cences;
• we told that different boy that he was
remembered, loved, and deeply respected;
• we told him we now recognized that he, in
true paradox, had always been the real
source of our Dream, of our strength to
resist of our stubborn endurance, a
strength, again in true paradox, that few
Hetero Males can even begin to approach
let alone m atch:
• we told that beloved little Sissy that we had
experienced a full paradigm shift and that
he could now come home at last to be
himself in full appreciation.
Carl Jung, in this report proved to be abso
lutely right When the Fairies reached out to
make re-union with that long-ago-cast-out
shadow-self so long suppressed and denied,
the explosive energies released by the jubila
tions of those re-unions were ecstatic beyond
belief. When we caught up that lonely little
sissy-boy in an ecstatic hug of re-uniting, we
were recapturing also the suddenly-remem
bered sense of awe and wonder of the
Marvelous Mother Nature who in those years
so powerfully surrounded him, we were —
yes — even recapturing the glowing inno
cence of that Sissy-boy's Dream. And in that
Dream, the glowing non-verbal dream of
young Gayhood, may lie the key to the
enormous and particular contribution that
Gay People may have to make to our beloved
Humankind; a key known as subject-
SCIBJECT Consciousness.
How to infect other Fairies with the same
excitement we bubbled with in the Desert,
and have soared and circled with ever since?
One way would be to share the steps by
which w e made the breakthroughs to the
riveting perceptions hereinafter to be known
as subject-SUBJECT Conciousness. And
then, beyond that, to share some of the
gleaming insights these new dimensions to
the Gay Vision lend to problems that hereto
fore have locked us in.
The world we inherit the total Hetero-Male-
oriented-and-dominated world of Tradition
and of daily environment, the SUMMUM
BO NUM of our history, our philosophy, our
psychology, our culture, our very languages
of communication, a ll are totally subject-
O B JEC T in concept in definition, in evolv
ing, in self-serving orientation. Men and
Women are sexually, emotionally, and spiritu
ally objects to one another. Under the “Fair
Play without-which-there-ain’t-no-game”
rulec of the Hetero-male aggressive territo
riality, even the Hetero-Males, precisely be
cause they conceive of themselves as in life
long competition each with the others, en
gage themselves endlessly in tug-of-war
games of Domination and Submission. The
most lofty system of governance the Hetero-
Male has devised — Democracy — must be
seen as a domination of Minorities by a Ma
jority, a tyranny of the Majority if you will,
Domination-submission, subject-OBJECT
Fair play, the Golden Rule, Equality, Political
Persuasion, give-and-take, all of these are
conditions of subject-OBJECT thinking. In
each of these cases, a given person is the
O BJECT of another person's perceptions, to
be influenced, persuaded, cajoled, jaw
boned, manipulated and therefore, in the last
analysis, controlled. In the parliaments of
government, the game of administration is to
persuade Minorities to make of themselves
objects o f approval instead of objects of
Disapproval, but OBJECTS regardless.
Subject-SUBJECT is a multi dimensional
consciousness which may never be readily
conveyable in the Hetero-male-evolved two-
dimensional, or Binary, language to which we
are presently confined in terms of comm uni
cation. And we need more than mere words
and phrases. We need what Scientists invent
out of the whole cloth when they attempt to
describe and communicate new concepts:
we need working models, a whole new math
ematics perhaps, a new poetry - allegories -
metaphors - a music - a new way of dancing.
We m ust re-exam ine every system o f
th o u g h t heretofore developed, every Hetero
male-evolved subject-OBJECT philosophy,
science, religion, mythology, political system,
language, divesting them every one of their
binary subject-OBJECT base and re-inserting
a subject-SUBJECT relation. Confronted
with the loving-sharing Consensus of
subject-SUBJECT relationships a ll A u th o ri
ta ria n ism m ust vanish. The Fairy Family
Circle, co-joined in the shared vision of LOVE
(which is the granting to any other, and all
others, that total space wherein each may
grow and soar to his own freely-selected full
potential, reaching out to one another
subject-to-SUBJECT.