Who and To What End
Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness
William Stewart
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BACK IN 2010, my old friend Mark Thompson invited me to write a piece for an anthology about the radical faeries that he was starting to compile along with a sometime collaborator, in hopes of filling a gap in the literature about a phenomenon which he considered to be as signficant as anything he’d witnessed during his thirty-five year career of observing and documenting gay culture in America. That impetus resulted in the book that eventually came out under Mark’s sole editorship, titled The Fire in Moonlight: A Radical Faerie Reader, and I was honored to have my essay included in it.
Mark initially asked me to write about Harry Hay, who as much as anyone had galvanized the modern radical faerie movement into being in the late 1970s, after decades of theorizing and activism. But despite the importance of Harry’s legacy, I realized that I didn’t want it to be my primary topic, and instead decided to pursue a conceptual thrust of my own, using Harry’s work only as a starting-point for my more personal message. I called the resulting essay “Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness,” and I still think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever written, though in retrospect I see significant weak spots in it that I hope to remedy here.
Broadly speaking, my piece addresses the question of whether there’s a special role for queer people in the context of systemic global collapse. Surely, the rationale for such an examination is at least as great as it was when I first wrote: our horrific planetary trajectory has only gathered speed since then, and as for why the situation deserves to be viewed through a queer lens, all I can say is, it’s of vital concern to me personally, since my involvement with queer culture is second only to my existential dread about environmental and societal catastrophe in terms of issues that claim pride of place in my list of energetic priorities.
In considering how to rework my material, I’ve pin-pointed two areas of concern that seem particularly problematic. The first of these relates to the topic of gender, which has been intertwined with questions of radical faerie identity since the term first surfaced, and indeed since long before that. In the original version of this piece, I introduced my subject by referring to “the people Harry Hay variously called third-gender folk, non-assimilationist gays, two-spirits, and Radical Faeries.” This was a bit of artful dodging on my part, devised in order to sidestep a problem that I didn’t want to deal with at the time, and therefore need to revisit now. If I’m to use an editorial “we” to express a viewpoint that I think should be widely shared, I need to be clear in my own mind about who I’m talking to, and on behalf of—in other words, like the queer of Khartoum in the limerick who had a lesbian up to his room, I want to shed light, if not literally argue all night, about who has the right “to do what, and with which, and to whom.”
When I first encountered the radical faerie swirl that was emerging in San Francisco in the late 1970’s, there were many unknowns, but one thing, at least, was clear: whatever else we may or may not have been, we were a subset of the category “gay men.” We were conditioned by a profoundly binary world-view, in which humans were either male or female; and while we were determined to investigate what kind of men we were, and while certainly there were moments when we saw the whole construct as simplistic, we nevertheless unquestioningly accepted the notion that ours was a quest by, for, and about men. We eagerly looked to the women’s movement for inspiration, the discourse of radical feminism provoked and inspired us, and lesbian separatists got us to thinking about how we, too, might want to form our own autonomous communities—but always, the “we” of our conversation was a bunch of theoretically progressive-minded and spiritually-oriented gay men, who were, not coincidentally, almost exclusively white, largely middle-class, and typically shaped by an educational system which, however much we may have rebelled against it, nevertheless validated a broadly shared world-view. In ways that were genuinely powerful, but also more narrowly self-referential than we realized, when we sat in circle and looked around the room, we saw…ourselves.
In the early 1980’s, I was part of a faerie-identified group that started meeting with the dream of establishing a residential community in rural northern California, and ended up taking collective ownership of the Wolf Creek Sanctuary—a property in southern Oregon that had been in use for gatherings and informal tenancy for over a decade through the generosity of its owner, who was eager to have the land legally entrusted to community hands in perpetuity. We named ourselves Nomenus, amused by the trope of “no men us” as an imagined answer to the question “who are you?” —but in truth, the assumption was always that Wolf Creek would be owned and governed by self-identifying faerie men, as delineated in our non-profit articles of incorporation.
As it happened, I began pulling away from radical faerie culture soon after the acquisition of the Wolf Creek property, troubled by the dysfunction that I saw there, wanting to honor my commitment to provide emotional support to people with AIDS through the Shanti Project, and generally feeling drawn to other priorities. As a result, I missed the turmoil of succeeding years, when more and more people not falling in the category of “gay male” learned of the faerie phenomenon and declared that they, too, were radical faeries and were entitled to be part of the burgeoning tribe. Some long-standing community members were resistant, but the newcomers pointed out that no less an authority than Harry Hay himself had insisted that the essence of “our” identity lay in the kinds of social roles we were called to fulfill, and not in a narrow biological determinism per se. Having felt powerfully drawn to the faerie ethos, these women—a mere handful at first, but in larger numbers as the years went by—became an increasingly widespread presence in the rad-fae culture, in many ways bringing new life to pools that had suffered severe attrition from the predations of AIDS, homophobia, and all the other insidious forces at work during the Reagan-Bush era.
Consequently when I reconnected with the radical faeries in 2009 after a twenty-odd-year leave of absence, I found a community that looked very different from the one I’d left behind. Male-identified, female-identified, transsexual, non-binary, trans-gender, cis-gender, gender-non-conforming, and in-betweens of all kinds were represented in faerie circles—not in equal proportion, to be sure, and not without a certain amount of bias and tension, but the admixture was evident. Here was proof that, in principle at least, neither sexual identity nor sexual preference was determinative of whether you were or were not a radical faerie.
This demographic shift reflected a turn of events that I wouldn’t have predicted. When we “non-conforming,” “counter-culture” gay men started coming together for collective consciousness-raising in the late 1970s, we never imagined becoming role models for anyone else: on the contrary, we (or at least I) visualized the road ahead as being one of emulation, whereby we would do our best to follow in the footsteps of our lesbian-feminist sisters, whose critiques of the dominant culture were so much more cogent than our own tentative explorations. Why would anyone want to tag along with us, a bunch of faggots just beginning to figure things out, easily distracted by silliness and desire, when other liberation movements offered such high seriousness of purpose?—at least, that was the thrust of my wondering, before my path diverged from that of the faeries and led me towards other interests and priorities. It never occurred to me that what I’d seen as our frivolity, our propensity to care more about fabulous outfits than political correctness, might hold active appeal for folks wearied by years of humorless leftist discourse. But such, in fact, was the case: many of the newcomers I met after returning to the tribe affirmed it, and I saw for myself how playfulness and high intention could, in fact, be complementary and not automatically antithetical as I had previously tended to assume.
Most of these newcomers were women, and it was a joy to find myself in community with them. For my entire life, the most durable and nurturing relationships I’ve experienced have been with women, and the presence of women in faerie circles seemed self-evidently appropriate the moment I encountered it. But then, the possibility that had drawn me to the radical faeries in the first place had been that of finding with other gay men the kind of intimacy that I already knew with my female friends: the impulse was toward expansion, not exclusion. I saw, and still see, the value of separatist space for certain kinds of consciousness work; but the idea of a community defined by maleness had never appealed to me, and when I reconnected with the tribe of the new millennium, I unhesitatingly joined with the “inclusionists” in being ready to welcome everyone who felt called to participate, regardless of genital equipment or predilection.
This impulse also led me to adopt without reservation the designation “queer.” Queerness, in my perspective, is a way of viewing and moving through the world: it entails the rejection of heteronormativity (also the parallel phenomenon, homonormativity), and instead embraces a multidimensional paradigm that doesn’t privilege any one set of “lifestyle choices” (ugh) over another. In other words, it’s not about what you’ve got or what you do with it; it’s about how you live, what you believe in, and how much you’re willing to commit in order to bring it one step closer to reality.
With regard to this perspective, it seems to me that Harry Hay wanted it both ways: yes, I believe he claims, our identity as a specific subset of the general population derives from our cultural roles, and not from what we do in bed and who we do it with—but “we,” nevertheless, are biological males who are attracted to and partner with other biological males, if not exclusively then at least in the overwhelming majority of cases. To put it simplistically, we’re a bunch of gay men who are distinctive not because we’re gay men but because we’re shamans, healers, etc., except that we’re shamans and healers because we’re gay men. Now, I certainly do Harry a disservice with this cartoon portrayal of his views; but I still think that there’s a certain amount of “unclear on the concept” involved, which I’d like to bring into a bit more focus if I can.
In my opinion, the most helpful lens for viewing this conundrum is the concept of statistical correlation. I want to suggest that there’s a frequent overlap between non-standard (minority) gender identity and/or sexual preference, on the one hand, and typical social function, on the other. Not a one-to-one correspondence, and not a statistically meaningless coincidence either—instead, a characteristic falling-together of psycho-social and psycho-sexual tendencies, which can loosely be clustered under the rubric of “queer.”
I like this conceptual framework of big-tent queerdom, partly because it feels comfortable to me, but more importantly, because of the inclusive energy that it fosters. I have no interest in converting people to homosexuality per se, even if the notion were not as preposterous as it is disrespectful; but I emphatically do want to advocate for queerness as I’m construing it, and indeed—to circle back to my larger theme—to make the case that our planetary destiny depends on making the world a more queer-spirited place.
* * *
UP TO THIS POINT, I’ve been trying to identify who, in my opinion, might be called upon to steward humanity through the dark days ahead. Now, for a moment, I want to consider the character of the change that I believe is necessary. Much of my 2010 piece, which follows this introductory section, focuses on this issue; but before I finish here, I want to pivot from the subject of culturally-determined gender to “gender” in the realm of the archetypal, and to introduce into the discourse a concept that I’ll call the deep feminine. It’s a charged term, because it’s based on the premise that there’s a spiritual dimension to reality, and that psychic energies are an active factor in shaping the lives of individuals, communities, and our evolutionary destiny as a whole.
I feel a strong imperative here to assert the felt truth of this premise, in anticipation of a rationalist critique which would claim that there is no material evidence for it. On the contrary, I would argue, the history of the last ten thousand years provides overwhelming evidence that we neglect the life of the spirit at our peril. Far from being mutually contradictory, the two stories—the social and the archetypal—are in fact equally valid: the lived experience of gender prejudice has been hugely damaging in countless individual lives, and at the same time the disappearance of the deep feminine from the collective psyche has caused an incalculable amount of harm on the planetary level, and is arguably at the root of why we, as a species, have gotten it so wrong for the last dozen or so millennia.
Evidence suggests that in paleolithic times, humans generally lived more or less in equilibrium with their environments, with largely stable population numbers and with natural resources exploited slowly enough for ecological self-regulation to redress any imbalances. That all changed, of course, with the discovery of agriculture, when for the first time, the possibility of surplus was revealed.
With the advent of surplus, cultures ceased to reverence the principles symbolized by the Great Mother. Motivated by greed and the lust for power, small male elites took control of the production, accumulation, and distribution of resources of all kinds, following a curve of exponential growth that now threatens the very existence of life on earth.
This, in my view, is ultimately a consequence of the displacement of the deep feminine from our collective psyche. And even in contexts where one would like to imagine that a greater degree of awareness would prevail, such as in radical queer communities, its absence makes itself felt. All too often, we joke about, parody, or pay empty lip-service to the notion of putting the archetypal feminine at the center of our community life, while continuing to demonstrate through our choices and behavior the narcissism, wastefulness, and disregard for anything not in our immediate self-interest that characterize the larger society as a whole. For me, the task before us is not primarily about things like goddess rituals, though such practices can be useful consciousness-building tools in the right spirit; the real invitation that I see, which is also an imperative, is to make space for the demise of the masculinist paradigm, which must give way (read: come crashing down) in order for something more viable to emerge.
I’m using the term “masculinist paradigm” on account of its potential shock value, since only something that truly shakes us can suggest the extremity of the peril we face, and the immensity of the task ahead. The construct of patriarchy, while certainly an essential tool of analysis, doesn’t fully get to the heart of the matter: patriarchy is a primary manifestation of masculinism, but the phenomenon is greater than that. The term toxic masculinity, similarly, pokes at the edges of the problem—but what I need to say here is that we’re dealing with a force that is in the process of destroying the world. Call it what you will, we must break its spell: only through the overthrow of the all-pervasive masculinist paradigm, and through the restoration of the deep feminine at the heart of our collective spiritual life, do we stand a chance.
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING of this new introduction to my 2010 essay, I stated that there were two topics that I would need to address before I’d be willing to submit a revised version to a contemporary readership. The first of these has been relatively easy to discuss, because even when I wrote my original draft, I knew that my call for emotional and spiritual availability in the face of incipient collapse needed to go out to as broad a spectrum of queer people as possible, even if I didn’t delve into what the latter might mean. It’s been important for me to probe this question, and to explicitly state why I believe that restoration of the archetypal deep feminine must be at the heart of our work—but none of this is unfamiliar territory for me, and for the most part I’ve simply articulated understandings and intuitions that were already part of my awareness, long before I began to write this piece.
I wish I could say the same about the other big subject that I need to discuss here, but like all white people, I’ve been profoundly unconscious about systemic racism and its ubiquitous impact on our society. It’s only since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement that I’ve begun to seriously examine my own complicity in this system, which so pervades all aspects of our lives that it’s invisible to those like myself who benefit from it—it’s the water in which I swim, and no more than the fish can I see it as something other than reality itself, at least not without an intensive re-education program, which I’m determined to undertake but also know can only be partial and incomplete.
At least, when a bunch of us gay men started gathering as radical faeries in the late ’70s, it was the result of a conscious choice that our group was to be all-male and wouldn’t include women. By contrast, we had no equivalent awareness of how we were excluding people of color; we were just getting together with others of our kind, and our kind “just happened” to be white.
As a matter of fact, there was a tiny handful of non-white participants in the early faerie circles I was involved with, and I can only imagine (no, I can’t imagine; that’s part of the problem, that I should presume that I could) what their experience must have been like, in such an overwhelmingly eurocentric environment. I, for one, never gave it much thought—a classic example of the obliviousness that’s enabled racism to flourish in society and in the individual human heart.
Of course, as good progressives, we were in principle aligned with the movements of Black and other minority communities to liberate themselves from systemic oppression. We believed in solidarity, and gained insight from reading, for example, statements from groups like the Black Panthers, whose incisive critiques of police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, blanket covert surveillance, and all the rest of it were eye-opening to say the least. But we were reading about those realities, not experiencing them. I, for one, remained comfortable in my oblivious “liberal” racism, never noticing how white privilege upheld and undergirded every aspect of my supposedly principled life.
As I look toward the future, and make the claim that queer people have a unique calling in the face of collapse, I see an absolute imperative to put dismantling white supremacy at the heart of our agenda, along with challenging pervasive masculinism, confronting gender categorization, and making space for the deep feminine as the ground and spiritual substance of all being. Standing at the intersection of multiple kinds of oppression, queer people of color can speak to the reciprocally-amplifying impacts of colonization, expropriation, sexual violence, environmental abuse, and the egregious dehumanization that accompanies resource-extractive capitalism as no one else can. I firmly believe that as a white person in the twenty-first century, my obligation is to make this point as forcefully as I can, and then to get out of the way and listen.
* * *
FOR A MOMENT, as I pondered how to update my 2010 essay for a new audience, I considered the possibility of a total rewrite, and of trying to weave my insights about gender and race into the fabric of the whole. Upon further thought, however, I decided not to go that route, and rather to write a substantial new introduction and to leave my original text essentially unchanged. What follows, then, is that earlier version, modified only by a few editorial tweaks and by a rewritten first sentence.
Why change the first sentence? Because that was where I’d used the slippery language about “the people Harry Hay variously called third-gender folk, non-assimilationist gays, two-spirits, and radical faeries”—and since one of my primary goals in this upgrade was to tease apart some of the confusion around gender, group membership, and radical faerie identity, I couldn’t let it stand. So here, with one critical substitution in that opening line, is my original essay, “Stewarding the Future: A Radical Faerie Call for Sacred Witness”:
* * *
AT THE CORE of Harry Hay’s vision was the belief that we (see above) have a calling and responsibility to be of service in the communities that we are part of, in keeping with our experience and inclinations. Among our typical traits, in his view, are the skills of artists, healers, tricksters, shamans, ritual-makers, and intermediaries between the worlds. The offering of these skills for the benefit of society as a whole, he maintained, is central to our purpose, our reason for being here.
Harry’s claim that social function rather than sexual preference should be seen as the defining characteristic of our kind is as radical now as when he first conceived of it in the dark days of McCarthyism. Bruised by the collapse of the original Mattachine and deeply troubled by the direction of postwar society, he had immersed himself in anthropological studies, and had moved to the Southwest in order to connect more deeply with the indigenous cultures there. Out of these investigations, cross-pollinating with his intuition and Marxist education, there emerged his pivotal insight that we queer folk have an essential role to play in maintaining and enhancing the common good.
Based on his research, Harry believed that this was implicitly accepted in traditional societies across the world, as manifest in the frequent existence of classes of individuals with special status and obligations as ritualists, medicine persons, and the like. If this is the anthropological norm, then Western culture’s stigmatization of nonstandard gender identities is actually an aberration, of a piece with all the other ways in which our society has deviated from healthy, sustainable practices in order to pursue exploitation on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, in this analysis the persecution of homosexuals and other people of “deviant” tendencies is intimately linked with the rapacious capitalism and spiritual fragmentation of modern life. In its greed to plunder the earth and its peoples, our expansionist global society has dangerously upset the balance of things, and has ostracized the very folk most attuned to what’s actually happening—the shamans, the visionaries, and the walkers-between-worlds, who are disproportionately often also the queers.
Harry died in 2002, with many hopes and many fears for the future of our tribe. Now, as we go deeper into the twenty-first century, I believe that we have an obligation to take this line of thinking to an entirely new level, in this era when resource depletion, climate change, and environmental degradation loom ever larger on the horizon. The sacred stewardship identified by Harry as our archetypal vocation, which the dominant culture desperately needs but pathologically rejects, will be tested and tempered in ways we can scarcely imagine as the planet faces collapse on an unprecedented scale.
For we are confronted by nothing less. Perhaps, if these imminent crises were independent of each other, the high-tech quick-fix approach might be adequate to address them individually—but even though the prevailing paradigm insists on seeing such phenomena in isolation, ignoring their overarching context, in fact they’re all manifestations of the same self-amplifying system of beliefs and behaviors that threatens the very foundations of planetary life. It’s no accident that climate change is spiralling out of control just as fossil-fuel scarcities approach a tipping point, or that languages, species, and entire ecosystems are disappearing at similarly accelerating rates. These and an endless list of other meltdowns—environmental, economic, social, spiritual—are all ultimately the result of human ingenuity run amok, acting on the disastrous misapprehension that the world’s natural resources can be exploited without negative consequences and essentially without end.
It’s not hard to see how this error arose. Until recently, all the evidence suggested that it was true. Beginning with the development of agriculture some ten millennia ago, we as a species have been manipulating our environment with ever-increasing effectiveness, enabling a trajectory of exponential growth. It’s only in this unique historical moment, when for the first time we are able to view the entire human experiment as a single episode in the context of planetary time, that the inherent unsustainability of the growth model has become apparent. From this perspective “civilization” is an anomaly of breathtaking proportions: never before has one species so completely dominated the planet, capitalizing on the evolutionary edge of its large brain size and taking advantage of an unusual interval of climate stability to drastically increase its numbers and power through plant and animal husbandry, resource extraction, and social control.
It’s an open question whether this pattern of human development would have been sustainable without the additional factor of fossil fuels. But once humankind discovered the secret of concentrated energy, the genie was out of the bottle. Expansion on a previously unimaginable scale became possible, and naturally, as a species determined to maximize control over everything around us, we took advantage of the opportunities available.
This one-time unrepeatable raid on the strongbox of petrochemicals has fueled a binge of mind-boggling proportions. Burning up eons of stored sunlight, we have exhausted most of the readily accessible sources of these substances within just a couple of centuries, enabling us to briefly, grossly, exceed our planet’s carrying capacity, with unheeded environmental consequences accruing all the while. Even those aspects of petroleum-driven growth which may seem the most benign—I am thinking of things like modern agriculture and medicine, which have made possible massive global population growth and, for some, a better quality of life—can now be seen as deeply problematic, because they have increased the burden of global unsustainability.
Immersed as we are in this era of overextended carbon-leveraged growth, our natural inclination is to experience it as “normal,” and a significant effort of consciousness is required to discern just how far removed from any previous reality our current situation is. But in truth, we are in dangerously uncharted territory. And this is precisely where we queer folk come in—for who better than we, with our outsider status and our multi-focal vision, to see beyond the insidious trance that holds society transfixed? While the “well-adjusted” sleepwalk through a world of material glut and anomie, we walkers-on-the-edge are already ahead of the curve in our ability to comprehend the spiritual bankruptcy and potentially catastrophic consequences of the Western way of life.
I don’t mean to suggest that this take on our global predicament is uniquely ours. Many provocative thinkers unconcerned with sexual identity have argued that we’re heading for collapse, and their conclusions are no less valid just because a queer perspective isn’t part of their analyses. But even though it’s not necessary to look through Harry’s “gay window” in order to see the peril we face, I believe that we queer folk have an important insight to bring to the table. As mediators between the multiple dimensions of reality, we have a predisposition to see the essential spiritual character of the coming global crisis. Our window reveals how it’s the psyche of the modern world that is fundamentally out of balance; all the other imbalances are tied to this disease of the soul, and nothing short of a revolution of consciousness will be enough to turn the tide.
Like addicts generally, our culture is hugely invested in denial. We grasp at the delusion that solar panels and clean coal and carbon-trading protocols will allow us to continue on our current path with only minimal sacrifice, as if the whole superstructure of modern life were not built on the myth that we can always spend our way out of trouble. Like mediaeval sinners buying indulgences, we imagine that we can trade up to an ever-grander fantasy while ignoring our ever-larger debt—fiscal, environmental, psychological, and spiritual. Hooked on the rush made possible by fossil fuels, we insist that we can maintain increasing population and resource extraction without courting disaster; and we eagerly devour the media blandishments proffered endlessly for our consumption by commercial and political power-holders who pander to those beliefs out of venal self-interest, since that’s where their short-term profits lie.
I do not claim for us queer visionaries a messianic calling to turn the world from the error of its ways. We may have some insight into what’s happening, but even in conjunction with our many allies in awareness, I believe that we are powerless to stop it. The momentum of uncontrolled growth and its destructive impact is simply too great to be reversed, no matter how many of us in the vigilant minority put our shoulders to the wheel.
No, only collapse will break the cycle. We could, perhaps, use our trickster ways to marginally hasten it along—but destructive energy most often backfires, and in any case, the process will follow its own trajectory, so intervention would serve no meaningful end. Just as the addict must hit some sort of bottom before recovery can begin, so the requisite shift in consciousness will become possible only when global expansionism falls apart under the weight of its own overreach.
It’s unproductive to speculate about how, exactly, the coming crisis will play out. The points of vulnerability are virtually endless, and chaos in any one of them could trigger a domino effect among the others. We can only hope that the process will begin sooner rather than later, since the longer current patterns prevail, the more brutal the ultimate debacle will be. Even a high bottom will create enormous suffering for our own and our kindred species, while a few more centuries of heedless consumption could condemn all life on earth.
This is why I put my faith in collapse. The sooner the growth model crumbles, the greater our chance of salvaging some measure of human culture, some fragments of viable ecosystems, some potential of spirit from the wreckage. In breakdown lies our last, best hope of redemption.
And then, my fellow faerie shamans-in-waiting, the world will need us as never before. In those dark days, if I read the omens right, a mighty and solemn task will be ours, provided that we can accept it. In short, I believe that our calling as queer spirit folk will be to midwife the death of the world.
For who knows better than we how to face the dark? Throughout history we have embraced the shadow, challenged denial, flirted with death. We dance close to the fire; many of us have gotten our wings burned, and not a few have gone up in smoke. Unlike the bulk of humanity, stupefied by falsity and averse to any psychic travail, our queer tribe knows how to meet the demons—our own, and also those of the dominant culture, which cannot see that it is about to be consumed by the unacknowledged shadow within. And thus are we tempered: because, while the collective psyche of modern society will have no bulwark against disintegration when its material scaffold crumbles, we have the tools to hold the sacred circle, even as everything around us falls apart.
We have done it before. We kept the flame alive during the plague years, when our own gay world was turned upside down and shaken to the core. And perhaps our experience with AIDS was just a foretaste of the work that lies ahead. Perhaps what we did for our own immediate kin—tending them, bearing ritual witness, calling on the ancestors to ease their passage onward —is what we will be summoned to do for the planet itself in its hour of mortal need.
Our strength lies in our heart-energy. The essential truth we know is this: in a world of endangered resources, the one inexhaustible resource is love. With mineral and bio-wealth exploited and abused to the point of near-terminal depletion, with oceans dying and a suffocating shroud of toxins enveloping the globe, where else to turn but deep inside, to the pure well of our hearts? Compassion, insight, imagination—these are assets which are not depleted by use, and should be squandered lavishly, because they’re actually self-renewing. We’re creators of magic and ritual, and we don’t need tinsel and Christmas lights to do it; the key ingredient is spirit, and we have it in abundance. Sacred keening, ceremonial rites and intercessions with the gods, trance and tenderness, heart circles and wild play and daredevil laughter in the dark night of catastrophe: these are some of the skills we’ve assembled that will allow us to undertake the shaman’s journey on behalf of our imperiled Mother Earth.
So gaze into the fire with me now, let it take us far into the future, a thousand years hence. See a time when all our current social and technological infrastructure is gone, when the biosphere has been convulsed by loss and countless humans and other species have died in the fight for what remains. Find some little resilient band of queers, determined despite everything to bring an element of grace to a desecrated world. And what are they doing? Holding a dying child perhaps, or telling tales of songbirds gone extinct; stretching the soup a little further, invoking rain for the growing season, ritually carrying nature’s grief, welling up with heartache joy that love and play and magic still live on.
Yes, windfarms must be built, wetlands restored, patterns of living reinvented. None of these efforts are wasted. What better way to spend a lifetime, in the shadow of incipient doom? Regardless of the outcome, it makes karmic sense for us to do what we can, here and now, to minimize the damage we have done.
But material remediation alone will never turn the tide. Like the addict, we as a species need to recognize the extremity of our sickness, and surrender our ego-driven will to the deeper wisdom of animals and plants, of stones and seas and stars. Of course we resist this reckoning, because we instinctively know how painful it will be. But face it we must, since cataclysm will confront us with the results of our hubris, and the suffering will be great.
And in anticipation of that moment, to my fellow beings I say this: we, your queer-spirit servitors and intermediaries, will hold you in your anguish. We will not flinch from our responsibility to witness the planet’s despair. Indeed, in the coming epoch of collapse you will see us emerge into the fullness of our being, in strength and humility and heart. This, I believe, is the sacred task awaiting us queer-spirit folk: to steward the end of the world, and to hold space for its rebirth.
