Number 156 Winter 2013 $9.95 relationshipsIssue 157 / Spring 2014 FAERIES GOING GLOBAL Submission Deadline: January 21, 2014 www.rfdmag.org/upload What impact and role do Radical Faeries have on GLBT rights internationally? Radical Faeries now have Sanctuaries in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. We have an established annual Gathering in Thailand, the first Gathering in New Zealand and first Sex Magic Workshop in France, and possibly the first Gathering in Argentina. Who are we as a global tribe? What does it mean to be a Radical Faerie in cultures that may not honor a of Western individualism? The UN has just announced a global campaign to bring GLBT rights human rights all over the globe, what is the Radical Faerie role as culture makers in supporting this initiative? It is still illegal in 76 countries to be GLBT, how do Faeries respond politically and culturally to this status quo? Please join us in sharing your experiences of being a Radical Faerie living outside North America. Or as you travel the globe what have you discov- ered that Radical Faeries have to offer other cultures and what have we to learn from other cultures? As the rate of change in the world expands expo- nentially and distances shrink around the world, what is the role of Radical Faeries as cultural radicals calling for greater freedom and what is our role in working towards safety and security for Queer Radicals currently suffering imprisonment, torture, extreme repression and death in many cultures and states around the planet? RFD 156 Winter 2013 1 Regretful French Detour Vol 40 No 2 #156 Winter 2013 As we celebrate another series of wins for gay marriage in Illinois and Hawaii as well as the Federal ruling this past summer, we’re delving into what GLBTQ relationships mean. This issue reflects readers ideas on the topic via art, poems, and essays. We hope you enjoy the layers of how our readers decided to explore relationships by telling personal narratives, reflecting on cultural values, exploring types of relationships, as well as a piece exploring how pornography shapes our relationship to the people who produce and star in it. We also are thankful to Franklin Abbott for his interviews with two au- thors—Alysia Abbott and Manil Suri. Both authors appeared at the Decatur Book Festival recently. We hope you enjoy the interviews with such talented authors as well as savoring excerpts from their recent work. Sadly, part of the news for this issue is the loss of The Shawl. We’re hoping it isn’t so but mark its importance to many within the Radical Faerie tribe with sadness as we reflect on its role as one of the few common talismans of the Faerie community. Our thoughts go out to its former caretaker, Rose- mary for Remembrance, as well as Dennis Melba’son’s partner, Dimid Hayes, as a piece of history is replaced merely with memory. We also want to invite our readers to respond to our piece on RFD’s pres- ence at archives and libraries by considering helping with either donating missing issues or contributing to our fund to help scan and digitize back is- sues. Both are noble projects which we’ve been dreaming of making a reality for some time now. Thankfully, the Collective is finally able to consider both. Enjoy the issue and have a propitious Solstice and New Year! —From the chilly climes of Vermont! The RFD Collective Between the LinesRFD is a reader-written journal for gay people which focuses on country living and encourages alternative lifestyles. We foster community building and networking, explore the diverse expressions of our sexuality, care for the environment, Radical Faerie consciousness, and nature-centered spirituality, and share experiences of our lives. RFD is produced by volun- teers. We welcome your participation. The business and general production are coordinated by a collective. Features and entire issues are prepared by different groups in various places. RFD (ISSN# 0149-709X) is published quarterly for $25 a year by RFD Press, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035-0302. Postmaster: Send address changes to RFD, P.O. Box 302, Hadley MA 01035- 0302 Non-profit tax exempt #62- 1723644, a function of RFD Press with office of registration at 231 Ten Penny Rd., Woodbury, TN 37190. RFD Cover Price: $9.95. A regular subscription is the least expensive way to receive it four times a year. Copyright © 2012 RFD Press. The records required by Title 18 U.S.D. Section 2257 and as- sociated with respect to this magazine (and all graphic material associated therewith on which this label appears) are kept by the custodian of records at the following location: RFD Press, 85 N Main St, Ste 200, White River Junc- tion, VT 05001. Mail for our Brothers Behind Bars project should be sent to P.O. Box 68, Liberty TN 37095. On the Covers Front : “Archer” by Rene Capone Back : Photograph by artboydancing Production Managing Editor: Bambi Gauthier Art Director: Matt Bucy Editor: Paul Wirhun Submission Deadlines Spring–January 21, 2014 Summer–April 21, 2014 See inside covers for themes and specifics. For advertising, subscriptions, back issues and other information visit www.rfdmag.org Artists in This Issue Rene Capone Front Cover, 7, 13, 15, 24, 31, 32-33 artboydancing 2, Back Cover Dimid Hayes 5 Faygele ben Miriam 8, 9 Marc Haberman 10, 11 Angele Myrer 18 Cory Thorell & Colton Baumgartner 22 Nina Subin 49 Amber Davis Toularentes 51 Gordon Binder 57 RFD 156 Winter 2013 3 Photograph by artboydancing CONTENTS Letters to the Editor ............................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Kernunnos Shawl is Lost and Gone Forever ...Rosemary for Remembrance. . . . . . . 5 Faerie Gathering in Austria .....................Mata Hari .......................6 Queer Marriage’s Meaning Answered: A Look at Pioneer Activist and Family .........Pendra Wilson ...................8 Healthy Relationships With Tantra ..............Marc Haberman ................10 Poetry ........................................Joe Arcangelini .................12 Ties That Bind ................................Graphyte .......................14 Keep In The Dance ............................Tara ...........................16 Anniversary ..................................Bambi Gauthier .................18 Honeycomb ..................................Feathers ........................19 Missed Connections ...........................Finger .........................20 Love Is My Religion ............................James Benedict .................23 Art ..........................................Vinton Rafe McCabe ............25 Poems ........................................Billy Malone ....................29 October ......................................Lindsey Drury ..................30 Dangerous Trees ..............................Nadja Bederven .................31 On Options ...................................Kaš ............................34 Circling Around Faeries ........................Hyperion .......................35 Myth .........................................Nicole Amato ...................36 Fragments ....................................Luis Edgardo Muñoz ............37 How To Be A Successful Gay Male ...............Riley E. Zipper ..................38 Secrets .......................................Patrina C. Jones .................40 The Porn You Should Be Watching ..............Roscoe Hudson .................41 Relationships .................................Notre Dame des Arbres ..........46 An Informal Report on the 2013 Decatur Book Festival .......................Franklin Abbott .................47 Interview with Manil Suri ......................Franklin Abbott .................49 Excerpt from “The City of Devi” .................Manil Suri ......................50 Interview with Manil Suri ......................Franklin Abbott .................51 Poems ........................................Steve Abbott ...................52 Excerpt from “Fairyland” .......................Alysia Abbott ...................53 The Religious Destiny of Our Tribe: Queer Gender-F**k Spirituality ...............Mushroom .....................56 Lovers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nyk Robertson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Featherstone ..................................Shokti .........................604 RFD 156 Winter 2013 Thanks for publishing my article, “Collecting SeedsCreating Community” (pp. 52-54). However, the photograph on p. 54 is not from that article and doesn’t relate to the Faerie gathering at Riversdale. It is from a different body of work, a documentary series looking at the summer gatherings at Au- tumn Farm, a gay naturist retreat in Takaka, at the northwestern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. I submitted two articles at the same time and the Autumn Farm photograph was among the images accompanying the second article. Regards Mark/Alchemist Editor’s Note: Our apologies. Since RFD’s early days, it’s readers have cher- ished their copies of the magazine, as they often reflected their own lives or merely reflected an interest in a queer culture which was a bit differ- ent, often rural, attempting to be both radical and spiritual. Well in these many years some of your cherished copies of RFD have been collected by libraries and archives throughout the country and around the world. Some of these were donated by readers, others were purchased, and as RFD became more known to the academic world these archives often would purchase back issues from us. Well thanks to the efforts of us pack-rats keep- ing our little history alive in this way—close to fifty organizations have RFD in their collections. Sadly though only three of them have complete runs of the magazine. This is where we would love your help and support. RFD has some of the back issues which these organizations lack but not all. If you have old issues which you’d like to donate to our project to com- plete these collections, please have a look at our back issues page on our website, it shows which issues which we have sold out. These are often the very issues which these organizations lack. With your help we may be able to complete these sets for more folks to have access to. If you have back issues you would like to donate back to us, we’d greatly appreciate it. At this time we’re mostly looking for issues which we lack, but we will accept any back issues in good shape which you may no longer want or that you would like to see donated to archives. In the meanwhile, we’re also working to digitize all of our back issues and we’re exploring ways to make these available to our readers. It’s an expensive undertaking and again if you’re interested in helping in this project please consider donating money to help. Digitizing the entire run of RFD will cost close to three thousand dollars. Your support will help us make this long dreamed project a reality. We’ve set up a webpage on our site—www. rfdmag.org/archiveproject please check it out and consider making a donation. And to those folks who have already sent us your cherished back issues, thank you, thank you, thank you! If you are sending back issues to us, please send them to: RFD Press PO Box 302 Hadley, MA 01035-0302 USA If you want to send us a check to help with this project, please send it to the above address with “RFD Archive / Scan Project” in the memo. If you want to include a donation for this specifically when you renew, please just make a note with your renewal. We’ve all squirrelled away a copy of RFD…Well so do a number of libraries and archives throughout the world LETTERS & ANNOUNCEMENTS Correction to RFD Number 155, Fall 2013 issue RFD 156 Winter 2013 5 Contrary to what I wrote on p. 31 of issue 155 (Fall 2013), the Kernunnos Shawl, the one and only talis- man I know of that belongs to all the Radical Faeries, is lost and gone forever! 2013 was going to be its most adventurous year of my stewardship, but it hasn’t turned out that way. It went to its first Billy Club gath- ering (the Billy Club was founded out of the Radical Faeries in 1988 by a collective of Northern California men who wanted more structure than the Faeries gen- erally provided). It was planned to go its first European gathering—Sex Magick 101 at Folleterre, France. It was intended to go to its first gathering that I know of that would include female Faeries, namely, the Pendulum Gathering at the Wolf Creek Sanctuary in Oregon. And, it was going to go to the Breitenbush, OR, summer gathering. But, the Faerie (who shall remain nameless—he’s given himself enough grief about this already) who was taking the Shawl to Folleterre in June left it in its box on the luggage rack of a French train in the rush to get off and didn’t realize what he had done until after the train was departing! He tried repeatedly to contact the SNCF, the French national railway sys- tem, about recovering it, all to no avail. As I write this, it’s late September, and he and I have given up hope of the Shawl’s being returned. As you may know, the Kernunnos Shawl was lost to us once before: It went missing in the U.S. Postal Service and was found about a year later in a Dead Letter Office by a San Francisco Faerie not long before it would have been discarded; but this loss is different: the SNCF’s workers are a disaffected lot, many of whom would just as happily discard a lost package as turn it in or try to return it across the Atlantic. So, I wonder whether there is any Radical Faerie reader who is an experienced crochet worker and might be interested in recreating the Kernunnos Shawl, probably in a different color yarn, either as a labor of love or, perhaps, for a negotiated payment. If you are such a Fae, please contact me ASAP at smuchnick@sbcglobal.net. —Rosemary for Remembrance The Kernunnos Shawl Is Lost and Gone Forever— Would You Like to Recreate It? Left: The Shawl, RFD#22, RFD Archives Right: Dennis Melba’son crocheting the Shawl, photo courtesy Dimid Hayes GATHERINGS (for more info visit www.radfae.org) Summer Solstice Radical Faery Gathering, Faerieland, NSW, Australia, Dec 15-22, 2013 Blue Heron Gatherrette, Upstate NY, Dec 28-Jan 2, 2013-2014 (RSVP thompsbs@tds.net) Asian Faerie Gathering in Thailand, Feb 7-16, 2014 Breitenbush Gathering, Detroit, OR, Feb 14-17, 2014 F7 Gatherette, Amber Fox, ON, Canada, Feb 14-17, 20146 RFD 156 Winter 2013 Dear RFD! “The Faerie Gathering in Austria was FANTASTIC … a rollercoaster of fun, dance, rhythm, love, erotism, talks, magic, soul ….!” In Aus- tria this summer there were both a temporary and a new permanent manifestation of faerie love. Europe is about to be home to a second faerie sanctuary. eight years after the inauguration of Folleterre in the Vosges Mountains of north eastern France, came the Kissing Awake of Weinviertel Sanctuary, a new faerie home in Austria. Ceremonials to kiss awake the new land happened 15-16 August and were followed by a faerie trek west across the country to the Sound of Music territory of Salzburg where 63 faeries from 14 different countries (including Aus- tralia, Austria, Brazil, Czechia, England, Israel and USA) met for the first full 10 day Austrian Gather- ing. It was a bigger success than we could imagine! Many lives have definitely changed! Still the emotions roll over—but in the most positive way! We could show the whole (faerie) world what faerie spirit and faerie energy is and could be. I was only the one who gave so many wonderful faeries from all over the world the opportunity in the most unexpected but real nature to BE what they really are—people longing for the real magical spirit and making them appreciate to what faeries and human beings are possible to create if you let them step out of this mainstream mentality. The Indian God Ganesha showed me this image that you are a sexual person and maybe whenever I wake up at night I will have this image in my mind—to believe that the time of regretting anything in your life is over now. You never should regret anything that happened to you in your life. It all brought you to these ten days of love and respect and diversity. I really was kissed awake these ten days—starting two days before in the opening ceremony of the sanctu- ary in Austria. For me it was the “Sound of DIVER- SITY” Gathering—and I did not want any other gathering! It is so important that everybody on earth feels accepted—some faeries still have to work on this, but you have to give them time to accept this. 3 Maybe the most touching moments for me was the closing ceremony—very simple, but when the Music of Mozart—the overture of Don Giovanni started—the whole atmosphere + the whole gather- ing transformed again. I really could see in the eyes—that this was such a great moment in all the lives of the faeries who were in this circle when we all started to kiss and to light up the candles and to look into each other eyes: We directly went into heaven at this moment—it was unbelievable beauti- ful. This moment I wanted to create! This moment Mozart wanted to create! This was true entrance to Paradise. And looking deeply into the eyes of each faerie made me very calm and grateful. I really saw each heart at its most beautiful moment. There are no other words to describe that. Twenty-five hearts being one! Real living, real love, everybody touched. Life animating the whole. Faer- ies animating the whole. And when we blew out the candles we closed the gathering. It was so unreal that this Magic really happened and that it should end now. No, it will continue in our hearts— through our spirit and energy we will spread it out to the whole world—and it will manifest again in two years at this place and we all will come together again—sharing love, peace, hearts, problems and hope!—that this world is a better one—a faerie world!—because we all know that spirit, heartful- ness + stillness unites us all—and the sound of faeries in faerie diversity—and we deeply and com- pletely love and accept this! See the entire report: http://www.eurofaeries.eu/austria/gathering-2013/ —Mata Hari Faerie Gathering in Austria Right: “Two Boys” by Rene CaponeNext >