Seance, Queer Climate Activism, and the Radical Faeries

The year is 1979. Two hundred gay men are meeting in the Arizona desert for the first (but far from last) “Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries.” They are fleeing a gay liberation movement that, from their perspective, has turned from its revolutionary roots to an assimilationist project that they believe maintains “white privilege, male privilege, and middle-class privilege.”

Hosted by gay Marxist Henry Hay and inspired by Arthur Evans’ work connecting queerness with spirituality, the conference includes workshops, meditation, and mudbathing, capped off by a collective “Fairy Circle” ceremony. Central to “the Circle” is a seance to invoke the Fairy Spirit, significant deceased figures like Harvey Milk and Walt Whitman, and others no longer with them.

While their seance is a series of performances, poems, and readings at a candle-lit altar, it is indebted to other seance practices seeking to establish a connection between the worlds of the living and the dead. These practices include a small group using a spirit board to spell out messages from beyond, a single “medium” channeling a deceased person directly, and the use of recording technology like cameras and microphones to capture the ephemeral traces of ghostly encounters.

As a folk practice, seances tend to be improvisatory and highly unique. While they are connected by a common belief in the ability to contact the dead, their ever-changing participants and settings mean that no two seances have ever been quite the same.

Using seance, the Faeries articulated a radically different form of gay identity: one that sees individuals as intertwined with their communities, ancestors, and environments. Contemporary environmental justice activists face a similar tension between liberal and radical politics that the Faeries did. Can the Fairy Circle’s creative use of seance in service of gay liberation inspire us towards forms of activism that embrace more capacious and creative types of community and climate work?

Liberal versus Radical Approaches to Climate Crisis

One of the climate crisis’s central debates is between liberal and radical perspectives. Various NGOs, political organizations, and activists use language and conceptual frameworks to articulate what really “matters” and what should be done. UNDP’s Climate Dictionary, for example, mostly describes the economic programs and UN organizing groups involved in green economic transition, dedicating only a single entry to “Indigenous Knowledge.” The UNDP acknowledges that Indigenous climate knowledge is often overlooked, but placing it among climate negotiation terms assimilates it into UN-led international liberal consensus.

While liberal conceptions of climate change currently dictate climate policy, they are far from the only way of thinking through the issue. Anna Tsing and her co-authors’ Feral Atlas uses Indigenous knowledge to confront colonialism. It articulates an intertwined and complex web of issues that require “practices of staying present and receptive to material processes and ecological transformations in the world, and by extension, radical anticapitalist action.” By challenging the popular language of the climate crisis, these projects put forward radical visions of what climate action should look like.

Cultural- and site-specific practices also expand the boundaries of—and deepen the possibilities for,—climate engagement. Christina Guevara and Rae Jing Han’s connection with ancestral grieving practices allowed them to engage with climate grief by returning to what sustains them while rearticulating the need for Chinese and Filipino communities’ involvement in climate justice. Since 2003, Anishinaabe women have performed Water Walk Ceremonies, combining political action with prayer and education to draw attention towards boil water advisories, pollution, and other water protection efforts. Such practices exceed the visions of climate action that corporations, governments, and NGOs are able to express.

Intertwining the personal, environmental, and cultural provokes everyday people to engage in radical, community-focused action. Cultural practices revitalize and celebrate the communities that they come from, but are vulnerable to appropriation.

Seance as Political

The spiritualist seance—a site-specific practice that emerged out of North American settler culture—offers an interesting counterpoint to these cultural approaches. The Ouija board-using, spirit-channeling practice that many people today understand to be seance first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century United States and was controversial even at the height of its influence. Some of the most famous seance practitioners were Mary-Todd Lincoln and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, both of whom were mocked for their engagement with it.

As more skeptics published material debunking seances, they declined in popularity. Since the mid-20th century, they have been widely considered psychological trickery. Seance’s legacy exists today most prominently in the Ouija board, now reduced to a children’s toy and horror movie prop.

While the claims that spiritualists make about contacting ghosts are often disputed, the function of seance is also more complex than its denigrators assert. The historian Anne Braude argues that seance was, from its outset, a tool for political praxis. Nineteenth-century American women were largely excluded from politics, but seance provided them opportunities to gather wide-ranging discussions that often veered into women’s issues and political organization. After seances declined in popularity, many women who hosted them moved to political struggle, using the organizing and speaking experience gained from contacting spirits to fight as suffragettes.

Coming together, reaching out to spirits who come and go as they please, and the improvisational and free-flowing format of a seance lends itself to thinking outside of conventional political structures and towards being attuned to ephemera, asking questions, affective responses, and continued conversations.

These interventions can inspire more capacious forms of climate work. Several outposts of the ZAD movement—a network of ongoing anarchist eco-protection occupations in Europe—practice pagan and spiritualist rituals as a means of connecting with the land they defend.

Radical Faeries

Seance was ripe for reappropriation by the Radical Faeries as a tool for radical climate action. The Faeries group was first conceptualized by queer Marxist activists Henry Hay and John Burnside. Hay and Burnside were part of a growing rift in the gay rights movement still felt today between activists fighting for queer assimilation and those who saw queerness as a radical way of being that necessitated anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-colonial action.

This rift led directly to Hay and Burnside’s decision to hold the “Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” in 1979. Their manifesto makes the mixing of spiritual and political action explicit: it states that a night to “share our gay visions, to sing sing sing, to evoke a great faerie circle” is necessary to reinvigorate the fight against patriarchy, corporations, and racism. Around 220 participants attended the conference, making it a notable success and leading to annual conferences in the following years.

The Radical Faeries have since been described as a “neo-pagan spiritual group, a gay tribe, a new religious/social movement, a bunch of hippy-f*ggot-farmers, gender-fuck activists [and] queer community anarchists.” One of the Faeries’ guiding principles is hybridity, typified by how they characterize themselves as combining masculinity and femininity, integrating various cultural practices offered to them by participants, and inviting members across religious and cultural backgrounds.

Radical Faeries chapters grew around the United States and the world, each organizing their own retreats. Faerie meetups have taken place across the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and beyond. Online forums and communication channels like Faenet and a Radical Faerie Whatsapp group have also allowed self-described Faeries to connect globally to this day, creating a contemporary networked group of Faeries across countries.

Events are largely crowd-sourced and determined by the interests of those in attendance. However, across the different event pages and write-ups, the themes of flamboyant queer expression, radical politics, land connection, and spirituality are consistent.

Appropriation

Seance is a central pillar of the Radical Faeries’ repertoire, structuring their meetups in the same way it did for the proto-feminists. For the Faeries, seance is a tool to gaze through a “unique, queer window to the world of spirit,” along with a variety of other spiritual practices that members bring to Fairy Circles and gatherings. While the Faeries’ mix-and-match spirit breeds creative expression and exploration, it can also strip cultural practices of their histories and meanings.

The individualized nature and flexibility of the Radical Faeries means their relationship to other cultures’ cultural practices has been fraught over time. One of the central factors that inspired Harry Hay’s creation of the Faeries was his love of Indigenous cultures. Early members brought cultural practices from India, East Asia, and elsewhere as a tool to construct an identity outside of the dominant American one. Another founder Mitch Walker even proclaimed himself a “Shaman.” He flew out to the Tsankawi Pueblo in New Mexico to meet Hay and seek queer inspiration from pottery fragments made by Ancestral Puebloans.

Hay and others advocated for Indigenous rights, but their presumed access to both land and practices that belong to Indigenous People and other marginalized groups complicates the Radical Faeries’ mission then and now. The physical movement of mostly white gay men from urban centers into rural areas in order to explore their queer identities mimics the processes of colonialism, undermining the liberationist project that the Faeries claim to embark on.

While other spirit-contacting practices exist across many cultures around the world, seance is a North American practice that emerged in the 1800s and belongs to the colonial culture. Unlike other practices, that origin makes it more open to experimentation and recontextualization without the violence of appropriation. For the Faeries, seance reinterpreted can be a game, a metaphor, a serious practice, or anything that its practitioners want it to be, because its use does not risk inflicting violence on minority communities.

The Faeries’ Future

The prevailing years have continued to be complex. At times, queer people from Indigenous and other communities of color brought their practices to Faerie meetups in the spirit of community and exchange. At others, Indigenous cultural practices have almost certainly been wrongly appropriated. Long-running Faeries companion publication RFD Magazine has published pieces by Faeries reckoning with their relationship to privilege and appropriation. Some still use Indigenous teachings and practices in attempts to create a “pan-cultural” queer identity focused on personal expression and hybridity. Many still regularly practice seance.

Seance gives us a way to think about the transience of our times. Researching the Faeries brought us to domains that fell out of use a decade or more ago. When we accessed the remnants of these projects that were once enthusiastically blogged about and attended, it felt like talking to ghosts. The website for our nearest Faerie sanctuary hasn’t been touched since 2020. Is its author still alive? Have they moved on to other projects? Harry Hay passed away in 2002 and John Burnside passed in 2008. The UN Climate Dictionary, however, will be online for as long as the internet exists.

The Radical Faeries maintain a complicated legacy with their founding and relationship to the Indigenous and marginalized practices that long underpinned their doctrine. And yet, the conference remains a space where queer people around the world express their vision for a community that resists the heteronormative and assimilationist pressures of liberal capitalism.

RFD Magazine recently celebrated their 50th year of continuous publication. Faeries today continue to gather around campfires, speaking the names of the queer liberation activists that came before them. The Faeries website maintains a directory of Faeries that have passed; perhaps they have more to teach us, if we ask.

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Featured image: The Radical Faeries walk in Portland Pride 2008. Photo by Portland Pictures, June 15, 2008.

Sam Bean is a queer independent scholar with a Master’s Degree in English Literature, Specialization in Climate Change from Carleton University. His interests include how art and activism respond to changing social and economic relations in times of climate crisis. Contact.

Alison Schultz is a Master’s student at Carleton University in the department of Anthropology, researching the impacts of wildfire evacuations on pregnancy and birth care in the Northwest Territories. Contact.

Carmen Warner is a PhD candidate in Communication at Carleton University. Her work considers the intersections of difference, communication, and spatial politics in contemporary Nova Scotia. Contact.

Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time and Academic Director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement. Contact.

Together, they make up a climate humanities research group working out of Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory.