23 minute read
Interview with Keith / Cuz’n robin hood
Interview with Keith / Cuz’n by robin hood
robin hood: In this interview I’m excited to explore your formative experiences of ritual leading up to how you presently incorporate it into your life and artistic work. What is your story of ritual? How has your relationship to ritual evolved from the first time and place it entered your life? How has it informed your life as a queer person? How do you use ritual to counteract supremacist conditioning?
Cuz’n: I am responding to these questions in bed. It’s 11pm. A quiet Saturday night after a long bath soaking in warm water with Epsom salts and aromatherapy. For some people this might have been a ritual. What were the ritualistic elements of this bath? I did it with the intention of shifting my mood, my body, my state of consciousness. I wanted to spend some time outside of time, in a place outside of my habitual places. I mixed earth (salt) and water, supported by plant medicine. Warm water is a meeting of fire and water. I lit a candle and turned off the light. One expression I learned early in my witch trainings was, magic happens at the place where the elements meet. I have no idea how long I was soaking. I’m different now than I was before the bath. For some of the time I was reading Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism. These days, with the supremacy of my phone and screen based reading, anytime I read an actual book (even on my kindle) feels like a ritual. Reading about sex and pleasure and healing from political harm shifts my breath, drops me into my body, and moves me out of the habitual or quotidian world.
I am not interested in most psychological or family narratives. I forget most myths I’ve ever read or worked magically at Reclaiming’s Witch Camps. I’m not a story person. Which is ironic because I’m a storyteller. I can talk all night. I can describe most performances I see in rich detail. All this to say that nothing much or too much comes to mind when I think about my story of ritual. I’ve always been drawn to ritual and I haven’t unpacked why.
I was raised Catholic, like a lot of queer ritualists. My godparents were eccentric artists/seekers who only once gave me a gift, at the age of fifteen, a course in Transcendental Meditation. This was very unusual in our family context. The only time I went to a summer camp was as a junior counselor on a small island on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, in Georgian Bay. The camp was run by an American psychologist who had an idea to start the summer with an encounter group featuring the entirely white and teenage camp counselors with a group of Anishnaabe (Ojibwe) teens from Manitoulin Island. This was very unusual in our summer camp context. I moved to San Francisco in 1982 and by 1984 I was involved in a ragtag community of anarchist artists; hippy punks who went from protest to late night
rituals in an abandoned brewery or the vacant lot at But the celibacy grew to be a self-directed training in the corner of 16th & Valencia, the site of a landlord better understanding my sexual body and desires in arson where several SRO residents died, and where relationship to the shitty sexual oppression strucin 1986 our dance collaborative Contraband would tured into every aspect of everything. I studied porn make a massive ritual performance called Religare. and my response to it. I read a lot. Spending a lot of The title, from the Latin root of religion, spoke to our time in solo sex, I learned more about my butthole, efforts to reinvent ritual and community, which we its connection to my dick, and then to my brain/ didn’t differentiate. We wore dirty white clothes as heart/attitude/voice. we dove and rolled through the dust. Then we would I had always imagined being able to learn about all pull black dresses over our clothes. We wore those sex, going to school for touch, specifically sexual dresses for years in multiple works and somehow touch, and more specifically a safe space for men they were ritual dresses, invoking ancestors and to not hide their ignorance about women’s bodies, unseen forces. Choreogradesires, and pleasures. pher/mystic Sara Shelton When my celibacy ended Mann asked us to meditate on light coming out of the ground to bring healing to
I shifted from a vague bisexual to a queer faggot and looked for a sex school the site. Visual artist Lauanti-racist philosophies for gay men. I found Joe ren Elder built lights with car batteries in plexiglasstopped milk crates and buried them in the ground.
Kramer and Body Electric and after taking my first class, was invited to co-teach at one of the The healing visualized and spaces, or white majority summer intensives, where then represented. The performance concluded with a massive circle around a
Somewhere in the mid-80s while at anarchist mate training. Earlier I met Jack Davis, a pioneering direct action protests we met witches connected faggot activist, Radical Faerie, fiber queen artist, and with Reclaiming and we started going to their rituwitch. We started co-teaching workshops aka leading als, which became our rituals. Rose May Dance and rituals focused on gay/queer male sex and intimacy Geoff Yippie were my first witch teachers. Maybe healing. In these sexual healing contexts I was able to Brooke too. It’s hard to remember because my recall show up in one place as what I understood as my full has fused many different rituals, classes, and meetself, a holistic hybrid of anarchist, dancer, faggot, and ings that happened in the ritual room at Blackcat witch/ritualist. house where Starhawk and Rose lived with several It’s past midnight now. I’m not going to write a others. Back then there was a network of anarchist full memoir. I have to get up at 8am so that I can collective houses in San Francisco, linked through be on time for day two of Tantra and Ritual Sex, monthly coffeehouses/political benefits/open mic a workshop in Oakland with Jason Tantra. At the performances. My relationship to Reclaiming is ripe age of sixty I’m in a process of returning to the ongoing and important to me despite my alienation work and worlds of sexual healing. Visiting ritualfrom groups in general, my perception that the informed sex workers in various cities and countries, rituals used to feel more politically radical, and my seeking out the bold and shamefree guys who use the allergy to deity and the awkward gendering of the terms healing, tantra, conscious, or love, I’m doing sacred. some important self-healing while getting some kind
I was relationship celibate for nearly three years of overview of what’s happening around gay/queer in my late twenties. That was more of an initiatory men’s sexual healing. process than a ritual. It started unintentionally…I For those who aren’t involved, there is a renaistend to have long dry periods between relationships. sance going on. One of its manifestations is the
my contributions were in the areas of ritual, political context (understandtowering fire, first of the ing sexual oppression as six or seven folks from linked to authoritarian Contraband, then our large community choir, and regimes, and homophobia as linked to misogyny), then the audience. Hundreds and then thousands and basic body awareness. I was one of the three watched from the sidewalk above the sunken lot. founding teachers of the Body Electric’s Sacred Inti
Stretch festival in Berlin, and its cousins Ignite in Vancouver and Arouse in Seattle. These are weekend festivals that bring together many teachers – offering a smorgasbord of naked yoga, tantra, light BDSM, and all manner of naked touch rituals—for a hundred plus queer men, mostly white and cis, but with some leadership by men of color and trans guys. It has many roots and resonances with the pioneering work that many of us were actively developing during the queeruption of cultural production and political resistance during the pre-1995 AIDS era.
One thing that has changed in the past twenty years is the possibility and even necessity for certification and professionalization. Both Joe Kramer and Annie Sprinkle (among many others who used to be renegades of the radical sex underground) now have PhDs in sexology. Joe created a legal precedent for queer sex workers through a program for Sexological Bodywork. And then there’s tantra, which is cited by many gay erotic bodyworkers in Canada, UK, Europe, as well as the US, often as a claim to legitimacy for a scene that used to be almost entirely underground. I see it connected to the mainstreaming of yoga. The lineage of neo-tantra, a mostly straight white money project influenced by 70s New Agers and the diaspora of Osho/Rajneesh’s ex-followers, was pretty homophobic when I encountered it in the 80s and 90s but Jason Tantra and Barbara Carrellas (Urban Tantra) are among those who have adapted tantra for queers with goals as utopian and meaningful as shame free sex, the body’s pleasure as a gateway to spirit, and the elusive ego death of enlightenment. Is tantra ritualistic? Sure. It’s a technology for shifting consciousness, healing the heart and the mind, and for opening one’s awareness to universal, mysterious, and powerful forces beyond language and knowing. While stroking your dick or someone else’s. Nice.
How do you use ritual to counteract supremacist conditioning?
For the past decade my attention to decolonial and anti-racist philosophies and practices has made it harder and harder to participate in white gay spaces, or white majority contexts, even the ones that have been good for me. One of the perspectives that is common in queer and QPOC artist contexts is that if a project or workshop or community is not actively anti-racist, then it is racist, or more specifically that it is upholding white supremacist structures. Due to the bitterness of getting older and of barely surviving a couple of sad gay divorces and the increasing fucking fuckedness of climate change and neo-fascism, I have been less active as a ritualist, except in art and dance contexts with younger more racially and gender diverse communities. Instead of using ritual to counteract supremacist structures, including the internalized oppressions that they produce, I have spent more time critiquing how alternative cultures, including Faeries, contact improv, yoga, psychedelia, and Burning Man, reproduce supremacist ideologies and privileges. In my performing and teaching work I have been prioritizing collaborations with trans and queer artists of color, including indigenous Two Spirit artists/ritualists. I deeply question the role of the white artist, the white ritualist, the predominantly white community or gathering, and myself.
Most of the white scenes I’m connected to continue to be resistant to the current discourse of younger anti-racist queers. I was one of at least ten gays who were troubled by the unintentional supremacist and colonial logics of the first Global Generate gathering so I assembled our comments into a written critique. It was mostly dismissed and several of the organizers had time to personally insult me but no time to engage the issues with me. This gathering has continued to evolve, offering activism and healing in response to global homo hatred. But if we can’t look at the settler colonial shadow, that we have all internalized and reproduced in Faerie and other alternative culture New Age post-Hippy contexts, then the potential for harm is more likely.
I know that Free Cascadia Witch Camp (which has happened at Wolf Creek Sanctuary) and multiple gatherings at Groundswell have looked at whiteness much more closely and developed more decolonial approaches to ritual than any of the white-dominant Faerie and gay sexual healing communities. But it will surprise no long term anti-racist or feminist activist that there have been gnarly schisms in both of these organizations. It is not easy to renegotiate power and be destabilized by differing levels of understanding and commitment to radical change.
The challenges are many for white and middle class folks with regards to cultural appropriation, colonial logics, white and male supremacist practices and how our niche communities might shift how we pray and celebrate, mourn and fuck, and depend on ritual to construct our gatherings and ongoing relationships with both spiritual and political integrity.
Heart circle is beautiful ritual technology. Yes it is rooted in white observations of indigenous practices. But also in Quaker meetings. And in anarchist and feminist organizing. And so many traditional or contemporary practices of radically democratic hori-
zontality. Faerie gatherings begin and end with light rituals where ancestors are thanked, the organizers are blessed, the guests are welcomed, and the histories of the land are acknowledged. And where the deities of delight, kindness, sexiness, and fierce fabulosity are invoked, are ritually called into our bodies and the body politic, the temporary society of the gathering. The no/talent show is an amazing ritual, a time outside of time, a magical place, where queer glamor and humor create powerful spells that sustain many of us into unknown futures yet to be revealed but sensed as not only possible but likely. No matter what happens, the performance ritual affirms that there will be queers in the future and their fucking/ fabulousness will be important. These ritual practices of heart circle and community open mic no/talent show have spread far beyond Faerie communities. Because they work. Because they’re simple and deep and adaptable. But I’m the bitchy queen who can’t stop asking, in the middle and at the edges of the ritual/community, what other spells are we casting? What are the poetic and magical impacts of the ritual when almost everyone is white? There are all kinds of reasons that we segregate, that we are produced by legacies of divide and conquer, that we seek safety in sameness. I want white and middle class Faeries and witches and queers to simultaneously sensitize ourselves and toughen up so that another kind of ritual, that we have not yet experienced or learned or channeled is possible.
We’re at a really tough time politically right now, especially when we consider bringing together diverse groups of diasporic people (that’s almost all of us) to do rituals with widely divergent influences (Wicca, various indigenous and “generic” indigenous, Faerie, yoga/Hindu, mindfulness/Buddhism…) on what is often referred to as stolen or colonized land. The best way we might use ritual or let ritual use us might be to create rituals or prerituals where we can talk through these antagonisms and paradoxes. I’m still and always a fan of the nonverbal, poetic, improvised, and touch-based healing practices that have consistently changed my life for the better and kept me alive and inspired. But when group rituals seem nearly impossible, especially public rituals that I as a cis white man might lead, I retreat back to one-to-one practices where the personal-is-political practice might be a prayer that touches circles beyond the two of us who have dared to be vulnerable together and cross some structural lines of cultural difference where healing and love just might be activated, again, and again.
On the Aqueduct
If Parsival were to ask about the king’s sorrow, the land would be healed, the king would be healed, and joy would abound—but he doesn’t. —Joseph Campbell, Romance of the Grail.
for Holger
Silver stone against a solid silver sky as we approached on foot its base and walked up the mountain behind. New Year’s Eve im Hessichen Bergland, thick with intuitive cold.
O Parsifal, take your older gracious Gawain to the rim of the aqueduct in Willhelmhöhe Park where in summer roiling adolescent waters released from the lakes above Kassel
flow over its edge, its end, to the pond below— fountain plume of finale, now hardened cobalt blue. You skate along the frozen channel; I crawl the crusty snow, frightened, further out and along the shifting, slippery concrete, to the precipice: where you stand!
My Aryan hero— my blond unreachable boy smiling cruel as Wagner— until at midnight fireworks burst like shattering ice in the sky, thrill of a year in flux.
You pour a shot of schnapps into its bottle cap, pass it to me— the Chalice! We have discovered the Grail but your toast is silent, the only sentence comes through glacial eyes. You do not ask
the question, and the liquor burns bitter. We return from the forest across the wasted three a.m. kingdom, the exhausted city, human once again.
— D.S. Humphries
Rituals
by Timothy White Eagle and Adrain Chesser
We gathered in a group on the rim of a canyon, we were AIDS warriors, survivors, widows, the newly infected, the not infected but afraid, we came to consider this thing that had invaded our life. We built an effigy, we wove into the costume our fears, doubts prayers and hopes, we called what we built the Specter. We each went for a walk inside, invading that which had invaded us. Walked almost blind on uneven earth under the heavy cloak, we fought with it and freed ourselves. And after sunset we burned it, releasing all of it. We made the art and magic we needed. Through ritual we brought into the world a monster and we slayed it. And that symbolic action gave us strength and hope. For one week thirteen people lived on the edge of a canyon and made art and ritual and prayer. And when finished we were transformed, by dwelling with our own creative force in the action of making we art we found power.
The Red Room was built as a sacred space to bring your fear and dissolve it. I knew the red room was about fear but I didn’t exactly understand why I was doing a project about fear. It opened in October and in November there was a presidential election and suddenly the project made more sense. I Invited people to participate in a simple ritual designed to relieve fear. The room became a gathering place and drop off point for fear and anxiety. My work is
most often simply self-centered; I create the work I need and offer it to my community to see if anyone else needs the same piece of work. I hold a basic principle that by documenting my ritual art practice and sharing we are spreading the medicine. I believe art contains a spark. The intent behind my art is almost always to create objects or experiences, which contains the convenience of spirit.
Faerie Sex Magick Turns Thirty
by robin hood and participant-facilitators
Come sundown July 4 th , 2020 a circle of over a hundred loving companions will gather in the meadows of Wolf Creek Sanctuary, Oregon. We will disrobe one another and begin to sing and dance widdershins as we turn the clock backwards until we glisten in the fires of 1990 where Harry Hay and his lover John Burnside led the first Faerie Sex Magick workshop. We will call on our faggot ancestors and the names of the Faeries that attended the very first workshop. We will call our own erotic bodies home and hold one another close. Hands on the back of one another’s hearts, cupping one another’s genitals in testimony, we will scry into the flames until we return to 1950 when Harry first dreamed the Circle of Loving Companions into existence. How far back into the mysteries of erotic rituals might we go? We have a week together to play again, fall in love again; step through the portals again to what Harry called, new vistas of consciousness.
The week welcomes all Faeries who have completed a Faerie Sex Magick workshop. Over the decades several hundred cis and increasingly trans fags have circled in counsel to help one another reveal and heal layers of sexual fears, social stigmas and related somatic traumas. As none of us got into our troubles by ourselves we know that none of us can get out of from beneath these burdens by ourselves. The practice of group consent means to share the risk of coming out from the body’s imprisoning shame and the heart’s coerced isolation together.
Sex Magick has changed everything about how I see and live sex and intimacy. It’s taught me to be fearless in what I feel. To practice more patience with others and myself. It never fails to remind me of where I can be messy, can feel like I am falling apart, have room to grow—and that there is a community of love to catch me, if I lean into it (and even when I don’t). It shows me how relationships are something I choose—a commitment to connect, to share presence with one another, to name and respect conflict. It challenges me to accept everything about the people I love, and it surprises me when I find, yet again, that I too can be ritual queen. It dares me to make my sex about intimacy, too. It has remade my marriage and given me the courage to love the men I cherish. So in short: I’m a Sex Magick facilitator to build the community I want to have in my world. —Boyscout, participantfacilitator, Berlin.
What is a Sex Magic Workshop?
For most of the past thirty years, one to six workshops have been offered annually. Currently we have a volunteer team of a dozen participantfacilitators running workshops in France, Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, USA, and this year in Portugal and New Zealand. Members of the Circle of Loving Companions often act as local hostesses, organizers, and cooks. In preparation for a workshop three facilitators spend six months developing each ritual container. When an interested Faerie registers online (see faeriesexmagick.org) Sparkle lets them know someone will contact them in a few weeks to set up a confidential conversation with one of the facilitators. During the call we discuss heart circle experiences, barriers to intimacy and related patterns of romantic and sexual experience as well as substance use histories. The goal of this gatekeeping call is to see if the workshop feels like a good fit at this time.
The workshop was born out of an observation that Heart Circles at Faerie gatherings were already emotionally moving and transformative. The question was could they be even more so, if the constituents were together consistently for a longer period, might even more intimacy be achieved if we allowed in our sexual self-expression? When we deliberately and explicitly acknowledge our desire for physical intimacy within the context of emotional sharing we facilitate a deeper level of trust and awareness of others and ourselves. With over a thousand Faeries having done the workshop, many have felt profound levels of transformation in their relationships to everyone including themselves. Most particularly affected are those romantic and intimate relationships where many participants report new levels of self-confidence and authenticity. —Chas, long time organizer and participant-facilitator, San Francisco.
Radical Faerie Sex Magick is grounded in the process of Faerie Heart Circle. Knowing that all twelve to eighteen workshop participants have experienced heart circles before offers reassurance, preparing us for the intensity of learning how to intimately see and be seen by one another prior to entering into what is known as ‘ritual space’. Once that veil is opened, and for the remainder of our time together, we often co-create playful and occasionally intense healing rituals through communal erotic touch. It can be sexual and it might not. As each participant is, so each workshop is unique. If we get snagged on an upset along the way we drop back into our central ritual of heart circle until the group feels the potency of our connection once more.
Harry taught us that, as ‘radical’ Faeries, it was incumbent on us to look deep within to find our own rituals, rather than seeking forms from without. These would include ceremonies from other cultures, supposedly sacred ancient rituals from other languages that we never could properly translate and truly understand, and anything coming out of hetero-normative practices that could never align with our values. Rather, in ritual space, we co-create rituals that align with the specific needs and desires of that circle in that place and time. Though every workshop uses the same process to move toward ritual space, each one is unique given who is in that circle in that time in their lives with these co-conspirators at this time in their lives. Even if the same group regathered the next year, the ritual space for them would be totally different = chaos magick at its best! —Rosie Delicious, participant-facilitator, New York.
Prior to the first workshop, Harry must have intuitively known that sexual liberation must emerge from this embodied mutuality. Collectively, carefully we tenderize our heart’s scar tissue in order to find a key that viscerally unlock’s the door to the heart’s imagination. Faerie Sex Magick is a living communal process of what Harry called subject-Subject consciousness.
After each workshop I have become more nuanced, confident and informed in my whole approach to intimacy. I can be clearer on how best to nourish and sustain my appetite for intimacy either alone (with myself!), when intuiting non-verbally with strangers or, in consensual agreements with lovers/friends. And I can see what might be reasonable for me to expect of myself and of others. I’m still working on how best to give myself permission for it to be OK the way it is! …. I love the fact that by engaging with this process and by cultivating a more developed discourse around how men (and by extension people in general) can physically/emotionally BE with each other, I am engaged in a joint ‘queering of consciousness’ venture. Together we’re working out who we are and where we came from and that IS (IMHO) what we’re here for! (Because that’s what we’re good at). —Mushroom, participant-facilitator, Brighton.
Like Harry, or RadFae culture, this workshop is not above reproach. Some non-attendees however, have erroneously perceived the workshop as cockcentric, elitist, catharsis driven or money making. These critiques have been responded to many times by volunteer facilitators and participants over the years. The workshop is inarguably shaped and limited by the white-westernized privileges and politics of cis facilitators; we have seen our task as keepers of what has been an organically grown oral tradition, a mystery practice of faggot magic. We also strive to be responsive to the needs of evolving Faerie values. Issues of equity, inclusivity and cultural capacity strongly influence the workshop in ways similar to the Faerie sanctuaries that host sex magick workshops. The workshop continues to grow as participants from all over the world, including from regimes actively and covertly violent toward LGBTQIA people, find a space safe enough to begin exploring radical connection. As gatekeepers of this workshop it has been our intention in recent years to welcome a broader representation of participant-facilitators to better reflect an intersectional approach to this gently organized project. As such the very first all-gender Sex Magic workshop is scheduled to take place in England a month after the 30 th anniversary gathering.
What makes Faerie Sex Magick magical?
For many Faeries seeking sexual freedom and gender liberation we choose to play in the field of magic as our healing path. For many this workshop is our devotional practice. As the faggot lover, within these spaces between the worlds, I willingly surrender to the Wounded Healer who in turn nurtures my desires back to life. For many us this workshop has been a lifeline through the plague years.
