Ruins of a Nation, 2026
I am walking backwards on the path of reinventing ancestors.
I reached Short Mountain Sanctuary at midnight on Beltane Eve.
Sounds of drums were coming from a clearing down the path.
I walked, a shadow among others, feeling my way through the darkness.
Momentary lights from LED hoops and poi drew colorful shapes.
I followed the glow of a bonfire that led me to a crowded circle.
The flames lit up nude bodies, adorned with jewelry, tattoos and flowers, dancing to the beats of the drums.
Now and then, a guttural cry pierced the night.
I watched, mesmerized, despite being tired and still recovering from my recent illness.
It struck me that I had never associated queerness with something so ancient, so primordial as the surrendering of our bodies to nature.
Here, queers are guardians of Nature and Nature preserves us from outside gaze.
“Go,” he told me. “I want you to have many lovers.”
I understood the imperative to mean that there cannot be one source of knowledge, that lovers are gateways to experiences outside oneself.
I did not want to leave the comfort of his chest, the warmth of the hearth.
But we both know that I still have so much to learn, so much to witness.
He cannot show me everything.
Once in a while, he would get up and pick a book or two from his library.
These were not just dead people.
They were people he knew.
He was there.
He had made his journey.
The things I have only read about, heard about, they were real-
he had lived them, and so, it was only natural that it is his duty to pass this knowledge along to me.
Lest we be forgotten.
I woke up to my lover standing outside my tent.
The young green leaves of early spring filtered the late morning sunlight.
They laid their head on my chest and we continued to dream, to the songs of birds and rustling of leaves.
An orgasmic echo through the woods.
Hovering above us, veils swirled like silvery ghosts.
They shimmered iridescent copper, gold and blue.
They mark the entrance to the Ancestors’ Circle, at the edge of a ridge, where the earth descended:
the holiest place on the Land.
Small shrines were put up for faeries who had passed away from AIDS, made from cheap toys and washed out photographs.
Who are these people?
How am I connected to them?
How come people so gladly call them my ancestors?
I was not born here, I have no blood relations to this land.
And yet it is here, where for centuries, people have fought, lived and experimented with life in ways that have made my life possible-
a sociocultural progenitor, a force of history that begot the possibilities of the present.
That is perhaps what radical imaginary means.
It is not simply the future they were ensuring:
they also shaped a past that linked us back to the moment when we were deities, mages and shamans.
A man falls asleep inside a circle of ruins and dreams of another man, until he begets him.
What more homoerotic form of procreation is there?
Trans people are the natural progeny of cis gays, a reproduction to their likeness, moving across instead of staying on this side.
Trans fags, trans lesbians and T4T, which in itself, a form of homosexuality- the love of sameness, continue the spiritual quest to reach “the shared vision of non-possessive love -- which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to [their] own freely-selected, full potential.”
The true meaning of radical is, by the root.
A return to the soil, to the essence of being gay, not just as a sexual orientation but an otherness and an inner difference that separates us from the rest of humanity.
Breakfast takes place on an elevated porch.
We are surrounded by tree tops and sky.
Inside the main house is a small room with a library, where books of our history weighed on shelves.
When people learned that this was my first time at the Sanctuary, they told me, “Welcome home,” echoing the sign at the entrance.
Scramble, Goose, Trinity, Pith Marmelade, Rainbeau, Saltlick, Horehound, Supernova, Sky, Huck, Nix, Sweetpea…
faery names evoke all living creatures, the pleasure of taste, meteorological happenings and the wonders of the universe.
A group of people went into the woods to find the new May Pole.
We were led by an Elder who had announced that this would be the last time he would act as a guide.
The tree had to be unanimously selected and each of us was expected to take a turn at the ceremonial cutting.
Once we found the tree, we all placed a hand on its trunk, forming a human web around it.
Over twenty bodies joined together around a single living being, making ourselves into its branches, a re-pairing of human and vegetal limbs.
The newbies, among whom I counted, were asked to take the first strikes.
Tall trans women in dresses, small mustacho’ed trans men, grey-haired bears in camo, lanky twinks and all in between, each took up the axe.
“Chop, chop, chop, chop” went the chant that accompanied the drums.
When the tree finally fell, we raised it on our shoulders, miraculously light by the sheer number of people taking care of the load.
We walked out of the woods, thus, a 16 foot long centipede.
On the Knoll, long colorful ribbons made from discarded garments were strewn on the grass. People surrounded the hole, spitting, casting wax, incense, ashes, bodily fluids, wishes and spells. Memory, in forms of photographs and handwritten notes, is the ultimate offering to plunge into the true depth of darkness.
We lose ourselves into the orifice of the earth in order to reconnect with the plurality of our own selves.
Such is the price for rebirth:
one must effectuate a clearing for self-expansion, renewed in clarity of purpose.
Harry Hay had conceived of this since the founding of the Radical Faeries:
that there exists a mythical dimension to gay identity, an indigenous gay spirituality that seeks to connect and heal with Nature.
The Hausa people of West Africa say that the men and women of the village who relate to each other have, each one, an eye in their soul by which they perceive themselves, however dimly, on the right path in the dark and perilous realm of SPIRIT.
But the souls of those men among them who relate to other men, and women who relate to other women, have two eyes!
This Two-Eyes feature, different from the way Eurocentric Imperialisms might misinterpret it, bestows neither special powers or privileges -- instead it lays upon the Two-Eyed ones a sacred responsibility.
For Two-Eyed ones have the capacity of vision to penetrate the dread gloom of the SPIRIT world to discern the path that their Group, their Community should follow to discover the next resting place, where they all will be temporarily safe and nurtured, on the SPIRIT journey all must take.
In 2017, as a burgeoning trans person, I traveled to Athens.
On the rooftop bar of a squat, I met a transwoman who immediately signaled me to come to her.
“You are neither man, nor woman. What are you?” she imperiously demanded.
She cupped my face in her hands and asked me to touch her head beneath her wig.
“You are a healer,” she whispered.
I had a headache earlier today.
When you walked in, it went away.
Many people’s lives will improve because of you.”
First, she gave me the gift of recognition, then a social responsibility.
As in all spiritual quests, I do not know how nor where to begin.
Is this my true path?
Has it already begun?
What is the meaning of healing and how do I learn how to heal?
A ritual inside the bathhouse:
a trans girl brandishes her vial of estrogen up in the air, kissing it with veneration.
She guided us to pull our hormones and prep our skin for injection.
Six to ten trans people held their needles at 45 degrees angle, waiting for the go signal.
The mass injection party was followed by a play party, where all different types of bodies touched and soothed each other’s scars.
Does sameness still function as a prerequisite for homosexuality?
“These men on their deathbed, would confess that they’ve been in love with their trans best friend all this time!”
A man with silver hair tied in a pony tail, sporting a bright blue Hawaiian shirt, sat down next to me.
“It was the young people who surrounded Harry.
They were dying of AIDS and being taken care of by their lesbian friends.
That’s when they realized, they are faeries too!
So they had a meeting about including female-bodies on the Land and Harry cried and they cried.
But that was how things started to open up.
The things I saw go down in that bathhouse,” he chuckled, shaking his head fondly.
“The guys who could not put up with it, they just self-selected to leave.
I think it was for the best.”
A hushed whisper, a crack in the long intertwined history between gay and trans, that is where I find myself.
There is no literary canon that celebrates gender fluid unions and cross overs between lesbians, gays and other forms of sexuality.
This ancestry can only be approached with approximation and comparison.
In the bathhouse, I looked up from the pile of trans bodies and saw three men giving each other blow jobs.
My gaze involuntarily lingers.
Is that what it’s like to experience love in a cis male body?
Is that how pleasure is communicated, how their bodies are cared for?
Viola disguises herself as a page boy who goes by the name of Cesario to serve the Duke of Illyria.
S/he falls in love with the older man but is sent instead to court the Countess Olivia on his behalf.
The countess in turn falls for her/his soft manners and androgynous charms.
The play’s resolution takes the form of Viola’s long-lost twin brother, Sebastian who arrived in Illyria, conveniently replacing his sister as the love object of Countess Olivia and restoring the balance of heterosexuality.
All the characters remain untouched by the glimmer of queerness that the subterfuge allowed them to experience.
Where is the revolutionary love that fully transforms and breaks down our preconceived notions of who we are and who we desire?
I seek another fairy who is as independent, as resilient, as self-reliant as I am, who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me looking down the same road ahead with similarly shining inquisitive eyes.
It struck me that it takes a collective effort from groups of radical queers to ensure the yearly passage into spring, we who are portrayed as threats to the nation, not belonging to the nation.
We encounter the same initiation rites, as noted among American Indians, the Asiatics, the Africans, and the Mediterraneans, wherein The Adolescent- cradled in the loving concern of the hearth- is suddenly tried and tested by being sent into the unknown to brave all its threats and terrors […]
This rite was an imitation of the seed, kept warm by the hearth in a protective basket all winter.
Then at the Vernal Equinox, [...] the seed was suddenly thrust into unknown darkness, away from the friendly sun and the blue sky and the faces of friends.
But, when, pushing through the best it knew how, its green head suddenly popped through the crust of the earth- everything was right again, the seed was a reproducing entity and surrounded once more by the sun and sky and the familiar faces. [...]
The Feast of Fools began at Vespers on the afternoon of the day of the Vernal Equinox with the chanting of the “Magnificat” [...] “He hath cast down the princes from their thrones and hath exalted the lowly and oppressed; the hungry he hath filled with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” […] In this fortnight, the Fool who represented this change every hour of his life, was the leader of the proceedings. Every custom, tradition, law, and decree was questioned and turned upside down and inside out and fully exposed to the Village Collective.
The Fool, grown from the adolescent “changeling”, “he who is what he seems not to be”, alone has the capacity to invert the world order and lead us into a new clearing.
… MEDIATORS between the seen and the unseen- as Berdache Priests and Shaman Seers, as artists and architects, as Scientists, as Teachers, and as Designers of the possible;
… MEDIATORS between the make-belive and the real- through Theatre and Music and Dance and Poetry;
… MEDIATORS between the Spirit and the flesh- as Teachers and Healers and Counselors and Therapists.
And in the [twenty first] century America- how do we differ?- and how do we remain the same?
My lover, a multicolored cap with drooping peaks on their head, grasped my hand and together we held on to one of the ribbons. Around and around the May Pole we went, laughing and stumbling over other bodies doing the same. The sun was bright. Some people climbed up the pole, shaking their fists in a sign of victory.
Italicized excerpts from:
“This new planet of Fairy-vision”, Harry Hay, Arizona 1979
“What We Two-Eyed Ones have to share,” Harry Hay, 1991
“The Feast of Fools”, Harry Hay, 1953
“Radical Faerie proposals to the “March on Washington” Organizing Meeting”, Harry Hay, 1986
I reached Short Mountain Sanctuary at midnight on Beltane Eve.
Sounds of drums were coming from a clearing down the path.
I walked, a shadow among others, feeling my way through the darkness.
Momentary lights from LED hoops and poi drew colorful shapes.
I followed the glow of a bonfire that led me to a crowded circle.
The flames lit up nude bodies, adorned with jewelry, tattoos and flowers, dancing to the beats of the drums.
Now and then, a guttural cry pierced the night.
I watched, mesmerized, despite being tired and still recovering from my recent illness.
It struck me that I had never associated queerness with something so ancient, so primordial as the surrendering of our bodies to nature.
Here, queers are guardians of Nature and Nature preserves us from outside gaze.
“Go,” he told me. “I want you to have many lovers.”
I understood the imperative to mean that there cannot be one source of knowledge, that lovers are gateways to experiences outside oneself.
I did not want to leave the comfort of his chest, the warmth of the hearth.
But we both know that I still have so much to learn, so much to witness.
He cannot show me everything.
Once in a while, he would get up and pick a book or two from his library.
These were not just dead people.
They were people he knew.
He was there.
He had made his journey.
The things I have only read about, heard about, they were real-
he had lived them, and so, it was only natural that it is his duty to pass this knowledge along to me.
Lest we be forgotten.
I woke up to my lover standing outside my tent.
The young green leaves of early spring filtered the late morning sunlight.
They laid their head on my chest and we continued to dream, to the songs of birds and rustling of leaves.
An orgasmic echo through the woods.
Hovering above us, veils swirled like silvery ghosts.
They shimmered iridescent copper, gold and blue.
They mark the entrance to the Ancestors’ Circle, at the edge of a ridge, where the earth descended:
the holiest place on the Land.
Small shrines were put up for faeries who had passed away from AIDS, made from cheap toys and washed out photographs.
Who are these people?
How am I connected to them?
How come people so gladly call them my ancestors?
I was not born here, I have no blood relations to this land.
And yet it is here, where for centuries, people have fought, lived and experimented with life in ways that have made my life possible-
a sociocultural progenitor, a force of history that begot the possibilities of the present.
That is perhaps what radical imaginary means.
It is not simply the future they were ensuring:
they also shaped a past that linked us back to the moment when we were deities, mages and shamans.
A man falls asleep inside a circle of ruins and dreams of another man, until he begets him.
What more homoerotic form of procreation is there?
Trans people are the natural progeny of cis gays, a reproduction to their likeness, moving across instead of staying on this side.
Trans fags, trans lesbians and T4T, which in itself, a form of homosexuality- the love of sameness, continue the spiritual quest to reach “the shared vision of non-possessive love -- which is the granting to any other and all others that total space wherein each may grow and soar to [their] own freely-selected, full potential.”
The true meaning of radical is, by the root.
A return to the soil, to the essence of being gay, not just as a sexual orientation but an otherness and an inner difference that separates us from the rest of humanity.
Breakfast takes place on an elevated porch.
We are surrounded by tree tops and sky.
Inside the main house is a small room with a library, where books of our history weighed on shelves.
When people learned that this was my first time at the Sanctuary, they told me, “Welcome home,” echoing the sign at the entrance.
Scramble, Goose, Trinity, Pith Marmelade, Rainbeau, Saltlick, Horehound, Supernova, Sky, Huck, Nix, Sweetpea…
faery names evoke all living creatures, the pleasure of taste, meteorological happenings and the wonders of the universe.
A group of people went into the woods to find the new May Pole.
We were led by an Elder who had announced that this would be the last time he would act as a guide.
The tree had to be unanimously selected and each of us was expected to take a turn at the ceremonial cutting.
Once we found the tree, we all placed a hand on its trunk, forming a human web around it.
Over twenty bodies joined together around a single living being, making ourselves into its branches, a re-pairing of human and vegetal limbs.
The newbies, among whom I counted, were asked to take the first strikes.
Tall trans women in dresses, small mustacho’ed trans men, grey-haired bears in camo, lanky twinks and all in between, each took up the axe.
“Chop, chop, chop, chop” went the chant that accompanied the drums.
When the tree finally fell, we raised it on our shoulders, miraculously light by the sheer number of people taking care of the load.
We walked out of the woods, thus, a 16 foot long centipede.
On the Knoll, long colorful ribbons made from discarded garments were strewn on the grass. People surrounded the hole, spitting, casting wax, incense, ashes, bodily fluids, wishes and spells. Memory, in forms of photographs and handwritten notes, is the ultimate offering to plunge into the true depth of darkness.
We lose ourselves into the orifice of the earth in order to reconnect with the plurality of our own selves.
Such is the price for rebirth:
one must effectuate a clearing for self-expansion, renewed in clarity of purpose.
Harry Hay had conceived of this since the founding of the Radical Faeries:
that there exists a mythical dimension to gay identity, an indigenous gay spirituality that seeks to connect and heal with Nature.
The Hausa people of West Africa say that the men and women of the village who relate to each other have, each one, an eye in their soul by which they perceive themselves, however dimly, on the right path in the dark and perilous realm of SPIRIT.
But the souls of those men among them who relate to other men, and women who relate to other women, have two eyes!
This Two-Eyes feature, different from the way Eurocentric Imperialisms might misinterpret it, bestows neither special powers or privileges -- instead it lays upon the Two-Eyed ones a sacred responsibility.
For Two-Eyed ones have the capacity of vision to penetrate the dread gloom of the SPIRIT world to discern the path that their Group, their Community should follow to discover the next resting place, where they all will be temporarily safe and nurtured, on the SPIRIT journey all must take.
In 2017, as a burgeoning trans person, I traveled to Athens.
On the rooftop bar of a squat, I met a transwoman who immediately signaled me to come to her.
“You are neither man, nor woman. What are you?” she imperiously demanded.
She cupped my face in her hands and asked me to touch her head beneath her wig.
“You are a healer,” she whispered.
I had a headache earlier today.
When you walked in, it went away.
Many people’s lives will improve because of you.”
First, she gave me the gift of recognition, then a social responsibility.
As in all spiritual quests, I do not know how nor where to begin.
Is this my true path?
Has it already begun?
What is the meaning of healing and how do I learn how to heal?
A ritual inside the bathhouse:
a trans girl brandishes her vial of estrogen up in the air, kissing it with veneration.
She guided us to pull our hormones and prep our skin for injection.
Six to ten trans people held their needles at 45 degrees angle, waiting for the go signal.
The mass injection party was followed by a play party, where all different types of bodies touched and soothed each other’s scars.
Does sameness still function as a prerequisite for homosexuality?
“These men on their deathbed, would confess that they’ve been in love with their trans best friend all this time!”
A man with silver hair tied in a pony tail, sporting a bright blue Hawaiian shirt, sat down next to me.
“It was the young people who surrounded Harry.
They were dying of AIDS and being taken care of by their lesbian friends.
That’s when they realized, they are faeries too!
So they had a meeting about including female-bodies on the Land and Harry cried and they cried.
But that was how things started to open up.
The things I saw go down in that bathhouse,” he chuckled, shaking his head fondly.
“The guys who could not put up with it, they just self-selected to leave.
I think it was for the best.”
A hushed whisper, a crack in the long intertwined history between gay and trans, that is where I find myself.
There is no literary canon that celebrates gender fluid unions and cross overs between lesbians, gays and other forms of sexuality.
This ancestry can only be approached with approximation and comparison.
In the bathhouse, I looked up from the pile of trans bodies and saw three men giving each other blow jobs.
My gaze involuntarily lingers.
Is that what it’s like to experience love in a cis male body?
Is that how pleasure is communicated, how their bodies are cared for?
Viola disguises herself as a page boy who goes by the name of Cesario to serve the Duke of Illyria.
S/he falls in love with the older man but is sent instead to court the Countess Olivia on his behalf.
The countess in turn falls for her/his soft manners and androgynous charms.
The play’s resolution takes the form of Viola’s long-lost twin brother, Sebastian who arrived in Illyria, conveniently replacing his sister as the love object of Countess Olivia and restoring the balance of heterosexuality.
All the characters remain untouched by the glimmer of queerness that the subterfuge allowed them to experience.
Where is the revolutionary love that fully transforms and breaks down our preconceived notions of who we are and who we desire?
I seek another fairy who is as independent, as resilient, as self-reliant as I am, who will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me looking down the same road ahead with similarly shining inquisitive eyes.
It struck me that it takes a collective effort from groups of radical queers to ensure the yearly passage into spring, we who are portrayed as threats to the nation, not belonging to the nation.
We encounter the same initiation rites, as noted among American Indians, the Asiatics, the Africans, and the Mediterraneans, wherein The Adolescent- cradled in the loving concern of the hearth- is suddenly tried and tested by being sent into the unknown to brave all its threats and terrors […]
This rite was an imitation of the seed, kept warm by the hearth in a protective basket all winter.
Then at the Vernal Equinox, [...] the seed was suddenly thrust into unknown darkness, away from the friendly sun and the blue sky and the faces of friends.
But, when, pushing through the best it knew how, its green head suddenly popped through the crust of the earth- everything was right again, the seed was a reproducing entity and surrounded once more by the sun and sky and the familiar faces. [...]
The Feast of Fools began at Vespers on the afternoon of the day of the Vernal Equinox with the chanting of the “Magnificat” [...] “He hath cast down the princes from their thrones and hath exalted the lowly and oppressed; the hungry he hath filled with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” […] In this fortnight, the Fool who represented this change every hour of his life, was the leader of the proceedings. Every custom, tradition, law, and decree was questioned and turned upside down and inside out and fully exposed to the Village Collective.
The Fool, grown from the adolescent “changeling”, “he who is what he seems not to be”, alone has the capacity to invert the world order and lead us into a new clearing.
… MEDIATORS between the seen and the unseen- as Berdache Priests and Shaman Seers, as artists and architects, as Scientists, as Teachers, and as Designers of the possible;
… MEDIATORS between the make-belive and the real- through Theatre and Music and Dance and Poetry;
… MEDIATORS between the Spirit and the flesh- as Teachers and Healers and Counselors and Therapists.
And in the [twenty first] century America- how do we differ?- and how do we remain the same?
My lover, a multicolored cap with drooping peaks on their head, grasped my hand and together we held on to one of the ribbons. Around and around the May Pole we went, laughing and stumbling over other bodies doing the same. The sun was bright. Some people climbed up the pole, shaking their fists in a sign of victory.
Italicized excerpts from:
“This new planet of Fairy-vision”, Harry Hay, Arizona 1979
“What We Two-Eyed Ones have to share,” Harry Hay, 1991
“The Feast of Fools”, Harry Hay, 1953
“Radical Faerie proposals to the “March on Washington” Organizing Meeting”, Harry Hay, 1986
