Foundation: 1978–79 , a co-founder of the Radical Faerie movement, in 1996 Hay was a veteran of gay rights activism, having been a longstanding activist in the
Communist Party USA prior to becoming a founding member of the
Mattachine Society in 1950. After being publicly exposed as a
Marxist in 1953, Hay stepped down from the Society's leadership, shortly before the other founders were forced to resign by more conservative members. Kilhefner was a skilled community organizer and a main member of the Los Angeles branch of the
Gay Liberation Front (GLF). He began hosting gay reading groups called, "Gay Voices and Visions" in 1975 at the new center Kilhefner founded, The Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, later renamed
The Los Angeles LGBT Center, where he served as its first executive director, and which is now the largest in the world. Walker had written and published many works on gay mysticism, sexuality, depth psychology and liberation, including an article published in the Jungian journal Spring in 1976, The Double: An Archetypal Configuration, a book, "Men Loving Men, A Gay Sex Guide and Consciousness Book”, published in 1977, and he was in the process of conjuring what was to become "Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Transmutational Faerie", published in 1980. Walker went on to spearhead a pioneering gay-centered psychologically minded grassroots movement through conducting hundreds of workshops, groups and work with many individuals. The idea for a spiritual conference for gay consciousness exploration came out of Walker's deeply inspired correspondence with Hay beginning in 1976 and culminating a year and a half later when Walker flew to the desert to visit him in early 1978. Timmons writes: "Meeting Walker was a critical link in Harry's development of a new kind of gay movement...Walker and Hay formed the 'society of two' that grew into the Radical Faeries. The mythic, hidden aspects of gay identity that they had studied separately suddenly converged, with greatly increased current." After Hay and Walker were joined by Kilhefner in successfully presenting a workshop together in the Fall of 1978, "Hay told Walker that with 'this magnificent organizer,' Don Kilhefner, they were now a society of three. Their dreamed-of conference could now proceed." Raised into an
Amish Mennonite community, Kilhefner had studied at
Howard University where he joined the
anti-Vietnam War movement and the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After university, he spent time in Ethiopia with the
Peace Corps before joining the
Peace and Freedom Party and becoming a leading figure in the GLF from 1969 to 1971. As the GLF evolved into the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, Kilhefner became its first executive director. As it grew, it sought the support of wealthy gay people to finance its social work and public relations, with Kilhefner becoming concerned at its increasingly assimilationist stance and taking a leave of absence in 1976. He proceeded to enter into a retreat run by
Baba Ram Dass, where he got into an extended conversation with Hay in May 1978. In 2019, forty years after the fact and into his eighties, Kilhefner claimed that the Radical Faerie movement came out of conversations between Harry and him alone beginning in 1973 about "the course of the Gay Liberation movement and what was missing." Kilhefner went on to further claim that the "intellectual and spiritual foundation came out of workshops [he] hosted in 1975-1981 called Gay Voices and Visions," while completely avoiding acknowledging Walker’s central role in the forming of that foundation within the Radical Faerie movement. Kilhefner's claims directly contradict Timmons' more objective interviews with the principle players, interviews that occurred while things were actually unfolding, and who directly quoted Hay stating that it was he and Walker who initially formed the "'society of two' that grew into the Radical Faeries." In the autumn of 1978 therapist
Betty Berzon invited Hay, Walker, Burnside and Kilhefner to lead a workshop on "New Breakthroughs in the Nature of How We Perceive Gay Consciousness" at the annual conference of the
Gay Academic Union, held at the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This event convinced Hay and his partner
John Burnside that they should leave their home in
New Mexico and move to Los Angeles, where they settled into a 1920s house on the eastern edge of
Hollywood. The four then decided to organize an outdoor conference at which they could discuss with other gay men ideas regarding gay consciousness and spirituality. Kilhefner identified an ideal location from an advert in
The Advocate; the Sri Ram Ashram was a gay-friendly spiritual retreat in the desert near
Benson, Arizona, owned by an American named Swami Bill. Hay, Walker, Burnside and Kilhefner visited to check its suitability, and although Hay disliked Bill and didn't want to use the site, Kilhefner insisted. Their conference, set for
Labor Day 1979, was to be called the "
Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies", with the term "Radical Faerie" having been coined by Hay. The term "Radical" was chosen to reflect both political extremity and the idea of "root" or "essence", while the term "Faerie" was chosen in reference both to the
immortal animistic spirits of European folklore and to the fact that "fairy" had become a pejorative slang term for gay men. Initially, Hay rejected the term "movement" when discussing the Radical Faeries, considering it to instead be a "way of life" for gay males, and he began referring to it as a "not-movement". In organising the event, Hay handled the political issues, Burnside the logistics and mechanics, Kilhefner the budgetary and administrative side, and Walker was to be its spiritual leader. A flier, which Kilhefner claims to have written, While the Radical Faeries are often associated with subversion of gender norms, there is a surprisingly complex relationship to their masculinity and femininity. Using fieldwork and queer theory, Peter Hennen argues that although Radical Faeries deploy drag and embrace a
New Age spirituality that challenges heteronormative standards, masculinity maintains a privileged status within many of the Radical Faerie spaces. This complexity becomes a focal point in Faerie disputes and discourse. Sometimes participants would even reaffirm their identity as men in drag, as noted in one Faeries’ declaration, who preferred to remain anonymous, “We are men, and no matter how you slice it, we’re men…You are still a boy in a dress.” Rather than providing a straightforward challenge to the dominating masculinity , Radical Faerie practice can simultaneously undermine and reinforce elements of mainstream gender ideology. This effect demonstrates that, even with a counterculture queer community, deep-seated cultural assumptions about gender and masculinity remain influential, and prevail to shape rituals, language, and power dynamics. While the Radical Faeries are widely known for blending counterculture activism and queer spirituality, there has been a long-standing and internal debate about gender inclusion within their movement. Specifically, it’s been argued whether or not gatherings should be open to all genders or reserved exclusively for gay men. According to ethnographic researchers, the result of this debate is only what can be described as “universal versus provincial boundaries.” Some Radical Faerie communities welcome women,
transgender,
bisexual, and
nonbinary people, where others defend ‘gay men only’ spaces as spiritually essential. Gender-diverse participants have reported both open support and exclusion. Their experiences of
sexism and boundaries reflect deeper tensions about the meaning of Faerie identity and the ideals that the community holds. This process of making boundaries is not just theoretical, but plays out in different policies, in mixed gender and men only events, and has led to a declining participation among those who feel unwelcome. These evolving debates mean that the definition of who can be a Radical Faerie, and what the movement means, remains deeply contested among its members.
Since 1981 The first Faerie gathering in Australia was held in January 1981, at Tony Newman's Whole Earth Dream Farm near Ourimbah (established in 1974), inspired by the
RFD reporting of the second Faerie gathering (in Colorado), and held in conjunction with Sydney's Gay Men's Rap, although this first gathering did not generate any ongoing Faerie activity. A subsequent and unconnected Faerie gathering was held on 9–12 April 1982, at Mandala, a gay spiritual commune established near Uki in Northern NSW in 1974 by David Johnstone. This second gathering included Faeries who had attended the second and third gatherings in the United States, and led to continued growth of the Radical Faeries in Australia, and repeated attempts to establish Faerie communes, such as Common Ground (Clarence River Valley), and eventually the ongoing commune Faerieland, near Nimbin, NSW. Guided by Mica Kindman, Lloyd Fair, Cass Brayton, and Will Roscoe, the San Francisco Faerie Circle had formed a non-profit corporation under the name of NOMENUS (varyingly interpreted as "No Men Us", "No Menace", and "No Menus"), supported by Hay. They raised enough money to put a down payment on some land from a 1983 gathering in
Napa, however decided against forming a self-sufficient community, instead choosing to purchase a smaller piece of land that could be stationed by a few caretakers and which could house regular gatherings. In 1987 they purchased Magdalene Farm – an 80-acre property near
Grant's Pass, Oregon – from George Jalbert, who had unsuccessfully hoped to establish his own rural gay commune there over the preceding decade. Throughout the 1980s the Radical Faerie movement had spread out from the United States and had gatherings in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Italy, as well as Folleterre in France.
Black Leather Wings is an organization for spiritual gay
leather folk affiliated with the Radical Faeries. The
San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley includes bronze boot prints that honor 28 people important to the local leather communities, including
Mark Thompson, a co-founder of Black Leather Wings, and Alexis Sorel, a Black Leather Wings member. ==Sanctuaries and gatherings==