Interview of Garan du by Margot Adler

M.A. You describe in your description of GLBT spirituality, a breakdown of groups into Dianic, Minoan Brotherhood and Sisterhood, Radical Faerie, Feri, Two-Spirit, and non-affiliated groups - gay parts of Norse, ADF, etc. If we think of Gay spirituality when I wrote my chapter on radical faeries, 1985-ish, were all these diverse groupings there in ‘85 and I just was unaware of them, or has there been a real growth and diversification of the GLBT spirituality movement?

G.d. There has been as great a period of growth and diversification of Paganism in the gay community as there has been in society as a whole since Drawing Down the Moon was first published in 1979 and reissued in 1985. Only a few traditions or movements within the modern Pagan spiritual sphere catered specifically to GLBT persons in those days. These included the Minoan Tradition, founded in 1977, the Radical Faeries, founded in 1979, and Dianic Witchcraft, which began evolving from Wicca almost as soon as it arrived in the United States in the 1960s under the influence of the feminist movement already afoot here. An examination of the early days of the Craft in the U.S. shows that homophobia and racism existed - a reflection of the attitudes of society at large. Gays and, to a lesser extent, lesbians felt shut out of the movement. There wasn’t an emphasis on solitary practice in the early days like there is today, and the resources were not necessarily available for folks to strike out on their own alone or to form their own groups disconnected from the existing traditions of the time. That is no longer the case.

As the Pagan movement has evolved in the U.S., so too have the ways in which members of the GLBT community have become involved in it. And in becoming involved, they have succeeded, like the feminists, in changing it along the way. There was a time when to be gay and Gardnerian was an unthinkable notion from the standpoint of those in charge. Homosexuality was considered incompatible with the practices of a fertility-based spiritual path. It was considered to be a mental illness in the U.S. until the mid-1970s, and homosexuals were vulnerable to charges of criminal and moral malfeasance throughout most of the country then. And yet I have spoken with gay men who were initiated into Gardnerian Wicca in the early 1970s and who struggled to live their lives within a tradition that gave them very little encouragement in the personal struggles of their daily lives. Not every Gardnerian (or Alexandrian, or…) coven was like this, to be sure. However, this attitude was sufficiently prevalent to provoke a sense of irony in queer people who were escaping the intolerance of their childhood religions. Imagine entering a path that preached “all acts of love and pleasure are Mine” only to be confronted with denunciations that some acts of love were still considered to be perversions. In this, the “mainline” traditions of that time were very much like the GOP of today, advocating rights and personal choice until people actually attempted to exercise those freedoms.

But times have changed in our society, and these changes are reflected in the traditions of old. It is somewhat ironic that just as the interest in the queer community for queer-specific groups and practices is really taking off we see the trend in mainstream Pagan community continuing to accelerate towards fully welcoming GLBT spiritual seekers. As a recent issue of Time magazine observed, it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as antigay, at least in the public arena. Many queer Gardnerians can now be found, as well as Alexandrians, and Heathens, and Druids, and Santeros, and others. And where existing organizations or ideas do not offer exactly the right blend of life-affirming philosophy and mythos to assuage one’s soul, then people are free to forge one that does. The reason that the Minoan Tradition was begun was simply that in 1977 queers were for the most part shut out of ritual Witchcraft. And even for those who got past the black lists, there was nothing available that spoke to the energies that resonated at the core of their being. And for some men and women, the debate continues. They question the reason for worship based upon a Divine male-female couple, and the meaning behind sexual polarity in magick. And where the answers cannot be provided by an existing path, they strike out on their own like a cross-country skier in new fallen snow to break a new one. Thus the umbrella that is the Pagan movement in the U.S. continues to expand wider even today.

M.A. Do you have a sense, I know this is an impossible question as it is for most Pagans, how big the GLBT spirituality movement is, and how many groups are in each category? At this point are there scores, hundreds (more?) groups around the country, and again, looking at changes in 20 years, how different is the movement in size and character?

G.d. The size of the Pagan movement and the number of groups has grown tremendously over the last 25 to 30 years. Back then the Pagan movement was really limited in its scope and character to Gardnerian Wicca and a few related traditions, the OTO, and a few other groups, located mainly in the large cities on the east and west coasts and a few cities in the heartland. The landscape that we see today is as different as night is to day. Pagan solitaries and groups are now found in some of the smallest towns in the country, from coast to coast to coast. You cannot walk into a bookstore chain anywhere in the U.S. without encountering a New Age section filled with books about Witchcraft, Heathenry, Druidism, Santeria and other paths. You can find titles such as Christopher Penczak’s “Gay Witchcraft” in Idaho Falls, ID. You can go online to amazon.com and search for “witchcraft” under the Books category. It generated 1646 hits for me. This is an astonishing turnaround.

When the movement was limited to the telephone, mimeograph machines, offset-printed newsletters, mail order, and notices on cork bulletin boards, it was small. With the advent of the electrostatic copier machine and then the internet, the growth of the movement exploded. I do demographic research and public outreach for the Between the Worlds Men’s Gathering. If one goes to a gay site such as gay.com or PlanetOut, or to a mixed-use site such as The Witches Voice, where people have the opportunity to note their spiritual path and their sexual orientation in their personal profile, you will see an ever-increasing number of GLBT people claiming non-Judeo-Christian spiritual beliefs. The Witches Voice alone has 66 entries for GLBT Pagan groups, and this is just the tip of the iceberg, as it doesn’t begin to include all of the GLBT groups such as individual covens of a given path such as the Minoan Brotherhood, nor does it include all of the groups that welcome or are run by GLBT people. By contrast, a search for “gay” under Sexual Orientation in the Adult profiles section of that website nets 2000 entries. I think that trying to figure out the number of groups is a harder question to answer than numbering the individuals because their existence is so fluid. And while lineaged Traditions, the overarching matrix in which many groups/covens/circles/groves are embedded, continue to play an important role in the Pagan community, I agree with what other elders have said, that we have moved forever from the time when they held the center stage. We are in the era of pop-influenced Paganism; a time characterized by fluid and rapid growth and a multiplicity and diversity of ideas. There are arguably more solitary practitioners than members of formal groups at this point in time. No one holds the keys to the kingdom; or, rather, everyone does.

M.A. What gifts do you think GLBT spirituality has to give the larger generic Pagan movement and vice versa, if there are any? In my chapter on women and feminism and the Craft, for example, it was clear that the feminist Craft gave the regular Craft a lot of things, from a spirit of rebellion to real energy in rituals. And the regular Craft gave women some sense of what structure was possible in training and rituals, which they could reject, but they could also add to. I know there are plenty of Dianic groups, but my feeling is that they are not at the center of stuff in some sense. You get the idea.

G.d. I think that you’re absolutely correct. There is still a feminist separatist thread out there, and I think that there will always be one. But it is not a driving force as it may once have been. Let’s face it…more young female Witches have heard about Silver Ravenwolf than they have of Z. Budapest. And Silver is a suburban working mom, as most Pagan women today are. Witchcraft has gone from being a political act of rebellion against the status quo to one of personal empowerment to one of right action to one of, well, chic trendiness, let’s be honest here.

Feminism seized onto Witchcraft and made it a part of America. I think that without the feminists there would not have been a sufficient incubator for the nascent Craft movement to make the gains it has. If you look at the confluence of factors in the 1960s-1970s - Witchcraft, gay rights, black rights, women’s rights, anti-war, and environmentalism - it was a cauldron of rebirth, each thing reinforcing the others. I’ve been exploring these ideas as I write Eddie’s biography, and the only conclusion that I can come to is that there was no coincidence in this synchronicity.

As far as what GLBT spirituality has to give the larger generic Pagan movement, there are theories promulgated by gay historians and thinkers such as Randy Conner, Arthur Evans, and Will Roscoe suggesting that GLBT peoples have been a mainstay of nearly every spiritual path and movement since the dawn of time. The “why” of it is open to much speculation, but many believe that it is because we bring to humankind a sense of “otherness” - a sense of mystery - as if we are ever so slightly out of phase with the rest of the species. Does this come from the tension inherent in our refusing to play by the same rules as everyone else? The fact that we don’t play by the boy-girl rule of relationships, for example, or that we don’t necessarily toe the gender line when it comes to society’s expectations on the work that we are attracted to or the clothes that we wear? Who knows?

The Christians would have us believe that the old Gods are dead, but this is not so. If you go to a gay club on a Saturday night, you will feel Dionysos throbbing in the sweaty, heated air around you on the dance floor. We know that They continue to live in us, because we feel Them on a personal, visceral level even when we don’t understand the “why” of it. Perhaps being on a lower rung of society gives some of us a keener eye to see things. And make no mistake about it; despite recent advances in society, despite the polite tolerance we usually encounter these days, we are still for the most part on a lower rung of the ladder. Ecstatic faiths almost never arise from the upper strata of society where all the marrow has been sucked out of life in the process of screwing over the little guy while morally posturing with the Joneses. Ecstatic faiths manifest themselves amongst the little guys who are getting crapped on. The speakers-in-tongues, the shakers, and the gay clubbers all give those in power today the heebie jeebies, just as the Galli and the Bacchantes gave the Roman establishment the willies at the turn of another millennium. We have more in common with a gibbering, shaking Pentacostal than we do with any moralizing, self-righteous Baptist with a broomstick firmly lodged in his posterior. We queer folk are still for the most part powerless ourselves, yet they say that we threaten to bring down society about their ears by making the wrong choices concerning the intersections of flesh with flesh. If Western civilization is so weak that its basis is threatened by our modest protuberances of meat, then it was not designed very intelligently from the outset. Perhaps it’s best to knock the whole teetering construct off its rotting pedestal and start afresh.

I would say that what we bring to the greater Pagan movement is a sensibility that speaks to the gut. Shake it up and shake it out, be hermetic, be mercurial, react, reject, rebel, look outside the bone box, look up the Goddess’ skirt, be more than they’ll let you be, breathe the free air, fight the good fight, seize the day, brave the elements, bust a nut, and live! All magick is an act of rebellion against the status quo. Magick isn’t timid or safe, just as life isn’t timid or safe. Aleister Crowley’s most powerful acts of magick certainly weren’t those he postured in dark parlors for a titillated Victorian elite. One might argue that they are best represented by the time he spent on all fours in the sands of the African desert being buggered by Victor Neuberg in ritual, but even that isn’t quite the case. Crowley’s most powerful acts of magick were when he came back from that desert wilderness and TOLD OTHERS ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE. Slamming a passionless, fossilized status quo between the eyes with a stunning hammer is a powerful magick. And if the scales don’t fall completely from society’s eyes in the act, then perhaps they’ll slip a bit, just enough to let in a tantalizing vision-speck depicting another way of doing things. This is one thing that queer practitioners can offer the greater Pagan community. We’re a safety valve.

The other side of the coin that we offer is our experience as healers and nurturers, artists and musicians. Many of us are able to tap into a deep well of compassion that causes us to be able to see problems from more than one perspective. Certainly part of this is due to the role-playing that we have been called upon to perform in the time before we come out as queer beings, where we have been forced to act out a part in order to meet society’s expectations of us. But is there a deeper current at work? The author Toby Johnson posits the theory that we queer folk may all be clear reflections of the androgynous Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. The spirit of Avalokiteshvara can be interpreted to describe the central “Self” of the universe, residing in each and every sentient being as a sweet, sensitive, attractive young gay man who “saves the world” by taking on the karmic incarnations of all sentient beings. Perhaps, then we are meant to be compassionate ones - caregivers, healers, Priest/esses, makers of beauty. More than one Gardnerian HPS has confided to me that gay men make the best Priests. The “why” of that I leave up to the individual for interpretation. I would say that queer folk are no better than straight folk, but we are often able to see things from both the men’s and the women’s point of view. The gender-variant and homoerotic transformed Shamans were often the walkers between the worlds of the men’s and women’s houses in tribal cultures. I think that we still function in this capacity in modern society. How many straight men and women look to a gay or lesbian friend to confide their relationship troubles? This is another thing that queer practitioners can offer the greater Pagan community. We’re a safety blanket.

What does the greater Pagan community offer GLBT Pagans? Breathing room. Sanctuary. A place to belong. Community. Acceptance (which is not, nor ever shall be, the same as “tolerance”). The Pagan community offers us an opportunity to connect with our brethren - men and women and intersex, gay and bi and straight and celibate, Witch and Norse and Shaman and Druid and Voudoun and all of the other paths, in a way that we generally cannot ever achieve in greater society even today. Archimedes said “give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.” I would say, give us a place to be, and with our passion and vision we can move people’s souls and CHANGE the world.

M.A. The other issue that I am really struggling with is the issue of bad scholarship. Lets face it only forty, to fifty thousand witches were hung, burned etc and they were mostly not midwives and not healers, etc. and a lot of them, though not the majority were men, and they were Christians, etc. I am beginning to think the whole idea, which was really important to me, the idea that the personal is political that from one’s own experience comes TRUTH, is both true and false, that it is true, it led to great insights, it led to incredible empowerment, sharing, political action. But it also led to people making false accusations of ritual abuse, and a lot of delusion based on mistaking the “real” world where a table is a table for the dream reality. Those are the issues I am struggling with now. I know you are coming from the gay men’s side, but I would love to know your response to what you think about my writing about this.

G.d. The delusions/bad scholarship have always irritated me. I know that I’m not alone in this. Bonewits has been playing this tune for many years, and I think he would have been more effective in his message had it been couched more diplomatically, but that doesn’t change the facts.

My opinion is that it doesn’t matter if Witchcraft (as we know it) is only 70 years old. What matters is whether or not it speaks to our souls and gives us some peace in the living of our lives. Each of us, if we are fortunate, is able to grasp a little bit of the truth…admittedly from our own perspective. Some of us may even be open-minded enough to grasp a bit more by stepping outside of ourselves. But the process is always tainted by “I”. I’ve struggled with this process as I’ve researched Eddie Buczynski’s life. Learning about someone else’s experiences is not the same as living them yourself. You can read about a war in the paper, and understand it theoretically. You can even listen to a loved one relate what they went through if they are lucky enough to return from a war. But nothing is as real as being deafened by an explosion and being covered with the brains and blood of your buddies. That is what brings it home and implants it indelibly upon the psyche. Thus we are all searchers in the dark, carrying lamps large or small to illuminate our way.

So long as there are people in this world who will deny you your right to happiness, the personal will remain political. I think you’re onto something.

M.A. What do you think are the main struggles and problems confronting the movement?

G.d. We still have a few problems, some of an internalized nature, as well as some external issues. Homophobia still exists, even within the Pagan community. One author, formerly a leader of the Seax Wiccan path, has been particularly vile in his condemnation of GLBT Pagans. One might think that he was a sexually frustrated fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, given his expressions of hatred for us and purposeful lack of understanding or empathy of us. This runs counter to most Seax Wiccans, who are fine people, including their founder Ray Buckland. Every path has its non-progressive, mean-spirited and intemperate members. Most Heathens aren’t racists or homophobes, for example, and there is no reason to tar the entire tradition with the bad acts of those members who are. Yet some people do, and this isn’t a right action either. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to whitewash the history of homophobia within the Pagan community. For example, we shouldn’t forget that one of the main reasons that Circle Sanctuary founded Pagan Spirit Gathering in 1981 was to counter the open hostility that homosexuals experienced at previous Pan-Pagan gatherings. Homophobia is a problem that will continue to plague the Pagan community for some time, just as it does mundane society. Thankfully, the tolerance for this viewpoint is diminishing, and has generally been less of an issue within our community than it has in society at large. Building bridges amongst our supporters remains as important today as it did in the days after Stonewall.

Queer peoples in our society have a history of self-destructive behaviors, whether it is addiction to and abuse of substances or risky sexual behaviors. The incidence of suicide in queer youth, particularly adolescent boys, is still much higher than it is for the population at large. Part of this has to do with the stresses under which we live our formative years, when personality and particularly sexuality is developing. These stresses are slowly receding as positive role models and resources become available in society. Religious institutions do us all a great evil by touting untrue stereotypes in an effort to exercise control over other people, and by refusing to acknowledge the findings of modern science on the origins of gender and affectional orientation. GLBT Pagans can play a role in this debate by offering an opposing viewpoint and an alternative vision of spirituality that is free of the Judgmentalism of the mainline faiths.

Spiritual indifference amongst members of the GLBT community remains a great challenge. Often queer folk, having abandoned the faith of their childhood as irrelevant or destructive to them have simply given up on all spiritual pursuits. This is a common response, but it is often not a final one. Sooner or later, many of these people will begin to search for spiritual paths that give their lives meaning. It is important to the health of these people, and to the overall health of society, that we present alternatives that are life-affirming to GLBT people. Proselytization isn’t required for this. Just being able to lead by example and to be available for people is sufficient. This is why it is so important to continue working towards eliminating the last vestiges of homophobia within the Pagan community, lest queer men and women see us as just another in a long line of hypocritical faith communities.

Excerpts of this appear in “Drawing Down the Moon” (Penguin, 2006)
Questions Copyright (c) 2005 Margot Adler.
Answers copyright (c) 2005 Garan du. All rights reserved.