Radical Faeries are gay men who practice queer-themed spirituality associated with radical politics, paganism, feminism, gender liberation and witchcraft.
Harry Hay and Mitch Walker, veterans of various phases of Gay Liberation, issued a Call to a "Spiritual Gathering of Radical Fairies." Anyone who felt called, showed up.
The introducation of the idea of spirituality into gay liberation was jarring to those who were used to seeing it as a political matter. It was part of Hay's genius that he was able to make this kind of leap.
Hay and Walker wanted to address the question of what kind of society would emerge if Gay men were together by themselves. This line of thinking produced Fairy Gatherings that were a week or more in length, so that some kind of spontaneous way of relating could generate itself.
In keeping with the hippie, neopagan, ecology, and even eco-feminist trends of the time, gatherings were held out-of-doors in natural settings. There was an idea that the souls of Gay men were linked with the natural world.
The concept of Gay people as practically a separate nation was part of Hay's thinking from early on. The African American liberation movement provided models of how to think about society's subgroups. One of the questions here is self-definition: "Who are we Gay people? What are we for?" A popular idea was that "Gay space" was a kind of magical arena of possibility in which consciousness and events could develop that were fundamentally different from those in ordinary society. It was space "between the worlds."
The idea of consensus, as developed in democratic and feminist thinking, and a theoretical opposition to hierarchy drawn from feminism and from radical politics and from Hay's idea of "subject-subject consciousness," and experience with various therapy or human-potential or consciousness-raising groups, led to a group process in which everyone at the gathering came together daily in a circle to talk, discuss, and emote, to share thoughts and feelings, to heal, to make decisions, and to develop a deeper understanding of what it is and what it means to be gay.
Informality, acceptance, and flamboyance of dress (and undress) is the norm at gatherings.
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