Radical Faerie Sex Magick

The following article appears in this Winter's edition of RFD 2020)

And was written by Robert Birch 

Come sundown July 4th, 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, participant-facilitator, Berlin.


What is a Sex Magic Workshop?
For most of the past 30 years, one to six workshops have been offered annually. Currently we have a volunteer team of a dozen participant-facilitators 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 1,000 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 12-18 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 cock-centric, 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 30th 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.

Each workshop is an experiment in paradox. While many an initiatory journey test us to bring dignity back to life’s inevitable lessons of pain and pleasure, this particular community-loving spell stretches the heart far enough for sorrow’s song to learn how to also dance with ecstatic joy. In sacred space we make love with what I imagine to be the twin companions of Eros, Compassion and Compersion.

How do we enter this magical landscape, into the heart of Eros? Harry and John devised a subtle and elegant spell to focus our attention, a way to be in counsel together until each of us readily steps through our necessary resistances and doubts into a shared intimate adventure. As facilitators we keep the heart circle intact so we can actively explore this dynamic tension between safety and risk until our deepening into trust teleports us into ritual space. The effect is immediate, is as
delicate as instinctual, as revolutionary as mysterious. While most workshops make it into ritual space there are no guarantees. Whatever the outcome magic happens. This week of radical kindness and mutual care with our Fae kin invariably shifts one’s life story, unsettles normative sexual narratives and reinforces a passionate desire for authentic intimacy and belonging.