Radical Faeries as Nature Religion by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Radical Faeries as Nature Religion: The Sixteenth Essay for The New American Religions of Nature Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Abstract This essay argues that the Radical Faerie movement constitutes a distinctive and theologically innovative form of contemporary nature religion. Emerging from the 1979 Spiritual Conference for Radical Fairies in the Sonoran Desert and shaped by figures such as Harry Hay, Arthur Evans, and later interpreters of “gay spirit,” the Faeries integrate queer liberation, ecological reverence, and ritual experimentation into a lived spiritual practice. Drawing on genealogical threads from Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter to late twentieth-century pagan and animist revivals, the movement situates same-sex desire and gender fluidity within a cosmology of sacred immanence. Through the development of r...