for Jane,
for my sisters

Jules International
1997

The WWW Edition
1998

All Reproduction Rights Reserved

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Printed copies of the original version are available

A merry band of men, like Robin Hood or Peter Pan (boys), the mystique of the tribe, the codes, the mysteries of our ways, the nervous anticipation of the uninitiated, the simple greetings, sweet gifts, tender glances. We have our own secret language, the hisses, the "yoo hoos", the shared in-jokes - like "it's very greek", which evolved as we prepared for the greek night, dressing in the foxy boutique. Our drag, our dish, circles and tetes-a-tetes. A chance to pass certain lines, like the French barrier, like age barriers, class barriers. Political and attitude barriers - it's not like we all agree. But here at least maybe we get the chance to really hear our own silences. The shock of discovering what I know, the way others respond, their eyes light up, they glint and gather round and say "You know something I want to learn." The spark of enthusiasm - this knowledge is real, and we can share it. Smiling, listening to our hands, hearing with our skin, favouring muscle and bone for a change, wandering barefoot on grass, smelling our intimacies for hours afterwards... A merry band of men.

"Sex can be found in any city, I come to gatherings for intimacy..."

My antennae quiver when there's talk of intimacy floating around in gathering space. It seems that intimacy is one of those remarkable commodities which is not only highly-valued but also in plentiful supply. It's definitely a word with as many meanings as it has users. Now, it won't surprise you when I say that intimacy plays little part in my experience. I live alone in an urban gay ghetto. So from the void at the centre of its absence, I want it. I surely need it, but rarely do I extend it, and then only in odd aspects of myself. There, I have declared my own investment in the business at hand. That explains, in part, my interest in checking out the intimacy market-place at gathering-time. And like only some others deeply absorbed in the notion, my intimacy is part of a strictly interpersonal transaction. From my remote and romantic vantage point on it, intimacy stands as a doorway to the corridors of intense involvement leading on to the halls of love. I do not conceive of intimacy as some thing to be dished-out un-directed onto a platter for group consumption. Needless to say, it must be this virginal attachment to the precious gem of my idea of intimacy that provokes my fear (and a little moist desire) at the thought of it being crudely ravished, like some toy on a field of studly PLAY!

After all, what is play but the accomplished manipulation of performance technique. Play is a brilliant display of virtuosity -- without meaning. It's not of ideas, but action, in time, with a limited duration. Everybody knows that the best play constructs a facade of emotion that only appears to be real. Surely play profanes the gentle precincts of the intimate with crass and deplorable exploitation. (Patient reader, if you have managed to suppress your gag reflex at my repeated thrusts of hyperbole, get ready. I'm coming -- to my rhetorical climax). Play for example, is also what the player/musician does with his passive, inanimate, and without him, utterly silent instrument. Coaxing into existence for a timeless moment, an exquisitely intimate pairing. An ineffable musical realization of the experience in which we simultaneously attain and lose the eternal, vividly in the here and now . . . Magic!

A Faerie Gathering can be a kind of living Koan in which we are immersed in an experience of paradox with profound implications for realization. There's absolutely no obligation to participate however. We can happily choose to float in the sunlight dappling the still pools on the surface of paradox, avoiding the real peril of conceptual bruising risked by the release of our cherished notions into the current of experience, where they may be swept up against rocks of doubt, cast by paradox into the rushing awareness-stream of space-time-action. Or we can think as we do. Adopt a view askance . . . as we act.

The sophisticated faerie is accomplished in the art of transporting himself and his voluminous travelling cases of accessories from the hum-drum routine of his real-world home through a warp-zone to that mythic sanctuary in the exotic space-time locale of the gathering. It may take a while to make the transition. But once there he is free to fashion and present a new or edited persona; bare his ass, his soul or his most intimate parts, and turn-on new levels of intensity, or play. It is at the point when some of our attachments to the established conceptual patterns of our non-faerie identity have loosened sufficiently, that we begin to experience the magic of the gathering, bubbling up in glimpses of intense clarity as ecstatic recognition of being here now!