Audio version

HOW QUEER IS THAT?
 by Dylan Frances

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’ -Anais Nin

‘Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star.’ -Edith Piaf

‘Our stories are not who we are. They are what pass through us. As light passes through stars.’ -Dolphin Starfucker

It feels as if my attendance at the 2023 Queer Spirit festival, as a steward, was the final piece in a very large jigsaw puzzle that I have been working on for many, many years now. From my early teens, I knew that there was something a little queer about me, but a combination of fear and shame made me look the other way, imagining that if I did so, for long enough, these strange and sometimes distressing feelings would all go away.

Audio version

Being Earth, by Al Head

The theme of this year's Queer Spirit Festival is:
'Born of Earth, Born to Love' and I've been reflecting on this.

My personal suggestion for the theme was' Remembering we are Earth'. This is why.

We do not just come from the earth, we are not just connected to the earth, we are the earth. Our bodies are made from the same elements as rocks, soil, water and other animals. Our breath is the same air that is breathed by all other animals, the same air that the trees breathe out so that we can live and so that the balance of life can continue. We live within the atmosphere of the earth. We share the same energy that makes up everything in the earth. We are earth.

Queerness is the crossweave on the loom of human life.
by Shokti

Queerness is the crossweave on the loom of human life.
Women who love Women
Men who love Men
Trans and Non-Binary People...
have always been part of the human tapestry.

In many cultures of the world queerness was not only accepted as natural,
it was seen as having spiritual qualities.

At Queer Spirit Festival we affirm and celebrate the naturalness
of queer gender identities and sexualities,
and the spiritual gifts that go with them! 

Audio version

Sacred Sexuality Temple  – Born of Earth, Born to Love
by Triskelion

Youhoooo Queer Spirits: after spending a few lovely days celebrating Imbolc at Paddington Farm in Glastonbury, including a wonderful Radical Faerie No Talent Show, where I could see everyone leaning into the restorative Imbolc space of connection and celebration, I'm thinking about our queer ancestors: remembering, and re-learning resilient practices from our ancestors can help us to grow our creativity. I find myself thinking about Sacred Sexuality, and as we move towards Pisces month (Feb 19-March 19), about the need for the emotional expression of the Earth. 

Audio version

Why Sex Magic is a Subversive Activity, by Al Head

Sex is magical. I think many of us glimpsed this, perhaps before we knew anything about 'magic'. Many of us, often not understanding what it was we were experiencing, felt the touch of the divine, or the flow of universal energy, when we were in an aroused state with a lover, or at the moments before, during or after orgasm. In a sex-positive, magic-positive, free culture, this would have been one of the ways we learned to connect with the truth of our magical selves.

Wishing everybody a blessed Imbolc!

The Celtic Fire festival of Imbolc (February 1^st) celebrates the promise of Spring, just a few weeks away. Imbolc is a powerful moment to perform acts of divination, eg draw tarot cards, cast runes... in order to receive guidance from the subtle realms, and the time to set goals and intentions for the upcoming seasons. We hope you will be setting the goal of coming to Queer Spirit and inviting more people along!

Winter Solstice - Triskelion

Approaching winter solstice, the sacred wheel of the year has turned once again. As my ancestors did , I do now, and celebrate the solstice, the longest night and shortest day. We celebrate the return of the sun, and from now forward the days will start to get longer, lighter, and warmer. Whilst the solar year has run its course, completing its cycle a new year is getting ready to begin, bringing light, life and hope to the earth.

Call for Queer Spirit 2024

QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL, 15th August to 19th August 2024

The spirits are calling! We are gathering!
The elements are calling! The animals are calling!
The trees are calling! The Earth is calling!
The rivers are calling! The ancestors are calling!
The Queer in me and you is calling! Above all Love is calling!
Queer Spirit is calling!
Come and join us!
Carriers of Consciousness, Cosmic Connectors 
- Born of Earth, Born to Love -
born to reunite the worlds, below and above
with the cosmos inside each of us!

Binary Compulsion: A dangerous gender myth, by Sunil Pant

The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, shocked and dismayed so many of us with his defiant declaration at the Conservative party conference that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that's just common sense!” Seems he has never met masculine women or feminine men?  Even more mind-boggling and disturbing - how is it even possible that an educated man of Hindu heritage can not be aware of the rich tradition of third-gender people in Asian countries?  

QUEER SPIRIT FESTIVAL 2023: “A beautiful, life changing moment of radical community.”

The organisers would like to thank all our amazing volunteers, facilitators and performers who contributed to the phenomenal success of this years Queer Spirit festival, each of whom gave their skills and talents without payment to help build the energy of conscious, spiritual, heart-centred queer community. We would also like to acknowledge that not quite everything went as smoothly as the glowing testimonials portray – and want to assure you all that we hear what you're telling us. It is our intention to make improvements and innovations next time and make Queer Spirit Festival an entirely magical, radical, inclusive, diverse, sexy and comfortable space for all! 

Post Queer Spirit

Shokti here, back from the Divine Delights of Queer Spirit Festival, where 600 magical Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexual, Transgender and Non-binary folk along with friends and allies, over 5 days in the stunning, genuinely bucolic, setting of Bridwell Park in Devon, celebrated creative connection with nature, the thrill of bonding in community and the spiritual liberation that queerness can open up in us.

Being Queer and Spiritual

There's so much to say about being queer and spiritual, here's an opportunity over 4 days to say it! Over 500 people are expected at the 4th Queer Spirit Festival, in beautiful Bridwell Park in Devon, 17-21 August 2023. We gather to relax, play and make new friends, absorb the healing energies of nature, to share our stories, discover new things, honour our ancestry, to dance, sing and dream new dreams...

There must be radical healing of the gatekeepers if our globe is to truly be healed

In earth-connected traditions “The gay person is looked at primarily as a 'gatekeeper.'” Malidoma Some of the Dagara People

In a materialist paradigm, sex is just something we do with our bodies, driven by a biological urge to have pleasure, underlying which is nature's imperative in us to procreate. In that paradigm, those who love and have sex with people of the same gender, or people who embody both male and female in their person, become anomalies, nature's 'mistakes' and 'abominations' distracting humanity from its 'natural' biological purpose.

The Power and Meaning of 'QUEER', by Shokti

“Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across – it comes from the Indo-European root – twerkw, which also yields the German quer (traverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. . . . Keenly, it is relational and strange.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)

On Bridwell Park...

The team creating the 4^th Queer Spirit festival this summer are very excited about our new location – it's beautiful, quiet (no traffic noise, no Grand-Prix practice next door as we had in 2019!)

The land is expansive with lots of beautiful trees, including ancient oaks, plus there's a woodland and lake to walk around.

The Queer Search For Meaning

The scientific-sociological categories assigned to gender-fluid and same-sex attracted people from the late 19th century didn't sit well with some gay folk of the time. The term homosexual was coined by Hungarian writer Karl Maria Benkert, in correspondence in Germany with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the most prominent gay rights campaigner of the time. Use of 'homosexual' in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1886) led to it becoming the standard term. 

 On Sacred Sexuality...

At Queer Spirit Festival we are proud to celebrate the Sacred and the Sexual and to bring them together together in our adult only Sacred Sexuality Area which offers a rich programme of workshops, rituals and play parties from a diverse and talented group of facilitators. New this year, we have a second space where you can hang out, socialise, have some quiet time, sign up for workshops, and have someone to talk to if things come up for you during the workshops.

 Queer Spirituality Online Conference

Queer Spirit Festival is part of a global awakening to the spiritual history, nature and calling of Lesbian-Gay-Bi-Trans-Queer People... 

We are excited that Queer Spirit Festival will be involved in this upcoming virtual conference:

'RECLAIMING OUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGE' June 17-24

Gay Love Could Save Humanity

African Wisdom Teacher Malidoma Some of the Dagara Tribe brought his tribal understanding of gender and sexuality to the West in the 1990s. He, and his wife Sobonfu Some, both taught that it was accepted in their culture that a person's inner gender may be different to their physical sex, and that the sexuality of same sex orientated individuals was regarded a spiritual energy that was used for the greater good of the community. Gay sex was seen as a way to open gates to other dimensions, to worlds of nature spirits, ancestors, angels and deities.

On Queer Spirituality

A collection of thoughts, ideas and viewpoints on 'Queer Spirituality', collected together by Shokti.

How to respond to Uganda’s Fascistic Anti-Gay Law?

The parliament of Uganda has voted for laws imposing lengthy prison sentences for people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer or who are found to have promoted homosexuality. It establishes the death penalty for homosexual acts with under-18s, people with disabilities and several other groups, plus sets out punishment for failing to report suspected gay relationships – so criminalising the families and friends of LGBTQ+ people.

WE ARE ALL TRANS by Shokti

“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” Maya Angelou 

Trans people are constantly in the news, and getting similar, hostile, treatment to that given out to gay men in past decades: currently we are seeing anti-trans bills in American legislatures, protests at Drag Queen Story Time events in the UK, and anti-trans rhetoric flowing freely.  

Let's celebrate

At Queer Spirit Festival:
Let's celebrate
women loving women
men loving men
genderfluidity
non-binariness
queerness in all its fabulous forms...

Is Nature, the Universe and Everything Queer?  By Mackerel Sky

It has been proposed that one of the main driving forces of evolution, far outstripping that of Competition is the process of Symbiogenesis. Symbiogenesis happens when two or more organisms have been living in a symbiotic state long enough for them to join together and create a new separate species.