I – Radical Faeries: Chaos and Negotiation
We sit in a circle under a tree. Whoever has the talisman speaks their mind. Everyone else listens – with an open heart.
The Heart Circle is a central element in community-building within the Radical Faeries. Since the late 1970s, this community has been seeking alternative ways of living to homonormative realities. Faeries meet, usually in the countryside, to form a community for one or two weeks.
In many conversations this week, people have been talking about the “community”. But what exactly does this word mean when, in the Heart Circle, some of us have shared that we don’t really feel we belong at this gathering?
I don’t think my own sense of belonging depends on this particular group – because this is the first time I’ve come to a gathering with a partner.
I am startled out of my thoughts – loud recorded music, dancing faeries. I try to find a spot on the sprawling grounds where the music doesn’t reach. I’m annoyed – during the Morning Circle, where organisational matters were discussed, there was no mention of music that might be found disruptive.
What keeps drawing me back to the Radical Faeries is the desire to approach things differently from how we do in our everyday lives. That makes me all the more indignant at this unilateral action. Personal freedom ends where the freedom of others is curtailed.
At the next Morning Circle, I’ll bring up the issue of music, and through discussion we’ll work together to find a solution that suits everyone. Community requires negotiation, not mere assertions.
II – Asocial Media: Grindr as a Rejection Machine
As I start thinking about community, I’m fed up with Grindr yet again. The app describes itself as “the world’s largest social networking app for LGBTQ people”.
I’m on the app to find sex, intimacy and validation. But the online search for love – Mr Right and Mr Right Now – can sometimes be quite difficult: we’re constantly confronted with an algorithm that increasingly favours a very specific body type.
There are quite a few perfectly toned torsos to be seen in my neighbourhood – but on closer inspection, they’re actually 4 kilometres away. Dozens of chat messages go unanswered, and even when some sort of conversation does start, it soon gets bogged down in “What’s up?” and “What are you into?” and swapping dick pics.
And so we sit scattered in front of our screens, remaining disconnected. Social media isn’t social: Grindr is becoming a machine for rejection and isolation.
It’s a familiar story: a young queer person leaves their home village for the big city. The app is their first port of call for finding like-minded people. But the attractive young man who opens the door also opens up a world of hedonism and euphoria.
After the euphoria came the crash, the loneliness, the question: Am I good enough? Do I even belong here? Am I loved for who I am, not just for what I pretend to be?
On Grindr, I start to doubt not only my attractiveness, but also my very humanity. So I delete my profile and the app yet again, resolving to make connections and find sex in real life.
III – Chemsex: A Sense of Belonging in the Risk Community
When I first started going out on the gay scene in the mid-1990s, the motto was: the more masculine, the more attractive. Under no circumstances was I allowed to come across as effeminate. I began to control my voice, my movements and my gait.
Before long, I was hanging out with party people. Ecstasy helped me overcome my shyness and flirt with men. Over time, the party scene evolved into “Party and Play”. What connected me to others were drugs and extreme sex: at that time, bareback sex was still considered dangerous, so we turned it into a fetish. Perhaps it was this ‘risk community’ that made me feel like I really belonged for the first time.
We crossed boundaries to set ourselves apart from those who marginalised us. We flouted the rules because those who followed them had made them up without asking us. We were a close-knit community of wounded souls who, little by little, began to inflict physical harm on one another as well. We fell ill because we were labelled as ill.
I was diagnosed with HIV a few months after I’d discovered crystal meth, which allowed me to get closer to other men and feel more at ease with them than ever before. That “blending together” on Tina was a very real antidote to years of loneliness and feeling like an outsider.
Although I was part of certain circles of friends, I always felt somewhat out of place in this “community” of gay men who were primarily concerned with maintaining a good reputation and looking even better.
Later, I learnt that it was probably my illness, my addiction, that sought to cut me off from the world and isolate me, so that I would always have a reason to carry on using.
IV – AIDS: Collective trauma as a unifying force
The stories I hear and read about the AIDS crisis suggest that a community is at its strongest when there is a common enemy. All of a sudden, lovers, friends and acquaintances were dying. All of a sudden, the community found itself facing a two-headed monster: the invisible virus and society’s failure to provide assistance.
Lesbians, gay men and queer people stood together in order to survive. ACT UP, for example, aimed to use targeted actions to bring the issue of AIDS to the public’s attention and to put pressure on politicians who were failing to act. ACT UP was founded at the “Lesbian & Gay Community Services Centre” in New York.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the introduction of the first HIV drugs, and later TasP [JMDA1] and PrEP, I experienced a very hedonistic gay scene – parties and a cult of the body as a counterpoint to, and a defensive reaction against, the horror of the preceding years and the images of emaciated, dying bodies. We celebrated because we had survived the virus, perhaps in much the same way as our predecessors celebrated the Gay Liberation movement in the 1970s.
The legacy of the AIDS crisis may run deeper than we realise. To this day, this hedonism remains deeply ingrained in parts of the scene – as a search for closeness, a breaking down of boundaries, physicality, and sometimes also numbness. For some of us, the party never ends. For some of us, it ends when illness, loss or exclusion strike once again.
I wonder whether we can create a community in which no one is shamed for being ill, using substances, needing help or not fitting the idealised image of the desirable body. A community that doesn’t need a common enemy, but is characterised by care and solidarity – and a willingness not to let one another down, even when things get complicated.
V – Queer Community: Inclusion is exclusion
Gay and lesbian, LesBiSchwul, LGBT, queer: the community to which I belong has been known by many names. Our lowest common denominator: the experience of being different as a fundamental experience, of being cast out, of coming out.
But that is often where the similarities end. How different can people be whilst still seeing themselves as part of a cohesive community? Can people like us, who have learnt from childhood to be suspicious of others simply to survive, even form loving relationships with one another?
It seems almost impossible for the LGBTQ+ community to unite across the boundaries defined by these letters. We internalise stereotypes and hold them against one another. The muscular physique, the effeminate hand gesture, the lesbian’s short haircut: we draw conclusions about a person’s character and background – and thus about their identity – based on their outward appearance.
The queer community – like any other community – operates with an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. But who is included, and who is excluded? Who includes others, and who excludes them? Who is privileged, and who could use these privileges productively not only for themselves but also for others?
Perhaps the queer community does not even exist; perhaps it is merely a phantom. The political aims and needs of the individual sub-communities are so diverse that we find it difficult to formulate clear demands for society as a whole.
A good place to start might be to listen more closely to people who look different or are different from us. A good place to start might be to look for what we have in common rather than our differences.
VI – 12-Step Programmes: Community through Listening
Once again I’m sitting in a circle, once again I’m listening to other people and their experiences – this time at a meeting of the Crystal Meth Anonymous self-help group. For nearly ten years now, I’ve been forming what are probably my deepest friendships here. A friend who has only recently joined the community explains that he has moved house many times in his life, always on his own. When he last moved, acquaintances from CMA stepped in to help him at short notice.
In CMA and other 12-step programmes, we share our experience, strength and hope with one another. By telling each other how we recovered from addiction and are finding our way in life, and by listening to one another unconditionally time and again at meetings, genuine empathy develops.
Perhaps there are clues here as to how other communities might function. Speaking at meetings is not about convincing others, but about expressing one’s own feelings. To accept another person, I do not have to understand them, but I should at least listen to them when they show their vulnerability.
Another factor is consistency: even today, I still attend meetings two or three times a week, where I’ve been meeting the same people time and again for years. By now, I know their stories and there is a deep sense of trust between us.
Of course, the communities of CMA, NA (Narcotics Anonymous) and AA are not without their conflicts either. But I find that, for the most part at least, they are free from hasty judgements. Nobody is excluded here, because this is about survival. The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking or using drugs.
VII – Cruising: Temporary Utopias
I’ve been in a relationship for three years. It’s a privilege, a sense of having found my place, of having solid ground beneath my feet. But my boyfriend lives in another country, and we’re in a polyamorous relationship. So I want to continue forming relationships with others. The search for intimacy and a sense of belonging is a deeply human trait.
Lately, I’ve increasingly felt that I’m less desirable because of my age. More and more young people have better and better bodies, better and better sex, and better and better lives. That’s how it feels when I look at the world – especially the digital world.
Once again, I’m deleting my Grindr profile and heading off to the Grunewald for a bit of cruising. After finally having sex on my third lap of the woods, I’m lying naked in the sun, thinking about all the communities to which I – to a greater or lesser extent – belong or have belonged.
It’s becoming clear to me that the more aware I am of the space I’m in at any given moment and what its rules are, the better I can navigate it.
Among the Faeries and in queer spaces, I find emotional and political engagement with myself and others. In the spaces of the 12-step programmes, I find friendship and recovery. What’s more, my age and experience work to my advantage here. In Grunewald, I find serenity, sex and fun. Some of these communities are more enduring, others more fleeting. But that doesn’t make them any less real.
Community may be temporary – but it requires, at the very least, a willingness to negotiate, to listen, to fail, to allow for pain and joy – and to start again.
