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AFTERWORD Michael “Mica” Kindman’s Last Years ROSEMARY FOR REMEMBRANCE / STEVEN S. MUCHNICK A Note about the Radical Fairies, Their Founders, and the Name The Radical Fairies, or Radical Faeries, or either of them without capital letters (all abbreviated, along with their singular forms, as R.F. in this note) were founded in 1979 by Harry Hay and his longtime companion John Burnside, Don Kilhefner, and Mitch Walker. Harry had been a Communist in the 1930s as documented in Timmons’s biography1 and was also the founder of the Mattachine Society, the first gay men’s organization in the United States, in the early 1950s. John and Harry met in 1963 and quickly became inseparable companions, moving to New Mexico a few years later and living in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains among the Tewa Pueblo people. They formed the Circle of Loving Companions that is a model for much of what has happened among the R.F. since. Don Kilhefner has long been involved with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, and Mitch Walker is the author of a relatively early book about gay sexuality and consciousness.2 At its founding, the four men called the first national R.F. event, which they wrote was to be called “among other names, ‘a spiritual conference for radical fairies’”—and for its first year, the group was known by that name. However, by the second national event in 1980, “Conference” was changed to “Gathering,” which has stuck, and we were calling ourselves either “Radical Fairies” or “Radical Faeries” or either of those without the capitals and often without the “Radical,” depending on who was doing the naming. My experience is that most of us use the “Faerie” form, with or without the “Radical” qualifier, but Mica almost always wrote “radical fairy” and “radical fairies,” as he has in his memoir. Muchnick is well known as a computer science professor, researcher, and author, a Radical Faerie since the group’s founding in 1979, and an HIV/AIDS activist. He is the author of A Manual for Queens Registrar of the Breitenbush Gatherings of the Radical Faerie, and serves as a member of the National Institutes of Health–sponsored HIV Vaccine Trials Network’s Global Community Advisory Board, including its Scientific Working Group, and as chair of its Scientific Literacy Subgroup. He lives in San Francisco with Eric, his lover of twenty-four years and legal spouse since summer 2008. 190 | Afterword The R.F. are and always have been an anarchic group. This is not to suggest that we all are (or were) draft-card burners or destroyers, and in fact, our anarchy’s political manifestation is much more likely to be lighthearted than serious. We believe, unlike Chairman Mao, that not “all power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Rather, we are more likely to do things that seem silly in response to patriarchy but turn out to be powerful because they gently mock the oppressors in something like the 1960s tradition of sticking daisies into the barrels of rifles. The heart of our anarchy is that we have never had any central authority, and that any dogma we might have varies, often significantly, from one geographical area or R.F. to another. It’s often said that if you put three R.F. in a room and ask us to come up with a definition of what an R.F. is, you’ll get at least five different answers. Several groups of R.F. have formed formal tax-exempt organizations that exist to serve as stewards for land that serves as R.F. sanctuaries in the country, as educational and spiritual organizations, and/or as organizations that sponsor R.F. gatherings, of which there are now dozens each year across the United States and abroad. Finally, then, who is an R.F.? My answer is simple, though rather nuanced, and in its vagueness, rather unsatisfying for some of us. Most of us would say that any gay or bisexual man who says he is an R.F. is one by virtue of saying so. Why might one say so? Usually, that results from either having taken part in a gathering or having become friends with and identifying with R.F.; for most of us an essential component of that identification is a profound feeling of coming home to a psychological place we’ve only dreamed of before. Some of...

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