Contemporary Pagan communities, like queer communities with which they often overlap, take their names from reclaimed slurs. These identifications reflect a shared opposition to Christian-influenced discourses. Religious resistance and sexual resistance are not commensurate, but there are important convergences between Pagan alternative religious movements and LGBTQ+ activism, both in their developmental histories and in their current manifestations.
Contemporary Paganism, just like “LGBTQ+,” is a term encompassing a diversity of groups and values. Nonetheless, a shared project of positioning their traditions as recovering repressed spiritual knowledge empowers Pagans to construct alternative value-systems to those they largely associate with Christian-dominant western culture. Not all of these alternative worldviews are supportive of LGBTQ+ inclusion, but many are.
This presentation charts two main influences on LGBTQ+ inclusion within contemporary Paganism. The first uses the development of contemporary Paganism to explain shared theologies of sexuality. The second explores the trajectory of LGBTQ+ movements from the gay liberation movement through more recent queer activism (Stover).
Understanding Pagan sexual values requires exploring Christian discourses against which Paganism contrasts itself. Original Sin (Augustine) is especially denounced by Pagans, both in the imaginary of human beings as inherently tainted and in the notion that sex itself is the primordial flaw from which all other evil flows. Cultures of “sexual purity,” predicated on notions that all sex is inherently sinful, but that sex within marriage with the possibility of conception neutralizes that sin, restrict acceptable sex acts to penile/vaginal intercourse (i.e. Humanae Vitae). Resistance to this theological construct among Pagans includes recovering bodily pleasure, including sexuality, and rejecting shame.
Celebrations of embodiment and sexuality can comfortably take place within heterosexual, gender-essentialist contexts, such as Gardner’s original formulation of Wicca, but need not be restricted to them. Queer ideologies of Pride oppose the same Christian-originating shame, but with specific focus: while almost all sex is supposed to be sinful, some kinds of sex get targeted for denunciation more than others. As Heather White documents, over the last century popular forms of Christianity responded to the sexual revolution by creating new theologies of marital pleasure; however, rehabilitating some kinds of straight sex required concentrating that former vitriol elsewhere, with pre-marital sex and gay sex becoming metonyms for anti-Christian sex, synonymous with “sin.”
It is within this moral climate that Pagan theologies of the body emerged, striving to offer more morally coherent alternatives to Christian concepts of sin. Drawing on historical witchcraft persecutions to highlight examples of contemporary oppressions, Paganism positioned itself not only as more logically consistent than Christianity, but as better reflecting humanity’s place in the natural world.
Presaging counter-cultural re-evaluations in the 1960’s, Gardner promoted Wicca as the true heritage religion of the British Isles (Hutton, White), in contrast to socially repressive Christianity. In particular, he contrasted Wicca’s women-led ceremonies, paired Goddess and God deities, and celebration of sexuality as a normal part of human experience, against the misogyny and sexual shame he saw in Christianity. Nevertheless, Gardner’s celebration of women and sexuality were unquestionably of their time (e.g. Feraro). His cosmology is deeply embedded in heterosexual gender complementarity and androcentrism.
Gardner, however, is neither the last word on Wicca, nor on contemporary Witchcraft. A major disruptor of Gardner’s foundational gender assumptions within Paganism is the attention second-wave feminists in North America drew to religious enforcement of patriarchy (Clifton, Zwissler), including heteronormativity. If “witch” was just another word for “woman,” then a movement that champions women – feminism— could also be understood as a type of “witchcraft.”
In adopting Witch identity as a sign of alterity, feminist Witchcraft offered a model for solidarity with the marginalized. While this positionality carries the risk of collapsing all women’s experience into one community’s experience, it also aligns smoothly with the concept of the queer. The gay liberation movement, like the concurrent second-wave feminist movement, sought to recover historical visibility for contemporary, marginalized identities. Early modern trials involving sodomy offered a possible example of forebears, but also a vicious demonstration of historical persecution. Bringing attention to historical repression could throw into relief the damages of current homophobia, exposing ways that oppressive Christian ideals continued to shape society.
While there was synergy within political organizing and protests, the gay liberation movement reflected feminist separatism. Invoking the consciousness-raising model, feminists felt strongly that women-only space was necessary to detox off of and be protected from patriarchal oppressions. While gay men were also fighting patriarchal oppression, they nonetheless occupied a different place within its hierarchy and could still enforce aspects of it against lesbians and other women. Therefore, in this initial time of alternative religious exploration, lesbian and other feminist women and gay men prioritized separate religious development. Communities could come together to challenge Christian oppression, but there was not much interest in developing shared theologies or ritual practices.
A major way that feminist Witchcraft traditions were taken up within gay men’s communities was through the idea of “gay shamanism.” Gay resistance authors such as Arthur Evans offered a sweep of European history informed by Wicca and feminist Witchcraft. For Evans, gay sexuality fundamentally connects to religious virtuosity and taps into sacred truth. Soon after, inspired by counter-cultural stories of historical gay ecstatic religious leadership, and deeply influenced by feminist models of separate space and collaborative praxis, the Radical Faeries emerged in the late 1970’s.
Just as LGBTQ+ forerunners took time to recognize identities beyond exclusively lesbian and gay, so too did the religious communities that arose from their activism take time to begin explicitly including bisexual and trans people (Kraemer, Mueller). As feminist and gay liberation movements shifted from gender essentialism to gender construction, Pagan groups began to incorporate these shifts into understandings of the spiritual self.
Despite genealogies of gender essentialism, Pagan theology today contains elements that easily accommodate queer readings. As ritual creatives, many Pagan groups understand their religion as in the service of spiritual experience, both individual and collective. There is ample opportunity for the creation and adaptation of sacred narratives to reflect changing ideas of sex and gender (Magliocco).
Contemporary Pagan and Witchcraft communities, like queer communities with which they often overlap, take their names from reclaimed slurs. These identifications reflect a shared opposition to hegemonic, Christian-influenced discourse. While Paganism is a diverse religious category that can include openly politically conservative and nativist traditions, in the Anglophone west there are important convergences between Pagan alternative religious movements and LGBTQ+ activism, both in their developmental histories and in their current manifestations.
From the beginning, contemporary Paganism has connected sexuality to sacred joy, a sexual theology which makes possible, though does not guarantee, LGBTQ+ inclusion. Pagan communities reflect a variety of ideologies around sex and gender, from traditional gender complementarities, through feminist essentialism and same-sex ritual symbolism, to theories of gender construction and sexual fluidity. Generational models, following progressive politics, have evolved from heterosexist gender complementarity, through separatism, to radical queerness.